Josh Reviews Everything

Darwin’s NT News (“all the news that’s fit to print - and all the news that’s not!”) has kicked up a minor diplomatic incident by calling Singapore “a place where people think shopping is a sport and are so materialistic that they’ve stopped having children” and “zzzzzzzzzzz”.

Fortunately for the NT News: in Australia, truth is an absolute defence to libel.

That was nine months ago. This week, Bloomberg Businessweek joined the pileon: 

Singapore ranks as the most emotionless society in the world, beating out Georgia, Lithuania, and Russia.

Singaporeans are unlikely to report feelings of anger, physical pain, or other negative emotions. They’re not laughing a lot, either. “If you measure Singapore by the traditional indicators, they look like one of the best-run countries in the world,” says Jon Clifton, a Gallup partner in Washington. “But if you look at everything that makes life worth living, they’re not doing so well.”

To be fair, Singapore has realised that raising a nation of robots might not be a great idea, so after forty years of robotitude they’re trying to do something about it. Lee Kuan Yew would turn in his grave (wait, he’s not? Never mind) if he heard his son saying this: 

The country’s leaders want to promote a more free-wheeling society. In a speech last August, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told Singapore’s Tiger Moms and Dads, “Please let your children have their childhood! No homework is not a bad thing.”

I was more than a little disappointed to hear that Singapore Airlines (one of the good things about living in Disneyland-with-the-death-penalty) is pulling the plug on SQ21-SQ22, its 18-hour nonstop over-the-top flight between Singapore and Newark (the best airport in the world and the worst? Quite possibly!). 

I’ve flown that route a couple of times, and sometimes – if you’re lucky – it will take you further north than any other regularly scheduled flight in the world. The universe has to cooperate for this to happen: you can’t go too far north in the northern winter because nobody wants to ditch on the icecap in minus-40-degree twilight; you can’t go too far north if there are storms over the North Pole; and you can’t go too far north if the sun is too active (as it’s been for the last year or so), because your passengers will get fried by solar radiation.

But if you’re flying in summer, on a clear day, with no storms (terrestrial or extraterrestrial) to get in your way, your track can go as far as 89 degrees north, less than 200 miles from the North Pole, and if you have a window seat you can look down on Severnaya Zemlya from above:

And, three hours later, you look down on Greenland’s unearthly northern coast, utterly devoid of anything but rock and ice – a part of the world that only a handful of people will ever see: 

So I get that jet fuel prices are making the route uneconomical, and I get that Singapore Airlines would rather focus on its lower-cost routes and its one-stop intercontinentals instead of its marquee nonstop flights. But I’ll still miss SQ21/22 – the most impractical and most spectacular airline route in the world. 

(The new winner for “longest regularly-scheduled nonstop”, incidentally, is Qantas’s daft Sydney-to-Dallas nonstop. It’s a comparatively quick 15-hour flight, but the route only works one way: the return flight from Dallas to Sydney fights headwinds the whole way, and has to stop in Brisbane for fuel before the final one-hour hop to Sydney. Sometimes, if they cock up the headwind calculations, it even has to stop in Noumea as well as Brisbane - which really stretches the definition of a “non-stop” flight.)