Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s Friday! And along with that, I would like to announce that I hope to post random stuff each Friday from here forward. I also hope I will fulfill that with some consistency.

First thing, I would like to wish my beautiful wife, Julie, a Happy Birthday! She is 21 yet again this year!

What is with my Arizona Diamondbacks?! They went from being number one in their division almost the ENTIRE year, to missing the play offs completely in like two weeks. How sad is that?

I won’t even mention the bailout in Congress…

Gas was like $3.59 in my little tiny town today! Why am I excited?

Anyway, that’s it for me today. Take care everybody and have a great weekend!

Wow, I’ll bet you thought there would never be anymore coming about Singapore! haha There’s still more I would like to show. It was so much fun to run around with my camera and just be a crazy tourist! And I’ve included a little slide show of what tourist pictures I took when I was downtown Singapore.

But before you check out the little slideshow, I want to let you in a little Singapore legend. Singapore is the English version of Singapura, the original Malay name for the city. The word means Lion City. How it got its name is a fantastic story that rates right up with the best of legends.

You see, a long, long time ago, there was this Indonesian prince named Sang Nila Utama who lived in Sumatra. He decided, one day, that he wanted to build a new city, so he started to sail around the islands close to Sumatra to find a suitable place. But one day as he was hunting on one particular island, he ran up onto a rock that overlooked the ocean, and he had what I guess you could call a vision. He saw an island over the ocean with sandy beaches, called Temasek. He decided to go find this island, and set out with his men. Well, as any good legend would go, they ran into a huge storm as they sailed across the ocean. According to one version of the story that I heard, during the storm a huge sea monster started to attack the ship. The men tried to throw heavy things overboard to keep the ship from sinking but try as they might, it wasn’t enough. The Prince finally decided to try to make peace with the sea and the sea monster, and threw his heavy crown (which according to this version of the story was the crown of Solomon) into the sea. Evidently the sea and the sea monster felt that was fair enough and the storm subsided.

As the men arrived at Temasek and began to search around for food, a huge lion jumped out in front of the Prince. But the Prince just looked straight into the lion’s eyes. And after a second the lion calmed down, and left, as if the two had come to a silent agreement. Thus the Prince named the the city, Singapura, or Lion City.

Now in the little slide show, you’ll see a strange looking fountain, that has a lion’s head, and a fish or sea monster body. It is the Merlion, and represents the combination of sea monster and the lion that Prince Sang Nila Utama met while coming to Temasek.

I hope you enjoyed this little story of legend. I love learning things about places I live or visit, and it’s hard not to share a little!