Features

Stomp: Singapore’s Stasi (and Stomp’s lamest posts ever)

Stomp logoI’m a big fan of Stomp, the Straits Times’ gossip website. In the same way that I’m a fan of Britain’s Daily Mail, fondly known as The Daily Hate-Mail and The Daily Wail among those who claim they never read it.

Both know how to find a big audience. But you do have to question what sort.

If Hermann Göring was alive today, he’d love Stomp. So would the Stasi. It could’ve helped them with surveillance.

For the unitiated, Stomp turns ordinary members of the public who might otherwise be minding their own business into trained snoops.

It is a website where people living in one of the world’s richest countries post pictures of their fellow citizens up to no good, and complain about such heinous acts as a couple hugging at a bus stop or a pizza that is fractionally smaller than advertised.

To give you a flavour of the joy it brings to the world, there are 42,000 search results for the word “complain” on Stomp. There are 10,500 results for the word “appalled”, 14,800 for “upset”, 7,060 for “disgusted” and 8,610 for “disgrace”.

Here are 16 posts that deserve a bit of love, because they are miracles of publishing simply because they exist in the public domain.

First up is a post that is not only remarkable for the crime in question. If you look to the left of this photograph, you’ll notice that someone else appears to be taking a pic of the same scandalous act.

Stomp postNext up, we learn that Stomper Thivya is prepared to wait for an hour and a half for a sales assistant to get back to man a 7-Eleven when she could walk 500 yards up the road to the next one (there are ten 7-Elevens in the Dhoby Ghaut area).

7-Eleven staff go AWOLHygiene is a big bug bear on Stomp – there are 3,800 search results for the word ‘unhygienic’. Here, Stomper Angela feels that these parents have “no sense of hygiene” for the “inconsiderate” thing they have allowed their son to do. This is also the headline that every journalist dreams of writing.

Family wheels youth around in trolley

Now for another foot-related crime.

Man with no shoes on scales supermarket shelf

Man in sleep-on-couch shocker.
Guy lies down for a snooze

I’m an animal lover, but a police report – for this?
Cat sprayed with paintHere, a woman uses her dog as a shopping mule. The video exposé is seriously worth 44 seconds of your time.

aunti and dog Stomp post

Woman reads newspaper in unusual way.
Woman reads newspaper in strange way

Robbed, in broad daylight, of two and a half inches of pizza.

Pizza robbery

Bus driver eats his lunch. Crime helpfully highlighted with red circle.

Bus driver eats lunch

Public displays of affection are close to top of the list of shame on Stomp.

Here, we have the scandal of the embracing couple who “failed to press the button” at the pedestrian crossing.

Couple so caught up in PDA, they prevent people from pushing traffic light button

This woman, Stomper Haha suggests, is “a disgrace to Singaporean girls.”

Girl's butt makes us feel uncomfortable

What is, perhaps, more disturbing than some school kids hugging and kissing in a carpark is the individual who photographed them.

Schools kids kissing and rubbing

This “bad sight for the younger generation” is presented as a photo essay of enlargeable pictures.

Auntie exposes panties

The Straits Times is well aware of Singapore’s famous OB markers – rules that forbid anything that might rock the boat of racial harmony. But the ST’s gossip site has the habit of stomping all over them.

The word “foreigner” spits up 22,900 search results (among them the revelation, ‘Foreigner naps in Pizza Hut despite long queue outside’), but the favourite target appears to be mainland Chinese. Here are some headlines from Stomp posts after searching for the words “Chinese national” for which there are 15,700 search results:

Chinese national causes jam at Orchard Road
Chinese national makes himself comfortable on train floor
Chinese national takes a nap in front of everyone at restaurant
Chinese national woman eats on bus and yaks loudly on phone
China national tries to steal my handphone on board bus
Why can’t they obey our rules? China national caught smoking at a bus stop
China national places bare feet on train seat
Chinese national workers hang Singapore flag the wrong way

Here’s a fairly typical post. You’ll notice that these people “seemed to be Chinese nationals”.
Stomp post

Now back to what makes Stomp so great. The gloriously inane.

Napkin abuseHere is my own complaint I sent in to Stomp today, which I’m outraged hasn’t been published yet. I was at a Mexican restaurant yesterday, and I bit into a cheese-stuffed jalapeño nugget and hot cheese squirted out on to my hand. The boiling cheese left this red mark on my palm. The restaurant had not warned me that its cheese was hot, nor had it given me instructions for how to eat its nuggets.

Robin Hicks gets burned by a cheese-stuffed jalapeno nugget

Somebody call a lawyer and an ambulance.

Robin Hicks

Interning duties: Kellie Eminson

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