Hey Peeps,It’s Pancake, your favorite dek inter. OMG, do you know that we have to study on Saturdays until like the end of the Mayan calendar to make up for flood days? WTF? Seriously. It didn’t flood in my street. I never even saw any water except the stuff in our jacuzzi. Geez. Like people are sooooo selfish these days!!!I’ll tell you who else is selfish and greedy! All those taxis and bus drivers who were like all bitchin about the price of NGV and blockin the roads. Excuse me? That exploding gas crap is already way cheaper than what I have to put into my Mini.

Let’s start planning now. Because if 11½ months from now we have to slog through another season of tedious, tepid, yawn-inducing “What a year it was!” roundups, we swear we’re going to find a cave somewhere in MacRitchie Reservoir, crawl in, and never come back out.What we’re lobbying for is a little excitement, a little conflict, a little intrigue. Something that’s actually worth talking about, as opposed to the usual bitching about the queues in front of nightclubs or taxi drivers not being able to make change for a fifty.Take dying. We suck at it.

Woah, what was that!? 2011, was that you whizzing by just now? Three hundred and sixty five days gone in 60 seconds. We barely knew you, fella. Everything moves so fast in Singapore—rents, taxi fares, the door policy at Avalon. Fast, fast, fast. Everyone and everything on speed. Everyone and everything on speed except that goddamn SMRT—man, what a ride! Now we’re not calling for the lady’s head on a stick or anything radical like that—let’s be reasonable about this—but we’ve got to tell you just how awful it was down there, just awful.

Oh crap. We’re back at the office, without a public holiday in sight for the foreseeable future. What are we going to do? Work? No way. We haven’t done any real work since the floods, which were conveniently followed by Christmas, New Year’s, Yingluck’s holiday extension and a massive hangover. Sure we’ve sent the odd email, answered a few phone calls saying we’d get in touch early Jan (shit, that’s now, right?). But truth be told, much, much more time was spent watching how many things Sek Loso can smoke (our favorite is a coconut), episodes of Tei Tiew Thai and Shit Girls Say.

‘Twas the night before Christmas and across the red dot,Not a creature was stirring—’cept on Ed Saverin’s yacht.Brokers, jokers and models partying away on the tide,And more than a few throwing up over the side.An elite social network just back from Pangaea,Where they’d bought all the bottles (Champagne not beer...).All of them wasted, seasonally drunk and so jolly,And who’s that girl there?

You know, it’s really hard to pinpoint what the exact moments are that really define a year. Our cover story comes close, but why is it lacking the tear-jerking, inspirational quality of those fancy Google zeitgeist videos? Maybe it’s the fact that magazines can’t play really bad soft rock as you read them—yet. Or maybe it’s the fact that we focused on Thailand, a quiet, boring nation.Take dying. We suck at it.

It’s official. Singapore is now too expensive for human habitation, with a new survey pegging it as the sixth most expensive city in Asia. Japan took the top four slots (fuel prices having skyrocketed after every last tree was felled to print the new Murakami book), Seoul scooped fifth (with total annual spending on hairgel standing in for GDP). But Singapore was the shock, leapfrogging Hong Kong into sixth. Taxi fares are going up, Causeway fares are going up, stamp duty is going up, the price of the paper you buy to read about prices going up is going up.

Senator Rosana Tositrakul’s debut film, Dude, Where’s My Cash, offers hilarious moments even as it suffers from a pretty bizarre premise. In a nutshell, a gang of knucklehead thieves are offered 120 million baht if they rob a prominent politician’s house—but not before they plant the money in his living room first, then steal it. It’s absurd, it’s completely over-the-top and, of course, it’s comedic gold as the plan goes horribly wrong. Here is one of our favorite scenes, where the gang leader attempts to explain his plan to his goons.Wise Guy Weerasuk: OK, guys.

So the Standard Chartered Marathon has been and gone for another year, leaving torn energy gel wrappers, blistered feet and 65,000 smug grins in its wake. What lessons did we learn this time around?1. We need a new sponsor. Forget all the talk of an efficient, innovative event. Fact is that their blue and green kit is terribly passé. It used to be a kind of trophy; now half the people in the gym are wearing it. You want to be a fashion-forward city, Singapore? Then your running kit needs to make a statement, too.

They say there’s no smoke without ire. So let’s look at where you likely will and won’t be able to light up once the Health Promotion Board (HPB)’s consultation on extending the smoking ban closes at the end of this month. Desperate times call for desperate measures—and some out-of-the-box thinking.No WayOKParks and park connectorsTreetop walks (if you're dressed as a giant monkey)HDB staircasesHPB staircases (take the fight to the enemy)Beaches500 feet offshore, in the shadown of an oil tankerCovered walkwaysOpen sewersCarparksDangling from a helicopterHospitalsMorgues