The first time when I read the report, I couldn’t have agreed more with it; the economy many months back was still sluggish and not showing any signs of recovery. If you were stuck to the TV, you would have gotten constant waves of negative news directing at you. Have it gotten any better now? Maybe. At least the economy is showing signs of a slow recovery and hopefully it will continue this way.

Sad to say that news of the economy is only the tip of the iceberg of negative news. We constantly received news of people in suicide bombings; killing themselves and others in the process. There were also news of natural disasters all over the world - taking lives of some and making a lot others homeless overnight. What else comes into your mind? I would leave it to you to fill in the blanks. I guess you have gotten my idea on how depressive watching the news can be … especially when one is focusing on all the bad news.

A study by University of Maryland, by analyzing 34 years of data collected from more than 45,000 participants, shown that unhappy people spend 30% more time in front of TV than happy people. Could you imagine that? I like to watch movies, and informative shows or documentaries on TV. However, any time the opportunities come up to catch up with friends for coffee, I will readily give up the square box.

Engaging in TV is so easy especially for people who don’t like to socialise or may not have much resources to do it. For TV, they just need to turn on the set and they can indulge themselves in hours of inexpensive and passive self entertainment.

So what does happy people do? Researchers found that activities such as sex, reading and socialising correlated with the highest levels of overall happiness. According to the co-author of the study, Dr John Robinson, “We looked at eight to 10 activities that happy people engage in, and for each one, the people who did the activities more - visiting others, going to church, all those things - were more happy.” Can you relate to that? I certainly can.

The study further states that unhappily married couples also watch more TV. And what do happily married couples do? They engage in 30 per cent more sex (yes, that caught your attention, didn’t it?), and they attend religious services more, and read newspapers on more days. I believe for happily married couples, you need to spend more quality time together on engaging activities rather than passive entertainment on the TV.

According to the study, watching TV had a direct correlation with unhappiness. However, I believe that watching TV can be quality time spent too; you choose the right programs to watch and focus on the positive. There are things and values which we can learn from watching TV too. Are you happy? Then most probably you’re not watching much TV. What activities do you engage in that make you happy?

Photo by benipop

Last Sunday, I was at the Singapore Botanical Garden. As it was a Sunday, there were not only a lot of tourists, but there were also a lot of Singaporeans. Some were jogging, some were just taking walks and there were some who were having picnics with their families on the grass patches.

What were I doing at the Singapore Botanical Garden? I was intending to take some pictures of the place, with my Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot camera phone, to take part of a competition. However, the picture did not turn out all that well. Nevertheless, I still managed to get some pretty decent photos to share with you. I guess it was worth spending $55 to get the camera phone fixed.

There is a Symphony Stage in the Singapore Botanical Garden which sits in the middle of a pond. While I was taking photos of the Symphony Stage, I saw these white flowers growing out of the water at the side of the pond. And there were dragonflies and bees.

Finally found out the name of this with help from someone. This plant is called Sagittaria latifolia and is sometimes known as broadleaf arrowhead, duck potato, Indian potato, or wapato. This is usually found in shallow wetlands

From my previous experience trying to take photos of the Leopard Flower and the bees, I tried to move in slowly this, to steal some shots of the dragonflies and bees.

Apparently, they were much more ‘cooperative,’ comparing to the bees at the Singapore HortPark and I managed to take a few shots. Frankly speaking, I am quite impressed by the Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot camera phone although it has its limitations. Perhaps, I have yet to master the usage of it completely.

If you want to take a break from all the shoppings in Orchard Road, the Singapore Botanical Garden is definitely an ideal place for some family bonding activities in the heart of the city. The best thing is, there is no entrance charge; you can bring your whole family along.