The air outside sucks. Not something you hear everyday, I might add. Saying that the food in the school canteen is crap is one thing, with comparisons to dog food commonplace, but the forest fires in Indonesia are making normally incongrous-sounding remarks sound totally okay. And that is not okay.

It's those damned farmers with their slash and burn farming techniques. If you want to pollute your own damned air, by all means be my guest. But now the wind's blown all that stupid haze here, and there'll be no dearth of respiratory complaints, I'll say. Bloody hell.

Walking outdoors everyday is killing my lungs. I've got phlegm constantly lodged in my pharyx and it's giving my voice an irritating nasal quality sometimes. In addition to the negative effects to health, the air positively stinks too. I mean, it's totally more than enough that I'm shortening my life here, now there's insult to injury by having the air smell as well? Just great. If the problem is insidious and nobody really knows, fine, that's screwed enough. But now we have to live with this problem and can't do nuts about it.

It is in this light that I would like to suggest a couple of things that we can do to solve this problem:

1) Build hundreds of gigantic fans and blow all that damned haze back to where it belongs. But since our government is always looking for diplomatic ways to resolve problems, maybe solution #2 is more feasible.

2) Build hundreds of gigantic vacuum cleaners to suck all the haze in. Smelly smoke goes in, clean air comes out. Voila. Problem solved.

3) Since none of these solutions actually work, maybe we can all take an out-of-the-box approach to all this. I read a report somewhere that scuba-diving course fees are going down, and that more people are taking it up because of this. I say, what the hell. Everyone now has an addition excuse to go for such a course, since we all now have the opportunity to practice scuba-diving with oxygen tanks and a mask on land first. Who needs water when you can practice carrying the equipment on land? Better still, you won't need diving suits, flippers or any of those things. Saves money too.

I hate the haze.