Mr John blogs...

Indolicious

2011-09-18T12:46:00.004+07:00

I was going to write a post recommending everyone visit Indolicious, a really excellent and strangely empty Indonesian restaurant down the southern end of Lygon st, but it looks like I was too late. A friend who lives around the corner reports that they've closed down.

Unsurprising I suppose as they were always completely empty, even when Ying Thai right next door was packed and there was a queue outside.

A Friday night at Indolicious

Despite their apparent troubles in attracting customers, the food was fantastic. The nasi iga penyet (grilled beef ribs with sambal) tasted exactly like they do on the streets of Jakarta. The sambal on top was sweet and spicy in all the right ways.

Nasi iga penyet

And.... The, ultimate test of an Indonesian (perhaps this can even be generalised to south-east Asian) restaurant, the nasi goreng (fried rice) was perfect.

Nasi goreng ikan asin

Vale Indolicious. I hope you open up again soon. Es Teler and that Padang place near Melbourne uni aren't really cutting it...

High school health education in West Papua

2011-09-18T11:23:00.007+07:00

On one of my work trips to Papua in 2009 we visited a community infrastructure site that was next to a school a few hours out of Manokwari. It was a weekend and there were no kids around, so we thought we'd take a look at the school grounds to see what the facilities were like.

We came across these colourful health education posters that I thought I should share. The first two are about the dangers of drugs and malaria - pretty standard fare - but the next ones we saw raised some eyebrows.

Click on the photos to see the higher-res versions.

Mainstream Papuan society is really very conservative so I was quite impressed to see such detailed and clear information on sexually transmitted diseases and such anatomically correct depictions of the reproductive systems of men and women.

My guess is that, in the face of Papua's growing HIV/AIDS problem, the community that the school serves recognises the need for clear and factual sex education. It would be interesting to know if this school is unique or if this sort of education is common throughout Papua. I'm sure the FPI would have such posters down and the teachers beaten up in a matter of days if they were put up in Java.

Strange Birds in Northcote

2011-08-14T08:12:00.005+07:00

It's pretty late but if you're interested in West Papua or if you just generally like damn good music and you're in Melbourne you could do worse than to head down to the Northcote Social Club to see the launch of the soundtrack to Strange Birds in Paradise this afternoon from 1:45 - 4:45pm.

I saw a lot of these bands last year at an event to raise money for relief following an earthquake near the north coast of West Papua that caused a damage in Biak, Yapen and the nearby mainland. There was a really great mix of traditional percussion, I suppose what you'd call more modern guitar based folk songs and even some really tight soul. Great bands, great harmonies and always with a really driving rhythm common to a lot of Papuan music.

I recommend the music without reservation. The movie, less so.

I'm always a bit conflicted about these events because they tend to devolve into platitudes about freedom that make it sound like there's an easy solution to all of the troubles in West Papua. They encourage well-meaning Northcote types to buy lapel pins and Free West Papua bumper stickers while having no understanding of the context or the real-world implications of political change in West Papua.

To be clear, I don't support independence for West Papua. I'll go into the qualifications and reasons for this in a later blog post (if I tried to do it now I'd miss the gig). In short, I want the violence to stop, I want the people to be provided with health, education, infrastructure and other vital services and I want them to be free to express their thoughts, ideas and culture. I just think independence would be a huge roadblock on the way to doing that.

Politics aside, if you're in Melbourne, get down there and catch some great music. If you really do want some politics, ignore the rebels-without-a-cause and talk to the real Papuans.

For my non-Melburnian readers, fyi, Northcote is our little nexus of Hipsterdom. Centre of tight jeans, ironic glasses, veganism, fixed gear bikes and white people. It's top of the list of Stuff White People Like in Melbourne.

Finally, gamelan/metal fusion

2011-08-10T08:03:00.004+07:00

I found the above track on one of those music sharing services that the kids were all using back in 2002 after buying (and loving) Dreams by Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Ensemble. As you might expect, it blew my little 19-year-old mind.

It was brash, loud, aggressive and best of all, it prominently featured Balinese gamelan right in the front of the mix. They were just samples and they were used more as a texture than an integral part of the music, but still, it was something.

If you haven't listened to much gamelan, it can sound pretty odd at first, but even as a kid I loved it. I can't remember where I first heard it, but I have vivid memories of taking gamelan music classes in primary school in Jakarta at age 8 and still remember the lyrics to some of the Javanese songs. I even once convinced my parents to let the driver take me to an all night wayang performance, though my hazy memory suggests that I wasn't awake for much of it.

When I moved back to Jakarta in 2004 I started seeing a lot of metal and hardcore music. The scene was very mature with distinct styles to be found in all of the major cities.

Maybe it's just me, but I actually see quite a lot of similarities between the next two videos:

The stop/start rhythms, the shimmering layers of sound, the intense blasts and virtuousity required all made it seem like a no-brainer that someone would be fusing gamelan and metal but I was never able to find it. I heard that Krakatau were doing great work fusing jazz and gamelan but I missed their show in Melbourne before I left and never heard of any gigs they were doing in Indonesia.

Imagine my delight then when I saw a link to Anaking's Facebook page on Rumah Musik Harry Roesli's wall.

You can listen to a few of their songs below. I recommend the second track: The Final of Nowhere. I'm a little puzzled by their decision to sing their songs in English (or Engrish?), but I can forgive them that.

It makes sense that the first metal/gamelan fusion band (that I've heard of, at least) would come out of Bandung. They have, arguably, the best metal scene in the country and STSI Bandung has one of the biggest traditional music student bodies in the country. I just wonder what took them so long...

Is cycling in Melbourne dangerous?

2011-08-07T10:16:00.005+07:00

One of my favourite blogs, The Melbourne Urbanist had a thoughtful post trying to nut out the constraining factor preventing Melbourne being accurately described as a bike city.

He (and his voluminous commenters) cite various articles and personal anecdotes all seemingly predicated on the assumption that to venture out on to the Melbourne streets with a bicycle is to take your life in your hands and it got me thinking: is cycling in Melbourne really that dangerous?

I ride 50-100km per week as a commuter with probably 30-40% of that distance on bike paths (with numerous street crossings) and the rest on roads; with the exception of a short stretch of footpath on Bell st between my house and the Upfield bike path I never ride on the footpath. I have been doing this for around 18 months now and in that whole time I have had to slam on my brakes to avoid a crash exactly once and stopped with a comfortable margin of error to the side of someone who pulled out of a side street on Sydney road.

I suppose I have a reasonable bike* with good brakes that would give me a little more control than average and while I'm probably slightly more coordinated than the average potential cycle-commuter in Melbourne, I'm definitely not exceptional in that regard**.

It could be a matter of framing: I rode a motorbike in Jakarta for almost a year so I may have a skewed idea of what constitutes obnoxious driving and a lower expectation of driver awareness. Am I oblivious to my impending doom or is everyone else overreacting?

* I ride a low-to-mid-range hardtail mountain bike with disc brakes set up as a commuter with slicks and the front forks locked out.
** I long for the day when I can do a track stand at the traffic lights.

Arsehole vs. asshole

2011-07-29T14:35:00.004+07:00

There's this phenomenon I've been noting for a long time: there are more differences in Australian and American usage of the word arsehole/asshole than just the spelling and pronunciation.

Stanford professor Robert I. Sutton ably describes the intersection of the Australian and American usage in his book The No Asshole Rule as follows:

After encountering the person, do people feel oppressed, humiliated or otherwise worse about themselves?

Does the person target people who are less powerful than he?

Meet these two criteria and you, sir, are an arsehole/asshole. However, while avoiding the faux pas above will spare you being called an arsehole by Australians, you may still be subject to assholedom under certain circumstances.

Americans seem to have a slightly broader definition of "asshole" that includes people that we Australians would term "fuckwits" or "dickheads." A person can be a "fuckwit" without being an "arsehole" if they show themselves to be generally ignorant about the way the world works in a way that invites derision, but does not do so in a way that intentionally harms or attempts to harm others.

In an effort to further elucidate the subtle differences, I have helpfully prepared the following chart:

Where 'A's are the unintentionally inept, 'B's are actual, literal, anatomical arseholes and 'C's are those that fit Prof. Sutton's criteria (who also just so happen to be fuckwits).

Let me close with a few examples of American usage of "asshole" that would not be acceptable in standard Strine.

Let me know if you have further questions or counterexamples.

Ethiopian creationism?

2011-07-29T08:30:00.004+07:00

Have you ever heard of Lucy?

If you're especially knowledgable (or if you just read that Wikipedia page) you'll know that she was a partial skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis found in Ethiopia in 1974.

Lucy is far from the only primate fossil specimen that illuminates human evolution found in Ethiopia; there are dozens of important specimens found over the years. The national museum in Addis Ababa devoted a huge percentage of its space to providing detailed information about these fossils, human evolution more generally and palaeontology.

Another interesting thing about Ethiopia is the dominant religion: Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. Now, I'm far from an expert in the field, my observations are based purely on talking to a few people over a week in the country and reading a few Wikipedia pages, but here goes anyway.

As I understand it, the Ethiopian church split off from the rest of Christianity very early on; well before the split of the Eastern and Western churches into Orthodoxy and Catholicism. In fact, by the great schism, Christianity was already Ethiopia's state religion and they had already translated the Bible into Ge'ez (a translation that is still in ritual use today).

The religion still seems very strong in the country, at least in the north where we were. Pretty much everyone we spoke to professed to be a Christian though they said there were some substantial pockets of animism and Islam down south. The deacon who was our tour guide around the monolithic rock churches of Lalibela told us that there wasn't a strong history of proselytising, although there were missionaries that went to visit the southern provinces of Ethiopia, he said there weren't really any efforts to teach outsiders about the faith. They have a different calendar, a bit more of a focus on fasting* and their own festivals and holy sites, but as far as we could tell, they were pretty in line with the sorts of beliefs we had seen outside the country.

Wikipedia tells me that Ethiopian orthodoxy is considered to be in full communion with Catholic teachings, which means that the pope decided that they might have some different traditions, but they are essentially following the same doctrine. They seemed to have a lot of the same saints - St. George is a major saint had one of the churches of Lalibela dedicated to him. I asked a few people (including our deacon friend) what the significance of St George was to Ethiopians and he said that St. George was famous because he killed a dragon: the ultimate symbol of evil. There also seemed to be a lot of Ethiopian saints whose names and deeds escape me now.

A lot of the most spectacular sights in the country are Ethiopian Orthodox holy sites including the rock churches I mentioned earlier and what they claim is the real, actual ark of the covenant. Sadly, we didn't have time to see the church that supposedly contains the latter.

Soon enough, I started wondering: are Ethiopian Christians creationists? Does national pride over the importance of the scientific discoveries there outweigh doctrine?

According to the three people I asked this question (one deacon and two laypeople, all men between the ages of 20 and 35) the answer is no. The three people I asked knew about Lucy and were familiar with the idea that we shared an ancestor with apes but didn't believe it. None of the people I spoke to about it showed any interest in convincing me of their point of view, my guess is they looked at it as a matter of faith.

I'd be interested in finding out to what extent this is a doctrinal matter but, sadly, I don't know any Ethiopian Christians in Melbourne.

* Their fasting food was vegetarian and really tasty, which was pretty nice for the wife - she was getting pretty sick of nshima/ugali and greens from further south.

In search of Mulatu

2011-07-29T07:18:00.007+07:00

I had a summer subject in Mumbai last January so the wife and I decided to take advantage of our long university holiday and turn it into a trip through a few parts of the world we'd never seen before. Seriously... When is the next time we're both going to have 3 months off?

Unlike seemingly everywhere else in the world I have been (except maybe America) you almost never hear foreign music in Ethiopia. We heard massive amounts of American hip-hop and R&B all through Zambia, Tanzania and Kenya but when we hit Addis Ababa it just stopped. And it's not like they're not in the habit of playing music in communal places, every restaurant, cafe, taxi, drink stall, bus and - of course - music shop has massive speakers blaring out music at all hours of the day. It wasn't until the second day that I noticed this and until the third day that I finally heard some Aretha Franklin pounding out from a bar near our hotel. The rest of the time was either traditional Ethiopian music or their frenetic pop music.

The rhythms of Ethiopian music are generally pretty complex. A really common rhythm to hear is four groupings of really fast quintuplets, usually with the stress on the first and third beat of each quintuplet**. They also have some version of 12/8 that stresses different beats depending on the region. Vocals are very melismatic and the most popular songs seem to be the uptempo ones (a nice change from the arhythmic Celine Dion often playing in restaurants in SE Asia).

The one singer we heard absolutely everywhere is called Aster Aweke. Have a listen to this song and tell me if you can imagine a place in the world where this is the number one hit song.

It's so syncopated, so complex, so virtuosic and band is absolutely slamming... I guess Cee-Lo and Janelle Monáe would give her a bit of a run for her money, but not too many other people in the west.

While I picked up a lot of new music around the country, there was one musician I was looking for in particular: Mulatu Astatke. He is considered the father of Ethiojazz and has been gaining a second career touring the world playing to lovers of fine music who discovered him through the Ethiopiques series of albums or Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers soundtrack.

He even toured to Melbourne twice last year. The first time backed by local Melbourne band The Black Jesus Experience and the second time with his own band (so I hear). I caught the first gig and it was fantastic.

So, I sought out CD stores in every town we hit. People's eyes would light up when I said his name, but no one had any CDs.

We even found the Mulatu Astatke Institute of Music, but sadly we were there on a Sunday so no one was around.

Look at him, mocking me

Then finally, on our last day in the country in a mall on Bole road there was an electronics store with a little CD section and, sure enough, there it was: a dodgy early 90s smooth jazz album with more cheesy synth pads and corny drum machine sounds than you could poke a stick at. Still, I probably like it more than Tutu and You're Under Arrest.

Ah well, as it turned out, there were plenty of 60s Bollywood soundtracks in India to keep me busy for a while..

Backlog

2011-07-29T07:16:00.002+07:00

I have dozens of half- and quarter-written posts sitting in various places around my computer, my draft folder and the dark recesses of my brain.

I'm going to see if I can't clear a few of them out...

On live cattle exports, racism and the Facebook generation

2011-06-01T09:42:00.001+07:00

In the past few days there has been a lot of noise in the Australian media about live cattle exports to Indonesia. GetUp! has started a campaign and Animals Australia has a number of videos up with the aim of getting the government to ban live exports to Indonesia.

First off, I am sympathetic to a lot of arguments put forward Animals Australia (and people like them). I think that we Australians eat far too much meat, we (in general) don't know where it comes from or how sustainably or humanely it lives or dies. Anything that makes people think about how their meat gets from being part of a living animal to being on their plate for dinner is, to my mind, a good thing.

What I object to in these videos and the associated campaign launched by GetUp! is the dog-whistling for outrage with no action and the tacit racism.

I've never been to an abattoir in Australia (I have been to a few in Indonesia and seen animals killed for meat in mosques and streets) but I'd bet the main difference between the facilities in the two countries is how well insulated Australian ones are from the media. I would be willing to bet that your average Australian would be just as outraged by what they saw in Australian slaughterhouses. The only difference is that it's evil, uncivilised brown people doing it over there. One quote from the video: "the goal of the workers is to subdue and restrain the animals, so that they can kill them". Isn't that the job of abattoir workers all over the world?

The videos also use phrases like "beautiful Australian cattle", "he was a big affable steer", "that the workers get some gratification out of", "he called out in a way that was heartwrenching", "I swear I could hear him call out 'why?'", "3000km from home and safety" and name the cattle as if they are trying to tap into the same kneejerk anti-Indonesian sentiment that made the Schapelle Corby case such a media firestorm.

We have this strange disconnect in Australia where you can love animals like dogs, cats and dolphins but implicitly support the institutionalised violence against animals by buying factory farmed meat at the supermarket. It's true that Indonesia doesn't have animal protection laws in the same way that we do in Australia, but at least they understand where meat comes from.

A huge percentage of Indonesians see animals slaughtered in mosques and streets each year around Eid al-Adha. To my mind, the integration of the slaughter of animals into general society is much healthier than the sanitised mass-production meat machine that we have in the west (though arguably not from a public health standpoint).

No matter what the laws are in Indonesia, the way they treat animals is cultural and you're not likely to see much change in the way they treat animals for a generation or two. They have demand for beef, if we don't fill it, someone else will and it will just be "beautiful Brazilian cattle suffering thousands of miles from home and safety" instead.

The Facebook generation love getting behind causes as long as all they have to do is click a "Like" button. This cause seems tailor-made for that. Just click a button, hate on some brown people with some different values and keep on living the way you always have.

So, what do I propose instead? Don't buy factory farmed meat. Take action against factory farmers in Australia. If you really want meat, buy from local sustainable producers (like my Mum and Dad).

Unfortunately, all of these things require people to do things that actually impact their lives... What's to bet you see a lot more people signing up to GetUp!'s petition than actually stop buying their factory farmed steaks from Coles and Woolies?

Kangen masakan Indonesia

2010-04-13T18:57:00.004+07:00

I was craving Indonesian food a few weeks ago so I figured I'd give it a go.

Gulai pumpkin, fried tempe, steamed greens and sambal terasi

Pretty successful, if I do say so myself. The sambal, in particular, was awesome.

Shelley and I took a (probably ill-advised from a financial point of view) holiday to Indonesia last week and I picked up a bunch of cookbooks, including one that has 101 recipes for sambal...

I'd better get in shape for all this uleking.

SMS Indonesian

2010-02-01T11:21:00.001+07:00

People often say Indonesian is an easy language. It's true that the barriers to entry are very low if you want to be understood, but I maintain that to master Indonesian takes as much effort as mastering any other language. Sure, the grammar seems easy at first, but the ambiguity that makes it so easy to speak demands great creativity on the part of the listener to interpret.

Plus, as anyone learning Indonesian will tell you, what you learn from a book and what people speak on a day-to-day basis usually bear little-to-no resemblance to one another. This is especially true with SMS Indonesian.

A friend of mine received an SMS from a wrong number recently (or at least that's what he told me) and asked for some help in decoding it.

Cyank wis pulang lum

Any thoughts?

Well, this is a little unfair as one of those words isn't actually Indonesian... wis is low Javanese for already - more commonly written as sudah, udah, dah, uda or da.

Most students of Indonesian should know pulang: go/come home.

Let's try it again.

Cyank sudah pulang lum ????? already go/come home ???

The next easiest word to decode is lum which is short for belum (also often seen as blm or lm) meaning not yet, making our sentence:

Cyank sudah pulang belum ????? already go/come home not yet

So, what's Cyank? When people are being cutesy they sometimes replace 's's with 'c's, giving us Syank. Also, in this same cutesy register, they often replace 'ng's with 'nk's, giving us Syang. The last transformation we have to apply to this word doesn't really follow a common formula, it's just sms laziness... The author skipped over what he/she saw as a superfluous vowel: Sayang.

Sayang sudah pulang belum Honey already go/come home not yet

The most likely interpretation of this is Have you arrived home yet, honey? but it could also be Has my honey arrived home yet? talking about a third person.

Kakak Mau Tanya

2010-01-30T12:51:00.004+07:00

Beberapa hari sebelum saya pulang ke Australia setelah lima tahun tinggal di Timor-Leste dan Jakarta, saya sempat naik perjalanan dinas ke Oecusse, Timor-Leste. Pada hari minggu pagi kami istirahat jadi saya nongkrong sama teman-teman kantor di tepi pantai main gitar.

Kan, rada aneh, seorang bule main gitar di pantai, ya, mulai kumpullah alin-alin yang jalan-jalan pagi. Saya mulai main lagu Indonesia, mulai kumpul maun-maun dan tiu-tiu. Tidak lama lagi, datang Tiu Costan yang ingin menyumbang lagu.

Walaupun saya sudah lama bermain lagu-lagu Indonesia, banyakan lagu yang saya bawa kalau lagi ngejam bisa diklasifikasi sebagai lagu modern; yaitu dipengaruhi musik barat modern seperti blues, rock, pop, jazz, dll. Bukannya tidak mau belajar lagu-lagu tradisional, cuman jarang aja ada kesempatan untuk duduk bersama dengan orang yang benar-benar paham gaya dan iramanya.

Jadi duduklah kita dan tiu Kostan mengajar saya lagu Kakak Mau Tanya ini. Duduk di pantai, bermain gitar, menyanyi, makan babi dan minum anggur hitam pada siang hari Sabtu sebelum saya pulang ke Australia, entah kapan saya kembali lagi.

Obrigado Tiu no ate hasoru fali.

Masuk Angin

2009-09-28T08:23:00.002+07:00

I wrote this for Harvard's PROJAK newsletter in response to the theme: Describe a superstitious belief that you follow, or somehow affected your life.

In the West, when we have a runny nose, a cough, a headache, congested sinuses, a sore throat, frequent sneezing, a fever, general weakness or any combination of the above we say we have "a cold." Our persitent use of "cold" is a historical anachronism from the days before germ (and virus) theory of medicine where we thought that "colds" were caused by being generally cold and wet. They can be co-incident (e.g. being cold and wet can supress your immune system to the point where a cold virus can gain a solid foothold), but that does not necessarily mean there is a causal relationship (i.e. in the absence of a rhinovirus, you're not going to get a "cold").

In Indonesia, people refer to one with the abovementioned list of symptoms as having "masuk angin." Literally this means "wind has entered." In addition to the list of symptoms that accompany a "cold", Indonesian "masuk angin" sufferers can expect to burp and, less frequently, may even have an upset stomach, with all its concomitant symptoms. The burping and/or farting is key, as it symbolises the "wind" trying to escape.

You can catch "masuk angin" by being exposed to wind or any sort of fast moving air. Common ways that this can happen include being in the direct airstream of a fan or air-conditioning unit, having your window open in a moving car, sitting on a motorbike without a jacket, being outside on a windy day and so on. While some expatriates in Indonesia like to make fun of the locals for this superstition, of course, this is no more ridiculous than people warning "you'll catch your death of cold" in the West.

Good ways to get rid of wind include eating foods or drinking tonics that are "heating", ("heating" being foods defined thusly by Chinese medicine, such as ginger, etc.) and getting massaged. There are various massage techniques to draw out wind - the most notable of which, "kerok," involves rubbing the skin with a coin until you have big red lines all over your body - but during all of them you (and your masseur) are expected to burp profusely as the wind is drawn out of your body.

Now, being the sceptical sort of chap that I am, I try not to buy in to either superstition. But being used to the Western concept of "having a cold," the idea that you burped when you had acute viral rhinopharyngitis seemed odd to me. I expressed my scepticism to Indonesian friends who just shrugged the sort of shrug that says "I don't care if you don't believe me, it's true."

Sure enough, the next time I got a cold, I became very aware of my burping. "Do I always burp this much?" "Was that a 'masuk angin' burp or an 'I ate my food too fast' burp?"

Sceptical folk like me are often very quick to dismiss traditions that seem to be based on superstitions. We often mistake "all we currently know" for "all we can know." There is some bullshit behind the Western conception of "catching a cold," but there is some useful practical advice in there too: "Don't go out when it's cold. It depresses your immune system and makes you vulnerable to passing rhinoviruses." No doubt, there is some bullshit behind "masuk angin," but there may well be wisdom in it too.

And, hell, who am I to presume that I know how to sort out the pearls of wisdom from the bullshit? At least (as far as I know) the traditional healing methods haven't been conclusively proven as having no impact like Vitamin C, which is commonly sold in the West as a cold and flu cure-all...

Until then, bring on the awful tasting herbal medicines and burping masseurs...

Last post about cycling

2009-09-24T09:31:00.002+07:00

Ok, I'm aware that this has become a cycling blog... Not to worry, this is the last one for a while. I have a bunch of posts on Timorese nationalism, the current furore over Australian/Timor-Leste/Indonesian relations, use of Indonesian in eastern Indonesia, how expensive university degrees are a forthcoming bubble, and so on milling around my head.

Anyway, there are a bunch of videos of the Tour de Timor that were quite good that I thought I should post.

The first, replete with uplifting, energising soundtrack further confirming my conviction that it's impossible to write a good song even peripherally about sport:

That aside, it's a pretty rocking video.

Finally, here's one of the crowds on the way into Dili. I've got to say, I don't even really remember the crowds at the end because I was busy trying to outmanoeuver Jesse and Joao...

Crash

2009-09-21T17:17:00.002+07:00

I went for a bike ride this morning up Becora hill. I woke up a little late and by the time I got to the top, I figured it was too hot to do the whole Hera loop, so I turned around and started heading back down.

As I rounded the corner just as it starts to get steep I see a middle-aged Timorese guy walking down the side of the street. Not hearing anything, and - I guess - not expecting a quiet bicycle, he starts crossing the road without looking behind him. I'm still a good 30m away by this point, going about 40km/hr.

I yell out to him, "hey, look out!" and start to brake gently. He takes a second to react, and then turns around to see me coming. I start braking more heavily. He's bang in the middle of the road so there's no real obvious way for either of us to go. I start going left, he dodges left, I try to react and veer right at exactly the moment he reacts to my left-veering and dodges right.

I can't say for sure exactly how fast I was going when I hit him, but as my bike hit him I managed to sort-of leap over him and execute, what I must recognise as, a pretty impressive forward roll down the road ahead.

I've heard all sorts of horror stories about car-crashes in Timor. People quickly get surrounded by mobs that can turn violent (the story of the USAID guy who got hit in the head with a machete after his driver hit a guy in Metinaro, then jumped out of the car and ran off into the distance comes to mind). If you're lucky enough to extricate yourself from the mob, there are all sorts of payments demanded, no matter who was in the wrong.

Of course, before I even have a chance to worry about any of this, we've both popped up and both apologised and established that neither of us are too badly hurt. I have managed to come up with only small scratches on one knee and both elbows and a modest patch of road rash on my right hip. I can't talk definitively about his injuries, but he certainly had a cut on his hand and must have had some bruises in his back and side from where my bike crashed into him.

Sure enough, the guys who were sitting under a tree up the road start running down to see what's going on. By the time they get there I'm already helping the guy wash out his hand with some water I had with me. They seemed to be quite disappointed that no conflict had erupted and kept pointing out our respective scratches and wounds.

We both apologised, shook hands, introduced ourselves, expressed our desire to meet again sometime and went on our way.

I've only really had two proper crashes as an adult. One in New Zealand on a mountain bike track up above Golden Bay where I cracked a helmet in half and left a good chunk of skin on the road, and this one. Each time I've come away feeling thankful.

In this case, sure, I wouldn't have hit him if he hadn't walked out into the road without looking, but I probably should have been anticipating that and started braking earlier. People do it all the time here, and the concept of right-of-way doesn't really exist.

Each crash for me has a good lesson in your own mortality and fallibility for the price of a few square inches of skin. That's a bargain, as far as I'm concerned.

Respect the bike...

Tour de Timor results

2009-09-16T15:22:00.000+07:00

Before I decided to enter the Tour de Timor, I had only ever been a commuter cyclist. I could have counted the number of times I had "gone for a ride" for exercise or for pleasure on my fingers. But hey, I'm always up for a challenge and it's a beautiful way to see the country, so I signed up.

I didn't actually prepare that well. The only long rides I did were one to Baucau (130km, which just about killed me, there were multiple times I felt like I was going to cry), one to Manatuto (70km) and one to Gleno (30km, but most of it is up a big hill). Other than that I rode up to Dare (20km up and then down a big hill) a couple of times and to Cristo Rei (20km on the flat) a few times a week in the mornings. Other than that I did a bit of basketball, frisbee and yoga.

And, the verdict: easier than I expected... It was certainly tough, I don't want to undersell it. Spending over 23 hours on a bike in 5 days is no cakewalk, but it was certainly easier than a weekend frisbee tournament, or even a one day footy tournament. I suppose it's also a matter of knowing how to push yourself through the pain barrier. When I hit the barrier, I just slowed down...


	Total time	Stage 1	Stage 2	Stage 3	Stage 4	Stage 5
Winner	14:23:26	3:58:12	1:51:35	3:11:05	2:47:55	2:34:39
John	23:20:01	6:07:38	3:12:02	4:27:58	5:17:31	4:14:52
Percentage off the pace	62%	54%	72%	40%	89%	65%
Distance	455	130	65	95	70	95
Avg speed	19.5	21.217	20.309	21.271	13.228	22.365
Placing	127	115	145	139	130	154

Overall, I finished in the top half of the pack. I did better than I probably should have on the first day because so many really excellent cyclists were just dying in the heat and that was enough to keep me in the top half until the end. My fastest day by far was the fifth day, but I got two flat tyres halfway through and lost at least 20 minutes while I snapped my tyre iron and puzzled over why my brand new tube wasn't inflating (big hole in it right out of the box). The people I was riding with on that day ended up coming in the high-80s. Oh well, considering I hadn't had a single mechanical issue or crash the whole race, I was probably due for some karmic payback... My team-mate, who I had been riding with most days, broke a spoke on the fourth day, and other people had had run-ins with dogs, potholes and wash-outs, so I should count myself lucky.

Before anyone gets too dismissive of my average speeds, in my defence, the terrain was pretty rough, and some of it was actually proper mountain biking, crossing rivers and whatnot. The people in the top pack called the fourth day, where we climbed from sea level to 2000m and then back down to 1800m "the toughest climb I've ever done." Of course, they did it in just over half the time it took me, do that's not terribly surprising...

Health-wise, I felt really good the whole race too. My wrists and back were getting pretty sore by the last day, but my legs felt good the whole time. No digestive issues, other than getting really, really sick of all the sugar from the GUs, Gatorade and power-bars... I had a bit of a headache - most likely from the heat - after days 1 and 3, but I felt good at the end of the other days.

The organisers did an absolutely spectacular job. If I really want to think of something to complain about I could say that (i) there was a serious lack of vegetarian food, (ii) the food service was a little slow for one dinner, (iii) the speeches went a little long in Loihonu, and (iv) there weren't enough toilets at Maubisse. That's literally it... Not even counting how quickly they pulled this thing together it was mindblowingly well run. You arrive at the finish line, somebody greets you with a bottle of gatorade and a bottle of water. Your bag is right there, your camp-site is right there. Food, showers, water, physiotherapists, massage therapists and medics are all ready to go. We had a car with us to carry all our stuff and a lot of extra food, but we didn't need it at all. A friend who had been on the Trans-Alp race in Europe said that this was far better run.

And the crowd... The crowds were absolutely incredible... I felt like I was in the Tour de France. I was riding through Manatuto with two Timorese guys and the atmosphere was electric. People were going out of their minds cheering and seemed genuinely ecstatic that all of these international people would come to see their rai. I've got to say I got a little overcome with emotion feeling the love in the air.

So, will I be doing this more often? Well... It was fun and all, but I don't know that I'll be doing it as a regular hobby. It was a beautiful way to see the country and the racing side of it was interesting, but I think I'm more of a team sport guy. I think I'll go back to being a commuter cyclist and if individual races come along that look interesting, are close to me or are otherwise attractive (or all three as this one was) then I'll do a little half-arsed training and enter as I did with this one. I'll also keep cycling as a regular part of my weekly exercise routine, just because it's so different to everything else I do.

This race did certainly open my mind to the idea of cycle-touring. There are lots of places in the world that you can ride around. 100km on a good road is very doable in a day, even if you stop for lunch. This also opened my eyes to the possibility of much longer commutes in Australia, e.g. the 60km from Melbourne to my parents' place.

So, overall, I'll give it a solid 5 stars and highly recommend it to anyone for next year.

Spam poetry

2009-09-15T13:15:00.001+07:00

I've always had great trouble writing lyrics. I get very self-conscious about trying to put words together in ways that aren't contrived. As a thought experiment I have periodically taken lyrics to some of my favourite songs and tried to imagine that I had wrote them to see if they'd get past my internal editor.

e.g.

Ground control to Major Tom
Ground control to Major Tom
Take your protein pills and put your helmet on

I hear the train a'comin
It's rollin' round the bend
and I ain't seen the sunshine since
I don't know when

Here come old flat top he come groovin' up slowly
he got joo joo eyeball he one holy roller
he got hair down to his knees
Got to be a joker he just do what he please

And so on and so on. All great songs, all great lyrics, but if I'd written them, they would never have seen the light of day. For me, the challenge is turning off my internal editor long enough to try and develop an idea completely and then deciding whether or not it's crap. Of course, given my entire recorded lyrical output consists of one song and one line from one chorus of another song, you can gain a little insight into how regularly this process is successful for me.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney regularly proclaimed that they had no special creative talent. They wrote most of their early songs sitting side-by-side at a piano or with guitars, ukuleles or whatever other instrument they had at hand and bashing away at them until they heard something they liked. They particularly enjoyed finding bizzare combinations of chords at random and then trying to find vocal melodies that worked for them. John particularly liked to compose at the piano specifically because he knew less about it than the guitar and thus was less likely to rely on the tropes that had served him well in previous songs.This is why so many of their songs have chord changes that are theoretically "wrong", but oh-so-right. Kind of like the idea of the proverbial thousand monkeys, they claimed you just needed to wait around long enough and you'd hear something good.

If you believe this theory of creativity, then a great artist is no more than a great editor of the cultural flux that passes through his brain. All art is found art. The artist just found it hanging around his brain at the moment when he had a guitar/paintbrush/pen/can of soup in his hand. If this is so, does it matter what the source of that flux is? If the artist is just an editor, then can he take anything, call it art and be its creator?

Following the thought a little further, you could argue that all consumption of art is a creative process because to consume the art, you are interpreting the stimuli in a way that it pleasing to you. So, in consuming art, you become the artist.

I first came across the idea of spam poetry years ago, but I received a spam email just now with, arguably, the finest specimen of its kind I've ever had the privilege of receiving.

I present to you,

Anus Embus Syren Bride Anon.
sudd pore corny dulse!
glean rait pore scat?
marry fled qualm spill?
doty inker.
dull col rake tardy.
psalm duff rein ado.
apace palpi.
shout mark tower clan.
apace glean helve scan.
delve col embus.
bud syren pore who?
catty sudd scan syren.
sally rein col betid?
nexus reedy shay guest?
palpi samp apace scull.
old pore reedy grass.
grass inker stoke sudd?
spill calve sue scat?
cong scull.
corny lotto who wrap!
samp pear wrap embus?
cong old cur pule.
tenth work psalm.
anus embus syren bride.

I guess I don't quite buy into that theory of creativity, otherwise I would have credited the poem to myself. Still an interesting idea though...

Bahasa Oke

2009-08-07T12:04:00.004+07:00

I wrote a couple of articles on Wikibooks a while ago, but no one seems to have added to them... In hindsight, perhaps they work best as blog posts, thus, I reproduce them here. If you want to add to the Wikibook, the link is here.

Unbeknownst even to many native Indonesian speakers these days there is a subset of the Indonesian language derived from a peculiar form of a language game popular in the 1980s and often still used today.

The words you will learn in the following lesson are most definitely encompassed within what is known as Bahasa Prokem (itself a Bahasa Oke word as you will see below) and as such should probably not be used in polite company.

Language games and gibberish in Indonesian

Like English, Indonesian has its own Pig Latins and Ubbi-Dubbis, such as "Bahasa G." Simliarly, these language games are used code a message for specific parties in a crowd and are usually rarely used out of the schoolyard. A notable exception is "Bahasa Oke" and the words which have endured are the sorts of words that speakers would not want authority figures to understand.

How it works

To create a Bahasa Oke word the rules are by no means hard and fast, the rules are bent to create words which have more of a ring to them, but in general the following rules are applied. One takes the first syllable of a normal Indonesian word and replaces the vowel with oke, oka or oki. Usually the 'e', 'a' or 'i' is chosen to be the same vowel replaced but that is not always the case.
Now, let's get to the examples.

Word	Root Word	Meaning	Comments
Prokem	Preman	Crook, thug n.	Many people do not realise that Bahasa Prokem itself is actually a Bahasa Oke word. So literally, Bahasa Prokem is the language of the criminals and thugs. Good motivation for anyone to learn it.
Gokil	Gila	Crazy adj.	Used rather like the English 'cool', still in limited usage, but only really in Jakarta as a throwback to the 80s. Rather like the ironic usage of 'groovy', 'rad' and so on by English speakers these days.
Boker	Berak	Shit v.	Commonly used in major cities throughout Indonesia
Tokai	Tai	Shit n.	Often used as in the same manner as the English 'Bullshit', not particularly common these days.
Ngokar	Ngerokok	Smoke cigarettes v..	Not particularly common these days.
Cokin	Cina	Chinese person	This is an offensive term for Indonesians of Chinese descent, that said, you still sometimes hear it on the streets of Jakarta. Interestingly, some people even feel that the linguistically correct term, Cina, has too much of a racist ring to it and you will often hear them referred to by the English word Chinese.
Bokap	Bapak	Father n.	Extremely common, and although it doesn't really have a proper root, the term Nyokap is used just as commonly for Mother n. probably derived from Nyi, Nyonya or something like that as Bunda, Ibu, etc. don't really create words with much of ring to them. People often refer to their parents as 'Bonyok', short for 'Bokap, Nyokap'.
Pembokat	Pembantu	Helper, maid n.	Not particularly common these days.
Bokep	BF c.f. Blue Films	Pornography n.	The 'f' is changed to a 'p' as 'f' is not particularly commonly used in Indonesian. This has actually become the standard word for pornography in Indonesia and is now used to refer to all forms rather than just pornographic films. As noted above, many Indonesians are not even aware of its root.

This is far from a complete list of Bahasa Oke words but should help you on your way to gaining a more sophisticated understanding of the language of contemporary Jakarta.

Training - Week 1

2009-06-23T15:55:00.002+07:00

The first week of Tour de Timor training went relatively well. I rode about 160km, not counting riding to and from work and basketball. Legs, delicate bits and cardiovascular system didn't have too much trouble at all; my wrists however are another matter entirely.

I rode to Manatuto on Saturday. It was 68km from our house and took 3 hours and 10 minutes (with 3 medium sized hills). My wrists felt a little numb afterwards, but I didn't realise anything was majorly wrong until I tried to chop some vegetables later that night and kept dropping the knife. At yoga yesterday I was trying to point my fingers and the little finger on my right hand was pointing off at 45 degrees. It doesn't hurt, exactly, it just feels kind of numb and won't really do what I tell it.

Curious... I suppose this is what nerve damage feels like.

I think I need some gloves...

Tour de Timor

2009-06-23T15:37:00.002+07:00

Despite never having ridden further than about 30km in one sitting before, I plan to enter the Tour de Timor. I'm starting from a pretty low base, but hey, if Tour de France people can ride 3,500km over 3 weeks, surely I can handle a measly 350km in one week.

My dad used to be a keen amateur triathlete and he recently told me that you're not a real cyclist until you can finish an 80km time trial in 2 hours (note: apparently, he was never a real cyclist). My relatively fast cruising speed on my mountain bike is about 30km/hr so (with knobbly tires and running shoes without clips), on the way back from my first training ride last week I decided to try to sprint the last kilometre or two at 40km/hr to see how I went.

I turned on the gas once I hit the port. I start sprinting... I check my speedo: 34.5. I push harder... 36.4. Push again... 38.0... 38.0... 38.4... 39.8... 40.0 and then my foot slipped off the pedal...

I decided to finish the rest of the ride at my normal cruising pace of 30km/hr...

I think I still have a ways to go...

On eating meat, generally (and dog, specifically)

2009-05-28T09:43:00.002+07:00

I read this post by Matt and thought I'd add my own point of view on caninophagia.

I eat meat. Probably less than most developed world people, but probably more than most developing world people. For most of us rich people (and I define rich pretty broadly here as anyone who earns more than, say, $10 a day), eating meat is a lifestyle choice. We can get most of what we need from vegetables, so why do we eat meat? Because we like to. We feel, rightly or wrongly, that some combination of the taste, the sociocultural factors, the nutritional content, and a whole host of other factors present in meat justify the slaughter. In recognition of the fact that there is some "sin" (for lack of a better word) committed in the slaughter of an animal for my personal pleasure, I try to think about the slaughter whenever I do eat meat. If I'm going to have a part in the killing the thing, I at least owe it the dignity of recognising that it was once an animal and not just a hunk of tasty goodness that popped into being one day in my fridge.

I was talking to a guy over dinner a few months ago and he expressed the opinion that hunting was murder. We were eating steak at the time... This is very common in the developed world because we completely divorce the eating of meat to the slaughter of meat. We don't kill animals, we have poor people to do that for us. Calling someone who kills the animals a brute and then enjoying their handiwork is the worst kind of classist hypocrisy. It's outsourcing of the nasty moral issues to the poor bastards who have to work in the industrial slaughterhouses so that we can enjoy our tender cut of meat with a squeaky clean conscience. Eating meat is still killing, it's done by proxy, sure, but it wouldn't have been killed if your demand for it didn't exist.

Meat is murder. If you're not comfortable with that, don't eat it.

So, the way I try to justify my meat eating to myself is by asking myself: would I be happy to kill this animal myself, or - at the very least - be there while it is being killed and not look away? If the answer is no, then I shouldn't be eating it.

My set of criteria for deciding whether or not to eat meat is pretty hazy, but tends to depend on the following three factors:

the quality of life that the animal lived,
the manner in which it was killed, and
the sustainability of the raising and harvesting method.

To my mind, kangaroos are just about the perfect meat. They are often culled in Australia, saving them from a slow death from starvation. They live a pretty good life out in the wild and - as long as we're killing them anyway - we might as well put the calories that they have stored to good use. I try not to eat feedlot raised animals (or their products including eggs, milk, etc.) but I probably do on a semi-regular basis. Where I'm reasonably certain that hunting is not done sustainably (e.g. turtle in most places, fish caught using dynamite, non-dolphin safe tuna, etc.) I won't eat the products of it, but other than that I have no problem with hunting generally as long as the animal is killed quickly. The massive uproar in Australia every year about the JAPANESE KILLING OUR WHALES OMG!!!1!!1!1 leaves me quite bemused... I don't really see any difference between a whale and, say, a cow... As long as the populations are monitored and the fishing rate is sustainable then what's the big deal? Arguably, the battery hens that lay eggs that most of these outraged teenage girls eat for breakfast suffer more in their lifetimes than the whales being killed by the Japanese fishing vessels.

This brings me to dog. Specifically dog in Timor. Eating dog is a big thing in Timor. People love it. I was sitting around at a Timorese friend's house a while ago and he told me all about it. Apparently the best way to cook the dog is in what they call "RW" style, where it is basically steamed in a large dutch oven with a whole bunch of herbs and spices and (the secret ingredient) a can of "bir hitam" (stout). Dog is not the sort of thing that you whip up for an afternoon snack; it's a big community event. Even if you don't tell anyone you're cooking it, by the time you take off the lid of the steamer, you'll find yourself surrounded by dozens of new friends ready to share your bounty. Apparently even the Muslims turn up!

In principle, I have no problem with eating dog, as long as it fulfills the three criteria I stated above. As I understand it, pigs are just as intelligent and I eat them. From a public health standpoint, bats and freshwater fish in Jakarta are certainly more worrying, and I've eaten them (though the bat was awful, but not because I was grossed out, it just tasted foul. I'd try it again though). And the way in which the cooking of it brings communities together makes me want to try it sometime. They live pretty good lives on the streets of Dili. They basically eat garbage and turn it into calories that humans can use which is great from an environmental standpoint (though possibly not from a public health standpoint, but I digress). The issue I have is with the slaughter...

To get yourself a dog for your community feast is not as straightforward as buying a pig or a cut of beef (or more likely ox) at the market. People don't sell choice cuts of dog at the corner store. You need to go wandering from door-to-door asking people if they have one they want to sell. Apparently the going rate is about $20. So eventually, you find someone who is willing to part with their pet for this tidy sum, then call it over (often you need a piece of meat to call it, as Timorese dogs tend to be pretty wary of strangers - apparently with good reason) and stuff it in a sack for the trip home. Unsurprisingly, the dogs get pretty worked up while stuffed in the sack and can be tricky to extract to slaughter. To overcome this potential barrier, the Timorese folk have come up with an ingenious solution: a large stick. You make sure that the sack is still securely tied, then you take the stick then beat the dog to death.

Like I said, I have no in-principle objection to eating dog, in fact, I'd rather like to see the party that accompanies the cooking of it, but I feel like the method of slaughter is needlessly cruel.

I feel like it would be a shame to leave without eating dog though, so now I'm torn. I might ask some friends to let me know the next time they're cooking dog so that I can go with them and witness the whole process. Do I have to wield the stick myself to feel comfortable with eating it though? I don't feel necessarily like wielding a stick to beat a dog to death is something one needs to be particularly skilled to do so maybe I should. It's brutal, sure, but like I said, by eating it I'm proxy killing it anyway. If I want to enjoy the meat, I should be viscerally aware of where it comes from.

Maybe I can find a better way to kill them that might be more analagous to the slaughter of, say, a pig. Any tips?

Mr. John Blogs Bonus Feature!

For those who always wondered what RW stood for, the Indonesian Wikipedia article for Dog has the answer. Yes, we all knew it meant dog, I'd asked people all over Java, Bali, Timor, Flores and Papua what it stood for and no one could ever tell me. It turns out, that's because it's Bahasa Tombulu, one of the main languages spoken by the Manadonese people; notorious in Indonesia for eating anything that moves. It stands for Rintek Wuuk*, or "soft hair", being a euphemism for dog that they put on warungs so as not to offend the Muslims.

* Note the similarities between Wuuk and Fuuk (Tetum for "hair")**. I always enjoy tracing cognates across languages...

**Note that I could be completely wrong here, I know nothing about Bahasa Tombulu, it may well be that Rintek means hair... I doubt it though...

Abu Bakar Bashir - BS

2009-05-24T13:06:00.003+07:00

Tetep aje ABB ngomong BS. Gua pengen banget debat ama dia...

Yang dia proposisi adalah setiap daerah mayoritas islam harus mengeluarkan perda untuk mewajibkan sholat, menutup aurat, dan kewajiban keagamaan yang lainnya. Mayoritas Kristen mengeluarkan perda yg mewajibkan kewajiban keagamaan mereka dalam daerah mereka. Sama juga untuk agama-agama dan daerah-daerah lainnya. Ini hanya akan berfungsi untuk meningkatkan ketegangan antar-agama, bisa sampai perang sipil. Orang Kristen dalam daerah yang dinyatakan Islam akan mengungsi ke daerah Kristen dan orang Islam di daerah Kristen sebaliknya.

Kekuatan Negara Indonesia berada dalam keanekaragamannya. Bhinneka Tunggal Ika. Pembangunan rintangan antara sesama warga bisa mengakibatkan penghancuran negara Indonesia... Terserah sih... Bukan negara saya, tapi sayang aja kalo bisa terjadi. Dan ini pasti terjadi kalau rekomendasinya ABB dilaksanakan.

ABB minta agar pemerintah lebih aktif dalam kehidupan religius sehari-hari. Departemen Agama sudah merupakan departemen terkorup di seluruh pemerintahan Indonesia... Setiap tahun orang bayar mahal buat naik haji/umroh, kok tiba di Makkah dijemput pake angkot? Seperti ABB sendiri bilang "kalo pemimpin, masih ada kemungkinan nyeleweng". Kasih pemerintah mengurus hal-hal pemerintahan seperti menyediakan jasa infrastruktur, pendidikan, dll - masalah ketuhanan diserahkan ke instansi agama masing2, jangan dicampur.

Tapi, menurut saya, idenya ABB yang paling tolol dalam video ini adalah bahwa pemerintah harus memaksa setiap orang yang beragama untuk melaksanakan semua hal yang diwajibkan oleh agamanya masing-masing. Yang mana yang lebih baik? 100 orang datang solat karena dipaksa oleh Undang-Undang yg ABB usulkan, atau 1 orang datang oleh karena keinginannya sendiri? 100 orang dengan hati sebel atau 1 orang dengan hati murni?

Walaupun saya bukan orang beragama, saya pasti bahwa tidak akan ada tuhan yang ingin melihat orang datang ke masjid/gereja/dll hanya karena dipaksa.

"When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man"

Terus terang gua masih bingung orang ginian bisa jadi ustad... Yang bener aje...

Employee empowerment Padang style

2008-10-22T18:59:00.000+07:00

I went and had dinner at a Padang restaurant down the road from my hotel in Jayapura tonight and got to talking to one of the staff members. For those who are unfamiliar, Padang food (i.e. food from an area of West Sumatra inhabited by the Padang people) is by far and away Indonesia's most popular cuisine. Wherever you go in Indonesia, from Sabang to Merake, if a town has only one restaurant it's definitely selling Padang food. It's not just that Padang food is tasty (although it is), it's also due to the fact that Padang people are born salespeople. If there's a need, a Padang person will pop up in the most random places ready to fill it. Indonesians are very fond of backronyms and one of the most common is that Padang actually stands for "Pandai Dagang" or "Good at Selling Things" (it's funnier in Indonesian...). But I digress...

I was talking to this guy who had come all the way to Jayapura in West Papua (about the distance from Perth to Brisbane or LA to Washington DC) to work as a waiter in a Padang restaurant. I thought it seemed like a heck of a journey for a job that, I thought, probably didn't pay that well so I asked him whether he had a stake in the restaurant. Given his age (26) and his general lack of a managerial demeanour around the other staff I figured the answer would be no, but I was surprised...

He hadn't put up any equity, but apparently in Padang restaurants across the country the standard system is that the owners get 40% of the profit and the staff split the remaining 60% among themselves. He then launched into a quick economics lesson explaining the relationship between risk and return and the importance of incentivising good staff behaviours.

Empowering your staff like this is a pretty progressive notion; especially in Indonesia where labour practices are uniformly pretty terrible...

Impressive...

I for one welcome our new Papuan overlords

2008-10-21T18:48:00.000+07:00

Until recently a Chinese private company was in negotiations with the Indonesian government to clearfell 1,000,000 hectares of old-growth Papuan rainforest to plant palm oil. Fortunately, the two governors of the provinces of Papua and West Papua put a freeze on all logging contracts earlier this year and the project has been in limbo ever since. With the leadership of the two Papuan governors, the Indonesian government is starting to understand that the value of this forest is substantially higher than the pittance they are getting from the loggers, but deforestation continues at a terrifying rate in Papua New Guinea.

Right now the clean development mechanism only permits carbon credits to be issued based on avoided deforestation projects. Basically, that means that you only get money for keeping a tree alive if you threaten to chop it down first. This is ridiculous... Until we can put a dollar value on the amount of carbon that a hectare of old growth Papuan forest absorbs in a year and start paying it to them, who can blame them for selling it of cheap?

If someone built a big bubble over, say, Europe, how long do you think it would last before they ran out of oxygen? Days, weeks? How long do you think the world would last if someone built an enormous bubble over Papua? I don't know, but I'd bet it wouldn't be long...

Until now the Papuans have been providing free oxygen production and carbon sink services to the industrialised world. Considering the state of our own old-growth forests, that's quite a public service. It's going to be a long time until someone puts a dollar value on it but, as far as I can see, the Papuans have in their possession a resource of far greater value to the world than the oil tucked away under Saudi Arabia's deserts. The pure value of the carbon sink and the oxygen its forests produce is probably enough, not to mention the water storage, the biodiversity and the simple stunning natural beauty of the landscape.

When the oil boom first hit the Middle East mid-late last century there wasn't just huge upheaval in Arab society, conservative British society threw a fit over the lavish spending of the Saudis with their gold-trimmed dishidashas and abaya-clad women trailing 5 steps behind. We're seeing a similar situation these days with petrodollar fueled holidaying Russian oligarchs holidaying in Europe and Asia these days staying in hotels that cost tens of thousands of dollars a night and drinking vodka with gold flakes in it.

Think about it... How long is it until we see Papuan oxygen barons wearing diamond studded kotekas flashing their money around in Crown Casino while Melbourne high-society clucks its collective tongue disapprovingly at the Papuan's largesse?

Surprise

2008-08-18T19:46:00.003+07:00

Yesterday was Indonesia's Independence Day and as we had Monday off, Chad, Trish and I decided we would wander down to Wapres and see if we could find some live music.

Wapres, or Warung Apresiasi, is a great little cafe down in Bulungan, next to Blok M that has a jam session and an open mic every night. This article has a good overview of the founder and the community that he and others created.

As luck would have it, this was no run-of-the-mill Sunday night at Wapres, but they had set up a big stage out the back and had dozens of bands playing from mid-afternoon until well into the wee hours of the morning. We wandered in and took a seat on the bricks in front of some jilbabed ibus while a band from East Java who were like a cross-between Iwan Fals and Evanescence had the crowd rocking.

The standard of the bands was pretty variable, but as the night wore on, people started to get a little more into dancing and a mosh-pit (or reggae-dancing-pit depending on the band) started up. It was tough to see what was going on, but much to the chagrin of the organisers, a couple of fights broke out. The first one seemed to flow towards the gate of its own accord, but the next few were assisted by some pretty enormous preman/security guards who seemed to think it was part of their job to lay an extra couple of punches into the already subdued troublemakers. Not cool, especially as the kids they were ejecting were about the scrawniest 17 or 18 year-olds you can imagine.

After a metal band made up of Wapres staff finished playing, and the slam dancing had caused a couple of ejections, a couple of the organisers got up to encourage people to take better care of each other. "Especially", they said, "as tonight we have an honoured guest in our midst".

I was out the back at the time talking to a friend who was preparing for his set when I heard this announcement come over the PA. All of a sudden things got really quiet, so I wandered back to the crowd to see what was happening. Mas Anto Baret, the founder of the Komunitas Penyanyi Jalanan and Iwan Fals had taken the stage for an impromptu concert...

For those who don't know much about Indonesian music, this would be akin to going to an independent rock show with a bunch of no-name bands and having Bob Dylan wander out on stage to sing a couple of tunes. I pulled out my camera phone and recorded the last song they played: Lonteku a song about finding comfort in the arms of a prostitute.

Looking back over that video, it's hard to say if it's due to the bad sound/image quality, but it seems a little underwhelming. You can barely hear Iwan Fals's voice, the footage is grainy as hell and, honestly, if I wasn't there and I didn't know the song, I might just think it was a bunch of nobodies around a campfire singing some boring strummy song.

In fact, a lot of the songs that Iwan Fals is famous for are just simple 4 chord songs with very plainspoken lyrics. Done badly (or recorded badly), they're about as dull a campfire song as you can get. Done well, just like those simple three chord Johnny Cash songs, they'll send shivers down your spine. What made this performance special, and it was special, was the feeling of community there. To see the next generation of street musicians, kids in their early teens, sitting in absolute rapture, singing along with every word with two old guys who wrote these songs before most of the kids were even born.

Jakarta is a cesspit of filth and misery, I don't think that can be denied, but despite (or perhaps because of) these challenges, these incredibly passionate and tight-knit communities form around everything from sport and music to religion and race.

It's tough to get a glimpse of these communities, but now and then, if you go looking, they're there. In the almost 7 years of my life that I have spent in Jakarta I can probably count the real glimpses I've had into these communities on one hand, but they are experiences that will stay with me forever.

Literacy in Timor

2008-05-31T09:36:00.002+07:00

I've been thinking a bit about literacy in Timor recently and there was a discussion on language policy on the ETAN list recently so I weighed in. Below is my slightly edited email to the list:

I have been wondering to what extent the development of Tetum and Portuguese are hindered by the lack of reading materials in either of those languages.

Has there been any effort to develop home grown fiction? Teen novels are hugely popular in Indonesia. Their plots are formulaic and most of them are more than a little brainless, but they're written by teenagers (or at least those who were teenagers relatively recently) and deal with the issues that they face day-to-day.
They also get people reading.

How much Tetum or Portugeuse does your average teenager read on an average day? On a school day, maybe a couple of hundred words. On a weekend, your average teenager probably doesn't exceed a hundred. By contrast your average, say, Australian teenager is emailing their friends, reading blogs, flicking through magazines, reading good quality textbooks (not crappy translations), and maybe even reading a novel for fun. Australian are constantly wandering around in a sea of English language information, I would guess that, even on a weekend, your average Australian teenager reads over a thousand words a day. (Note: I have no basis for these "facts", all figures are off the top of my head).

How hard could it be to publish a novel in Tetum? Run a writing competition calling for 10,000-15,000 word stories in Tetum (!) about teenage life in Timor. The winning entry gets $500 and 5000 copies of their book printed up for distribution around the country. Get it properly edited to make sure all of the spelling and grammar are consistent and correct, print up 5000 copies with brightly coloured cartoons of Timorese teenagers doing teenage things on the cover and send them out to schools all over the country. My personal preference is that people have to pay for them (even if it's only 25c), one, because it gives the project manager an accurate measure of consumption of the book and, two, because it decreases the odds that someone will just take a pile of them because they're free and then have them sit on their shelf or use them as kindling, etc.

How much would it cost? Say, $2000 for advertising of the competition (all over Timor, not just in Dili), $1,000 in prize money (for runners up as well), $10,000 to print the books, $2000 for advertising of the launch and building buzz and maybe another $5,000 in other costs (salaries, etc). $20,000 not including what you make back in book sales? Sounds pretty cheap to me...

To my mind, the most important part about this process is that the books are originally written in Tetum and are not directly translated. In Indonesia there are tens of thousands of translated books to choose from in your average book store and almost all of them are practically incomprehensible. This is because the translators often maintain the sentence structure and flow of the original English and just translate the words leading to a mish-mash that is just confusing.

CARE in conjunction with the Ministry of Education publishes a bi-monthly Tetum and Portuguese magazine called Lafaek (Crocodile) for use in schools that has activities for kids, crosswords, math puzzles, articles with lots of photos, stories, cartoons and even vox pop style interviews with kids from around the country. Spectacular as this project is, and while I've heard anecdotally that teenagers and adults read it all the time, surely it's not as interesting for them as something really targeted at their demographic rather than at 4-10 year olds...

Anyway, that's just something I've been thinking about recently. If anyone out there wants to do it, please feel free. Hell, I'll even chuck in a hundred bucks for the writing competition prize money.

Fail...

2008-04-09T15:49:00.002+07:00

I went to get a haircut the other day. There are actually quite a few expat run joints in town but, as I have previously noted, I prefer to buy local so I decided to drive around until I found a place that was run by Timorese. My local in Jakarta was a place down the road from my house which had these beat up old barber chairs and charged Rp. 7000 (less than a dollar) so my goal for the day was to find an equivalent in Dili.

A likely contender was the place across the road from the Australian embassy. From the outside the building looks pretty run down, I figured there was no way it was run by an expat. I'd forgotten how to say hair, and I don't think I ever knew how to say cut in Tetum so I mumbled something in Indonesian and sat down. Turns out I was suckered by the old bait-and-switch and had my hair cut by a Filipino trannie instead of the Timorese barber I was after. It's surprising how long Tagalog can sound like Tetum when you're still a beginner... The Filipino English accent is unmistakable though...

Not only that, but it turns out koke hudi aren't called koke hudi at all but something else that I can't remember the name of... Kaka something? Anyway, I'd told a few people about my new discovery and they smiled politely and changed the subject. After two or three days they started to go soft and mouldy and I complained of this to my cleaner.

"Yeah, I know. I wondered why you bought them... We never eat those things..."

Oh well...

Hey America, take the hint!

2008-04-09T14:32:00.002+07:00

I was down at the market today and tried to get rid of my stash of loose change that has been piling up since we arrived in Dili in December. I count out a dollar using a selection of Timorese coins (Timor Leste uses the US dollar as its currency, but they mint their own coins to avoid having to ship heavy coins in from overseas) and head off to buy my rice, secure in the knowledge that someone else will be lugging around all of that deadweight.

I pick the kind of rice I want and hand over my pile of coins. "Oh these are no good, we don't use these anymore" says the old lady pointing a finger at my pile of 1 centavo pieces.

So, America, if a country with a GNI per capita of under a thousand dollars can get rid of the penny, then you guys are way behind...

Koke hudi

2008-04-02T09:27:00.003+07:00

One of the pleasures of moving to a new country is trying all the wacky new fruits they have on offer. Here's my latest discovery: koke hudi.

Hudi means banana but, unless you live in Timor where the bananas are actually red, they bear little resemblance to your everyday banana. I have no idea what koke means... From the outside they look like large kidney beans, or perhaps small red fejoias, but on the inside they've got these big, black, hard seeds covered in modest amounts of slightly tart, sweet flesh. The fruits they most resemble to me are custard apples, or perhaps small passion fruit with inedible seeds. More tart than a custard apple or an Asian passion fruit (with the yellow skin and grey flesh), sweeter than an Australian passion fruit (with the purple skin and yellow flesh).

I've been reading a lot of Jared Diamond recently and I can't really say I wonder why these things haven't spread beyond the borders of Timor... They're tasty, sure, but getting the flesh from the seeds takes some real labial gymnastics and there's really not that much of it. Over the last hour I've eaten about five of them and all I have to show for my efforts are some tired lips and probably about 4 cubic centimetres of koke hudi flesh. If I were a hunter gatherer in Timor thousands of years ago, I probably wouldn't waste my time on these.

I've been trying to think of better ways to use up my stash. Custard apples suffer from a similar problem (though the amount of flesh coating your average custard apple seed is substantially larger than you get off a koke hudi), and they manage to make juice out of those. Does anyone know how they separate the flesh from the seeds to make custard apple juice? Wikipedia tells me that custard apple seeds are poisonous (as are many fruit seeds) so I'm not quite ready to throw a bunch of them seeds and all into the blender...

Just what Timor needs

2008-03-17T09:26:00.002+07:00

One thing I find really puzzling about Timor is the amount of foreign labour around. I'm not talking about NGO workers, UN types and whatnot, I'm talking about semi- and un-skilled labour.

The HUGE new foreign ministry building is not only being funded and designed by the Government of the People's Republic of China, it's being built by imported Chinese labourers as well. I don't know where they work, but there are a bunch of Filipino labourers around as well that sometimes turn up to basketball. Even stranger, there seems to be a huge Thai population here as well with lots of Thai restaurants and massage salons all populated by Thai waitresses, masseuses and even cleaners...

Most estimates of Timor's unemployment rate come in around the 50% mark (and most of them add the disclaimer that that doesn't include the under-employed) with around 100,000 high school graduates entering the workforce every year. The only way I figured it would be possible that importing foreign labour is cheaper than training up locals, would be if they get their value-added through an increased ability to control their employees. i.e. bonded servitude type-of-thing.

I did something to my hip running on the treadmill the other day (stupid poorly engineered tall-person skeleton/musculature) so I decided to go and get a massage. I had a recommendation on a place called Dili Club House Resort from a friend so I thought I'd check it out. At US$17 an hour it's relatively cheap by Dili standards (i.e. only a bit over 5 times what I pay for a massage at my regular place in Jakarta), but it's genuine Thai massage provided by genuine Thai ladies. I speak a little Thai from a trip there a few years ago so I tried to get them to explain the intricacies of this puzzling pocket of increased developing country cross-border labour market mobility.

Now, I should preface this by a disclaimer that I once had a discussion in Thai about what I thought was a bombing in Colombia that turned out to be about the crash of the space shuttle Columbia, but I'll share my understanding of our conversation...

It turns out that my theory on bonded servitude was pretty close to the mark. I was stuck for a word and, considering she'd been in Timor for 5 months, I figured she must have picked up a word or two of either Tetum or Indonesian to get around so I asked her if she spoke either of those, but she couldn't speak a word. I asked her how she got around, going to the market and whatnot and she said, and I quote, "mai dai bai". Literally, as far as I understand that means "can not go". I may be misunderstanding some intricacies of the usage of "can not" in Thai, perhaps it's used in a different way to the way we use it and she meant she just doesn't go, but I'm pretty sure she means she's not allowed to go.

I was gob-smacked. Here I was supporting the international slave-trade were women are forced into servitude in strange countries and not allowed to leave the premises. I wasn't really sure how to continue so I asked the only question that I could muster given my linguistic limitations:

"So, uh, do you like it here?"

And the response came:

"Yeah, I like it. The money is much better here than in Thailand."

"You don't want to go to the market or the beach"

"No"

"Why?"

"Can not"

There it goes again... The ambiguous "can not" that I don't understand the potential intricacies of. Now the question comes: what do I do?

From a macro perspective, I can't understand why the Timorese government is issuing so many working visas for this sort of semi-skilled and unskilled work (assuming these businesses are above board, which is far from a safe assumption). In Indonesia a foreigner can't get a work visa unless he can prove that the job couldn't be done by an Indonesian and that over the period of his contract he will train an Indonesian to replace him. Of course, in most cases that doesn't happen, but the sentiment is admirable.

From a personal perspective, as much as I like Thailand and want their economy to be doing well, Timor's is in a little more trouble and it certainly doesn't need to be importing labour. I'd much rather support a local business, or at least one that employs local people and improves their capacity to work (even if it is just massaging rich foreigners, it's better than nothing), but, as far as I can tell, massage just isn't a part of Timorese culture. I've never seen a panti pijat targeted at locals so the only place to get a massage is at the fancy foreign owned places targeted at foreigners. And I like massages!

Also, as far as massage places go this one seems relatively above board. The three women I talked to seemed to genuinely like it there (despite my suspicions of bonded servitude), the set up is such that it looks unlikely that it gets transformed into a brothel as the need arises (certainly not something I want to be supporting), the massage was good, and I get to practice my Thai. So, I suppose I'll keep going there for a while, until I hear about a local place, or at least a place that employs local people.

I think I know some people who work for the International Labor Organization here, I'll have to ask them what they think about the situation. It's certainly very strange, but with such a bizarre melting pot of people and so many economies running in parallel it's really par for the course in Dili.

Corporate Environmental Responsibility in Indonesia?

2008-02-20T16:47:00.001+07:00

Wonders will never cease...

In my experience, telling people in Asia that you don't want a plastic bag for your shopping is a bit of an ordeal. After much puzzlement and despite all protestations, your stuff usually ends up in a plastic bag anyway. Then, when you take it out of the plastic bag and leave it sitting on the counter the whole situation is so novel that it normally sits there for a while, half-deflated, still holding the shape of your bunch of bananas and bottle of orange juice before they either throw it out or realise they can still use it for the next person.

I don't pretend to be an expert on the environmental economics of plastic bags, and I suspect that plastic bag reduction efforts get a disproportionate amount of attention (at least in Melbourne where people can be rabidly self-righteous about rejecting plastic bags) compared to their contribution to the average person's environmental footprint, but considering how easy it is to make gains, I think they're a good idea. They're especially vital in Jakarta where plastic bags make up a huge portion of the solid waste clogging up the waterways, which makes a major contribution to the annual floods.

So, you'll understand my surprise when I was in Carrefour (a huge multinational hypermarket chain) the other day and saw this:

Not so sure what's up with the "come hither" expression...

Translation: Buy once, forever. Broken Carrefour Green Bags can be
swapped for a new one... Free!

The best part is that they're only Rp. 2,000 (around about US$ 0.22, A $ 0.25), which - even in Indonesia - is a pretty small amount; especially for the types of people who shop at Carrefour. Interestingly they were all sold out which means that either Carrefour is poor at managing stock or that the promotion was much more successful than they hoped - I'm hoping the latter and that we see more promotions like this in future.

Cokelat Monggo

2008-02-20T08:43:00.002+07:00

While I was back in Jakarta over the past three weeks I had another chance to eat my fill of good Indonesian chocolate. "Good Indonesian chocolate?" I hear you cry... A Beng-Beng or a Silver Queen can hit the spot now and then, and I'm no chocolate connoisseur, but there's no way I'd class most Indonesian chocolate as anything very far above edible, when there's nothing else around. It's kind of waxy and thin-tasting; kind of like those cheap easter eggs I used to get as a kid.

A few months ago I was in Circle K in Bendungan Hilir and I noticed something new there: Cokelat Monggo. It looked like imported chocolate, but it had a Javanese name, and Shelley likes dark chocolate so I figured I'd give it a go. It's produced in Jogja by a Swiss chocolatier using Indonesian cocoa beans and it's really, really good. Price wise, it's not so different to imported chocolates (which is a bit of a shame) but it tends to stand the heat a little better and I like to support local industry...

The only place I know to buy it is in Circle K in BenHil, but if you see it around, pick up a block.

Copper

2008-02-12T10:49:00.001+07:00

I'm in Jakarta at the moment for work and my trip happened to coincide with the Chinese New Year holiday. I took the day off to head out to Kampung Melayu to say hi to Ardy and whoever else was around. While I was chatting to Ardy about stuff a bunch of kids turned up with a plastic bag filled with bits of copper - wiring, hinges and whatnot.

They'd spent the day picking over trash heaps to tear out dynamos from radios, electric motors from washing machines, and wiring from pretty much anything else they could find. Apparently they get Rp. 50,000 (about A$6, or US$5) a kilo from some guy down the road for it. It struck me because when I was back in Australia over new year I heard a couple of stories on the news about some enterprising young go-getters who were stealing power lines and high voltage cable from railway lines to sell for scrap. The kids assured me that they weren't doing anything like that, but then, only two of them consented to having their photo taken...

Costume for Bangkok?

2008-01-22T09:36:00.000+07:00

Well, I've booked my tickets and registered for the 8th Annual
Bangkok Hat Tournament (a frisbee tournament for those of you not
tapped in to the Asian Ultimate scene), but now I need a costume for
the after-party. The theme is superheroes and supervillains, I
suppose I could try and squeeze into Manoah's costume from Manila,
and while it does have the skin-tight lycra factor, it's been done...

With 2 weeks in Jakarta (Feb 4-15 for those of you looking for some
John-time) for some poor tailor to get to work, I need to come up
with an idea soon to make sure it's done in time. I need something
that exploits my imposing height and freakish silhouette to maximum
effect...

Hmmm...

My new toy

2008-01-17T12:35:00.000+07:00

I was doing a bit of wall-climbing (with just a touch of real rock-climbing) while I was in Jakarta and one thing that has become popular among climbers in recent years is known as slack-lining.

Slack-lining is basically walking and doing other tricks on a slack line. Now, I'm not entirely sure why it's called a slack line, because it's pretty bloody tight, but who am I to argue? Anyway, in addition to improving the opportunities for the guards at the embassy compound to laugh at me, it's also apparently good for strengthening one's feet, ankles, knees and those sorts of things. Being as poorly engineered as I am, they're probably good things for me to strengthen. Also, it's quite fun.

So I wandered around a few hardware stores, bought some equipment and gave it a go. Here was my progress a few weeks ago after a few hours on the line:

Obviously a natural... I'll be doing backflips in no time.

Something to do?

2008-01-17T11:54:00.000+07:00

After Howie and Haviva raved about it, I dropped by Arte Moris, a wonderful "Free and Non Profit Art School" on the way to the airport in Dili. With minimal support from the government and periodic grants from various donors from around the world they've had great success in supporting the development of a number of East Timorese artists with a few of them even gaining scholarships to study art overseas. They were even running afternoon art classes for as many as 200 students a day before the riots last year. Since then the IDP camp next door has been scaring the kids and their parents away and their classes are down to 20 or so junior students.

What they've done with the minimal materials the have available is nothing short of amazing. They get all sorts of random donations from all sorts of places. Some, like paints, brushes, tools for modelling clay, etc. get put to use immediately, others... well, not so much... As I was getting a tour of the place, I had a wander through their music studio (Arte Moris also provides rehearsal space for a few bands and a theatre troupe) and my tour guide pointed out one such donation. Edith Cowan University had apparently donated a bunch of musical instruments, but no one had any idea how to use them. I recognised them from some videos of bluegrass music I'd seen (and Reese Witherspoon playing one in Walk the Line) and figured they couldn't be too hard so I asked if I could borrow one and see if I could work it out.

Turn's out it's called an autoharp, and it's super easy to play. It's kind of like a piano without the hammers. When you press down the keys of a piano, two things happen. A piece of felt that is keeping the string silent is lifted up and a hammer hits it. Some smarty pants piano players like to show off and hold down the keys really gently so that the hammers don't hit the strings, and reach into the soundbox and strum the strings manually (e.g. Smoke by Ben Folds Five), that's basically what you do with an autoharp except that it's much easier. Some thoughtful person has set up a series of pieces of felt such that when you press, say, the G Maj- button, it mutes all of the strings other than the ones in the G major chord.

It's really made for bluegrass music so the number of chords available are really quite limited, but I've worked out how to play a few songs on it including some Slank, some Bob Marley and that sort of stuff so, hopefully these things will be able to get some use. I'm going to head back there this afternoon when it stops raining and see if there's any interest...

I've got some free time in between my trips to Jakarta for work and autoharp lessons to disadvantaged children in Dili probably aren't any less useless than frisbee lessons to disadvantaged children in Jakarta... Hell, maybe I can do both.

Hau hela iha Dili

2007-12-10T15:43:00.000+07:00

Hey there,

We just arrived in Dili yesterday. Here's a quick tour of our new home:

Stalkers...

2007-08-22T09:34:00.000+07:00

Shelley once said to me when I was describing the life of a white person in Indonesia that it sounds like the life of a D-grade celebrity and, y'know, it's really quite true. From people calling out to you on the street for no reason other than to get your attention, to being offered the table with the reserved sign on it at a club (not that I ever go to clubs). I sort of expected it, but there was one aspect of D-grade celebrity life I didn't expect. It sounds bizarre, but over the last 3 years I've attracted the attentions of 4 people who could broadly be defined as stalkers. The duration of their activities have lasted anywhere from 3 weeks to almost 2 years but eventually by ignoring them they fade away into the distance. The current one is a little strange though, hence, the blog post...

I don't know where she got my number from, but sometime around the end of last year I began to get phone calls in the middle of the night. The person would call up at 2am and then just sit there on the other end of the line and be completely silent. Sometimes there would be soft music or a TV playing in the background. Other times I could hear her breathing, and once in a while I could hear her humming. If I hung up, she'd call back straight away until I got fed up and turned off my phone. It would happen one night and then wouldn't happen for a week and then maybe happen two nights in a row.

One night, as we were going through this ritual I thought I'd just sit there and wait until she said something. I must have waited for a minute or two and as I began to doze off I heard her whisper "just say something". "What?" I responded. "Just speak" came the reply. I went into my normal "Who are you and why are you calling me?" routine and she went back to being silent, so I hung up and turned off my phone again in frustration.

Not long after that, the calling stopped, but I started getting smses. Normally saying something to the effect of:

Hi, happy sunday :)

Harmless enough, so I ignored them and hoped they'd go away.

Fast forward a couple of months and they're still arriving with some regularity. I started saving them a little while ago and I reproduce them for you, gentle reader, thus.

Hi,friend selamat malam.apa kabar?

22-May-2007 18:48

Hi friend, good evening. How are you?

Kamu marah sama aku ya?smsku kok nga dibalas.why?

22-May-2007 18:53

You're angry with me aren't you? Why don't you respond to my smses?

What's wrong with you?

22-May-2007 19:03

Selamat pagi,friedn.God bless you.have a nice day.

23-May-2007 02:43

Good morning friend. etc...

Aku tau siapa kamu?

23-May-2007 17:18

I know who you are

Namamu jhon heldway kan?

23-May-2007 19:09

Your name is jhon heldway right?

Happy Saturday night,Jack

16-Jun-2007 18:58

Bunda maria

17-Jun-2007 01:12

Mother mary (this one was accompanied by a little graphic of a woman with a halo around her head)

Happy Sunday

17-Jun-2007 09:20

R u ok?

11-Jul-2007 16:18

Happy sunday.

12-Aug-2007 12:55

Night..friend sory if i disturb you anymore.please don't be angry with me,coz i just want to be your friend.

12-Aug-2007 19:30

Good night friend.may God's love be with you always..

12-Aug-2007 21:47

When God open the window of heaven,He saw me and said"what you wish 4 2day?and i said"Lord please take care person who's reading this message

13-Aug-2007 10:07

Good night,have a nice dream.GoD BlesS u,always.

14-Aug-2007 22:27

Hai,friend have a nice dream.God blesS U always.good Night...

15-Aug-2007 22:31

And the creepiest one...

H@pPy BIRtHd@y...friend.May God BlesS U in your 25th Anniversary.i wanna pray for you always

19-Aug-2007 22:48

Hi..pa kbr ? How's yr day going?

21-Aug-2007 08:55

Hi, how's it going? etc...

These have been interspersed with random calls to my mobile phone... So, the question is: what do I do? Obviously ignoring her hasn't worked. She's remarkably persistent in the face of a complete lack of feedback (save for this post). Being a largish male, I'm not terribly worried about any potential violence or anything like that. She clearly knows enough about me (close enough to birthday, close enough to real name) that she either knows someone who knows me or has met me at least a couple of times.

So, I put the question to you, gentle readers, (that is, if there are any of you left after my long absence) do I:

Continue ignoring her?

Call her up and confront her once and for all?

Get a female friend to call her up and confront her?

Call her up from another number pretending to be someone else and see what hilarity ensues?

Post her number on my blog and have my friends from all over the world inform her politely that god is dead, Elton John said so?

I leave it in your capable hands.

Learning Tetum?

2007-06-19T09:36:00.000+07:00

In advance of our move to Timor this December I've been subscribing to a few mailing lists to try and get a better understanding of some of the issues. I've got to say that, while I've got a decent understanding of many of the issues from the Indonesian side, I haven't the faintest idea what the Timorese people really think about all of the same issues. One issue which particularly interests me is language - how it works, the political considerations in using it, its adequacy as a modern language.

I posted the below to the TimLang mailing list in response to a blog post posted there by the Blob Na'in from the excellent Living Timorously:

Please excuse the intrusion, I'm new to the list and won't actually arrive in TL until December so I'm still very much a novice when it comes to many of the finer points of the many political sensitivities that surround East Timorese language policy, but I'm looking to gain a better understanding (hence joining this list) and I had a few questions.

Without doubt, JRH could have made his announcement a little more tactfully and sounded out the idea at home before diving into it in an overseas press conference, but is the idea itself such a bad thing?

From my blissfully ignorant vantage point overseas, it seems like Portuguese should have been something of a disaster as a national language. Has it stratified society and excluded anyone but the elite from political discourse like it sounds like it should have? Is anyone happy with this solution?

The Blog Na'in makes some excellent points in his argument against the increased use of Indonesian in Timorese government and broader society, but is Tetum really ready to be a fully fledged modern language capable of all of the functions that are required of it? (Further disclaimer: I speak absolutely no Tetum whatsoever, I only know 3 words, two of which are 'kose' and 'kose')

A modern language needs to be a language of education. Can you discuss sub-derivations and discharge rules of formal logic in Tetum? I'm sure you could work it out, but having to invent much of the jargon rather than learning the meaning of the very specific terms would take a while. You could just work out regular rules for Tetum-ising English words or just pronounce English words differently as Indonesian has done (reformasi, administrasi, festival, toilet, publik, film) but what about more abstract philosophy? 'Empiricism', 'deontology', 'utilitarianism', 'hermeutic', 'proposition', and 'metaphysics' are all words that an English speaking first year philosophy student needs to learn to use properly, this is not so hard for an English speaker because many of the words have derivations that we are familiar with. Loan words are not as easy to remember as words from the original language. For me 'schadenfreude' is harder to remember than 'constructivist' though both may be equally new. And this is just one field of education, what about engineering, economics, computer science, etc.?

A modern language needs to be a language of government administration. Can you really discuss economic policy in Tetum to the level that is required? Can national government draft sufficiently unambiguous laws and policies such that sub-national governments know how to use their budgets, and insurance agencies know what they're allowed to insure, and investors know what they are allowed to invest in, and citizens can understand their tax obligations?

A modern language also needs to be a language of law. How do you say 'American Style Option' in Tetum? My experience with dual language legal documents in Indonesian has led me to think that Indonesian is barely able to cope with all of the requirements of a language of law (there was a lot of 'Put Option's and 'Conflict of Interest's on the Indonesian side of the page). Also, don't underestimate the added costs and complications that having legal documents in two or even three (god forbid) languages adds to a negotiation process.

Assuming all of the above are possible in Tetum, or can be made possible with a larger investment of resources in Timor's language planning institutions, you still have the issue of isolation from the rest of the world. Is national pride worth excluding the Timorese people from the international discourse in the above fields (or at least giving them another barrier to cross)?

Is the idea of Tetum as an analogue of the Indonesian concept of a regional language really so distasteful? Indonesia is such a huge complicated country, that they can't afford to spend time on the developing a custom solution for each regional language, hence the blunt instrument of the current regional language policy. Many of Indonesia's regional languages are alive and well, perhaps the Timorese government could find a similar happy medium...

I can never hope to see things from the same point of view as the Timorese resistance fighters who may now be faced with having to read their daily news and see their friends and family use domestically produced products labeled in Indonesian, and I can't really gain a visceral understanding of how distasteful this may be for them, but to me it really seems like this might be just another detour that TL doesn't need on their journey to prosperity.

It's not my decision to make though. Good luck with it...

I'm beginning to suspect I may be the only member of this mailing list, my opus was met with deafening silence... Oh well, I suppose I'll find out all of the latest juicy details on East Timorese language policy soon enough...

Competitive Emailing?

2007-06-11T11:37:00.001+07:00

Over the last little while I've been noticing a strange signature on the bottom of emails I've received from people who have Yahoo! accounts.

New Yahoo! Mail is the ultimate force in competitive emailing. Find out more at the Yahoo! Mail Championships. Plus: play games and win prizes.

What? The abstract of a paper published last year titled “Competitive Emailing” by Martin-Herran, Guiomar; Rubel, Olivier, Zaccour Georges is as follows:

We consider an infinite-horizon differential game played by two direct marketers. Each player controls the number of emails sent to potential customers at each moment in time. There is a cost associated to the messages sent, as well as a potential reward. The latter is assumed to depend on the state variable defined as the level of the representative consumer's attention. Two features are included in the model, namely, marginal decreasing returns and bounded rationality. By the latter, we mean that the representative consumer has a limited capacity for processing the information received. The evolution of this capacity depends on its level, as well as on the emails sent by both players. This provides environmental flavour where, usually, one player's pollution emissions (here emails) also affect the payoff of the other player by damaging the common environment (here, the stock of consumer attention).

We characterize competitive equilibria for different scenarios based on each player's type, i.e., whether the player is a spammer or not. We define a spammer as a myopic player, that is, a player who cares only about short-term payoff and ignores the impact of her action on the state dynamics. In all scenarios, the game turns out to be of the linear-quadratic variety. Feedback Nash equilibria for the different scenarios are characterized and the equilibrium strategies and outcomes are compared. Finally, we analyze the game in normal form, where each player has the option of choosing between being a spammer or not, and we characterize Nash equilibria.

It turns out that competitive emailing is a model that "direct marketers" (read: spammers) can use to work out how to get as much advertising into you as possible before you get pissed off at them. That's even more confusing... What on earth does that have to do with playing games and winning prizes? And what are the Yahoo! Mail Championships? Is this a ploy to disguise the ad as something innocuous so that consumers don't realise Yahoo! is advertising to the world that it wants to sell their email addresses to spammers?

Oh Game Theory, you are such a double edged sword...

Back from the wilds?

2007-06-11T11:04:00.000+07:00

There hasn't really been a reason for my absence over the last few months. I've had time, just had things I'd rather spend it on. I do like blogging though, so with a slight reallocation of time resources, I reckon I can start it up again. We'll see how long I last this time.

Just as a bit of an update for those who may wonder, life is good. My favourite girlfriend has finally moved to Indonesia and we're living with a friend in a wonderful (and rare) green leafy neighbourhood right in the centre of Jakarta; 10 minutes from my office and a 5 minute ojek ride for the girlfriend to her university.

My contract with the Cause of All the Sadness and Violence in the World ended in April so I headed over to Australia's Agency for International Development help them out on a mission to Papua and just generally be helpful on infrastructure/finance issues for a couple of months. Very fun, and interesting to get a look at another side of development, but I'm going to be working on a pretty important project with some pretty important people when I'm back at the Bank in a couple of weeks, so I'm looking forward to it.

Fun as everything is over here right now however, it is coming up on our time to leave. Come December, the girlfriend and I will pack our bags where I will be a diplomatic trailing spouse in East Timor for 2 years. Exciting times.

Anyway, must be off. Hopefully I should be posting more regularly now. I've got ideas for posts backing up into my brain all over the place... We'll see how long it takes to clear them.

John

PS - We just bought a motorbike (don't tell our parents)...

Uh-oh...

2007-02-13T17:23:00.000+07:00

I seem to have some sort of fever coming on... God, I hope this is unrelated to what I was doing last weekend...

What does cholera feel like?

John's Wager

2006-12-16T22:04:00.000+07:00

For various reasons I've been thinking a lot about religion, faith and supreme beings recently and have come to something of an epiphany.

Undoubtedly, as with every other vaguely philosophical epiphany I have had in my life someone will come along soon and tell me that someone else had it long, long ago, but before that happens and while I still I have impetus, I will write about it. So here goes...

Everyone knows Pascal's wager which says that assuming you're a moral person, you're better off being religious, because then the worst that can happen is you cease to be and the best you can get is heaven. If you foolishly decide to live as a perfectly ethical atheist, then the best you can hope for is annihilation, and the worst you can hope for is hell.

	God Doesn't Exist	God Exists
Religious	Time Wasted	Heaven
Non Religious	Nothing	Hell

Note: for the sake of simplicity, lets ignore the time you waste as a religious person and say that everyone is the same if there's no god

Not many people buy this argument because the choice is not really as simple as that. You also need to take into account that you might be supporting an evil belief system and otherwise wasting your time. Intuitively, this sounds fine, but if you start thinking about things mathematically you actually run into trouble here.

	God Doesn't Exist	God Exists
Religious	Nothing	+infinity
Non Religious	Nothing	-infinity

Now, much as I would like to, I can't truly discount the possibility that I'm wrong and there is a supreme being of some description, so I will assign probability p1 to God Doesn't Exist, and p2 to God Exists; where p1, p2 < 1. Problem for me is, no matter how I assign the probabilities, the possibility of an infinitely terrible heuristic value (or an infinitely wonderful one) should always compel me to choose religion. Here is where John's Wager comes in.

I think that the values would be more appropriately assigned as follows:

	No God	Whiny God	Good God
Religious	Nothing	+infinity	x
Non Religious	Nothing	-infinity	x

where 0 ≤ x ≤ infinity

Above, Whiny God refers to god existing as he does in Islam/Christianity/Judaism, damning people to hell for being homosexual, drinking alcohol, eating pork, not believing in him, etc. etc., and Good God refers to god existing, but having much better things to worry about; in this case you could get anything from nothing to heaven.

Unfortunately for me, there's still a non-zero probability that a Whiny God exists and will damn me to hell for not accepting Jesus Christ as my own personal saviour. But you know what? Fuck him. If he's going to be such a whiny little bitch about something as trivial as whether or not I believe in him then I'm going not going to believe in him out of spite.

If that doesn't sway you (let's be honest, it is a little childish), look at it from a moral perspective. Anyone who sets up a system for getting into heaven such that the vast majority of people have absolutely no chance of ever making it in because they were never exposed to the way, the truth or the light deserves to be protested against. I see it as my moral obligation to be an atheist for all of the children who die at birth, the people living in remote Papua who never meet the person who tells them about the right way to get into heaven (unless of course, their god is the right one, then we're all fucked), and the people who are just trying to get by and don't have time for all the praising and the self-flaggelation and whatnot.

Even if I go to hell, at least I'll know I was right...

Atheism: the only moral choice.

How do you move your live ducks?

2006-12-16T21:58:00.000+07:00

Flash! Aaaah!

2006-12-16T20:56:00.000+07:00

For some reason I should know from high school physics, despite the fact that I live on the 30th floor of my apartment building, I can hear every sound from the street as though it was right outside my window.

These sounds vary. Motorcycle races, nasi goreng guy banging on his wok, cats fighting, kids practicing the call to prayer over mosque's loudspeakers, sate guy yelling, the local imam telling the kids to stay away from drugs and alcohol, but tonight it's something different.

Yes, it seems as though some kindly soul decided that the whole neighbourhood needed to hear Queen's Greatest Hits on repeat.

MMMmmm...

2006-12-12T15:53:00.000+07:00

They taste exactly like you'd think they would...

Klub Frisbee Jakarta

2006-11-30T08:55:00.000+07:00

Despite all lack of life on this blog indicating the contrary, I am still alive (although my pants are falling down from losing so much weight to my damn intestinal fauna); I'm just super busy.

The thing which is taking up a lot of my free time (of which there isn't much) at the moment is Klub Frisbee Jakarta. So if you were needing a little John in your life that this blog just isn't providing you, head over there.

Ciao,

John

Score!

2006-11-29T20:38:00.000+07:00

I'm so busy... I've been at work from 8am to 10pm for the last 2 days, it's going to be the same tonight (partly because I keep procrastinating by doing stupid shit like this and posting on the Klub Frisbee Jakarta blog), but I couldn't help but post about this.

I signed up to one of those statcounter websites so I could see how many people were visiting the aforementioned Klub Frisbee Jakarta blog, and added this blog on a whim. It turns out these things let you know the links that people follow to get here and even tell you their location, ip address, platform, web browser and all sorts of other cool stuff...

So, the best web search that led people to this page: "gedein kemaluan". Or, for those of you who don't speak Jakarta slang, "enlarge penis".

Also, somewhat worrying is that I'm on the top page of Google for "Indonesian Pronouns".

On love and suffering...

2006-11-07T18:19:00.000+07:00

Back in Australia for just under two weeks and I have no one's phone number any more, so if any of my millions of Australian readers want to see me, email me at **myrealname**@gmail.com (actually my real name, not "myrealname"). I don't think Tohm even had a phone when I left, how things change.

So, on to the topic at hand. All my loser friends and little brothers from Australia seem to be in the process of painfully ending serious long-term relationships, still getting over the old breakups of years ago, or remaining painfully single even after moving countries to try and find some new poon whose friendship and intellect they don't value too much to sully by filthy, filthy sexual intercourse. But you know what? Right now, I'm super, thanks for asking! My favourite girlfriend who I haven't seen for months is arriving tomorrow morning and we're going to spend a large percentage of the next 10 days doing not much but making coochie-coo faces at each other and frolicking gaily through sun-kissed meadows of flowers. It didn't have to end up like this though...*

When I moved to Indonesia in late '04, even though in all honesty we both knew it wasn't going to work out, we decided to try the distance relationship thing. We lasted a respectable 4-5 months after which, because I was too much of a chicken to do it myself, she initiated the breakup and I agreed. The distance wasn't the hard thing, it was the open ended nature of it. I didn't know how long I would be away, I didn't make anywhere near enough money to fly home more than once a year, we're both young and it doesn't really make sense to be stuck in a relationship that didn't really seem to have a forseeable future.

We stayed in touch; in fact, I think the only difference between our "relationship" when we were together and when we were apart was that we didn't sign our emails "love you" anymore, and that we were back on the market. We still emailed and smsed about the same old inconsequential things we always did, in fact, a lot of things got more honest.

Almost exactly a year later, when we realised that in fact nothing had changed, we made the momentous decision to get back together. This, in the face of another year of distance relationship. Why? Well, it's simple really. Above all, she interests me. But enough about her, this blog is about me.

What horribly contrived-sounding cliches did I learn were true in the year we were apart?

If you were meant to be together you still would be, or at least, you will be again: This is the oldest cliche in the book, and for years I had thought it was a steaming pile of turd. It sounds like it requires a sense of fatalism that I just don't buy into, but in fact it doesn't. You've broken up, obviously this is because something is wrong, better you discover now than in 5 years. It might be able to be fixed, if both parties have the will, the best you can do (if indeed you want to reconcile) is remain open. In the meantime, though, get the fuck on with your life.

You need time apart to grow as people: This one sounded even worse than the first one. What a load of shit... I don't need to grow you condescending self-help book cliche spouting wanker. I don't know how to explain this to anyone else, but I honestly feel that I do know myself (and in fact my lovely girlfriend) better after spending 1 year and 355 days living in different countries... Go figure. I do wonder what Tohm's perspective on this is, as he went through a rather similar break-up relatively recently, he seems to be on the other side of it though... From reading his blog recently, I'm inclined to think he'd agree.

Don't expect Morley to be the better man: natch.

Damo needs to stop being a bitch: It's not a turn on for you to be worrying about the oppressive weight of the male patriarchy and it's impact on your conversation with the girl you are talking to. Ok, fine... I did that for quite a while, but I live in a country where it's much worse. You're in the first world dammit, they're just fine!

I read a quote recently by some old greek dude, probably a philosopher, playwright or something and he said: "the reward of suffering is experience". We're white (with the exception of Harvard and he's Chinese from Malaysia who are a ruling class anyway) middle-class males from first world nations, we can do with a little suffering now and then to keep us on our toes...

*Yes, I realise the potential jinx I am placing on myself, and the "not so smug now are you arsehole"s that I may attract in future by writing posts like this.

Not for the squeamish...

2006-10-20T19:05:00.000+07:00

Well, I went to the doctor, and now, gentle reader, I have a multiple choice question for you:

John Has:

A. Worms
B. Amoeba
C. A bacterial infection
D. All of the above.

You guessed it, it's D. Apparently there's some sort of fucking zoo living in my arse. A menagerie, if you will.

The worrying thing, is how I don't feel any different to how I've felt for the last 2 years. That, and the doctor told me that these sorts of cocktails of colonic fauna are endemic in Indonesia and the only way to truly make sure you don't catch this sort of crap is to completely segregate yourself from the masyarakat. What the hell is the point of living here if I can't share a beer with homeless schizophrenic dudes down beside Kali Ciliwung now and then?

Is bleeding from your arse the price you pay for being a man of the people?

The Shits

2006-10-19T13:39:00.000+07:00

You know you're really at home in Indonesia when you can fart with confidence...

My little sister was up here for two weeks a little while ago and, like many travellers, she had to take a day out of her busy schedule due to an unscheduled attack of traveller's runs. One unique thing about living in Indonesia is that, for many people, it never really, truly stops.

I woke up this morning with the familiar heavy, warm feeling in the pit of my stomach. The feeling gets slowly heavier, and warmer until you realise:

"Oh shit"

and your bowels reply:

"Exactly"

As much as an attack of amoebic dysentery can, I guess it just sneaks up on you. You get the shits when you first arrive, you get knocked flat for a day and then it starts to get better. You're so happy that you can move without it dribbling down your leg that you prematurely declare everything is fine and go back to eating street food. Next thing you know, 2 years later you find it strange that a doctor is shocked when you nonchalantly tell him that you shit at least five times a day.

I am writing this sitting at the Rumah Sakit MMC waiting for the results of my blood and stool test that I gave last night. It was kind of inefficient really, I could have given it to them in one.

I think it's time for a holiday...

Busy...

2006-09-24T12:36:00.000+07:00

Well, I've been a little busy in the last few months in case you hadn't noticed the lack of action on this little corner of cyberspace.

In summary, in the last 7 weeks I have left my old job, interviewed for 3 jobs, picked one, had a trip to Vietnam, started the new job, moved apartments and bought a lap steel and mandolin.

My old company, a local investment bank, was very good, but you know, even with the great experience I was getting, there reaches a point where living hand-to-mouth stops making sense. I had learnt most of what I would learn and the law of diminishing returns had started to tap me on the shoulder. I was planning on going home to Australia, but I was fortunate enough to get two job offers when I announced that I was heading back to Australia; one with a rather large development organisation, and one with an Australian accounting firm.

The Australian company offered me a substantially better package, and probably a job when I return to Australia; but when I arrived here almost 2 years ago I really thought I wanted to do the development thing. So, I figured, if I'm ever going to do it, I might as well do it now. Also, even the lower salary is roughly 4.5 times my old salary, so there's not too much to worry about.

So, continuing on my streak of getting jobs I'm hopelessly unqualified for: apparently I'm an economomist for the next 6 months...

I started the old job as an intern with no job specific skills whatsoever, whereas I got this job based on experience so they're actually expecting me to know shit... Considering I'm only going to be here for 6 months or so, they sure as hell don't want to spend their time training me just to have me leave.

Sure, I speak pretty damn good Indonesian; I'm young, enthusiastic and can pick stuff up pretty quickly, but there comes a point in your life where peope stop cutting you slack for your age and expect some hard skills.

Well, here I go...

Underwear

2006-09-14T14:09:00.000+07:00

I freely admit that I am not the most fashion savvy guy in the world. I know how to pronounce haute couture, but that's as far as it goes. Even so, I can generally make a stab at what various different parts of my own various items of clothing are meant to be used for.

I bought a pair of underwear recently, at first glance they seem normal enough...

but on closer examination, for some inexplicable reason, they seem to have a set of ribbons, one at the front, and one at the back. I have seen such ribbons before on certain delicate items of womens clothing for use in hanging said item out to dry, but these ribbons are seriously long, and it's a pair of underwear for christ's sake... They aren't going to be damaged by being hung on a line...

Can anyone offer an explanation?

Mud and Morons...

2006-09-14T13:57:00.000+07:00

Plugging "Lapindo" into Google News will give you a taste of the recent outrageous ecological disaster foisted upon the poor downtrodden Kampung-ites by big business in Indonesia.

Since late May millions of cubic metres of 160 degree celcius poisonous mud has been gushing out of the Lapindo drilling site in East ruining farmland for generations, shutting down roads, and displacing thousands of people. Let me just repeat that this mud has been gushing SINCE MAY (!), and it is now a good chunk of the way through September.

Big business does get a bit of a bad rap in Indonesia. Periodically they slip up a little and displace a couple of thousand people here, or chop down a heritage forest there, but on the whole the economic benefits they provide are helping bring Indonesians out of poverty and into the 21st century.

The people in charge tend to be well educated too. So when things do accidentally go wrong, they tend to use the most effective means possible to put things right again.

Take for example the most recent efforts to stem the mudflow as reported in the Jakarta Post last Sunday:

*ahem*

The government is offering a prize of Rp. 100 million (about US$10 grand, or about 10 times the stipulated ANNUAL minimum wage) to anyone who can stop the flow by supernatural means... And, to thin down the competition (because hundreds applied) they put together the following:

In a screening process, each psychic had to pass a test: turn off a water faucet left on by the organizer with only their supernatural powers.

"With the test, many candidates had to go back home. How can they stop a mudflow if they can't even shut off a faucet," Titus (the competition organiser - john) said.

As the rest of this article talks about the efforts of some of the participants, I suppose we are to assume that some of these "Paranormals" have passed the test.

Well, if the Indonesian government is as strapped for cash as they claim to be, then pick any one of these magic men and fly them over to the US to take part in the Randi Challenge. A cool million bucks is available to anyone who can demonstrate the existence of paranormal phenomena, and turning off a running tap would be sufficient. While they're at it, they can travel around the world and pick up all of the other prizes offered by the other sceptics associations around the world...

Not a bad return on investment, even if they split it two ways with the lucky winner... It might not stop the mud, but at least it can fund some of the clean-up.

At least this is only the regional governmental body offering the prize, the central government would never do something so stupid... Like, say, having the Vice President spend tens of millions of Rupiah on hiring rainmakers to rain on the May Day parade...

Sigh...

2006-07-23T12:50:00.000+07:00

I have just spent the last 2 and a bit weeks in the good ol' USA and write this at the LA Airport as I am waiting for my flight back home to Jakarta. No doubt there will be more posts about how weird this country is soon enough, but for now, I will write about a phenomenon a good friend of mine named Damo made me aware of back when we were in high school in country Victoria, Australia: TV Land.

Raised, as we are, with probably more than a healthy serve of American pop culture there is a whole universe of cultural knowledge that we know intimately, and yet have never actually seen.

As an illustration, when someone says the words "school bus" to me, the image that pops into my head is an american style yellow school bus, complete with left hand drive. Yellow school buses probably constitute less than 1% of the school buses I have seen with my own eyes and 0% of those I have ever sat in, and yet, because of the insidious viral nature of American pop culture, it sits there in my mind.

To us, when we eventually do make it to America, everything is just like on TV. To us, America is TV land.

Most Americans that I've met in Australia and in my travels are, by definition, the worldly ones and tend to be from mid-higher socioeconomic brackets by virtue of the fact that they can afford to fly overseas. The thing which is most TV-Land-ish about the USA is everyone other than those people that I already know.

People saying "I done told you", southern accents, Cajun accents, almost complete lack of mixed race couples, guys wearing Hooters t-shirts, frat-girls with scary tans, apple pie, steaks big enough to choke a rhinosceros, buckets (no seriously... BUCKETS!) of Coke, Republicans, Creationists, singing preachers, etc. etc. etc.

This makes walking around the US endlessly amusing for people like me when they see stuff like the above. This amusement, however, does start to wane when a youngish black girl missing most of her teeth comes up to you waiting for a bus in LA asking if you need a date for the night. Only $60... No? Well, can you spare a buck then?

Just like in TV Land.

NB: Apologies to http://www.violinmp3.com/barber-adagio.html I stole their flag picture.

Asia is funny

2006-07-23T12:45:00.000+07:00

I'm currently sitting in Taipei airport waiting for my connecting flight to LA, which will then take me on to my connecting flight to Orlando. From there, a quick couple of hours by car to Ocala, the site of my brother's impending marriage.

Being the general man-about-South-East-Asia that I like to consider myself, I didn't expect to see anything new in my very brief stopovers in Hong Kong and Taipei. I especially didn't expect to notice myself giggling at Engrish... I mean, how I'm-a-new-whitey-in-Asia is that?

But come on... Hey Song Sarsparilla? Come on... Only slightly behind is C is for Creative People Who Drink C.

Stupid Blogger

2006-07-01T00:17:00.000+07:00

Why do none of my links work on my last two posts?

I've checked the html... It's fine. Either that, or I'm a moron.

Is this happening to anyone else?

Indonesia 101: lesson 1

2006-06-14T16:04:00.000+07:00

Ok, look… I’m sorry. You may have learnt Indonesian in high school, maybe even in university, maybe even had an immersion course in Jogja. Heck, maybe you’ve had all three. The fact remains, chances are there is little to no correlation between what they teach you, and what people speak day to day. Fortunately, many locals are very willing to sit and chat at a warung and are unlikely to be terribly offended if you use the wrong word, but it’s still nice to try to avoid potential social faux-pas.

One of the more common mistakes people make, that makes people uncomfortable is incorrect usage of personal pronouns. No one is going to bite your head off, but referring to a taxi driver as kamu just isn’t cool. So to assist my loyal readers in their daily travels throughout the archipelago, I present the following as a practical guide for pronoun usage in contemporary Indonesia.

Please note: All of these, if they err at all, err on the side of politeness. So once you get a feel for them strike out on your own and forget about these rules; but until then, try and stick with these.

Rule 1: First Person Pronouns

Just use Saya… Simple as that. The only time that’s even slightly inappropriate is if you are talking to close friends, in which case they’ll tell you when it’s appropriate to switch to Aku or Gue.

Rule 2: Second Person Pronouns

Never use Anda. No one uses it except for in bad sinetrons, in formal speeches, or in advertising. Back in the days of the VOC, they decided not to teach the colonials Dutch, for fear that they might start reading about human rights and such pesky botherations, so instead figured they’d pick a random local language and impose that on this random assortment of islands they had conquered. They settled on Malay, which was a sort of lingua franca, spoken by a large percentage of people anyway. Problem was, as the version that people spoke was a trading language, it wasn’t really developed enough for legal documents, newspapers, literature, and so on. They appointed a couple of Dutch linguists with overseeing the development of the language from the lingua franca it was, into the fully functioning modern language it is today. They imported a whole bunch of loan-words from Dutch, and invented a whole bunch of abstract nouns, adjectives, and whatnot, among which, if I’m not mistaken (and I very well could be) was Anda.

Originally envisioned as a status-neutral second person pronoun (rather like You in English), the Indonesians (as they were yet to be called) couldn’t quite get their minds around this and instead the word has now become the most formal second person pronoun.

Um, yeah… So… Don’t use it, it sounds weird. Use the below:

Case 1: In professional situations

This could be anyone from a taxi driver, to a bank teller or a President Director of a large company. With anyone over the age of 20 or so, stick with Bapak/Ibu for the second person pronoun. e.g. Bapak sudah berapa lama kerja disini? - How long have you (Mr) worked here?, Ini pena Ibu Yati - This is your (Mrs. Yati’s) pen.

If the person is under the age of 20, you should be fine using the person’s name. e.g. Seperti Ika katakan tadi - Like you (Ika) said, Hadi mau minum apa? - What would you (Hadi) like to drink?

Case 2: In social situations

In social situations, people tend to be a lot more relaxed, and so unless the person is on the order of 5 or so years older than you, you can stick with the person’s given name. If not, go back to Bapak/Ibu. Once you get more confident you can throw in a couple of Mas/Mbak to shake things up if the person is around your age or younger, but keep it simple for the time being.

When to ignore this advice

When a person corrects you and suggests you use something else, then do it. When enough people have corrected you, and you’ve kept your ears open enough to hear the way Indonesians use terms of address, then go for it baby.

For more information on Indonesian pronouns, check out this lesson in the Indonesian Wikibook that some thoughtful soul has put together.

Arseholes and Hippies

2006-06-13T11:51:00.000+07:00

Do relief based NGOs profit from people’s misery?

In a word: yes.

When I arrived in Indonesia after finishing my Bachelor of Computer Science and Diploma of Modern Languages in Indonesian the NGO thing was actually what I thought I wanted to do, by some twist of fate (read: nepotism) I ended up working as a financial analyst in a local investment bank. So, the other weekend I thought I’d do my part for the recent earthquake victims and head over to Yogya to help out the relief effort and check out what I was missing along the way.

I read a book recently called Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux. It was pretty average in a lot of ways, although it was interesting in its portrayal of relief workers and the general NGO industry. The workers themselves are variously described as self-serving, incompetent, and reliant on “hunger porn” to prove their self-worth to the rest of the world.

The most wonderful thing about game theory is its mathematical simplicity. Well, that, and the fact that it provides a basis for the analysis of pretty much every organism based interaction in the universe.

The first ever version of game theory applied (whether the organisms knew it or not) and the most instinctive version, is what is commonly referred to as evolutionary theory. It relies on one axiom: each organism must do what it can to succeed. An organism itself doesn’t necessarily know what it needs to do to succeed, and may choose any number of strategies in reaching its goal. Some of those strategies are good – eating and otherwise obtaining good nutrients – and some are bad – being eaten (unless you're a salmonella bacterium, or a fruit with very hardy seeds, or something like that). There are infinite shades of grey in inter- and intra-special conflict, but I will dub the two extremes Arseholes and Hippies. A Hippie will gather his food and eat it, if it meets another Hippie they will have themselves a little party and share their food. An Arsehole gathers no food, if it meets a hippie it will beat it up and steal its food. If an Arsehole meets an Arsehole they will beat each other up, run the risk of an injury and get no food.

While there are so many strategies and so many local environmental dynamics that there is never one optimal solution to the problem, two things are clear… In a world of Hippies, the Arsehole is King. And, in a world of Arseholes, everyone suffers, but the Hippie suffers the most*.

Politicians may go into their job thinking they will stand up for what they believe in, but they quickly find themselves championing populist policies without which they will fade into obscurity. Australian companies could pay higher wages or give longer breaks, but their Chinese counterparts aren’t imposing such “unnecessary constraints” on their quest to succeed so why would the Aussies? A political party in a newly democratised nation that chooses not to buy votes may suffer a loss on polling day to another that does. Sure, it’s mean, but sometimes it pays to be an Arsehole.

An NGO survives by getting donations from various sources, spending an amount on administration (usually between 5-15%) and using the rest to fund their various projects around the world. To succeed they need to find the worst suffering (or at least the suffering that looks the worst) and get the most money from you. For example, evolutionarily speaking, it is in their interest to give poor farmers hybrid seeds that don’t reproduce, find pockets of unaddressed suffering in disasters and not tell any other organisation about it, and so on. Fortunately, in this most Hippie-fied (although mainly on the individual level, not necessarily the organismation level) of industries, I would like to believe that no NGO genuinely seeks to prolong the suffering for their own ends, although the minor sins of sexing up photos and sensationalism are rife.

So, we’ve established that NGOs are Arseholes (at least in a limited way), so who are the Hippies being taken advantage of in this situation? Us; the donors.

Thinking about it though, you know, I’m glad it is this way. We rich country nationals should be taken advantage of a little bit, don’t do nearly enough to really combat poverty (in our own countries or abroad**). Making us the Arseholes, and the poor the Hippies (if you consider not giving them money to be equivalent to beating them up). And sure, they make a profit. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be around very long. As long as they are open with their financials and all donors are aware of how their money is being spent, then of course they should!

Like banks, which take idle capital and make it available for use by entrepreneurs, NGOs play a useful role in the global economy: they take excess capital and redistribute it to those most in need, hopefully, in the most effective way. In the emergency phase of relief, that involves handouts, in the reconstruction phase, that involves reconstruction and livelihood building.

Having recently been a normal, healthy, lefty university student, I have found myself somewhat disturbed by slightly right leaning economic theories I have found myself espousing after only 2 years in the Real World (more on that later), but I’m happy that apparently my support for the UN and pinko-do-gooder projects in the developing world is intact. I did see some frustrating bureaucracy and jaded relief workers, but I’m trying, I’m trying real hard to be the Hippie; and I think they are too.

*Depending on how you formulate the game… It should also be noted though, that everyone in a world of Hippies is better off than everyone in a world of Arseholes. This is also a simplification where Arseholes contribute nothing to the system. For a much better and wonderfully written explanation of the complexities of game theory (although written in a wonderfully uncomplex way) read the last few chapters of The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins.
**The linked article is seriously awesome and everyone should read it.

Mount Merapi

2006-05-16T13:57:00.001+07:00

As you may have heard, Mount Merapi, a volcano in Central Java here in Indonesia is looking worryingly like it's about to blow its top.

I would research this post, quote statistics of people killed over the last hundred years or so from Merapi's eruptions, location, height, and all of that stuff, but a journalist friend of mine, Chad, is out on the slopes of the volcano himself and he'll do it better than I ever could...

So check out his new experiment in blog based (and hopefully, for his sake, net funded) journalism at http://www.mountmerapi.blogspot.com/.

This would work better if I actually had an audience...

Tahu Tempeh and Reggae in Indonesia

2006-05-11T19:39:00.000+07:00

I was sitting at a warung on the side of a little street just off Thamrin (Blora, Purworejo, or something like that) with a friend of mine the other week and another friend of his called Ho turned up.

Ho is a skinny Indonesian guy with long dreadlocks, a beat up guitar and a harmonica. He spent quite a lot of time on the street as a kid, and now makes his living busking on buses and along the streets of Jakarta.

We spoke about life, music, politics and so on and then traded songs for a little while. I played some Johnny Cash, he played some Iwan Fals, I played some Ween, and he played this. It's a pretty simple reggae song that Ho wrote about the wonders of cheap, tasty tofu and tempeh (and, in obligatory reggae style, a random reference to marijuana).

Why reggae is so popular in Indonesia is one of life's little mysteries. Any guy on the side of the street can play you No Woman No Cry and can mumble vaguely English sounding words to just about any Bob Marley song you'd care to name.

The standard off-beat skank in reggae is a very natural rhythm, you hear it in all sorts of musics all over the world. Possibly most notably for the purposes of this post, it is also very prominent in all sorts of Indonesian music, especially Sundanese Jaipongan. You even get the reggae triplets and other rhythmic figures that people would consider idiomatic to reggae.

I guess it's a credit to Om Coxsone and his buddies way over there in Jamaica that the style of music they developed can be so universally accepted and timeless.

If you're on the lookout for good reggae in Indonesia then fear not. The two most famous reggae bands in Jakarta at the moment are Tony Q Rastafara and Steven & Coconut Treez (who I randomly met at a party last night, or at least Steven and a coconut tree). You can catch them at a bunch of different places around town, but most often BB's in Menteng, some place in Citos I've never been to, and Wapress in Blok M.

Failing that, just stop by a warteg when you see a dude with a guitar and try your luck...

On Homesickness...

2006-05-09T23:05:00.000+07:00

Homesickness is a funny thing.

I was reading the blog of a friend of mine the other day who arrived in Indonesia relatively recently and she wrote recently her struggles with fitting in here and it reminded me of my own troubles finding my own little niche.

I think the reason that it hit me was precisely because I didn't expect it. I was very fortunate in that I already spoke the language pretty fluently, and had some great family friends that I could call in on and get a good meal, etc. Even so, I guess I should have expected it considering I was leaving all of my friends, a girlfriend I'd been with for 5 years, a job I quite liked, and a city and the associated lifestyle that I'd grown comfortable with...

For quite a while I think that I thought that the quantity of "friends" I had here made up for the qualities of the friends that I was missing in Melbourne. The realisation that I shouldn't give my number to anyone who asks was actually quite a revelation to me. Periodically, my policy of being passively friendly to people I had nothing in common with and had little interest in actually got me in trouble to the point where I had one bona fide stalker that took me 14 months to finally shake (well, shaken for 6 weeks and counting), and a number of borderline ones.

About 4 months after arriving here I met Stephi, the first western person within 5 years of my age I had met, and was having dinner with her and a bunch of other people at Amigos Kemang when the band started playing a cover version of UB40's cover version of Al Green's Here I Am (Come and Take Me).

I said, to no one in particular, as no one that in particular had paid attention to these little asides in the last 4 months so I was getting used to it, "Man... The Al Green version of this is so much better...".

"Yeah, I know..."

Suddenly I felt more at ease than I had in months and it struck me: even though I had been living in and around Indonesian culture for more than half of my life, and I knew how to adjust to their culture and make them feel at home, they didn't know how to do that for me; and now and then, I need it. My cultural response to so many things is a world apart from that of most Indonesians, even those who have lived in Australia, the US, or whatever.

McDonalds, littering, smoking, oral sex, drugs, George Bush, literature, politics, religion, synth keyboard sounds, 80s style fusion jazz, using cutesy alternate spelling when writing smses, cover bands, alcohol, homosexuality (or Gaydom as one friend put it), women, mobile phones, fashion, punk, romantic comedies, and innumerable other things conjure completely different images in my mind than they do for most of my friends here.

Stephi and I don't have that much in common, in fact, I don't think I've seen her more than twice in the year or so since then, but just the fact that she had heard of Al Green (a seemingly trivial fact) was like a big flashing neon sign that said My Cultural Experience Of What You're Culturally Experiencing Is Broadly In Line With Your Cultural Experience Of What You're Culturally Experiencing*.

The revelation I had over that dinner still wasn't quite enough to make me decide that, yeah, actually, I do really want to try and make it work here and I'll take these steps to do so. I didn't start really actually enjoying it until a few months later, when I had a surprise typhoid fever caused trip back home and brought over my guitars, got my own apartment, met a couple of expats a little more like the people I had been friends with in Australia and actually decided that I really did want to give it a genuine try; and here I am a year later loving it...

Homesickness and culture shock hit everyone in different ways at different points in time for different reasons. There's no one cure-all, in fact a good chunk of people don't get over it at all, probably 20% of people who come here get miserable and give up after 6 months or less, but if/when you get used to it, it's a hell of an experience...

Postscript: For no particular reason here is a song I wrote around the time I described above. I recorded it on my work computer in my kost room with my crappy travel guitar with a microphone I bought from Carrefour for Rp. 20,000 and it sounds like it... That said, it's a pretty accurate picture of how I was feeling at the time for anyone who cares, so there ya go...

*I wish I remembered enough javascript to know how to make that flash like an actual neon sign... Stupid Computer Science degree... Be More Useful!

No to Zero Culture

2006-04-24T00:57:00.001+07:00

For those who have just joined us, a relatively small but very vocal and increasingly violent and confident minority are trying to pass an exceptionally restrictive "anti-porn" law with definitions of pornography and "pornoaksi" so vague that will serve no purpose other than legitimising the violent and illegal actions of certain extremist groups (Front Pembela Islam, and recently Forum Betawi Rempung, among others) including hassling women for walking unescorted after dark and accusing them of being prostitutes, stoning the offices of Playboy Indonesia, and generally resorting to thuggery and intimidation to get their way.

What they don't realise, or maybe they do and the conspiracy theories are true, is passing laws like this which are supposed to "protect women and children and protect the moral health of the nation" will oppress those people and effectively tear the country apart.

I'm no expert in politics or social theory but, more than anything else in the last 5 years or so, I feel that this is a watershed in Indonesia's development as a nation. Anyone with a vague knowledge of Indonesian issues knows that Indonesia is having some national cohesion problems at the moment, much of these stem from a feeling of resentment at the perceived dominance that the Javanese and increasingly, the Sumatrans have over "Indonesian Culture". Regional languages and customs are dying out, transmigrants from Java are seen as invading regional areas (sometimes with disastrous consequences, Madurese in Kalimantan, case in point), and more and more societal and moral norms decided in Java are being forced on people who could care less that the state sanctioned religions that they have to choose from don't include Wektu Telu, their particular brand of Islam, or whatever. For some bureaucrat in Jakarta to decide that from now on, a good percentage of Papuans are breaking the law by wearing what they've been wearing every day for most of their lives, can't do anything but stoke the fires of independence that they've been trying to put out for the best part of 4 decades. That's not to mention Bali, or other regions dependant on tourism for their way of life.

So yeah... In opposition to the RUU APP (R-something Undang-Undang Anti Pornografi dan Pornoaksi), a committee of concerned individuals thought they'd put on a parade to oppose it.

At first, I was a little hesitant to head down there, I mean, the FPI and other fundamentalist organisations already see the evil foreigners as paragons of sin looking to corrupt the innocent youngsters with sex, drugs and liberal thought at any opportunity. For me to be wandering around actually joining in any protesting would probably do more harm than good. Also, it's not really my fight. As much as I want to see Indonesia develop into a cohesive, successful bastion of democracy in South-East Asia, it's for the people of Indonesia to make that happen. Not me. So I went down to observe.

My limited experience with these sorts of protests in the West normally amount to mass fornication in the streets unlikely to convince anyone who wasn't a rabid supporter in the first place, and likely to alienate anyone on the borderline. As my buddy Dave put it "well, I wasn't sure about the homosexual lifestyle before, but that fat, hairy guy with the cock-ring and biker boots makes a good point".

Fortunately (with the possible exception of the dude front and center in the photo above, zoom in if you can't read what's on his t-shirt), this wasn't anything like that at all.

The theme of the parade (which I prefer to refer to it as, rather than a protest) was No to Zero Culture, and that's exactly what it was. Instead of thousands of angry young men running around trashing pot plants and causing mischief, this was a true celebration of the wonderful diversity of culture that Indonesia has to offer that will be threatened by this ridiculous law.

There were literally tens of thousands of people in attendance, from trucks full of Waria (Wanita/Pria - Woman/Man - a sort of Transexual/Transvestite catchall), to trucks full of guys from Aceh playing traditional Gayo music, to hundreds of old women wearing jilbabs, to a truck full of guys with dreadlocks smeared in paint (I don't know either).

The whole event culminated in a big gathering at the Hotel Indonesia roundabout where a stage was set up for different groups to give cultural performances. We had some dances, some music, a pretentious poet, and last, but certainly not least, Inul (the one who is most often cited as the reason the bill is needed. For more information on her check out this article from TIME magazine)..

While I was overcome with joy to finally see Inul in the flesh, it is with heavy heart that I report that I was unable to get a photo with her despite hanging around for half an hour while she was hassled by TV cameras... Very sad.

Anyway, here's to hoping that people understand what's at stake here, and get active.

Do you think?

2006-04-23T19:19:00.000+07:00

Do you think that if you swallow a whole lot of air and stored it in your stomach, you would be able to hold your breath longer than if you hadn't?

I think there are two issues to consider here:

1) The regurgitation factor

At first thought, it might be possible to regurgitate some of the oxygen containing air out of your stomach and suck it into your lungs, but considering the fact that there's no way to create the negative pressure in the areas you require it to affect the transfer, I'd say it's impossible to play an active role in getting the oxygen containing air in your stomach to your lungs.

2) The incidental absorption of oxygen

As far as my understanding of pulmonary evolution goes, we wouldn't technically need lungs if we had a much, much larger surface area:number of cells ratio and had our capillaries much closer to the surface of our skin.

Sure, a stomach doesn't have the enormous surface area of your average lung, but surely it's better than our skin... Then again, I imagine there's some kind of mucus layer between the stomach acids and the actual stomach itself.

Maybe if you could somehow fast-track the passing of the air to the upper intestine, that would help. There are all sorts of blood vessels there.

Just wondering...

Mak Erot

2006-04-07T23:36:00.000+07:00

I was in Pelabuhan Ratu the other weekend with the Little Lady who thought she'd spend a grand or so to come up from Australia and see me for the weekend. I guess when you live in Canberra, you'll do whatever you can to get away.

We'd just pulled into town and were meandering our way along the coast looking for somewhere to find some lunch when a guy on a speeding motorbike suddenly appeared to our right driving in the middle of the lane going the wrong way banging on our window and yelling "Maerot, Maerot".

It doesn't sound like any Indonesian word I know, so I start running through the 15 or so Sundanese words I know to try and find a match. He seemed so excited about whatever he was yelling I was beginning to get a little worried. "Bridge out ahead", "new bombing in Jakarta", who knows?

Our driver seemed unpeturbed, waved him off and we moved on. We had a bite to eat and made our way to the strangest hotel in the world.

After booking into our room, a flourescently coloured canvas dome on a 20 metre high pole out at the end of a 5 metre long, 1 metre wide bridge from what the owner claimed was the highest free standing wooden structure in Indonesia, if not the world and comforted us by assured us that "no architects or civil engineers were involved", I wander down to the car to tell the driver that he can go for a wander if he wants because we're going to be there a while.

As I get down there, he and one of the caretakers are laughing about something.

kenapa pak?

what's up

yang tadi teriak-teriak tuh, anu, teriaknya "Mak Erot". Dia mo anterin kesana

the guy that was yelling before, he was yelling "Mak Erot". He wanted to take us there.

Eh, apaan tuh

Um, what's that?

Mak Erot, orang sini. Pernah denger?

Mak Erot, she's from around here. Have you heard of her?

Oh, Mak Erot. Gah pernah, kenapa dia?

Oh, Mak (Grandmother) Erot. Never heard of her, why?

Dia bisa gedein barang

She can make things bigger

Gedein barang?

Make things bigger?

Iya, barang...

Yeah, things...

Barang?

Things?

Iya, barang... Anu, barangnya laki-laki.

Yeah, things... Um, men's things

Barangnya laki-laki?

Men's things?

Iya... Anu, kemaluan. Ah...

Yeah... Um, the, uh, private parts (lit. the shame). Um...

Ah, barang... Uh, gimana ya?

Oh, things... Uh, how does this work exactly?

Ya, diurut.

Well, she massages it. (makes motions not unlike the milking of a cow)

Diurut? Sama Mak?

Massaged? By a grandmother?

Iya. Katanya laku dia.

Yeah, word is she's pretty busy.

Terus? Makin gede, barangnya?

So? It actually gets bigger?

Iya. Tapi nggak bagus tuh, nggak alami. Paling dua, tiga hari kembali lagi

Yeah, but it's not really good, not natural. After two or three days it goes back to normal.

Apa nggak sakit? Kok diurut aja bisa makin gede?

Doesn't it hurt? She just massages it and it gets bigger?

Ya, kasih minyak, trus diurut.

Well, she puts some oil on it and massages it.

Huh...

I see...

Anak-anaknya banyak tuh, di Jakarta. Tapi banyak yang palsu juga. Ini yang asli

Her students (lit. children) are all over Jakarta. But lots of them are fake. This is the real one.

Well... If you're looking for something unique to do next time you're in Pelabuhan Ratu. Keep an eye out. The guy's who know the way are near the first bridge when you're driving along the beach after passing through the town.

Ouch

2006-02-19T11:28:00.000+07:00

Now it's morning.

Oh absinthe, why have you forsaken me?

drunken ramblings

2006-02-19T02:39:00.000+07:00

Ah, maybe this blog thing has somethinfg to it.

I',m currently checingf my email nefore I gogt to bed as I NOW Hacwe afanchy cable internet.

Hooray fir absinthe and people who make much more than I do.

I(ndoesia is a strange place. You can lketerallty buy the sanme thing for Rp 70,000 or 5,000 depending on where you buy it. I read an article recently that rated the relative expensiveness of expat style living in various cities and Jakarta was like the 60th most expensive city to live in in the world.

Depending on how you live I can understand it though.... In Australia, the most I would ever pay for a beer would be $3, maybe $6 for a stubby if I was in bennetts or Dizzy's and felt like splashing out whereas here I relatively frequently end up in places which charge the equivalent og AUD10 for a locally made beer!

Obviously I don't stay in thjose places very long, I just stick to mooching of higly paid UN frinds.

Ah, my maiden post

2005-12-29T11:07:00.000+07:00

Well, I didn't intend to actually start a blog today. I actually just wanted to post a hello on Anth's blog that I heard so much about but I wasn't allowed to post anonymously... Fascists.

I would have called this "The Contractual Obligation Blog" but who wants to be associated with the Monty Python internet fanboys?

A wise and experienced blogger once gave me some valuable advice passed on to her by a similarly wise and experienced blogger... "No one likes a meta-blog".

So, yeah...

John