Karen Armstrong

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Behind the Scenes

The Islamic Day of Sacrifice only occurs once a year but it should remind us of what takes place in abattoirs every day in every country of the world. The animals are similarly mistreated. Islam is perhaps the only religion that lays down some guidelines for the ethical treatment of animals, even though the guidelines are almost completely ignored. Sites like www.islamicconcerns.com however, give hope that this may be slowly changing. On this site, Moslems discuss the ethical treatment of animals from an Islamic viewpoint and quote from the Qu'ran and Ahadiths (collected sayings of the prophet) to support their statements.

It is only from within Islam that change will come because criticism from non-Moslems is not well received at all. That won't stop me passing comment on Islam nor reading what other non-Moslems have to say about the religion and its founder. I'm currently reading Karen Armstrong's biography of Muhammed and the more I read, the more I realise how far certain professed Moslem groups like the Taliban have strayed from the original message of the Prophet. They have in fact regressed to the pre-Islamic period described as the Jahiliyah (the time of ignorance). Consider the following quotation from her book:

Muhammed was a man who loved and needed women. In this he differed from many of his contemporaries. Later, some of his closest companions, who clearly believed that women should be kept in their place, noted that in the pre-Islamic period most Meccans thought little of the female sex. We have seen that women had no status during the Jahiliyah and even some of the most prominent Muslims treated their wives and daughters harshly. But Muhammed seems genuinely to have enjoyed women's company and to have needed affection and intimacy. In later years, his gentleness and apparent leniency with the women in his life perplexed some of his closest companions.

It should be remembered that Muhammed was utterly faithful to his first wife, Khadija, until she died. In the early days following his terrifying revelation, she was a crucial support. The book goes on to say:

Trembling, he waited for the terror to abate, and Khadija held him in her arms, soothing him and trying to take his fear away. All the sources emphasise Muhammed's profound dependence upon Khadija in this crisis. Later he would have other visions on the mountainside and each time he would go straight to Khadija and beg her to cradle him and wrap him in his cloak. But Khadija was not just a consoling mother figure; she was also Muhammed's spiritual advisor. It was she who was able to provide the support that other seers and prophets have found in an established religion.

The Taliban have simply returned to their pre-Islamic roots and are a recidivistic insult to the changes that Muhammed tried to bring about. The fact that so many followers of Islam fail to live up to the ideals espoused in the Qu'ran is not Muhammed's fault. He did his best but the baser aspects of human nature and ingrained cultural norms have later distorted his message.

Have a Nice Day

The site http://www.animalsaustralia.org has some graphic photos of the suffering that animals undergo on their journey from Australia and on their arrival in Egypt and the Middle East. The photo above and video below were both taken from that site.

More videos from Animals Australia

Bouncing Back

My last post was on November 18th following my Bouncy Town misadventure. Since then I got sick, like two-week sick, and it was all I could do to drag my tired old body off to work. The second week I had a really bad chest infection and all the while there were exams to write and mark, followed by reports to write. I've bounced back however, and am looking forward to beginning holidays on Wednesday.

Of course Thursday is the dreaded Islamic Day of Sacrifice, so I'll stay indoors that day. The graphic that I've uploaded expresses my feelings in the matter. Here's a recent quote from a site that monitors the spread of avian flu:

The high point of the hajj, when pilgrims converge on Mount Arafat, will take place on Tuesday, and Eid al-Adha, the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice marking the end of the pilgrimage, will be celebrated the next day. All Muslims are required to make the hajj to Mecca, in western Saudi Arabia, at least once in their lifetime if they have the means to do so. Pilgrims sacrifice an animal, usually a sheep, for Eid al-Adha as part of the rituals. "Usually we get around 2 million sheep, goats and cows for the hajj season. The work is ongoing," Mohammad Jameel, an official in the storage terminal department at the Jedda Islamic Port, told AFP. "The livestock is shipped from Somalia, Djibouti, Australia and New Zealand," he said, adding that the ships each carry around 120,000 sheep or goats.

"The work is ongoing" indeed, two million animals slaughtered in Mecca alone on just one day. The total number throughout the Muslim world would presumably be in the tens of millions. Getting murdered is one thing but the suffering of the animals on these ships is appalling and well documented. The prophet Muhammed was scathing in his condemnation of those who mistreated animals and would have been appalled at these death ships and their connection with Islam. The Islamic Day of Sacrifice is not really about killing animals at all. It is about inner sacrifice which is much more difficult to accomplish of course . Today however, most Moslems are fixated on external rituals and miss the deeper meaning behind them. No matter what I say however, the bloodbath is coming.

Here is a link to an article written in mid-2007 by an Australian, Jenny Hume, about the live animals exports. It's titled "Live animal exports: defending the indefensible". Things are particularly bad in Egypt where sacrificial animals are horribly mistreated, in defiance of what is prescribed in the Qu'ran. I'm been down this path before however, and it doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in listening.

Bouncy Town

Sunday is normally a holiday for me but for some reason I decided to volunteer to help man a promotional booth that my school had set up in Bouncy Town. I had no idea where Bouncy Town was but I assumed it would be located inside an air-conditioned mall (all such previous promotions have taken place within malls). Nobody ever mentioned the word OUTDOOR and so it was with a sense of growing apprehension that I found myself sitting in a tent watching a blazing sun climb towards its zenith. I was still sitting there four and a half sweltering hours later.

If I do venture outdoors during the day in Jakarta, it is only for the purpose of moving from one air-conditioned environment to another. I can't believe I sat where I did for as long as I did. Sitting here writing this in my air-conditioned study, I still feel hot. Worse still, the booth was a marketing disaster, because there were hardly any visitors, apart from the one or two that my more enthusiastic Indonesian colleagues managed to drag in.

I was the token expatriate face that parents of prospective students supposedly like to see. This day however, it was a very sweaty face and the beaming smile ;-) that normally adorns it was gone. The smile still hasn't returned and it will take some time for the memories of my meltdown at Bouncy Town to fade.

Misguided

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Hari Minggu

Hari minggu just means Sunday in the Indonesian language and that's what it is here as I write this latest entry. The Government's Communications and Information Minister announced that yesterday was National Bloggers Day (I don't know what happened to the apostrophe) and so it seemed appropriate to acknowledge the fact with a fresh post. While there are of course many bloggers in Indonesia, the percentage of the population who maintain a blog would be quite tiny due to the lack of penetration of the Internet. SMSing is pervasive, even among the poor, but use of the Internet is not.

I'm rather cynical about the practice of declaring special days for anything, whether they be National Blogging Days or Save the Forest Days or whatever. "Blogging party gets official stamp of approval" is the title of the article that appeared on the front page of The Jakarta Post today. The minister gets some publicity but he's actually not doing anything except to say that blogging is good. The Government might do better by reducing its spending on multimillion dollar military equipment and channeling some of it into improving the telecommunications infrastructure so more people could actually blog if they wanted to.

Blogging could certainly help promote the Indonesian language. Another article in yesterday's paper is titled "Foreigners show 'less interest' in Bahasa Indonesia" and goes on to quote a linguistic expert on the Indonesian language who is from the United States but is currently working here in Jakarta. Uri Tadmor says "during the last few years, the number of students who want to learn Bahasa Indonesia in North America and Australia has declined rapidly". Learning Mandarin, Vietnamese and Thai has become far more popular, he said. Predictably, the Indonesian Education Ministry response to the news was that to simply deny it and instead confidently announce that "foreigners are showing more interest in learning Indonesian".

Don't get me started on the Ministry of MisEducation or I may get frogmarched to the airport. I need to move on. There's a very interesting analysis of the blogging phenomenon to be found here and some very funny comments to be read, one of which I'll quote here:

Several studies indicate that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation (with 60% to 80% abandoned within one month, depending on whose figures you choose to believe) and that few are regularly updated.

The 'average blog' thus has the lifespan of a fruitfly. One cruel reader of this page commented that the average blog also has the intelligence of a fly.

The Perseus report noted above indicates that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, "representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned".

Blogs can be useful however, as I was reminded last night when I checked the latest post from a PCTips blog that I subscribe to. I'd recently lamented the fact that in Vista's Business Edition, there are no games. My wife, Desy, likes playing solitaire on my laptop when I'm not using it but she wasn't able to after I updated from XP Professional. This blogger had experienced the same disappointment and frustration. Microsoft must have figured that being the business edition and likely to mainly used in business circles, this version of Vista should be free of games. It turns out that the games are actually on the computer's hard drive but they need to be activated. The post described how to do that.

The Fall of Alpha

Musim hujan (the rainy season) is upon us here in Jakarta. A couple of days ago there was a very heavy downpour and some gusting winds. The result for one of our local supermarkets (Alpha) was that a big advertising sign crashed down on at least two cars, crushing them completely. Fortunately, there were no people in the cars at the time.

As you can see from the photograph, the structure that came down was massive but the winds that brought it down were hardly of hurricane strength and the fact that it fell suggests very shoddy construction standards. This is the carpark that I use at least once a week and I've never once considered the possibility of the towering Alpha sign crashing down on my head.

It's rare for anything stronger than a gentle breeze to blow across Jakarta and construction standards would seem to reflect that. In the case of the Alpha sign, it was the considerable area of the sign that led to its downfall because of the equation F = P x A where F is Force, P is Pressure and A is Surface Area. The resultant force was too much for the supports holding the sign in place to handle.

If a sustained and powerful wind were ever to blow through Jakarta, the results would be catastrophic because construction standards seem to rely on the assumption that will never happen. Meanwhile, Jakarta residents can look forward to their annual flooding as gutters and waterways clogged with discarded rubbish fail to cope with the volume of water pouring into them.

The streets of Jakarta are generally clean but that is only because an army of sweepers (paid Rp200,000 or A$30 a month) keep them that way. The rubbish however, is simply swept into covered drains that wait for the annual flushing from rainwater to clear them, thus passing the problem on to the canals and waterways.

MIRAS

Indonesians love portmanteau words or words that are made from a combination of other words. "Miras" is one such example, being a combination of the words "minuman" meaning drink and "keras" meaning hard. The word flashed up on the TV screen during the local news tonight and I asked Desy what it meant. I was surprised that I hadn't heard the term before. The news item concerned a number of a people who had died after drinking some sort of lethal brew. So "miras" doesn't really refer to hard liquor like whisky but instead to locally produced rocket fuel whose composition can only be guessed. As the cartoon above says "MIRAS: minuman pencabut nyawa" which means that it can suck the life out of you, literally.

When I first arrived in Indonesia, there could be found on the supermarket shelves bottles of locally produced spirits like Vodka and Whisky. The prices of these concoctions were very low and I remember purchasing a bottle of vodka once, taking it home and having a quiet sip. One sip was enough however, and it sat untouched on the kitchen shelf for many a year until being finally tossed out during a cleanup. I don't think this stuff was lethal, just very rough, but it gave me a hint of the sort of stuff that's out there.

The supermarket shelves are empty now of all such spirits following application of the unofficial 5% alcohol rule. Supermarkets no longer stock beverages with an alcoholic content above that limit and so there are only beer and mixers to be found. The mixers are very colorful, boast an alcoholic content of 5% and contain vodka, whisky etc. as their active ingredients. Ever adventurous, I recently sampled one and got an instant headache for my trouble. So the spirits that once haunted the supermarket shelves back in the old days are not gone, instead they've been diluted and put into these noxious mixers.

Strong alcoholic drinks are still easily obtainable however, despite having disappeared from the supermarkets. I'm told that some of the vendors who push food and drink carts around the streets also surreptitiously sell quite potent and very cheap alcoholic concoctions that probably come close to qualifying as MIRAS.

New Gadgets

A busy holiday period in which I've journeyed far and wide but in a technological sense, not a geographical one. In fact I haven't ventured out of Jakarta and instead I've been trying to keep myself technologically relevant by catching up on all that's happening in what's termed Education 2.0, an impossible task of course. I can only absorb so much and then my brain gets full, but I'm pleased to report success at least in creating a test podcast and accessing it via iTunes.

It's important to not only start using as wide a range of Web 2.0 tools as possible but using them repetitively so that I consolidate and refine my skills, and push the boundaries of what a particular tool can offer. As most to these tools are social in nature, it's important to consider how to reach as wide an audience as possible. I may develop an interesting and technically proficient podcast but what's the point if no-one listens to it. It's the same with blogging. Bloggers like people to read their blogs and so they need to attract readers.

Social networking sites can help in this respect as I realised when looking recently at Jacqui Cussen's Facebook profile. It was there that she made reference to her blog which I subsequently read and then subscribed to. In order to get the most out of blogs, it is important to subscribe to the ones that interest us. Feed aggregrators, like Google Reader, will regularly check the blogs that we have subscribed to and alert us to any new posts. We don't need to periodically check all those blogs ourselves, it's done automatically for us. Other tools, provided by free sites such as FeedBurner, enable us to check the number of subscribers to our blog and the number of visitors we have had. These statistics, when increasing, can encourage us to keep blogging and also to raise to raise the quality of our blogging.

So the message in the post is to SUBSCRIBE. It doesn't cost anything and you can always unsubscribe at a later date. You only need to remember to check your feed aggregrator regularly. A good way of doing that is to make that site the opening page when you start your web browser. Do it today.

Frantic Facebook

I joined up with the social networking site Facebook some time ago but didn't really make any use of it. Recently however, some of my current students discovered that I had a Facebook account and invited me to be their friend. Since then further invitations have been coming in a steady stream and I've already connected to several of my former students, who are now studying in Australia and the United States. Of course, each new person whom you accept as a friend has his or her own circle of friends (whose details you can see) and you suddenly find that you are part of a very large network of people, all connected via Facebook.

The activity on this site can only be described as frantic and until you become an active part of it, you don't realise the magnitude of what is going on. I'm vaguely nervous about the possibility that I might be the oldest member of Facebook, because my experience so far indicates that the average age is about 20. Of course, I've been talking about social networking sites in my IT class for quite some time but my current practical experience is giving me a much deeper insight into the way they work and the speed at which they work. I also had largely inactive MySpace and Friendster accounts but I've just recently deleted them, having realised that one social networking site is quite enough for a slow poke like me. I'm sure the 20-somethings are juggling multiple social networking sites simultaneously while they chat and play online games but I'm not up to that.

A Day in the Life

I've started a photo blog on Picassa, Google's photo sharing site, in which I upload a photo every day. It's taken with the low resolution, VGA camera of my Nokia N73, quickly edited using the oilify option in my GIMP image editing software, transferred to my laptop via Bluetooth and then uploaded to Picassa. Of course, I could upload directly from my phone but my service provider charges by the kilobyte and so it would end up being a bit expensive.

So I'm creating a sort of mini-painting to capture the minutiae of my life. The motivation comes not so much from narcissism but from a sense that I need to start making more use of the wide range of online services available and coordinate them more efficiently. The photo album will be maintained at http://picasaweb.google.com/reeves.sean/ADayInTheLife. I'm simply numbering the photos as Day21366, Day21367 etc. with the numbers referring to the numbers of days I've been planet-side. I've included the very first photo (Day21366) in this current post.

UPDATE

June 30th 2021

The Picasa links above (and below in the comment) are no longer active!

Animoto

This video comprises photographs taken in one of my computing classes. It was created at a site called Animoto where you can upload your photographs, chose an accompanying sound track and then wait while a 30 second video is created using a variety of fairly impressive special effects. The site allows you to embed the video that you create into Blogger, so I thought I'd try it out. You can create longer videos on the site but that will cost you.

UPDATE: April 13th 2022

Clearly the Animoto video is no longer in existence!

Dreaming in Indonesian

I guess it's a sign of how long I've been in Indonesia that occasionally I hear snippets of Indonesian in my dreams. A couple of nights ago, I awakened with the word "rohani" ringing in my ears. Now "rohani" in Indonesian means "spiritual" and in the dream, I was with a small group of white-clad Moslem men. This is the fasting month of course and the focus is supposed to be firmly on spiritual matters. I'm not fasting but nonetheless maybe I was being reminded that this is a good time (with holidays almost upon me) to focus on "batin" or inner matters.

In an interesting instance of synchronicity, I opened Skype tonight and noticed that somebody called Rohani had tried to make contact with me back in May. I usually ignore these sorts of random contacts and the request had just been sitting there all that time. When I looked at Rohani's details it turns out that she is a 49 year old female living in Singapore who provides these details about herself: "EEG Neurofeedback Practioner, helping children to improve their school performance. Especially good for the hyperactive, lack focus and concentration and reading challenges. I have a proven record."

I've recently done a Tarot card reading for myself and one of the cards indicated that a person who could help me is close at hand. This was a week or so ago and since then I've been watching my dreams and the external world for signs as to who this person might be. In my mind, the help I need relates to how to stay on in Indonesia after I turn 60. At the moment, I'll be given my marching orders in June of 2009 unless I can figure some way around the fact that expatriate teachers who have turned 60 do not have their visas renewed.

It's still a way off yet but I can't afford to procrastinate. I remember my English teaching back in high school asking the class one day to complete the proverb "procrastination is ... " and while the rest of the class were still absorbing his words, I spat out " ... the thief of time". Heads turned, I remember it well. Even at that young age, I knew all about procrastination and life would later expose me as a champion procrastinator. So I've belatedly accepted Rohani's request to chat and maybe she'll make contact. Who knows? She may be the one who can give me a clue as to what to do.

I'm thinking of course that if I can't stay, then Singapore is not too bad a location. Flights between Jakarta and the island state are quick and cheap. Of course, the Singaporeans may have a similar veto on ageing expats. Ageism is alive and well and living in Asia, despite a supposed respect for the elderly.

Yipe, Yoghurt

A couple of weeks ago I got it into my head that I ought to eat a small carton of zero fat yoghurt every day. I decided to mix it with fruit, usually mango from our mango tree, and consume it when I got home from work about 4.30pm. Intermittent pains and rumblings in my intestines followed but I didn't make any connection between this discomfort and my yoghurt consumption. Even worse was a chronic fatigue that seemed to be always with me. I was nodding off at work and crashing out when I got home. As usual, it was Desy who alerted me to the fact that maybe the yoghurt was causing the problems.

At first I was dismissive of the idea but then I accepted it after I returned to my normal self after not eating it anymore. I couldn't really understand why yoghurt had had that effect on me. A little Internet searching however, soon threw up an answer in the form of lactose intolerance. To digest lactose, you need an enzyme called lactase. Humans stop producing this enzyme about 4 or 5 years of age and thereafter don't easily tolerate milk or milk products in their diet. This is true of about 70% of the world's population, including most Asians. Due to a genetic mutation about 4,500 years BCE however, most Europeans still produce lactase into adulthood.

Even in Europeans however, the production of lactase falls off as they get older. It seems that zero fat Yoghurts are especially high in lactose and so my daily dose of yoghurt was putting my digestive system under continuous stress. There wasn't any mention made of fatigue as a symptom of lactose intolerance but that was certainly one of the effects it had on me. So I'm back to normal and wiser for having learned about the source of my problem.

It seems that lactose intolerance develops naturally in most animals shortly after weaning. In certain situations, it is genetically advantageous to maintain lactose tolerance into adulthood. For example, while most Chinese are lactose intolerant, the Mongol tribesmen on the border of China are not. These tribesmen are heavily reliant on horse milk. A similar thing seems to have happened with Europeans and cows milk. There is some evidence that the European genetic mutation originated in Sweden.

Horse and Carriage

Here's a photo I was able to take with my camera phone on my way to work this morning. The traffic was crawling along and in front of me was a horse and carriage. I'd allowed the driver in front of me when the two lanes of traffic converged into one. Just something a little different. There are quite a few horse and carriages wending their way around Bintaro Sektor IX. I suspect that they are owned by people in the kampungs (local villages) and rented out during the day.

More Magic

Magic is definitely in the air lately. A work colleague of mine, an Indonesian of Javanese ethnicity, confided in me this morning that his house is haunted. He has recently purchased a new house but he and his family have not moved in yet. They are still living in their previously rented accommodation for a little while longer. However, my colleague has slept alone in the new house on a couple of occasions, without his wife and daughter.

During these sleep-overs he heard a baby crying and heard someone running around outside and inside the house. My colleague visits a sufi master every week and when he talked about these events, his master explained that his house was occupied by a gondoruwo, a cruel, Yeti-like ghost who has two ghost children, a baby and a teenager. They were apparently there before the house was built. This particular gondoruwo has the capacity to cause a lot of mischief and disruption to the future residents unless it can be removed.

Apparently ghost-busting remedies are available but they do not come cheaply. What is required is an apelgin, a term that translates as ghost apple, and it costs about US$200. I'm a little unclear about what it actually looks like or how it is used, because our conversation was disrupted prematurely. The device is imported from the Middle East and contains special fragrances that can effect the exorcism. I'll certainly report back on my colleagues ghost-busting progress.

In the meantime, it's fascinating to realise that there is not only a recognition of distinct categories of ghosts but also clearly defined methods of dealing with the pesky things. A few months ago, I was introduced to a particular category of ghost known as a tuyul. This type of spirit takes the form of an unseen small child and obtains wealth for its human master. It can enter people's houses and steal wallets and other valuables. In return, the tuyul is afforded a special bed in the master's house and may be breast-fed by the woman of the house.

I had been in Indonesia six years and I'd never heard mention of a tuyul, but of course I'd never asked. Once I did, every Indonesian I talked to knew about this type of ghost and was happy to share stories he or she had heard about them. No one ever scoffed at the idea and it was quite clear that such creatures were simply regarded as a fact of life. It was about this time that I realised I had no idea what was going on here. I was and still am a stranger in a strange land.

Magic in the Air

As you live in Indonesia, it slowly dawns on you that magic colours every Indonesian view of the surrounding world. Some regions of the country have a reputation for magic that is particularly potent and every region has its own distinctive type of magic. The Dayaks, native inhabitants of Kalimantan for example, are famed for the power that their women's love magic works on hapless males whom they meet. The dukun or magic man can be found in every corner of the country and people visit him when deciding on a course of action, trying to woo a lover, seeking a job or just wanting some good luck to come their way.

This drives the followers of the strict and supposedly pure Islam of the Arabian Peninsula to absolute distraction but there is nothing they can do about it because the traditions are so entrenched and they themselves are in a decided minority. Some of the magic is black in that it seeks to harm others or sway them in some way. For example, it might be used to make someone fall in love with a person whom they might normally not have been interested in.

Most people feel a very real connection with relatives who have passed on and often seek their advice or feel their presence in certain situations. They often feel that a grandmother or grandfather is protecting them and looking out for their best interests. What the objective truth of all this is I can't say but it permeates everyday life in Indonesia and, rightly or wrongly, people believe in its reality. The more educated and cosmopolitan an Indonesian is, the less involvement he or she will have in this magic business but a deep-seated belief in its reality will always remain.

Whatever the truth, if this magic business continues to cause apoplexy in those Moslems who are pushing for a Saudi Arabian type of Wannabi-Islam in Indonesia, then it can't be a bad thing. The reason Islam took root in Indonesia in the first place was that it was accommodating of local traditions and fortunately the majority of Indonesian Moslems continue to embrace an interesting and syncretic form of the religion. God bless magic.

Truckies

Apropos the psychic consequences of my twin prime days, all I'll say is that I've had some very strange dreams and quickly move on to something much more concrete, namely truckies. Whereas truckies in Australia are apt to display paintings of semi-naked women on the mudflaps of their trucks' rear tyres, their counterparts in Indonesia have transcended such low carnal urges and taken a more spiritual approach.

The figure on the left is praying, her hands held up in supplication, and the caption says "DOA IBU" which I'd translate as "a praying mother". The figure on the right is holding some Muslim prayer beads and the caption says "MEMBAWA BERKAT" which I'd translate as "brings blessings". I assume there is a connection between the two paintings and that the overall meaning is "a praying mother brings blessings". I should check that translation with Desy but she's asleep now (it's after midnight).

Currently, there is a dangdut concert raging on the other side of the wall of our house, so I don't know how much sleep I'll get tonight. Tomorrow is another prime day, number 21323, and I can probably expect more strange dreams tonight. Desy's biological clock continues to tick as well and this coming Thursday, August 23rd, she'll turn 43. This is the day that the Sun enters Virgo.

Twin Primes

Blame my recent drought of postings on "blogger's block" and let's move on. Today is a prime day and by that I mean that a prime number of days has elapsed since I hatched. 21317 days to be precise. It turns out that the next odd numbered day (21319) is also prime, thus forming a set of twin primes and engendering within the psyche, for a time at least, a sense of stability, foundation and centredness.

As for the silly photograph, well I've been teaching image editing lately and have been tinkering with photographs. The words are from the first line of Brian Eno's song "Spider and I" which I was listening to while manipulating the image using GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program).

Tomorrow, which is almost upon me, will be a tween day: a day sandwiched between two prime days and thus a day to be savoured. Looking ahead, the next odd numbered day is not prime, because 21321 is divisible by 3, but the next odd number (21323) is. Such a concentration of primes is unusual and may have interesting psychic consequences. Watch this space.

Sylvan Silence

It's been a long time since my last post. I don't know why. Staying in Jakarta over the long holiday break didn't generate a lot of newsworthy postings I guess. Anyway, in an earlier posting titled "Gengsi", I talked about the popular habit of cutting down a perfectly healthy, shade-giving tree that stands in front of a house and restricts the view of passers-by . In the photo, Sabina sits atop what remains of an obviously healthy tree that once stood on the footpath outside someone's house. It's just around the corner from where we live. Unfortunately, there are many more examples to be found within walking distance of our house.

I'm reminded of the Joni Mitchell song lyrics: they cut down the trees and put them in a tree museum, and charged the people a dollar and a half just to see them. I recently heard a great new version of that song (Big Yellow Taxi) by the group Counting Crows, with Vanessa Carlton contributing vocals. If cutting down the tree is too difficult or expensive, then savage lopping is often carried out instead. Indonesia is about to overtake Malaysia as the world's largest producer of palm oil. The forests with all their biodiversity are disappearing rapidly and massive palm oil plantations are taking their place. Big but illegal profits are to be made, firstly from the timber (that is sold to China and other countries) and secondly from the palm oil itself. Within a few years, tree museums will be the only place to view Indonesian rainforest trees. These museums will be little pockets of rainforest, left standing in an effort to attract tourists who will be charged a dollar and a half (around 15,000 rupiah) just to see them. So it goes.

Engage brain first

My granddaughter is currently on holidays from school. She started in January at a private school that shall remain unnamed. On her final day of school, she received her report and a copy of the school's yearbook. Nothing unusual about that. A closer look at the yearbook however, shows photos of all the children, their full names and the names of their mothers and fathers, the children's dates of birth, complete addresses and telephone numbers (handwritten by the children themselves).

Now this is a country where kidnappings of students for ransom money is on the increase and initiatives like this just make the kidnapper's job easier. It could be argued that the yearbook only goes to the students and their parents but the reality is that it would have gone off to the printer first where many people would have had an opportunity to peruse the contents. In addition, yearbooks are often just put down somewhere and can easily go missing. As far as I know, there was no consultation with parents about whether they wanted these details disclosed in the yearbook. The privacy issue here is that the information originally supplied by the parents to the school should have been used for administrative purposes only and not serve as content for a yearbook.

What were the staff at the school thinking when they got these children (four years old and upwards) to handwrite this personal information onto a sheet of lined paper that was then scanned and attached to their photographs? Clearly they weren't thinking at all. Amazingly, I don't think any of the parents have complained about the issue. The culture here is to just accept these things and not make trouble. Educational commonsense is not in plentiful supply in Indonesian schools and that's not going to change anytime soon because NOBODY COMPLAINS!

Gengsi

One of the things that sets Indonesians apart from Westerners is the concept of "gengsi". It was well explained in an article that appeared in The Jakarta Post this morning. Here is a quote from it:

Maintaining gengsi (pride, prestige and appearance) is of the utmost importance for many people in Indonesia. People, especially in the big cities, try to maintain their gengsi in order to keep in with their peers, and please the people around them. They are status and power oriented, with a strong need for external and social affirmation. Indonesian society is often described as collectivist, as compared to individualist. This is maintained in a close long-term commitment to the "group". The "group" could be a family, extended family or extended relationships. Acceptance from the whole group is extremely important.

It's hard to capture the full implications of the word with the translation "pride, prestige and appearance", although that's certainly a part of it. The phrase "keeping up with the Joneses" also conveys a sense of it. Indonesians who can afford it love to buy homes beside busy roads where more people are able to admire the house's facade. The more impressive the facade the better. What's inside doesn't matter nearly as much as the external appearance. Shade trees that impede the view of the house from the street are brutally lopped or cut down entirely, replaced by palms that are less obtrusive and cost a hell of a lot of money. As many cars as possible need to be stacked in the driveway of course. As an individualistic westerner I prefer an outwardly modest-looking home hidden behind trees and located in a quiet street.

As quoted, commitment to the group is also a strong part of gengsi. The family is the most important group followed by religious grouping, ethnicity and nationality. In a country as diverse as Indonesia, there are many ethnic groups. The Javanese are the most populous but other prominent groups include Sundanese, Betawi (native Jakartans) and Batak. Most of these ethnic groups have their own language and that strengthens the sense of belonging. Curiously, Indonesians must declare their religous affiliation and can only choose from amongst Islam, Christianity, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism. To a non-religious westerner with loose family ties, no strong sense of ethnic identity and only a vague sense of nationality, Indonesia can seem "foreign" at times but remembering the importance of gengsi helps make it more understandable.

Miss Mary

Let it be known that I am not really all that comfortable on social networking sites. I was invited to join Friendster by a work colleague and thought that I ought to accept because, after all, I'm teaching Information Technology to students who all belong to one or more social networking sites. So far I have three friends (all work colleagues) and 512 so-called second degree friends. I'm afraid I'm almost totally inactive on Friendster but so far I've received two emails from random persons who have viewed my profile. The last one, received yesterday, went like this:

Hello My Dearest One,



Dear how are you today? and how is things moving with you? hope fine and you are in good health. My name is Miss Mary, I am looking for a very nice man of love, caring, sincere, easy going, matured, and understanding, then after going through your profile now on this site ( www.friendster.com) i pick interest in you, so i will like you to write me via my email address which is as follow (mary4u_babyreal@yahoo.com ) so that i will give you my picture for further discussion, because i am really looking forward for a serious friendship with you,



Yours New Friend Mary

That's how easy it is to find new friends on Friendster. I like the phrase "how is things moving with you?" It has a Rastafarian ring to it as in "how is things moving with you, man?" but with "man" really drawn out and sounding like "marn". "Miss Mary" has a nice ring to it as well and I'm definitely "matured" but I'll let someone else run with that one. Feel free to pretend you're me.

The Timeless Land

The Timeless Land is a place in time, a four week period in which the school bell falls silent and timetables no longer dominate the day. Any day can be a sleep-in day, if I want it to be, and I can stay up after midnight, any night I want. I can read books. I've already read one called "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" by mark haddon. The reading of it, completed only a few minutes ago, has affected my writing style, but only temporarily I hope. It's written from the point of view of a fifteen year old autistic boy and the style is similar to the text that I've italicised. The boy has a fascination with prime numbers and loves Mathematics and puzzles.

One of the puzzles that he discusses in the book is the so-called Monty Hall problem about a game show host who asks a contestant to choose one of three doors. Behind one door is a car and behind each of the other two is a goat. The game show host knows what's behind what door and before opening the door that the contestant has chosen, he opens one of the other two doors and reveals a goat. The car must then be behind one of the remaining two doors. The game show host then offers the contestant the chance to change his original selection. Should the contestant stick with his original choice of door or change doors? Intuition suggests it doesn't make any difference: the chances would still be 50-50. A careful analysis however, reveals that if the contestant changes his original selection, the chance of choosing the car is 2/3 while sticking with his original choice offers odds of only 1/3. There is a very good explanation of why this is so at www.answers.com.

This problem does not relate directly to the story however, and the novel is not about Mathematics or problems in logic. It's a story about a "curious incident" that befell a "dog in the night-time" and it is related in the first person by the autistic boy. I found the book quite enjoyable and I intend to go out and about tomorrow and purchase another book, because that's what I can do on holidays. I can also choose to not go out at all and postpone buying a new book until another day. I could stay at home and read an old book, or watch a video, or I could do neither of those two things but instead practise guitar because one day I might have to busk for a living. OK, "enough already" as they say in Yiddish. Suffice to say that tomorrow is full of possibilities and free of school bells and timetables.

The cyber-mice are running a little faster this year

After marking examinations, correcting practical work and writing about one hundred reports, I'm ready for a holiday and finally I have time to blog again. I'm reverting to blogging from Word because I find that I like the output that it creates in Blogger. The ScribeFire that I used last time gives the text a cramped look, the same as what you get by simply editing within Blogger itself. Why this should be so I've no idea.

In reference to an earlier post, the IT article did get published in The Jakarta Post last Sunday but without my name displayed. That's standard practice I think for what is termed an "advertorial" which is presumably a cross between an advertisement and an editorial. Maybe I should try for another letter to the editor. Maybe my blacklisting period has expired. I'll have to choose my topic carefully in case I offend again.

It doesn't look as if there will be much travel these holidays. Home renovations and car upgrading will see to that. So I'll have four weeks or so to do much as I please. I'll certainly be spending a lot of time upgrading my computer skills because lately I feel like I'm slipping behind. It was nearly twenty years ago, in January of 1988, that I taught my first computer lesson and in those pre-Internet times, the pace of change was a lot slower.

In terms of experience, I guess I'm qualified to teach about the History of Computing. Hopefully it will be made a formal academic subject one day and when those cyber-mice start running just a little too fast for me, perhaps I can take up the teaching of it. I would be a living fossil who could talk of the dreamtime before the coming of the silicon ships ... oops, I mean chips.

Just in case that scenario doesn't pan out however, I intend to work on my musical skills over the holidays in an effort to boost my busking credentials. It may well be that, for an old IT teacher who couldn't handle the pace of change, the only livelihood will be to provide musical entertainment on the footpath to passers-by. It wouldn't be such a bad life, at least there would be no more reports to write.

The Pace of Change

I've prepared this post from within ScribeFire, a Firefox plug-in, that enables me to post to a blog from within the browser itself. It's very convenient and just another of the many features that are making blogging easier and easier. However, there are just so many new so-called "Web 2.0" features appearing in cyberspace that I feel like I need to spend all of my coming four weeks holiday just trying to catch up with them all. There seems to be an change of pace in Internet innovation or it is just that I'm not keeping up with the pace of change, as in the mice are running a little faster this year sort of thing.

I received a comment to my YouTube video about the Great Wall of Nippon. It was from a 29 year old Australian who wrote "this is such a pointless video and I hate your accent, it sounds very poor". I thanked him for this helpful feedback but explained that the video was intended as part of a blog post and wasn't meant to stand on its own. I was surprised that someone had come across the video from within YouTube but I guess it just goes to show that however obscure you think your posting might be, there is somebody out there that will stumble across it.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Portable Slideshows

I just noticed that Picasa Web Albums, Google's photo sharing service, now provides a facility whereby you can turn any photo album that you have stored there into a slideshow that can be embedded into a web page or blog. You have the option of choosing from a variety of frame sizes. It just illustrates how easy it is becoming to present personal photos and videos on the Internet in interesting ways. To illustrate the facility, I've chosen the smallest frame size and used my December 2006 photo album containing shots taken when Desy and I visited my brother in Australia. The captions associated with each photograph in the web album can be displayed or not displayed, depending on the user's preference. In this case, I've chosen to display them. Various controls become available once you click on the slideshow. Try it and see.

The Jakarta Post

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The Wall Part Two

I wrote about "the wall" in a previous post, explaining that this formidable edifice, that had once lurked behind a spacious green belt, was recently relocated so that it now abuts the roadway. The wall divides the Japanese International School on the outskirts of Jakarta from the rest of the neighbourhood. Naturally such an expanse of white concrete proved a magnet for graffiti and one day it may cover it all and end up not looking so awful. It's hard to capture the extent of it in a photograph or even series of photographs, so this morning I took a video of it on my way to work. I've put the result on YouTube for all to see. Click here to view.

A Watery Grave

Who says nothing exciting ever happens in Bintaro? This afternoon, at the end of the street, entertainment was provided by a crane pulling a car from a storm water canal. The driver of the car had somehow panicked when behind the wheel and she and her female passenger ended up in the canal. Neither was injured apparently and the salvage attempt was successful as this YouTube video shows. The video size is a little under 8Mb if you're thinking of watching it.

Midnight Special

I'm writing this as the witching hour draws nigh but unfortunately it's Thursday night and I have another day of teaching ahead of me. I've fallen into bad habits lately, napping when I get home from school and then not being able to sleep while most honest citizens, and a few dishonest ones, are snoring soundly.

SBY (the acronym for Indonesia's president) is going to have a cabinet reshuffle soon, according to the political pundits. The reason I mention it is that perhaps he'll replace the current Minister of Education who was responsible for the implementation of the "60 and you're out rule" for expatriate teachers. Would a new minister rescind the rule? It's probably unlikely but even if it did happen, we ageing pedagogues would still feel unsettled because another change of minister might herald a reimplementation of the rule.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on my stay in Indonesia. Tick. Tock. Soon I'll launch my worldwide cyberspace campaign to keep Sean in Indonesia. Via the blogosphere and the social networking sites, the collective cry of injustice will persuade the powers-that-be here in Indonesia to grant me complimentary citizenship because of my selfless service to the education of Indonesia's youth. As the clock passes midnight, it's comforting to imagine such improbabilities.

I may as well end a gloomy post on a gloomy note by quoting from today's Jakarta Post: Indonesia is losing its forests faster than any other country, with the equivalent of about 300 soccer pitches destroyed every hour, according to Greenpeace. Certainly an inconvenient truth but unlikely to cause much concern in the corridors of power. This rate of destruction will not be arrested because environmental awareness and concern are not a serious part of the national educational curriculum.

Walking the Dog

As of Friday night, I've begun to embrace that quintessential suburban activity of walking the dog. However, it's sort of different here. To begin with there aren't many dogs about and so far I've not seen any dogs or anybody walking a dog. Man's best friend does not enjoy high status in this predominantly Muslim country.

The reason is that the poor animal gets a bad press in the Qu'ran (or Koran as it's written outside the country) due to a certain incident. I've forgotten the details but Desy knows (she told me the story originally) and I'll get her to recount it to me again. Probably because of that story, the saliva of the dog is considered haram (forbidden under Islam) and most Moslems are vigilant in avoiding getting licked by an overly friendly pooch.

Gromit, as our dog is known, had previously never ventured outside the house and so a whole new world has opened up before her, filled with myriad smells and strange animals. So far we've encountered startled cats, furtive rats and elusive toads. It's also an experience for me because, even though I've been in Jakarta for many years, I've rarely walked its streets.

Before I bought a car, I always felt a bit conspicuous walking about the neighbourhood on my own. Desy has never been keen to walk ever (most Indonesians see it as a pointless activity) and so I've seldom ventured out on foot into the suburban night (walking in the day is not an option). Now I have the perfect excuse. I'm just a man walking his dog. I can loiter at my whim or allow myself to be pulled along by the beast at the end of the leash.

I'm sure that I'll have more to report about my evening adventures as I travel further afield and venture down previously untrodden byways. Actually tonight, I was walking past the local mosque at prayer time and, as it often does, my mind fell to considering worse case scenarios.
There was no fence around it, only fifty metres or so of open space. What if Gromit suddenly broke free of her leash and dashed off into the mosque, scattering the faithful as she scurried about? She'd be surely killed and then the outraged congregation would turn on the dog's owner.

Fortunately it didn't happen and I've lived to post another day. Perhaps my post today is of the sort that Andrew Keen had in mind when he wrote his book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. I came across a great article today in the Guardian commenting on his book.


The article begins:

Andrew Keen finds himself in the eye of a storm. The Briton, who made his living from the hi-tech boom in California's Silicon Valley, has dared to challenge the assumptions behind the internet revolution which began there and swept the world. America's massed army of bloggers do not like it one bit.

Far from his birthplace in Golders Green, north London, Keen is now being labelled the nemesis of the new worldwide web. The author and entrepreneur has stunned his adopted country with a book that accuses bloggers and other evangelists for the web of destroying culture, ruining livelihoods and threatening to make consumers of new media regress into 'digital narcissism'.


I don't know if I've destroyed much culture or ruined any livelihoods but, well yes, I guess I am a bit of a digital narcissist but I can always argue that I'm doing it to retain credibility as an ageing teacher of Information Technology. How will my students take me seriously if I don't blog, or belong to a social network, or upload videos to YouTube?

YouTube

I've been downloading from YouTube a lot recently, getting videos for the Web 2.0 topic that I'm currently doing with my ITGS (Information Technology in a Global Society) class. I've only uploaded one video and that was just as a trial. It's been sitting on YouTube since March and I remembered that you can embed videos from that site into a blog. I'd seen it done many times but never thought to try it myself but as part of a determined plan to extend my technological skills, I'm embedding that video into this post. It's only 22 seconds in duration if you plan to watch it and is decidedly domestic but if it succeeds then I'll try to upload something more interesting to YouTube later and embed it in a later post.

Here goes:

The Law

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I recommand you read this

I was downloading some software today and received a prompt containing the word "recommanded" in regard to a particular course of action. I don't know if it was simply a spelling mistake or a deliberate attempt at humour by combining the words "recommended" and "commanded" into a single composite word. Whatever the reason, I've now adopted the word and its variants (recommand, recommandation etc.) and will use them on appropriate occasions. For example, if a student's concentration has lapsed ten minutes into one of my frequent pedagogical monologues, I can reclaim attention with the warning "I recommand that you listen to what I'm saying".

My posts are likely to be more frequent now because I've discovered that within Microsoft's Word and OneNote, I can simply type something and then choose "blog this". You can send what you've written to the blog of your choice (selecting from a drop-down menu) and it's posted. Simple as that. Attaching photos is a little more complicated but that will be my next step. Of course, you can edit what you've uploaded later if you need to.

YOTYEB

As the old TMBG (They Might Be Giants) song says:

You're older than you've ever been and now you're even older,
And now you're even older, and now you're even older,
You're older than you've ever been and now you're even older,
And now you're older still.

I can't think of a better way to put it. My 58th birthday was celebrated quietly at the in-house bar that can now boast of being open 24 hours thanks to the flashing sign that Desy bought me as a present. As I often do on such occasions, I paid homage to the great god Bacchus by indulging in a bottle of white wine. So it goes.

Mista Vista

Maybe the horns in my previous post are appropriate because I've been bad. After making rather derogatory comments about Microsoft in previous posts, I now have Windows Vista installed on my laptop. How did I come to embrace the Great Satan? Well it happened like this. The school where I work entered into a software site licence agreement with Microsoft a couple of years ago and part of the deal is an entitlement to free software updates for Office and Windows, whenever they become available. As an employee, I'm can install these programs on the laptop that I use at school, validate the installation with Microsoft over the Internet and the software won't cost me anything.

The temptation was simply too strong, I upgraded my Office 2003 to Office 2007 some weeks ago and after recently increasing my laptop's RAM to a hefty 2Gb, I made the transition from Windows XP to Vista TODAY and earned the moniker "Mista Vista", the first kid on the block to get to play with Microsoft's latest operating system. So far, and it's only been a few hours, I'm quite impressed. It offers a very slick interface and the whole experience is made sweeter by the fact that I haven't had to hand over any of my hard earned dollars to Bill Gates. The photo in this post was taken from the same location as the photo in an earlier post showing Tux (the Linux mascot) towering over Microsoft's head office.

Alfresco Blogging

Sitting outside this morning with my laptop, I actually noticed a variety of insects in the garden and the occasional arrival and departure of some small birds. There is wildlife in Jakarta but because I spend most of my time indoors, either at home or school, I rarely notice it. There are certainly some beautiful butterflies or kupu-kupu as they're known in these parts. I have grown insulated and disconnected from my environment.

Ah well, as the day warmed up, I'm ashamed to say that I retreated to the comfort of my study and played around a little more with Adobe Photoshop. The thing about a bald head is that it is just so bald and what better way to add interest than by growing horns, which I've done. I like the look but in a conservative country like Indonesia it would probably lead to the revocation of my work visa. So let's keep it a secret, shall we.

The Equinox Cometh

It's nearly here, the vernal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, when the Sun reaches the first point of Aries and the days and nights are of equal length. Of course, in Jakarta, the event marks the autumnal equinox because the city is just a little south of the equator and it will occur at 7am. The configuration of the planets at this time is unusual in that all the planets (including the Sun and Moon) are contained within an arc of about 135 degrees with Saturn spendidly isolated and diametrically opposite this grouping. This would be an interesting planetary pattern to be born under.

Meanwhile, I've been making use of my holiday time by adding the ability to receive postings to my blog via email or a blog feed accumulator. Furthermore, my old blog postings from my Geocities blog have been transferred to:

http://reeves.sean.googlepages.com/oldblogentries

and I've resurrected my Geocities site at:

http://www.geocities.com/sean_reeves/

for professional purposes, specifically to start working on my curriculum vitae. I've already put a rough draft up and will refine it over the next few weeks.

My Google site at:

http://reeves.sean.googlepages.com/home

will be used as a personal, rather than professional, website. I've just got a basic opening page up at the moment with a link to my old blog entries. I'm basically having a bit of a tidy up and reorganization of my cybersites in an effort to avert cyberchaos. Such an enterprise is of course appropriately Saturnian because Saturn represents the psychic urge toward structure and categorization (amongst other things).

Born Again

I watched an interesting documentary the other night called "Jesus Camp". It's deservedly garnered a number of awards and focuses on evangelical Christians in the United States. To qualify as an evangelical Christian, you apparently have to be born again by accepting Jesus as your saviour. Unfortunately, 43% of those who were born again were under 13 years of age when the experience befell them. Equally disturbing was the fact that 75% of home-schooled children in the United States live in evangelical families. Some of these kids are then sent off to summer Jesus camps such as the one depicted in this documentary where they are indoctrinated even further.

The evangelicals see themselves as involved in a battle to reclaim their country for Christ and to make it a Christian stronghold against the dark forces of liberalism and secularism that the devil has unleashed. They view the devil as a very real force at work in the world and are very firm in their belief about heaven and hell. The documentary features Ted Haggard who in 2005 was voted by Time Magazine as one the top 25 most influential evangelicals in America. Unfortunately, in November 2006 (soon after the documentary was produced), poor Ted resigned or was removed from all of his leadership positions in the evangelical movement because of allegations of homosexual sex and drug abuse (which he subsequently confessed to). The evangelicals are far too unshakeable in their beliefs to be troubled for long by embarrassments like Ted. They'll put it down to the work of the devil and have an extra prayer session.

The brainwashing that these children are subjected to is a reminder of what goes in some of the Indonesian pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) where a similarly narrow and distorted view of the world is inculcated. It makes you wish that a secular education was made mandatory for all children and that religion was declared a form of mental illness. George Bush owes his presidency to the support of these evalengicals and in the documentary it was reported that Ted Haggard used to meet with the President every Monday. I wonder if the meetings have been cancelled now that Ted has been disgraced, or maybe he still turns up and the two of them share a little methampetamine and laugh about how gullible the American electorate is.

Everybody wants to be a dog

The writing is very small in the photograph above but it says "Everybody wants to be a dog" and it's one of a number of photographs that I found on a blog professing to display the 100 best advertisements of all time. It shows a terrapin knocking on a door wanting to be taken for a walk. Just struck me as funny because our household has both terrapins and a dog. I don't know what the product is that's being advertised.

For many years, in fact until quite recently, I'd not had much contact with animals. I'd long ago given up eating any of them but I wasn't close to any sort of animal. In fact, it occurred to me about a year ago that I'd become quite estranged from them really. It was just an observation and I didn't do anything about it. As she's grown up however, Sabina has been intensely interested in all the animals that she has come across and I've started to see the animal world again through her eyes.

It was her insistence on buying terrapins and a dog that led to their current incorporation into the household. Every weekend, Sabina helps me to clean out the terrapin tank and shampoo the dog. She very much wants to be involved in every aspect of their care. Her success in acquiring terrapins and a dog has of course emboldened her and she is currently very insistent that we acquire a horse.

There are small horses that she often rides beside the supermarket where we shop and so she is constantly reminded of their existence. Her persistence will be to no avail however, because our backyard is too small. If we acquired the block of land next to our house on the other hand, we could ... no, that's silly thinking.

Here's a photo that was taken of her on a horse. She has added some special effects that are available with her mother's camera phone software. Nobody else really knows how to add these special effects but Sabina is quite competent is accessing all of the phone's features, including music and video.

Night of the Marauding Musangs

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Having complained in a recent post of the absence of wildlife in our local area, I was surprised by news tonight of an incident involving binturongs (or musangs as they're known locally). I was aware of the existence of these animals in the local area and that they prowl around of a night. I had even caught a glimpse of one maybe a year or so ago but I'd never thought too much about them. However, yesterday evening, our neighbours (father, mother and adolescent son) were sitting in the front of their house when they noticed two musangs descend from a nearby tree. Suddenly, the animals charged toward them and the family retreated. This was only a ploy however, because the musangs turned and carried off the family cat that had been relaxing out front as well.

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I've never heard of musangs killing cats and there is nothing in the literature about such attacks. They regularly attack chickens, rats and birds but not cats. This cat wasn't a kitten. It was a fully grown female. The recent cull of poultry in the area (to reduce the risk of bird flu) and the fact that fruit is currently out-of-season suggests that they may have been driven by hunger to launch this audacious attack. The photo in this post is not one of the said miscreants but instead is a photo taken from a very interesting blog called The Voltage Gate at:

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http://thevoltagegate.blogspot.com/search/label/Binturong

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There is some fascinating information there about these animals. The binturong can grow to a metre in length and weigh 15 kg. It is also known as a bearcat and is one of several species of civet whose anal gland secretions can be used to make perfume. Interestingly:

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The binturong is the only Old World mammal to evolve a fully prehensile tail, meaning the tail is dexterous enough to be used to manipulate objects, like food items. The rest of the mammals possessing a fully prehensile tail are only found in North and South America (monkeys, opossums).

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So I'm reading up on this little known but most interesting animal, partly out of curiosity and partly out of apprehension because we have recently acquired a small, white dog by the name of Gromit who is not much larger than the ill-fated white cat that was carried off. We normally leave her outside of a night but tonight we have brought her inside just in case the musangs strike again.

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Sabina, our resident four year old, had been maddenly insistent for several months that we purchase a dog. Her constant whine was "beli anjing" (buy dog) and eventually resistance crumbled. The catalyst was an ill-advised visit by her grandmother to the pet shop a couple of hundred metres away. Sabina spied a white toy poodle, about three months old, and there was an air of inevitability to the purchase after that. I was consulted as the final arbiter in the matter but because I had once owned a toy poodle by the name of Chloe, I felt it was a case of kismet.

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It would be difficult explaining to Sabina that her beloved Gromit had been carried off in the night by marauding musangs.

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The Wall

Welcome to the wall. The nature strip with its trees, bushes and grass is no more. I have just learned of the probable reason for its erection. A reliable source has told me that during the recent floods, the kampung or village at the back of the Japanese International School was flooded and some of the residents sought temporary refuge on the green fringe. This occupation couldn't have been for very long because I never noticed anybody there at all. However, the School felt that this occupation might become permanent and compromise security.

The school owned the land and had set the area aside as parkland in accordance with local government regulations that require a certain percentage of green space to be made available as part of any development project. All that seems to have swept aside with the supposed threat of a refugee camp developing and the area has now been thoroughly bulldozed and the concrete wall now abuts the footpath. It's comforting to know that there is a logical reason for this environmental vandalism. Extending this logic further, perhaps all green spaces in Bintaro should be bulldozed and walled off from the general public because of the risk of conversion to refugee camps.

Why not just move the fence and leave the trees in place? Why bulldoze everything? At least people inside the school could have enjoyed some shade and a little slice of nature. This construction has certainly added to the uglification of Bintaro. The graffiti has already begun and will continue because there is such an impressive expanse of wall.

Wildlife

This is a photograph that I took at school yesterday. I just happened to have my camera on me when this moth, about the size of a dinner plate, landed near to me. I was the only one who saw it, there was no one else around. I've edited the background of the photograph to enhance its shape. It was the first moth of this size that I'd seen in Jakarta and it reminded me of the general disregard for nature that exists here in Indonesia. It's rare to see a natural creature apart from ants.

Progress seems to be measured by the extent to which humans can impose themselves on the natural environment with little thought to the environmental consequences. Most of the aquifer in Jakarta is contaminated by E-coli because septic tanks leach their contents into the ground. Jakarta has no sewerage system. There is so much water being pumped out of the aquifer by high rise buildings and malls that ground levels have subsided by a metre or more in places. Salt water has begun to penetrate further into the aquifer so that areas near the harbour cannot use the groundwater because of its salinity. Most of the population is reliant on groundwater because the reticulated water system is very limited.

The rivers are convenient places to dispose of household and industrial waste. They are clogged with rubbish and are uniformly putrid. They get flushed out in the rainy season and then the cycle of pollution starts all over again. Residences are kept clean but what happens to the rubbish that is removed is apparently of no concern. It's OK to toss it into a vacant lot, sweep it into the gutter, dump it in a river. Ecological awareness doesn't extend past the boundary of the property. There is no sustained educational initiative to change these attitudes and so Indonesian children are destined to be as ecologically ignorant as their parents. The future can only be worse because there is limited awareness that anything is even wrong and certainly no willingness to do anything about it.

The Degreening of Indonesia

No sooner do I mention the degreening of Indonesia than an example of it appears in my own backyard. On the way to school today, I noticed that a long strip of land that runs adjacent to a perimeter boundary of the Japanese International School is being stripped of trees. It is doubtless being made ready for some development and the formerly green and grassy area will be replaced with buildings and Bintaro's catchment area will shrink a little more. Amusingly, Bintaro is marketed as the garden suburb but its greenery is rapidly disappearing in the face of rampant greed. Land developers of course are the same the world over but in some countries there are constraints placed on them. Not here. It's a pity that I don't have a before as well as an after photo. The difference is quite dramatic.

Disaster Management

The photo is taken from today's Jakarta Post. To continue from my previous post, my Second Life adventures were brutally interrupted by widespread flooding in Jakarta. The flooding was so severe that it inundated the building that my ISP used to house its telecommunications equipment. My Internet connection has been out from Friday to Tuesday and was only reconnected tonight. Most reputable companies have a disaster management plan that they can put to work in cases like this but not my ISP. They obviously got out the mops and buckets and went to work mopping up for a few days. I have a CDMA card that I can insert into my laptop and this enables me to use the mobile phone network. Unfortunately, that was knocked out as well. It was only my PDA with its GPRS connection to the competing mobile phone network that held up and I was at least able to check my email.

I shouldn't complain I guess because there are still many people homeless as a result of the flooding. There are actually only a couple of million people who even use the Internet regularly in Indonesia. That translates to about 1% of the population. The rest have other priorities, like not getting washed away by floods. The flooding has been exacerbated by an alarming decline in green space within Jakarta and its environs. Parks and recreational areas do not make any money and are sold to developers who build housing estates and luxury shopping malls. This is what masquerades as urban planning here. Increasingly, the rainwater has nowhere to go but into the gutters that are already choked with garbage. The gutters carry the water into creeks and rivers that are also full of rubbish. When you have a lot of rain, you have a big flood. It's as simple as that.

Before the flooding and the cessation of my Internet connection, my adventures in Second Life took me to an orientation island where you were prepared for interaction with others in the larger virtual world. However, things went wrong from the start. I wandered into the ocean and spent most of my time walking along what seemed a biologically dead ocean floor. When I finally activated my flying ability, I was above water but zooming over miles and miles of trackless ocean. The island was nowhere to found and then the program crashed. Hopefully, I'll have a more auspicious experience next time. I notice a lot of the large IT companies, like Microsoft and Dell, have a virtual presence in Second Life and Sweden has even opened an embassy there. The Australian government is active as well and has established some sites.