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.