• The man who took my car battery last night said, in Indonesian, that the battery will be ready in the morning and that I should bring the car in to have it fitted. It took a couple of slow explanations (it may have been my fractured Indonesian of course) to point out that the 20km to his benkel might prove too far to push the hulking beast. A friend on Facebook said something about it all being very zen.
  This morning, as if to underline that, he turned up with a brand new top of the range battery to replace the older one we’d bought a year or so ago…free of charge. It wasn’t inside the warranty period but it seemed they thought it was the right thing to do, and at their cost. How often does that happen?
• I’d forgotten that teenagers sleep so much. Did I? I guess I did. But I’m thinking that Isabella has my night-owl genes as she sleeps half to day, only to rise around noon to stagger to the computer to communicate (rarely with us for an hour or two unless it’s in snarls, it improves after food is administered). Myself, I think I used to crawl out and place headphones on at that stage, while mum pointed angrily at the festering pile that was my bedroom.
• And thinking of Facebook and such things, I used to get annoyed at the snipes at Facebook from those who just don’t approve. Last night a good friend, over dinner, made a series of remarks ranging from the dangerous to kids (so is riding a bike if you don’t have few simple enforced rules) to the standard wasting of time nonsense. I’m fairly even tempered and held it in, but that I like chatting and passing some time with friends and, yes, mere acquaintances, without having to a) drink large quantities of alcohol or coffee, or b) get on an aircraft really is my business, so please, get over it.
• And now I’m relentlessly told by the spoilsports that twitter is a) destroying the English language and b) yes again, wasting my time (please worry about your own time, and I’ll worry about mine), with critics relentlessly asking who wants to know when someone is heading down to the shop or about to do the ironing. Well, to be honest, I don’t, but I’m intellectually curious enough to have a couple of hundred people hunting out links and bit and pieces that I may or may nor be interested in, which, if you manage the stream smartly (and use an app that sits outside the browser, so as not to distract..I’m liking Tweetie now) is what you get…along with the trivial of course, but it’s my trivial and I’ll do what I like with it.

  Hell, I dunno about you but I like communicating with people and large parts of my day to day has always been rather inane, as I suspect most people’s is. And yes, several times a day I’m sent a link to something that might even make me laugh…sorry if that offends….sour off. Witness the always grumpy and out of time Australian newspaper miss the point completely and in the process get all misty eyed and nostalgic about a TV show that was on thirty odd years back, which rather says it all. Mate, you stick to your struggle to find readers to tell us how good it was in the good old days, and I’ll interact.

• The madness continues…..Indonesia, in it’s usual perplexingly irrational way, has tightened up the importation of alcohol to a frankly insane level. The argument from the lads in Jakarta is that there was so much untaxed stuff being smuggled in that something had to be done, so the license to import booze was all given to one company (just, funnily enough, coincidently like every other state defined monopoly, owned by one of the good old boys) in Jakarta, and the duty was raised to amongst the highest in the world. How to kill the higher spending end of the tourist market…..while Malaysia and Thailand are pulling in tens of millions of tourists a year, Indonesia, even with Bali as it’s jewel, staggers towards 5 or 6 million.

  The end result, aside from bottles of AUD$7 Australian and Chilean paint stripper retailing for US$50 each is that we, in the past two weeks, have been to a Belgian Beer Bar that has no Belgian beers, and a Japanese restaurant that had no bloody Sake. Oh, and the smugglers, with the help of the rather inevitable little customs lubrication, are back at it with a very thirsty market. I’m rather over it and would do just about anything for a well stocked wine shop (or restaurant) at reasonable prices. Or a bloody Stella Artois….

• 
• We’re moving…or rather have been forced out. The folks around us, the locals, have decided to build right to the boundary..three of the four, a selection of gruesome concrete block monstrosities, all completely illegal of course but that’s neither here nor there in the gilded isle where the law will happily bend as far as your wallet will open. Oh, and for good measure a bunch of young guys have, joy, opened a motorcycle repair business…the sort where they take the mufflers off and rev loudly to show the watching young girls just how well appended they are, out the front. The serenity and peace of Bali…it’s time to move to Seminyak..at least I can stagger off to a beachfront bar to hide from it all. Once you step outside the tourist myths the concrete block and badly tuned motorbike are as close as you get to the real Bali.
• I think I need a holiday

We the people:

The Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), in its annual report issued in Washington on Thursday, said it had put Indonesia back on its “priority watch list” of intellectual property violators, prompting Jakarta to respond with claims of unfairness.

“I’m deeply disappointed,” said Andy Sommeng, director general of intellectual property rights at the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights. “It’s like our efforts in protecting intellectual property rights are ignored.”

[From Jakarta Globe]

You can buy pirated DVDs in the departure lounge at Bali’s Ngurah Rai Airport.

This is my favourite link so far today:

FSB reports circulating in the Kremlin today are stating that United States Supreme Court Justice David Souter [photo top left] has been forced to resign over his refusing an order from Bush-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts to support the planned implementation of Martial Law within the US planned for this coming fall due to the combining of the current H1N1 Swine Flu virus with the H5N1 Avian Flu, which, as we had reported on earlier, will, according to Russian scientists, unleash a “Tidal Wave” of death upon our World.

According to these reports, Justice Souter, Justice Ruth Ginsberg and Justice Samuel Alito were all refusing Chief Justice Roberts orders when yesterday, a protégé of Justice Alito, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General under President Clinton, and head of fundraising for Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential bid, Mark Levy [photo 2nd left], was “suicided” prompting Justice Souter’s immediate resignation.

[From Top Supreme Court Justice Forced Out]

Good stuff indeed…..

Just to lighten things up…

Oh look, a pandemic is breaking out..well maybe not a pandemic but the beginnings of a flood of common sense.

The British are leading the way. There was of course Simon Jenkin’s piece in the Guardian two days ago, much derided by some, but now reading as somewhat considered and rather more sensible than much of the doom laden drivel the mass media has foisted upon us in recent days.

And yesterday, in the same paper Dr. John Crippen (a pseudonym we are told) opined:

We met at lunchtime, not to talk of heart attacks and Lego, but of flu. There have been deaths in Mexico. There has been one in the US. Our Indian partner said: “There were 2,000 deaths, mainly children in Africa and Asia, yesterday.”

Our medical student looked shocked: “I didn’t know swine flu had reached that part of the world.” “It hasn’t,” said our partner. “I’m talking of deaths from malaria. But that isn’t news, is it?”

We were silent for a while. Time to get things in proportion.

Ah, yes, exactly.

And in the same paper, and even more precisely, Simon Tisdall has written:

Confirmation that Switzerland had suffered its first case of swine flu is big news today. According to the Swiss federal health department, a young man recently returned from Mexico exhibited symptoms of the virus. He is now tucked up in bed in Baden, north of Zurich, where it is hoped he will make a full recovery.

Not considered quite so newsworthy by perspiring international media infected by a global sneezing fit was the latest extreme violence in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. According to Human Rights Watch, 35 civilians were killed, 91 women and girls raped, and hundreds of homes burned down in fresh reprisal attacks by Rwandan Hutu militias in North Kivu.

But, we are told by the concerned, the WHO have tagged this as a stage five pandemic. Is that the same WHO whose Dr David Nabarro, in 2005, when discussing the impending bird flu pandemic, said:

The range of deaths could be anything between 5m and 150m

Which the WHO later downgraded to

between two million and 7.4 million

Let’s be real, the WHO reacts to governments, governments react to mass pressure, which reacts to the media. And around it goes.

There seems to be a quiet step back from the governmental extremism of the past week with the EU Health Commissioner quietly suggesting a more considered response might be in order, and the frenzy of the past week slipping back a page or two in the papers.

But there is a much uglier side to all this as both Tisdall and Crippen say. And that’s the largely western media’s screams of panic when any hint of a threat to our happy civilized world raises its head. Forget the deaths of up to 200,000 children a year from waterborne disease in South Asia, with at least 100,000 babies a year dying in Indonesia alone. Or the Malaria, or the Cholera, or the AIDS or the Dengue (50-100 million cases a years and 22,000 dead..you didn’t know that?) or 100 other diseases that devastate third world nations daily, with nary a mention in the Western media.

In India, in 2007 some 2,402,00 children died of largely preventable causes…those are bloody epidemics, pandemics, disasters…call them whatever you will.

Nope, we are more concerned with the threat from three mildly ill school kids returning to NZ from their break in Mexico, or the odd unwell person in some European country.

And let’s be even more honest..if this had just occurred in Mexico, and 500 kids had died from some obscure virus, we really wouldn’t give a damn.

Sometimes I feel rather ashamed. There is something rather obscene in all this.

I wonder how many toilets 32 million UK facemasks would buy in Java?