The woman in the mid­dle, on the side of the Sky­train, adver­tis­ing the Bank Of China, looks com­pletely demented.

I won’t open an account unless she’s the point per­son I deal with daily. I used to have a demented bank man­ager at the ANZ in Par­nell many years back. I liked him and I think he liked me. He never rang.

You have to love the retail wars of Asia — nowhere else would you find, amongst the dozens of humon­gous overblown shop­ping precincts, a haunted mall, pitch­black inside dur­ing the day aside from the large hang­ing moon.

A pet shop with dog­gie Play­boy bunny out­fits, a Spi­der­man cos­tume and mul­ti­coloured canine wigs com­pletes the thrill.

Sat­is­fac­tion.

Yep. Smug sat­is­fac­tion. 110,000 words writ­ten, then edited, then edited again and then finally rewritten.

That’s 440,000 words.

Heh…

That only one on 2,000 man­u­scripts is ever printed, or so I’m told is almost nei­ther here nor there.

Almost.

Of course I’d like to see the damn thing in print and I tell myself it’s different.

It is.

Nev­er­the­less, the sense of exor­cism is almost worth it.

And it’s reordered my mind.

Now of course, I can begin to work on less demand­ing things like teach­ing myself how in the hell HTML5 embeds video. I don’t understand.

And work­ing out why my Word­Press installation’s twit­ter plu­gin won’t fuck­ing well work.

And fin­ish­ing that book on the Eng­lish Civil War.

I might even blog again.

The Indone­sian Reli­gious Affairs Min­is­ter proves once again that being a moron is no imped­i­ment to get­ting a cab­i­net post in that nation.…

Suryad­harma added he did not agree with Muhammadiyah’s brand­ing of smok­ing as haram, say­ing he believed Islam’s orig­i­nal stance on tobacco was makruh (frowned upon) but not haram.

“Unless it poses a direct threat to human health, such as by caus­ing heart dis­ease, then smok­ing should not be haram,” he said.

[From Min­is­ter calls anti-smoking edict ‘unwise’ | The Jakarta Post]