Kids and birds

These boys were carrying racing birds down the street near the Jakarta Post offices . The birds seemed remarkably calm considering that the boy on the left had just finished holding his up to his mouth and shouting. Not shouting AT them; just shouting, the way kids do. Maybe they're used to it.

From Art to Happy

Shot through a taxi window this afternoon while I was on my way to Jalan Sabang, Jakarta's most famous food street, to look for a particular spicy fruit salad (rujak) vendor. I didn't find him.

Titanic without deck chairs

There aren't any bridges over this stretch of the canal, so a few enterprising people operate water taxis. If you look at the upper right-hand corner of this one, you can see its name: Titanic.


The boatman pulls the ferry along on a cable strung over the water. I don't think we were in any danger from ice, but the water was full of garbage -- I suppose a big crapberg could have taken us down.


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Adults at play

Pardon my recent absence from the blogosphere. I recently discovered you can play Scrabble online against a computer (http://www.scrabulous.com/solitaire_scrabble.php -- but don't say I didn't warn you), and for the last three days I've been playing Scrabble the way some people play the horses, or the way other people use heroin.

Having emerged from my haze, I'll write some more about our walk along the canal in Roxy. Appropriately enough, today's subject is games.

The kite-flying kids weren't the only ones enjoying a Saturday off. There's a little pavilion next to the canal, and a bunch of the neighborhood guys were playing board games. This one looked like a variation on checkers, using a reduced number of chess pieces and half the board.


Behind the modified chess game was a big handmade board that seemed kind of like a cross between billiards and air hockey. You have to flick the round white disk at the colored pieces and try to knock your opponent's pieces into the pockets at the corners.


Everyone was amused to see foreigners give it a try.

Pigs on the loose

You may recall that I bought a little stick-on device for my phone with the Monokuro Boo pigs on it a while back. The pigs were supposed to flash whenever the phone was active, but they didn't work. Then they fell off in Bangkok, were miraculously recovered, and even more miraculously, started working!

Well, now the story has come to a bad end. I whipped my phone out in a cafe the other day to show off the pigs, and they were gone. I guess I should have expected that. Perhaps they had other, more pressing business to attend to. Perhaps they felt discriminated against as pigs in a Muslim country. Anyway, even though our time together was short, I feel enriched by it. And I feel that when I go get some other stupid flashy-phone thing to replace them, I will also get a tube of Superglue.

Thousands of reasons

Indonesia's former ruler, Soeharto, is gravely ill. Naturally the Indonesian media is following his condition closely. They seem especially obsessed with the medical terminology and procedures: the TV news is peppered with terms like Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy and Tissue Doppler Imaging.

Photo shamelessly swiped from Kompas

Soeharto stepped down ten years ago amid widespread unrest due to the economic crisis. He was a dictator who killed, jailed and oppressed his opponents and impoverished his own people through rampant embezzlement. But I think a lot of people feel conflicted about his illness; there's definitely some nostalgia for the Soeharto era these days. Someone has even written a book called Thousands of Reasons Why People Love Soeharto. They're all the kinds of reasons you usually hear when autocracy gives way to democracy: Prices weren't so high then, we had a strong leader, there weren't as many problems. And all those things are true, in their way.

Soeharto's illness has an eerie quality for me, because it mirrors the course of my father's final illness: poor circulation and fluid retention, followed by failing kidneys and lungs. I can't help feeling sorry for his family, even though they were a driving force behind his theft. I remember taking part in those decisions about what medical procedures to do and what not to do, and they're not easy.

The irony is, the average Indonesian has no access to all these fancy treatments the media is yammering on about. Lots of people who live basically good and honest lives don't last long enough to see their hearts give out at age 86. They certainly don't have crack medical teams charting their every heartbeat. As my mom liked to remind us during our childhood squabbles, "life isn't fair." I suppose the same is true of death.

This is what I'm talking about ...

when I say there's garbage along the canals.


I mean, it's almost like being in Naples. Unfortunately, nobody has sent in the army to clean things up. There's just this pregnant kitty, and she's more interested in finding dinner than tackling environmental problems.