The Numbers Game And A Bombing Shame

email: pjdillon@attglobal.net
They say you’ll lose it of you don’t use it but despite a two week hiatus the blog lives and I’ve still managed to remember the login codes. That alone is no small feat burdened as I am with all manner of personal and business codes locked away in my malaria enfeebled brain.
It’s pretty amazing how numeric life has become, even for someone who prides himself on keeping a pretty slim data shadow.
There’s logon names and password protection for both my outlook email and the yahoo address, for the three servers I use, the three internet back accounts I access as well as close to a dozen members websites of different shapes and sizes (most mercifully recognizing me when I dial up a page), which are password protected and have assigned random logon numbers, frequently alpha-numeric combinations running to 16 characters. Add to this the various POP questions and software queries I’m posed if I call for system support.
There’s several bank accounts in three different countries each with unique quick codes and account names and numbers, and two automated phone banking systems they require codes and PINs, not to mention the bank ATM cards themselves with their unique PINs.
Like most people, I’ve got a passport (unlike most, two of them) and a citizenship card all of which feature numbers, and of course there’s the granddaddy of ‘em all, my social insurance number, too. I know my lapsed Medicare card number and driver’s license and if pushed, I might cough up a B.C. video store membership number from five years ago.
I’ve got an address here in Jakarta, an occasional mailing address in Vancouver and a second in Quebec all of which are heavily memory dependant. There’s the birth dates of four other family members and countless friends to remember (though if you asked them they’d probably say that I’m not much for remembering those special dates), and of course perhaps 20 or thirty phone numbers rattling round my head at any one time.
So it is no small miracle that every year when I confront my locker at Yaletown Storage in downtown Vancouver I somehow manage to come up with the right three digits to pop the lock, though I couldn’t tell you what they are right this moment. I have to be there, standing in front of the white painted particleboard door on the third floor and I can just reach into thin air and pull it out.
I’ve go the number thing on my mind because I’ve just today replaced a lost cell phone (Nokia 6310 and all its saved numbers etc) with quite a smart new model, the Ericsson T-68i, which pretty much does everything you’d want a phone to do nowadays, part digital calendar, part phonebook but with Bluetooth and perpetual Internet access should you be so inclined (I’m not). I’ll play games, wake you up in the morning, remind you to wish Mom a happy birthday and pick up the dry cleaning (not one of my problems, living as I do in a world of cotton and lycra and more cotton), and with the right attachment, I’ll take wee tiny (3 cm x 2 cm) utterly useless digi-pix which you can (theoretically) send immediately via your wireless Web connection directly to the cell phones of family and friends who I suppose have been living their own lives of quiet desperation and will immediately send a picture back showing their shock and awe at what you’ve send them.
One cool thing it does offer if I can figure out how to make it work, is a synchronization function that’ll speak to my Outlook Express contact list and calendar and swap data both ways so that I should be able to load most of my PC contacts onto the phone’s address book without having to key every friggin one. Right now it’s all theory but I’ll be mucking about with it and will report faithfully on progress made.
It has been busy the past couple of weeks. Among the highlights, I’ve started a new writing gig with a UN agency. I’m going to be unnaturally coy about this job as it is shaping up to be quite interesting and I don’t want to blow it. Suffice to say at this time that I was in central Java for a coupla three days last week talking to child prostitutes and the street workers who deal with them. Unlike N America or W Europe this kind of outreach is quite new and not particularly sophisticated but if all they do is provide a safe space for the kids to hang out in for a few hours every day then that’s a heck of a lot more than what they’d otherwise have. I’ll write more about the project I’m involved with in coming weeks but for the moment I’ll leave it at that.
The trial began last week Wednesday of Abu Bakar Bashir, the guy US intelligence says is the head of JI, the group suspected of pulling off the Bali bombing last Oct. 12. That same day cops arrested more than a dozen more guys they suspect of planning terrorist hits in Indonesia, seizing weapons and ammo, chemicals and detonators. Two days later, a bomb went off outside the UN building in downtown Jakarta and Sunday morning a similar pipe bomb device detonated at the airport injuring 11 people. People are on edge at the moment and there’s fear in the streets for the first time in many months.
J and I traveled to Bandung, W Java, on Easter weekend for our friend and colleague Chris Brummit’s wedding. Simple Moslem service though there was nothing simple about the bride’s opulent kabaya, a very Javanese sarong, blouse and diaphanous vest combination topped with a pretty extraordinary gold headpiece. Several friends had flown in from Bangkok so it was a bit of a homecoming.
On the Thursday before the wedding I went to the groom’s wake, uuuuhhh, I mean, stag, which began at the city’s quasi foreign correspondent’s club, the sort of mauve-painted, dimly lit place that would have been trendy in New York. About 10 years ago.
Then we made for the dingy dangdut lane three minutes from my house for 90 minutes of heavily made-up women screeching to high amp Indian-influenced pop tunes. It’s an okay experience once in a while not something I’d do on a regular basis. Say, once a year or so. Later we booked out to 1001, which is sorta high-end entertainment center offering everything from live karaoke in a hall full of respectable Chinese businessmen and their wives, to skeletal Latvian whores on the backend of long careers, and hard-faced, 18-year-old Javanese hookers who line up kike cattle to be selected to act as ‘companions’ in the smaller karaoke rooms on the second floor. It’s all so predictable and dingy, everything depressing and cheap about Asia crammed into a space the size of my living room.
There’s another coming up, that of Linsay Murdoch, the Sydney Morning Herald’s guy in Jakarta, and the city’s poor version of Hunter Thompson. His excesses are legendary and that he is getting married at all came as a bit of a shock, frankly. It starts at 3 pm. I’m worried.
Finally, I'm going to sign off on a conflicted note. Apparently the five guys who killed my friend Harry Burton from Reuters on the dusty road to Sarobi back in Nov 2001 have been captured in southeastern Afghanistan. I guess I should be happy but really it leaves me cold. I've looked in the eyes of killers before, there's nothing new there. In many ways they're exactly like you and I. But I am curious what it feels like to be able to exact revenge. How would it feel to take one of those guys and cut his throat, to feel the tip of the blade as it pushed through the tightened muscles of the neck, how he'd bounce and struggle and what looks would be, captured on the faces of the four who remained. I'm sure they've seen that look themselves. They say it's a hard thing to do the first time but that it gets easier. I wonder.