Miracle Of Birth No. 17,346,301,856... And Counting

pjdillon@attglobal.net
We’re all pretty excited about welcoming the newest member to the extended clan, my first nephew, eight pound, 10 ounce Cole, who stepped out last Friday afternoon, June 19.
He’s up and about and pretty much running the Ottawa household. His amazing mum is in great shape, dad is anchored to the radiator in the front room with the same length of string we used to prevent him floating off following the birth of Isabelle back in Dec. 2001. The grandparents are ecstatic and are threatening to move into the basement, and Netminders everywhere are warned to set their photo attachment filters to maximum in order to weed out the inevitable flurry of multiple meg files to be produced in coming weeks as the above mentioned shoot every waking moment of young Cole’s life.
Myself and the gal are even now conspiring to fly over sometime between now and mid-August. Crazy post-SASs deals to be found if you dig deep, including a tasty Cathay fare from Sing to Toronto for about $520 US. If it happens, and it remains a big IF, we’ll get the bike tuned up and go for a ten day tear about northern Ontario, maybe do some camping or something, as well as seeing family and friends on the east coast.
We’d like to hit the west coast as well, perhaps pick up Drew’s wee Yammy 650 for a quick run up the coast, look at a couple of properties I’ve been following on the Net (hey, a guy can dream, right?).
‘Course there’s been a whole lot of irregular behavior out there as well so I think some of our time will be spent tummy rubbing at least two other swellin’ bellies that we’re aware of at this time. A word of warning to breeder women heading for Vancouver: think Bottle Water. Stay away from the taps. I repeat, Stay away from the taps.
I’m off to Bandung for a couple of dry, cool mountain days, traipsing about Tanjungsari sub-district observing matters village-based early childhood development programs and generally making a pain of myself to any and all forced to decipher my garbled Bahasa Indonesia.
Back to Jak Sunday hopefully with time and energy to blog-on.

More Lessons From The Mostar Mash

ACTUALLY WRITTEN 02:00, 06-06-03
pjdillon@attglobal.net
These late night files have got to end!
Funny how three pints of Bintang and a glass of Chardonay will turn yer average, mild mannered typist into some sort of wordsmith in waiting… this is the way it use to be, light buzz, free association time… lets see where we end up tonight.
The voyage of discovery continues today with new music files, and continuing tale of the Grinch and his music box.
As the casual reader will be aware, I’m losing a small part of myself with the departure from the archipela-nation of my best man Sasa, he of the Yogyakarta, joint tattoo session of two weeks ago. I’m not gonna gloom and doom about that ‘cause there’s always tomorrow or tomorrow for that. Mentioned here only in the context of how sometimes the learning only comes when it gets to be late in the day and transit is bad and maybe you’re gonna have to leave early and you don’t really know for sure when you throw “See ya later” over your shoulder just how long “later” might turn out to be…
And so here’s the word. I’m sitting propped up in bed (alone, on account of my sweety being off in East Java doing the family thing for a couple of days) accompanied by the whirling of the AC and Dexter Gordon’s smooth-as-bubur ayam sax on the deck, and it is all very fine.
What do you learn from someone’s music collection? Better yet, what do you learn about your own constricted airs when thrown a stash of new music, of names you know but have never really listened to?
I wouldn’t be lingering amidst these silky airs this evening had Sasa not dropped off about 15 kgs of CDs to be blended and mulched and scored into my hard-drive and turned into a usable, ‘groovable playlist for Friday’s big “goin’ ‘way” party (more on that later: ed). See, ‘cause even though we’ve covered a lot of ground over a couple dozen long evenings, I had no idea of my man Sasa's musical tastes extended to so many variably variable terrains.
I’m looking at platters worth of Ella James and Shostakovich, Aretha and Vivaldi, oblique African jazz rhythms and Eric Clapton. Al DiMeola and Fiddler On The Roof. Leonard Bernstein and Leonard Cohen. And many sleeves-worth of Croatian pickings, running from urban Mostar electro-trance to military drinking songs, and other esoteric eccentricities.
I’ve been entertaining him with White Zombie, Zappa and BB King, for four years, unaware of the bass-line that’s been running through my buddy’s personal soundtrack all this time. And so, I’m learning again. Right now it's Dexter Gordon (a name I knew but never consciously heard), and the many others I’ve been sampling, tasting, and saving to my laptop these past few days.
So this is what Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond were up to at Carnegie Hall back in the fall of ’63? Sweetness!
……… and so the battle goes on. News and views: New York Times this morning announced both editor and ME are leaving after the whole scandal with the Jayson Wazzisname, the golden boy, the poster-child for in-house affirmative action (he’s black) who cooked half of the stories he wrote since October of last year. Another journo living real in a post-modern world. Gimme substance abuse and gimme Beltway snipers baby, and I’m good to go.
Always curious about the moral judgments passed at these moments. This young fellow deserved to get caned, no doubt. Bitch slapped? Oh yeah.
Funny thing though. Most of the people my age I know who’ve been operating at the international levels of the business say that while I was banging away in obscurity in Western Canada for so many years, they’ve been witnessing the gradual decay in the quality of international journalism, accuracy sacrificed for access, some sort of objective truth lost to higher in-house political ambitions (something I’ve seen personally, reporters torque-ing up stories from Indonesia because it is safe to do so and it moves your byline from inside Page 14 ). These friends with the majors are almost uniformly appalled by the extent to which their colleagues lie, cheat and bullshit their way through assignments.
Spoke with one friend who’s a “Face” with one of the networks recently who identified three on-air journalists most competent news consumers are familiar with that he said were notorious for filing stories that were not only not accurate, but were complete figments of their imagination. When pressed, he came up with specific examples. And, we’re not talking about the bald-faced lies Geraldo filed from Tora Bora, but more recent stories from Southeast and Central Asia that had no basis in fact.
More on this I’m sure in later editions. For now though the blood is starting to chill, Dexter’s mellowing me out and I’m gonna crash.

Loathsome Palace Lizards Declare War

pjdillon@attglobal.net
I’m seized by these moments recently of absolute disgust and loathing. Mostly it’s directed at the conscienceless crooks, at the vile, populist whores in high office, and the zealots in the armed forces whose commanders (careerists with at least some sense of military history and the ‘code’ etc) for the most part seem to have learned absolutely nothing from the sacrifices of their forefathers on 10,000 battlefields across multiple millennia.
(I’m talking about Indonesia right now but feel free…)
I’m self-aware enough to fight the pull towards becoming one of those obnoxious and painful ex-pats who’ll bitch and moan 24/7 from the comfort of their plush bar stools or catered golf charity events, but this new, unnecessary war in Aceh is sooo pissing me off.
50,000 soldiers and half again as many police backed by attack aircraft, artillery, tanks and armored vehicles. A khaki-clad zealot in charge of operations, reporting to one of the more reprehensible characters the Indo military (TNI) has spat out in recent years, the point-man for the demolition of East Timor.
All talk is about “crushing” the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), something a nine-year-long military free fire zone (till 2000) failed to do. They did manage to kill something in the order of 7,000 civilians and rape 10,000 women (according to the toothless, widely ignored national human rights commission) during that period. That’s roughly two murders and three rapes a day, every day for almost a decade, in a province of about four million people.
The laugh-till-you-cry part of this is that the head of the Armed Forces reared up on both hind legs last week to say that it is unlikely they’ll be able to get rid of the GAM. And so you’re in there now for what reason…..?
This week he takes it one step further, telling Time magazine that, well, look, pretty much it’s okay to kill civilians and kids because, well, they might have guns. Perhaps we can get our brains around shooting a 12-year-old kid carrying an AK-47. But is it necessary to execute unarmed children (or adults for that matter) who have the temerity to run from a TNI patrol when they’ve been brought up on a steady diet of excesses by those same soldiers?
The West’s golden boy in the palace, security minister Yudhoyono has shown his true colors, his military pedigree; the spineless minister responsible for human rights fights a real guard action, attacking foreign journos who question his ability to deal with the inevitable raft of brutality charges that’ll emerge from Aceh; while right at the top of the shitpile, the feckless bitch who would be Queen (the same one who publicly swore two years ago that she’d never raise a hand to her ‘Acehnese children’; the one who had students arrested and charged for daring to walk on a poster of her face: “I thought I looked quite pretty in that picture” she comments later) refuses to meet foreign envoys appealing for calm and patience as the clock ticks towards the May 19 deadline for peace talks. Basically, she’s not been seen since the fighting began. Last month she emerged from her gilded burrow long enough to see the shadow of a problem (the trials of the Bali bombers) and scurried back again.
The other variety of reptile here is, as always, fairly predictable. The Yanks went to the wall trying to get a last minute deal to prevent this from happening and got nothing. Now that the killing has started of course they’ll line up behind the government while mouthing words like human rights. Post-Iraq Washington needs whatever reluctant support the Indonesians will give, and I’ve a strong feeling that the wily Javanese exacted a high cost for that support before April’s Monster Truck show north of Kuwait.
The British ambassador threw his weight behind the ‘national unity’ line Jakarta has been using to justify this latest abomination, and Alexander Downer, the Aussie foreign minister, when asked what he thinks about human rights abuses committed in Aceh says that he wishes GAM would stop doing them.
I want to meet that smarmy bastard one day. He’s too self-satisfied for his own good and there’s a few people I know lining up to know knock that look through the back of his mouth.
When you think about it, who’s got more to lose geopolitically, The States and it’s allies or Indonesia? It looks, at least on the surface, that the folks at Istana Merdeka have got Bush Younger and his posse over the preverbial barrel. Indeed they have for some time. It’ll be interesting to see how those administrations deal with Indonesia when it returns to a military dictatorship in a few years. Hell, the Army never really stopped running the friggin’ country.
How’s that for a gloomy prognosis.
I’m going to find something else to write about later this week. Like how I've become a Body Nazi, or stumbling across an elementary school radio tucked away in the lush base of the very Fuji-esque Slamet Mtn. Or how cool my new tattoo is. Or something. Tonight, I just needed to vent.