Friday 29 September 2006

The Indonesian Vice President is a Pimp


It appears that Vice President Jusuf Kalla has finally lost his marbles.

Perhaps it could explain his otherwise offensive suggestion that tourism campaigns for the Middle East should highlight the availability of attractive women.

"The marketing needs a better campaign based on the visitor's appetite and segment," he said at a seminar on tourism promotion to the Middle East.

"If there are a lot of Middle East tourists traveling to Puncak to seek janda, I think that it's OK," he added, referring to the West Java mountain resort and using the Indonesian term denoting either widows or divorcees.

He said the tourists would bring numerous benefits to the women and their offspring, as well as the country's entertainment community.

"If the janda get modest homes even if the tourists later leave them, then it's OK. The children resulting from these relationships will have good genes. There will be more television actors and actresses from these pretty boys and girls," he said.

Kalla was referring to a common practice in some areas of West Java and Batam island, where local women engage in short-term relationships with foreigners, many of them businesspeople from the Middle East, after taking informal religious vows.

Although many Islamists say the arrangement avoids illicit sexual relations and provides income to poor families, women's rights activists contend it is a form of legalized prostitution, especially when minors are forced into the unions by their parents.

The Vice President said the focus of Middle Eastern tourism campaigns should not stereotype Arabs as devoutly religious people who would only spend their days at the mosque.
After providing a visa-on-arrival facility for several countries in the Middle East, the government expects to attract 300,000 visitors from the wealthy region this year, up from around 40,000 last year.

Middle Eastern tourists, feeling unwelcome in Europe and the United States after 9/11, are flocking to Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand and Malaysia. Thailand had almost 290,000 Middle Eastern tourists in 2004, a 42 percent jump from the previous year. Malaysia attracted almost 150,000 last year.

In a nutshell – Pimping for Tourism! I cant wait for the next election campaign banners!

Thursday 28 September 2006

Enough to make you Boke!




















Deep Fried Rat

4 mature rats or 8 small rats
10-15 garlic cloves, crushed
2 tbs. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper

Skin and gut the rats, removing the head and toes. Mix garlic, salt, and pepper into a paste, spread on the meat, then place in direct sunlight for 6 to 8 hours, until dry. Fry in deep vegetable oil for about 6-7 minutes, until crispy and yellow in color. Serve with sticky rice, sweet-sour sauce, fish sauce, or a hot chili paste, and raw vegetables.

In Indonesia many eating traditions are related to social class and region. The Javanese and Balinese have Waroeng, a particular dining custom which takes place in their homes or in waroengs, simple traditional huts found in each village that serve as meeting places where the inhabitants can eat and talk together. This custom goes back several centuries to the days when the Hindu kingdom of the Majapahit still governed Java. When the Hindus were defeated and exiled to Bali in 1525, the tradition was carried with them. Today these waroengs are restaurants furnished with large tables and benches where people can gather for meals and discussion. The essential has not really changed, I would imagine that 500 years ago they were still stinking shitholes.

Indonesian food is supposed to be excellent and tasty, I for one have not really explored this fully, but some of it is OK. My premise is that if you don’t get the shits, don’t puke and don’t get the oral cavity stripped by the amount of Chilli in the food it may be considered passable. The national dish is called nasi goreng, fried rice with finely chopped meat, shrimps and egg, and Oh yes, and I nearly forgot, Chilli!

The food varies from island to island.

In Kalimantan, you can enjoy the biggest fresh water shrimp you've ever seen. (Basically the size of Lobsters – Prawns on steroids)

In Bali, enormous prawns and frog's legs from the rice paddies are a considered a special treat. (If it walks, crawls wriggles or squirms, catch the bastard and cook it)

Sumatra in general and the west coast around Padang in particular pride themselves on having the spiciest food in all of Indonesia. Nasi Padang is a specially spiced rice dish, and deng deng is a meat dish generously seasoned with hot chilies. (Read fucking Red Fucking Hot).

Fresh fish is a specialty of Sulawesi, as are grilled pork and buffalo - the meat is grilled in bamboo poles and generously sprinkled with tuak (palm alcohol). Now that stuff I do not mind, the only problem is if you get this on a kebab skewer, fresh from the BBQ there is a possibility that more exotic additives like tikus (field rat) and paniki (fruit bat) will be on the stick! . Oh yes, Sulawesi is not the place to be a dog! They are rather favoured as an appetiser!

For a quick bite to eat, the local population eat from the kakis limas (literally "five legs"): little mobile stalls where they buy rice and soups that are kept hot over charcoal. What you have to remember is that the water is not potable, at least not for westerners. It must be boiled first. But being Indonesian they tend to serve water that has been merely heated up. You have to ask for "medidih duapuluh menit," meaning water boiled for 20 minutes. Failure to do so ensures the shits like you have never had before.

Most of the pkace is, as youy will have realised a culinary adventure that I refuse to undertake.

Bonking In Bandung

 Posted by Picasa
Residents of Saritem, the oldest red-light district in Bandung, West Java, were enraged Tuesday when public order officers began closing brothels as part of a plan to totally close down the area by November this year.

An elderly resident of Saritem, Etty, 60, expressed anger over the closure. The residents have urged the municipality to provide alternative employment for around 1,000 sex workers.

"The public order officers are safe as they get paid. How are we expected to live if we don't sell women here," quipped Etty, who openly described herself as a pimp in front of TV cameras. (There was me thinking pimps were all greasy guys who looked like Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch)

Etty, who claims to be a native of the area, has 11 grandchildren, all of whom work as sex workers there. (Keeping it in the family!)Besides the presence of pimps and middlemen, many residents take advantage of the thriving business by selling food and drinks, renting out rooms and offering their services as motorcycle taxi drivers.

Another resident, Pendi, 30, said that activities in the district has slowed down as most of the sex workers had returned to their hometowns a week before the fasting month of Ramadhan.
Authorities had initially informed residents of the permanent closure in early September.

A public order officer, Taspen Effendi, disclosed that the closure would be done in stages since residents had not fully accepted it. As of Tuesday, only five of the 81 brothels had been sealed by the municipal police. (That many whorehouses, think I’ll take a wander down there just to get photographs before they all shut down, but then again, this is Indonesia, they’ll still be open next year)

"We're not finished. We'll seal the rest by November," said Taspen.

Data at the Kebon Jeruk subdistrict office in Andir district, shows that the brothels are located in two neighborhood units -- RW 7 neighborhood unit consisting of 207 sex workers and 28 pimps and the RW 9 with 243 sex workers and 45 pimps. (Looks like RW7 girls get better money as there are fewer pimps taking their cut!)

Saritem has existed since the Dutch colonial period. The Bandung municipality has been planning to close down the red-light district since 1998.

The municipality allocated billions of rupiah to build the Darut Taubah Islamic boarding school in the area in 2000 to change the image of the area and provide religious guidance to motivate the sex workers -- around 80 percent of whom come from outside the city -- to quit the profession.
However, six years on, it has failed to have had a favorable impact on the sex workers.

The closure of Saritem was incorporated in a 2005 city bylaw on order, cleanliness and beauty, (Superb, obviously the girls have been convicted of being out of order, unhygienic and pig ugly) which will take effect in November this year.

The article on prostitution in the bylaw stipulates a fine of Rp 50 million (US$5,600) for providers of sexual services -- pimps and sex workers -- while users of the services will be subject to a Rp 5 million fine.

One can only wonder what will happen in Bandung after the closures, the girls will no doubt move to Jakarta and the poor males will have to get used to the unthinkable – shagging the wife!

Will the real prostitutes stand up!

Something seems to be amiss in the current nationwide crackdown on prostitution.
Tangerang municipality is leading the charge by rounding up women walking alone in main streets past newly imposed curfew hours, but Jakarta and other major cities have also been raiding locations allegedly used as brothels. Needless to say, these campaigns get massive coverage by the ever news-hungry media, with female prostitutes the main focus, to send a clear message that the authorities are serious about fighting vice. (Yeah – right)

Waged in the name of stopping society's moral decay and saving the nation's young from moral bankruptcy, one is left to wonder if the campaign is missing the real targets.

Commercial sex workers who sell their bodies for a few hundred thousand to a few million rupiah (a few million, seems a lot for a bonk to me, thought that top price was a million in places like Styx Bar) are certainly a menace, and if they operated in your neighborhood, you'd probably want them removed too, and thus you would wholeheartedly support the campaign.

But let's be honest with ourselves. These streetwalkers are not the only ones who are selling their bodies and souls for financial or material gain in this country. Since they work in hiding to evade the authorities, they are not even the most visible of all prostitutes, either.

No. There are bigger prostitutes -- bigger fish for the authorities to catch if they are serious about wiping out prostitution. And a lot of the time, these prostitutes do their deeds so blatantly that it is really just a matter of political will for the authorities to round them up.

Prostitution is usually defined as the sale of sexual services, but the online encyclopedia Wikipedia says: "In a more general sense of the word, anyone selling his/her services for a cause thought to be unworthy can be described as prostituting him/herself."

Going by this wider definition, we can think of many other people in various forms of employment who are engaging in the world's oldest profession:

* The elected politicians who betray the people's mandate by continually claiming to work for the people when they are really just serving their personal and political interests.

* The appointed officials and bureaucrats who, instead of acting as the servants of the people, make the people their servants while enriching themselves.

* The intellectuals who sell their minds and thoughts to provide scholarly justifications for laws and policies that are clearly detrimental to the interests of the people.

* The Iman’s and priests who willingly give a religious cloak to laws and regulations that suppress people's freedoms and rights.

* The journalists who betray the public trust and fill the media with lies and half-truths to mislead the people.

True to the wider definition of prostitution, they are selling services for causes thought to be unworthy. And there is no cause more unworthy than corruption.

These, and many other people in different professions, are the real hardcore prostitutes and thus the real menace to society. Their corrupt and perverted conduct poses a much more serious threat to the nation's morals than the simple sexual services offered by streetwalkers.

Most streetwalkers enter the profession not by choice but because of economic pressures. 11 million people within Indonesia are out of work (according to unreliable official statistics) and 30 million others are underemployed. For many, prostitution is the only available means of survival.

Such justification cannot be used by the elite members of society who willingly and knowingly sell their soul and services, and sometimes their body too, for profit, material or otherwise. Their only reason for prostituting themselves is greed.

And they are doing it in the open for all to see. Corruption is so rampant that Indonesian children, whose future we are all concerned about, are so exposed to such practices at early age that some grow up to accept them as normal.

Moral decadence is indeed a big problem in this country, but moral hypocrisy is an even bigger problem since we tolerate the bigger and more dangerous type of prostitution.

Currently its cool to condemn prostitution in the name of morality, but it's the bigger and more menacing prostitutes that deserve to be pilloried.

Who ya gonna call! Mudbusters


On May 29th something went horribly wrong on a well site in Central Java. The Oil Company is named Lapindo Brantas and the drilling contractor shall remain nameless, mainly because I have an Indonesian friend who works for them.

In order to get things done “quicker” (read bunch of fuckwits) the Oil Company representatives chose not to perform a simple operation which resulted in what can only be described as a huge ecological disaster. Forget wells going on fire, forget gushers leaping high in the air, this one stated oozing “MUD”.

And fucking loads of it, months later, houses, villages, factories, farms, motorways (I use the last term loosely) have all been buried under the constant flow of the evil brown stuff.
Attempts are being made to drill a relief well directionaly which will allow the flow to be stemmed far underground, but this is slow and it looks like the rig doing the drilling will soon alo be overwhelmed by the mud flow.

So much for the technical intervention. As usual, Indonesia has an alternative.

Even late at night the site remains busy -- not with workers trying to stop the constant gray streams, but with mystics attempting to use their supernatural powers to end the disaster for a Rp 100 million (US$10,869) prize.

Quotes from assorted fuckwits!

Fuckwit One!
"I could have called the spirit around the oil well l, but the spirit left upon learning that the press were here and would take picture’s, I'll try calling it again so I can communicate with it."

Fuckwit Two is nearby,crouched over busily chanting, throwing sand and stone into ponds built to contain the mudflow. "The sand and stone were taken ... with God's guidance from the cemetery of Sunan Ampel in Surabaya and of Sunan Giri in Gresik," referring to two of the nine legendary Islamic clerics who spread Islam in Java.

Fuckwit Two who works days on a tobacco farm, said he hoped he had adequate powers to stop the mess from spreading. "I've had a blessing from Gus Dur (former president Abdurrahman Wahid)... If I win, I and my family will live in a house," he said. (Wonder what he currently lives in?)

There are 50 psychics taking part in the contest, organized by the Kedung Bendo village head, a wealthy businessman named Hasan Fuckwit.

The competition has attracted psychics from many cities in East Java and from further afield, including Jakarta and Medan. All are trying their luck to stop the hot mud, which has been gushing out of Lapindo's exploration well since May 29.

The organizer has not collected any registration fees for the contestants nor provided them with accommodation; they only get free water, and are required to bring their own equipment.

(Not one of them had a vacuum cleaner like appliance strapped to his back whilst wearing a spacesut!)

"Some of the psychics are scary-looking, but there are also those who are gentle and polite. But none of them have stopped the mud," said the contest's coordinator.

He said the competition had received such a large response that the committee had to limit the number of participants and separate them into several groups. The committee has not set a deadline for contestants to end the flows.

In a screening process, each psychic had to pass a test: turn off a water faucet left on by the organizer with only their supernatural powers. (Brilliant!)

"With the test, many candidates had to go back home. How can they stop a mudflow if they can't even shut off a faucet,"

The contest is one of the more unusual attempts to end the disaster, which has left more than 9,000 people homeless and more than 1,800 people out of work.
"Many people may not accept that we have supernatural powers," said Fuckwit Three, a psychic from Jakarta.

"But it is clear that the mudflow can only be stopped if the government and Lapindo end their sinful acts, which are affecting the people."

Fuck it, ending sinful acts? Methinks the mud will continue flowing for years based upon the amount of badness in “Sindonesia”

Nude Thievery

Wood thieves in Indonesia have discovered that crime pays. Wives of wood thieves are being strategically placed to distract the forest guards with acts of striptease, holding their attention until the bare truths are revealed, by which time, the wood has gone.

The Indonesian daily “Jakarta Post” reports that the wood thieves prepare their operations weeks in advance. The wood is cut and stored as logs, the main problem being to load it onto trucks for transportation. It is here that the wives of the wood thieves come into play. (Wait for it!)

Standing at the roadside, they wait until the forest guards appear and then, the striptease act begins. The forest guards are transfixed by the show and while they are spellbound, the logs disappear. (The actual details of what goes on at this point are sketchy and unreliable, however, it can be assumed that the guards get a woody while the thieves get their logs off!)

A government official explained “Hard (good analogy) as these men may be, the guards do not have the courage to act against nude housewives”.

“Hard (wonder if they really understood the innuendo in using the word hard twice in this context) indeed is the fight to stop the unscrupulous from destroying Indonesia’s rain forest and natural environment.”

Once again Indonesian inventiveness leaps to the forefront when it comes to thievery.

Bike Crash

This guy runs a bicycle shop. Every day he re-arranges his display! Never ever the same, looks more like art to me! Posted by Picasa

There are those that have!

Offices and Apartments in downtown Jakarta! Posted by Picasa

And those that have not!

Housing in Tanjun Priok, Jakarta's major Industrial Area and Port Posted by Picasa

This is what you see every day

Typical Traffic Posted by Picasa

Something Rarely Seen

Eeerie.....taken on National Day this month Posted by Picasa

Wednesday 27 September 2006

Tits or Terror

Militant Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir sees erotic shows on TV as "more dangerous than the Bali bombs".

Ba'asyir, who was released from jail on June 14 after serving 26 months for his involvement in the 2002 Bali bombing that killed 202 people, said pornography was more damaging because it destroyed people's morality.

"So if you ask me which one is more dangerous, nude women or the Bali bombs, then my answer would be the women showing off their skin," he said.

He called on TV stations across Indonesia to replace shows that have erotic content with programs Allah would approve of, such as Koran discussions, especially during Ramadan.

But not everything about Ba'asyir's statement is bad. Inadvertently, he gave me a brilliant idea about how to deal with Muslim terrorist hijackers. Rather than bother about complicated and frustrating security measures, airlines should simply eliminate all male attendants on flights and have only nude female space waiters. Since a nude woman is apparently something that completely offends potential Muslim terrorists, they will naturally avoid flying!

In fact, maybe if all the fit looking women in the world ran around nude there would finally be peace in the world!

Horny & Hungry

Sunday was the first day of Ramandan and all over the country the mood changed and brought those rumbling stomachs.

Instead of food, sustenance became prayer and religious meaning. (Fuck that – try beer)

Food courts, which are usually crammed with people, emptied during the day. All over the place, the resident fuckwits lie slumped in the afternoon as fatigue began to show. “It is not unusual to see people asleep at desks or in corners due to the strain of getting up at dawn to pray and eat. Must be a real killer!” said a friend of mine who works in a large Oil company here. (I wonder if he was being serious)

Yesterday afternoon, the roadside “Warungs” were doing a brisk trade as people stocked up in anticipation of sundown's breaking of the fast. Presumably, eating this shite makes it easier to get up at dawn as your bowels are ready to explode thanks to the e-coli additives used in Warung cuisine.

As usual, those scurrying around to buy this shit in anticipation of the first evening meal complained like fuck about the usual price hikes. Best time to rape and pillage is when you have a captive market.

Prices for pork products, beef, fish, prawns, chicken and vegetables had all shot up, shoppers complained. One enterprising Warung owner could not keep up with the demand as he sold all his Bacon Sandwiches within 15 minutes of opening.

Ramadan is supposed to provide a moment of clarity for many Muslims in terms of providing purpose in life. There are however exceptions.

The first day of the fast with eating, drinking, smoking and having sex banned between sunrise and sunset dragged for many of the country's roughly 200 millions Muslims.

``I am not really doing well this morning, but then this is the first week of Ramadan,'' said Indra Fuckwit, a middle-aged cigarette seller in central Jakarta.

``It will get better later in the day near the break of the fast and in the evening when I can have a smoke and a wank. Afterwards, I’ll head down to Blok M for a couple of beers and probably shag a prostitute until its time for breakfast'' he said.

Ah, the pleasures of the holy month!

Was it really 3 months........

Since I posted anything.

I have no excuses, been a lazy bastard and then took a bit of annual leave, bought a new camera and generally pissed about.

Better post some stuff, not necessarily in chronological order....