A Beautiful Mind
Only the brightest get to Balliol, the
cream of Oxford colleges. Christopher Hitchens, the British polemicist whose
writing and advocacy put him at the forefront of political, social, religious
and scientific debate, and who died in December (far too early at 62) was one
of them and is a figure who will be sadly missed. His atheism angered many
critics – one cannot imagine why, since if there is any existence after death
Hitchens will now have proved himself wrong, though in common with all who have
gone before he won’t be back to tell us about it – and his politics many
others.
Christopher Buckley, a friend and argument-foil of 30 years, wrote in a
blog note on The Atlantic magazine site (Hitchens wrote for the magazine for
years after moving to America in the late 1970s, saying later he jumped the
pond because Britain was “like Weimar without the sex”) that Hitchens was “a
feast of reason and a flow of soul, and, if the author of God Is Not Great did
not himself believe in the concept of soul, he sure had one, and it was a great
soul.”
The television channel Al Jazeera posted some memorable quotes from
Hitchens as part of its reportage of his death, including this one: “[George W.
Bush] is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally
unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured,
extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”
Hitchens said this in 1999, a year before Bush became US President. In
2003 Hitchens was a staunch supporter of the US-led invasion of Iraq. He later railed against waterboarding, a
torture technique favoured – until rightly banned – by the US military.
He wrote 17 books, including The Trial of
Henry Kissinger, God is Not Great, and a memoir, Hitch-22 (he was Hitch to his
friends). His final publication of a collection of his essays, Arguably, was
released this year.
It was perhaps apt – it is certainly poignant – that in the month of Hitchens’
death astronomers confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet in the “habitable
zone” around a star not unlike our own. The planet, Kepler 22-b, lies about 600
light-years away, is about 2.4 times the size of Earth, and has a temperature
of about 22C (despite global warmists’ alarms, Earth’s mean surface temperature
is still around 15C,where it’s been during the whole galactic nanosecond since
homo sapiens discovered how to measure it).
Kepler 22-b – named for the space telescope that is busy spotting
distant parts of the neighbourhood – is the closest confirmed planet yet to one
like Earth: a planet on which it is conceivable that advanced intelligent life
could occur; such as, say, a life of Hitch.
Sun Don’t Shine
We tweet on Twitter (@Scratchings if you’re
interested) to a select few who have chosen to follow Hector’s ephemeral flight
paths and were thus pleased to see the other day that something called the Bali
Sun – though its website and Twitter page call it Bali The Sun – had elected to
follow us. It’s nice to have followers. No former leader writer should be
without them.
That day, there were only two tweets on its Twitter page. Both said it
was an on-line tourist papper (sic). It’s “about us” page on its website was similarly
uninformative. The single entry there said its popularity was 5 percent. It
didn’t say what it was 5 percent popular with, but we couldn’t ask because the
website doesn’t say who’s in charge.
It is said that if you can’t say anything
nice then don’t say anything at all. But diarists couldn’t possibly survive
under such restrictive rules of engagement. A far better rule is that if
something pops its head up above the parapet, shoot at it.
Perhaps the Bali Sun will shine one day. But it will need to put a few
more additions (oops, silly, we must mean editions) up on its site before any
illuminating flashes of light reach us from the heavens.
Speaking of illuminating moments, the other day we inadvertently bought
a week-old copy of another local newspaper, the Bali Times. We’d parked outside
a Circle K so the Distaff could negotiate some laundry next door and thought
we’d better drop in to buy something at the convenience store, just to show
goodwill. It was two days after the new edition should have been on the shelves,
but sadly we weren’t paying attention and forked out Rp10K for an old
fish-and-chip wrapper instead of a new one.
It wasn’t all wasted effort, though. The Times, which continues to
assert that it reveals the real Bali all the way from distant Ireland, turns
out to be still on its inexplicable vendetta against the British novelist Will
Self, whom, granted, some regard as tendentious and tedious, not to mention far
too far up himself. Some time ago it reported “Man Throws Self off Cliff,”
which surprised us no end because we had no idea he was even on the island. In
the edition of the paper we just inadvertently bought is a story with this
headline: “Man Sets Self Alight Outside
State Palace.” (He must have recovered from his Uluwatu plunge and gone to
Jakarta.)
Clearly someone’s out to get poor Will. We didn’t think his densely fantastical
piece de resistance, Great Apes, was that
bad. But should he be planning further Indonesian trips, he might consider
doing so under an assumed name. We’d considered proposing Safe, since that
suggests a measure of surety against unfortunate incident. But no, that
wouldn’t do. The Bali Times would just report that robbers had blown him up.
She’s Our Hero
Robin Lim, who operates the Bumi Sehat
foundation that provides health care and maternity and prenatal care to women
in Bali who might otherwise not get it, was deservedly named CNN Hero of the
Year 2011 this month, selected from among 10 finalists. She got US$250,000 for
her win, having already received $50,000 for making it onto the finalists’
list.
Lim is truly a hero. She said at
the awards (in Los Angeles on December 11): “Every baby's first breath on Earth
could be one of peace and love. Every mother should be healthy and strong.
Every birth could be safe and loving. But our world is not there yet.”
Hear! Hear!
Kindling Thought
We had a lovely dinner party recently. Two
people we got to know from their business activities but who are now friends –
he’s a real estate broker, she is manicurist to the Distaff – joined us at The
Cage for a western meal with Asian flavours, judged sufficiently Halal for mild
Muslims, with background music by iPod, Hector’s latest toy. He’s very proud of the playlists
he has managed to create from a mix of iTunes and burned CDs and is in danger
of becoming quite boring about it all.
Amid
the evening ambience – The Cage sports a sort of deep crimson light-pool at
night, courtesy of some table lamps that inevitably propel one’s thoughts
towards the more classy among Parisian and Chinese brothels (Hector is not at
all unhappy about this) – talk turned among other things to the developing
world of ebooks and specifically to the Kindles now on the inventory at our
house.
It will be great when a far larger body of literature in Bahasa
Indonesia is available in electronic books, especially since bookshops in Bali
are seriously deficient at the sentient end of literature’s envelope.
The Diary is at present rereading (though perhaps that should be
e-reading) James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, a long-time favourite as well as
the spark for that grand old pub-crawl, Bloomsday. (It’s on June 16 every year,
but you need to keep in training year round.)
It
is particularly memorable for Joyce’s use of some lines from William Butler
Yeats’ 1892 poem Who Goes with Fergus? They include these two lines, sage
advice in any vicissitude:
And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love’s bitter mystery
Santa in Seminyak
We expect Santa is now taking his customary
well-earned rest after the oh-so-busy pre-Christmas period he and the reindeer,
not to mention the elves, have to endure each year. One of the many spots he
dropped in on in Bali in the lead-up to Present Day was The Cornerstore in Jl
Oberoi at Seminyak.
That was on Saturday, December 17. Informant Sean Cosgrove told us the
red-suited gent would be there from 9am to noon. We do hope the sleigh didn’t
get held up in the traditional traffic jam that gridlocks Kuta-Legian-Seminyak on
a permanent basis.
Animal Capers
Someone kindly alerted us to a list of the
most popular dog names this year – OK, it was in New York, which is one very
self-absorbed apple – which lists Bella as No. 1. Presumably that’s for lady
dogs. The Diary’s personal favourite was way down the list, at No. 49. We don’t
have a dog, but we’re always calling “Oreo.”
Guess there’ll be a new list next year.
That’ll be 2012, which from January 23 is the Year of the Dragon. We’re just leaving the Year of the Rabbit, in
which some among us have found that we have been the bunnies. It can only get
better.
Happy New Year!
Hector's Diary appears in the fortnightly print edition of the Bali Advertiser and on the newspaper's website www.baliadvertiser.biz
On Twitter: @Scratchings. On Facebook: Hector McSquawky
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