HECTOR'S BALI TIMES DIARY [for May 15]

The Bali Times is at www.thebalitimes.com and on Facebook

FACES IN THE NEWS:
Australian author and tree hugger Richard Flanagan is Ubud-bound and late emerging songbird Susan Boyle excused herself from a date with The Man (President Obama) because she had to stay home to wash her hair.

You Could Pop Your
Cork for This Idea

REGULAR readers of The Diary – not to mention regular drinkers, or those who would regularly drink if only they could – might find attractive an idea that has been put to Hector by a concerned reader. It relates to the miserable state of the liquor supply in Bali, where (apparently unknown to revenue collectors in Jakarta, or at least uncared about) lots of people who drink in conformity with their own cultural habits come to spend their money.

The suggestion is that there should be a petition to the national government to regulate alcohol imports, distribution and consumption on a basis that provides Bali with access to required supplies.

Tourists who drink would probably spend a bit more money – and indeed, more of them might come here to spend it – if the national government could only get over the dialogue of the deaf it is having with itself over alcohol. There are several things to be said about this situation. Not quite all of them are rude.

First and foremost, Bali is Indonesia’s only mass tourism destination. Balinese culture has so far managed to survive the alleged onset of western decadence and immorality that apparently exercises the pious minds of public servants and commercial venture managers elsewhere. That is not to say that changes are not occurring in the island’s culture as a result of exposure to foreign influence. But it seems clear that Balinese Hinduism is up to the present more than a match for such external threats. In any case, it is primarily an issue for the Balinese community itself and the island’s provincial-level government.

The idea of such a petition would be to restrict the present sole importer of alcohol into Indonesia, Sarinah, to operations in the rest of Indonesia and to license another operator to manage Bali’s separate requirements. These should be regulated through the provincial government. Arrangements could be made to forward (hopefully growing) excise income to the national government.

Such an arrangement would recognise three important facts that apparently elude officials in Jakarta. These are that Bali has a distinct and unique culture within Indonesia; that the island is effectively the country’s sole mass tourism market; and that the policy of regionalism which the government supports would be advanced (and the country strengthened economically and socially) by devolving real cultural and economic authority to the provinces.

Given the difficulties Bali’s hotel and resort and restaurant sectors have in servicing the demands of customers, it would surely also be in their interest to get behind such a proposal. The Governor’s office and the provincial legislature might also take an interest – in the interests of Bali’s primary economic driver.

Any takers?

Read All About It
AUSTRALIA’S increasingly tabloid press – and we refer to the mindless genre rather than mere page size, since, really, size doesn’t matter – just can’t get enough of poor Schapelle Behind-the-Wire or, it seems, her sister Mercedes On-the-Run. Jakarta based Murdoch press reporter Cindy Wockner has lately brought readers of Rupert’s lesser tomes more on that front.

She tells us that while Corby may have resigned herself to being locked up (not happy but not expecting a miracle release) she could be a step closer to fulfilling her ambition to become a beautician (Wockner uses the term beauty therapist) through an innovative idea to assist female prisoners at Chateau Schapelle, aka Kerobokan jail. Along the way to this dream, she is – in the words of Wockner – “teaching other prisoners the art she studied before her arrest on drug smuggling charges.”

Wockner’s readers learn that Corby and other female prisoners have proposed to jail authorities that they set up a beauty salon on the grounds, where Corby and perhaps some outsiders would teach beauty therapy, provide beauty treatments for prisoners, and perhaps open a small shop to sell handicrafts made by inmates.

The plan was proposed last year. It has won support from the prison doctor. Jail conditions are not ideal at Kerobokan – well, nowhere is ideal if you’ve been locked up because you were naughty, we guess – and keeping inmates occupied is a constant problem in places where they care about such things and have spare taxpayer cash to fund rehab and work programmes. It consistently escapes the attention of most western critics of Indonesian and other prison systems that the plush facilities of the west are not affordable elsewhere. Oddly, too, western received wisdom that criminals are just poor misunderstood victims of society doesn’t wash here either.

Nonetheless, as Mercedes Corby tells Wockner, there is an argument worth having about the need for special efforts to look after female prisoners in Kerobokan, who for cultural reasons cannot use the jail’s recreational facilities – such as they are – and literally have nothing to do.

So learning the snip and clip trade is probably a good thing. Schapelle turns 32 in July. Maybe she’ll get a hairdo for the occasion.

Off the Boyle
SPEAKING of hairdos, Britain’s latest bad hair lady, late emerging singing superstar Susan Boyle, stirred up an ant’s nest when she said no, she’d rather not go to Washington to attend a dinner (put on by the press) at which The Prez, The Bam, was guest of honour. Susan, who shot to fame in a British TV talent quest, is evidently a sensible girl. The Diary can think of few things less worth doing than having a US$200-a-head dinner with a pack of Obama worshippers – particularly since they included not only boringly opinionated pundits but also luminous beings from the world of entertainment such as Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Eva Longoria Parker, Ashton Kutcher, Alicia Keys, Jimmy Fallon, Samuel L. Jackson and Jon Bon Jovi.

President Obama is in a tough job. He’s already attracting criticism for some policy decisions and his unique approach to the problems of his office. He deserves some sympathy – but songbird Susan was far better staying away because she had to wash her hair.

They Hung Out for a Win
THE former British icon store Marks & Spencer has changed its pricing policy on larger-size bras following a Facebook campaign by a group calling itself Busts 4 Justice. Nearly 13,000 people signed an online protest against its policy of charging customers more for oversized bras.

The campaign was started by Beckie Williams, a comely 26-year-old who wears a 30G bra (what this actually means is a mystery to your diarist, whose now historic interest in the garments began and ended with whether what was in them was available at the time and how easy they were to unclip) and was fed up with being charged the equivalent of Rp30, 000 extra on bras bigger than a DD cup. According to Busts 4 Justice this policy was criminally unfair.

A spokesman for Marks & Spencer was quoted as saying: “Basically we boobed.”

Post-Colonial Blarney Alert
WHILE Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the 81-year-old Colombian doyen of Latin American literature says he is still too busy writing to talk to the media, Australian former enfant terrible of post-modern storytelling, Richard Flanagan, 48 this year, is happy to chat. And he’s coming to Bali to do so, at an Ubud Writers and Readers Festival literary dinner on June 6.

Flanagan is a tree hugger – he’s from Tasmania, after all, where there’s not a lot else with which to reassure yourself you’re relevant – and from the long tradition of Irish Australian antipathy to anything colonial or imperial. Such people dislike the Brits even more than the Brits dislike themselves.

Although his writing is sometimes as dense as the wonderful and unique cool temperate rainforest of his island home, Flanagan is masterly in his craft. He is sure to bring some lively colour to the June 6 event. His work – his debut novel in 1997, Death of a River Guide, is particularly compelling – is a two-fingered salute to the imperial origins of modern Australia and the Brits he met and didn’t like as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He’s very good at that modern bane, fictionalising history. His latest book, Wanting, published in 2008 and shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin Award, is yet another rendition of colonial oppression. His 2002 novel, Gould’s Book of Fish, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize that year.

This year’s festival is from Oct. 7-11. Visit the UWRF website at http://www.ubudwritersfestival.com for information.

Oh the Shame!
WE hear disturbing news that those ever-cautious Aussie border controllers – you’ll know them if you ever go there, because they’ll take you to a darkened room and ask you at least 200 questions about whether you have any peanuts on your person or foreign laxatives in your luggage – have taken a set against that most Australian of icons, Vegemite.

Or so it seems. Ubud foodie and festival girl Janet DeNeefe tells us a friend of hers tried to take a jar of Vegemite into the Godzone the other day. This criminally negligent act evidently excited a beagle of the anti-food patrol or something. The contraband was taken away for destruction. Well, that’s what they said. We reckon it ended up on someone’s savoury cracker at little lunch.

Vegemite, while now at home in the big bickie tin owned by the US conglomerate Kraft, has been “proudly made in Australia since 1923” and is famous for its original advertising pitch that it put a rose on every cheek.

Apparently that blush should now be one of embarrassment.

Fast Food for Thought
THE American fast food giant McDonald's is hoping to offer PhDs, after receiving approval to award its own nationally recognised qualifications in Britain, according to the company's “chief people officer”. We don’t know whether he cleared it with the Big Mac first, but David Fairhurst told the London Financial Times newspaper the company's new power to award qualifications made it “a university in its own right”. He said the company wanted to award qualifications equivalent to university degrees.

They’ll offer fries with that, naturally.

HECTOR'S BALI TIMES DIARY [for May 8]

The Bali Times is at www.thebalitimes.com and on Facebook

Saved! By Yet Another
Jakarta Smokescreen
IT’S SO good to read that Jakarta’s civic authorities are taking a lead in a great national endeavour and finally getting to grips with the central issue of pollution and ubiquitous environmental health risk that confront the people of their under-serviced metropolis. And after so long! The law on which they are finally acting is one passed in 2005. Ahem, that’s four years ago.

But never mind. They’re on the job now, sending squadrons of eager-beaver Botherers out to catch the miscreants red-handed and subject them to criminal sanction. These people are a fundamental threat to life and limb, after all. They pollute the atmosphere. They create poisonous rubbish. Even worse, they ignore regulations (and here we were thinking that doing so was a way of life in Indonesia; silly us). These days they even tend to gather in seditious little groups, which always alarms the authorities, who respond – as authorities always do – by creating even more opportunities for ticket-issuers to make a nuisance of themselves.

And these people? Are they the ones who block the drains (Drains? What are they?) and waterways with mountains of dumped rubbish, helping to spread disease, kill wildlife and create floods? Are they the people whose concept of efficient internal combustion is an engine that avoids by the narrowest of squeaks creating quite enough smoke to kill you immediately and just fails to completely obscure your view of the road? Are they factory owners who prefer not to spend money on plant and equipment and instead to run it dangerously into the ground, and who might fake a tear, as long as it doesn’t put a brake on profit, if one of their employees is injured or killed on the job? Are they people who allow pools of stagnant water to offer prime breeding grounds for dengue and other disease carrying mosquitoes and for waterborne killers like typhoid and diphtheria, or leave rotting refuse around to help the rats along with their daily round of vectoring various diseases?

Well no. These baleful people, this baneful collective, are smokers: ordinary folk who use a legal product and contribute such a lot to tax revenue.

He’s Their Man
LEX Bartlem, Australia’s newish man on the spot in Bali and points east, is quite a hit in Lombok, we hear. They view him there as the very model of a modern consul-general, following a visit he made to the island just after ANZAC Day. Australian (and by treaty arrangement, Canadian) expats on Lombok and Sumbawa are counted in his flock for consular purposes.

His message to them was that he wants them to feel assured that despite the strip of water between them and us – and that Wallace Line thing that changes the flora and fauna among other environments – they’re a top priority of his office.

WARWICK PURSER

A Celestial Occasion
OUR favourite party duo – Lord Quaffalot of Poteen and Baron Graf von Spee-Kiezy – were unaccountably left off the jest list (oops, guest list) for the latest glit lit event in Ubud, a bolly and bling thing arranged for a select sighting of Warwick Purser who, we hear, may be joining that stellar cluster residence-wise. Thus we have to rely on our very own Stella Kloster, ever a girl to gather when bubbles are about, for a report on last Thursday evening’s celestial event.

Purser, who is now an Indonesian citizen (though he seems to have managed to live with his Anglo name throughout all his years here), duly put in an appearance. So did the former Michael White, who hasn’t managed to live with his Anglo name at all, who is said to believe that The Bali Times is a “white supremacist paper,” and whose contribution to Balinese culture on the night in question was to appear in something hideously green and red. (Memo FMW: You don’t actually get IN the cocktails.)

Stella reports – from behind the third bougainvillea on the right, because, unusually, she was seriously out-blinged on this occasion, though there was a silver lining because her hidey-hole was conveniently close to the ice box where the bubbly was – that Purser wowed the small crowd. Decorously, of course: this event was not for the great unwashed who might get visibly over-enthusiastic and among whom designer stubble is not designer stubble at all, but merely evidence of lack of hygiene.

We’ve Got the Screaming Abdabs
BALI, in case you hadn’t noticed, played host this week to the Asian Development Bank conference. What a jamboree! It began with a 4000-seat entertainment extravaganza at GWK on Sunday night. We hear the logistics of moving the Favoured from their hotels to GWK and back again were a very useful primer for delegates’ first item of business on Monday morning. They all attended an interesting seminar on Measures to Ensure the Common Herd Gets Out of the Way When We’ve Got Important Business to Do. (There was also an interesting panel discussion later in the week on the theme “How to Extend Your Use-By Date”.)

Jimbaran-Bukit residents tell us they think the headline act at Sunday’s funfest must have been the Screaming Abdabs. They could be heard far and wide, we’re told. Ah well, maybe it kept the possibly rabid dogs at bay.

We shall read the final communiqué – and any media guff the ADB bureaucracy deigns to put out – with close attention. Promise.

Des Res, At a Cost
THE Diary’s resident Lombok spy tells us a delightful story about long-term resident Don Storen – now a permanent guest of the Indonesian people at Mataram jail where he’s serving a lengthy sentence for crimes he, like around 90 per cent of convicts, claims he did not commit – and a new chum. The new chum is an expat fellow who made the grievous error of expressing irritation with a fractious local by waving a military sword in his general direction. He is being accommodated in Mataram jail for 11 months while he works out that being quietly irritated by asinine idiocy and frightful sloth is a better policy.

Inmate Storen – an Aussie of notoriety who has a plausible story for every infraction you could think of (and others you can’t or wouldn’t want to) and a remarkable facility for liberating money from people who express the merest hint of concern about his welfare – apparently having heard that he was about to acquire a new companion, offered to sort out a nice cell and get it painted and cleaned for him. A snip at Rp 3 million, we hear.

The new chum duly appeared and settled into his newly painted, buffed and polished place of confinement. A day or so later he had a visit from a little chap who said it had been he who had done him this favour. Oh thanks, said our man, and it was good of Mr Don to organise it too. Ah yes, came the response, but now you owe me money. Why so? Ah well, it seems Mr Don had handed over significantly less than the full money-bag of smackeroos he had requested from his new chum to have the work performed.

Ah, It’s 2009!
GOOD to see that the 2009 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival now has a website that (like the rest of us) recognises that 2009 is upon us. Well, actually well under way. 2008 was last year. Not that 2008 was much of year, of course, apart from the UWRF, which was magic. This year is shaping up as an even better one for the Festival – it’s on in October – and Hec is keeping an eye out for little flashes of light that may fall from heaven (or at least from Guru Central).

They’re LOHFE-ing Again
FANCY a glass of Aga Red, Hatten Wines’ “Balinese” red? Well, tough. And that’s not because Aga Red is a taste you could easily un-acquire if any alternatives were affordable. It’s because you can’t get it at the moment. A reader’s intelligence to this effect is supported by Hector’s own assiduous analysis of the local wine market. It’s dry. And we don’t even mean as in dry whites. We mean as in “nada”; nothing; none; kosong; habis. Finished. All gone.

The problem shouldn’t be a problem. The Australians have plenty of spare products of the grape just waiting to be put into differently labelled bottles. Or even a cask. So wine joins whisky and sundry other products, not all of them alcoholic by any means, on the LOHFE manifest. The list of hard to find essentials just gets longer and longer. (Has anyone seen any Jack Daniel’s around lately? And no, we don’t mean the friendly fellow who puts out Bali Update or any of the other Daniels he hates being confused with, preferring to be the only Daniel in the lion’s den.)

Oh dear, life in paradise does have its difficulties.

A Big Welcome
WE say hello this week to another keen competitor on the Bali-Perth route – Air Asia Indonesia.

As the GFC bites deeper, and begins to impact heavily on European and North Asian tourist travel, the Australian market is likely to gain in relative strength. We are such close neighbours, after all.

Kylie’s Other Handicap
HECTOR would like to thank Cassie White, otherwise a person unknown, for taking the trouble to post an item on ABC Online’s must-read blog The Shallow End the other day, advising that Kylie Minogue and her boyfriend Andres Velencoso apparently spent Aus$82,000 on golf gear in England.

It seems the little Aussie crooner, who long ago parlayed a part in a TV soapie (Neighbours, to which, to his continuing bemusement, Hec’s dear old mum was addicted) into a “singing” career, got the taste for the game while holidaying in Queensland over Christmas.

Later, on returning to the UK where she has non-Aussie neighbours who haven’t a clue where Ramsay Street actually is, Kylie and her current squeeze reportedly spent hours buying made-to-order equipment and being specially fitted.

We hope her golf is better than her singing.

HECTOR'S BALI TIMES DIARY [for May 1]

The Bali Times is at www.thebalitimes.com and on Facebook

ALL SMILES: Cliff Hahn and his class of keen young Bali kids in Ubud last weekend.

Gearing Up to Face the Future
AMERICAN journalism teacher Cliff Hahn tells us he had a really lovely time in Ubud last weekend, working with 35 local kids to introduce them to the principle and practice of journalism. It was a workshop sponsored by the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival – The Bali Times is media sponsor of that annual extravaganza – and is a productive example of how events such as the UWRF can help the next generation.

Hahn, who is a youth development consultant and former New York Director of Children’s Express, an award-winning not-for-profit agency that created youth media programmes in the United States, Britain and Japan, says youth media can help young people make a difference in their communities.

He told The Diary of his Ubud experience: “The workshop went really well and we had 35 Balinese kids attend both days. They practised working on stories they thought of: the problem of garbage in their communities, the quality of village education, orphans and child labour.

“My goal was to share with local kids my experience and knowledge from teaching media skills to other kids all over the world and what I found exceeded all my hopes. Balinese children have great ideas, enthusiasm, and a real hunger for knowledge and having their voices heard.”

Hahn’s website is at www.cliff-hahn.com. UWRF is at www.ubudwritersfestival.com.

Another Myth in the Making
GARUDA, the notional airline named for Indonesia’s mythical ancient eagle, fresh from dumping Darwin as a destination after 28 years, has announced with a fanfare that it is to return to Bali-Brisbane service in November. It’s a “prospective market” at present, according to CEO Emirsyah Satar, who told reporters in Jakarta on April 24 that he hoped everything went to plan. Now that would be a good idea.

We remember an earlier plan that was apparently deficient in that crucial area. That was when Garuda late last year announced a return to Brisbane – which it had had to let go when its creative let’s-not-pay-our-leases bookkeeping scheme resulted in the not unexpected disappearance from service of several of those strange bits of equipment that airlines need to do business (aircraft). It then failed to do so because no one bought any tickets. We’re sure that wasn’t the plan. It may have had rather more to do with lack of planning.

As to Darwin, where the future of a local soccer team is up in the air after its sponsor took its ball away and went home (yes, Garuda!), we are assured by CEO Emirsyah Satar that everyone else has given Australia’s northernmost city the flick too: Silk Air, Qantas “and even Royal Brunei.” So sad, too bad, then. Never mind that Darwin, while not a big market, is such a long-term fixture in Bali’s tourism market? Or was.

Garuda has just announced a substantial profit growth, by the way. Perhaps they’re doing something no other airline around the world can manage at the moment. We just hope it’s not that they’ve inadvertently confused their revenue and expenditure columns.

WING AND A PRAYER NOTE: We see Lion Air is still flying people around in the MD-90s the government banned them from operating for safety reasons. Apparently they just make sure they’re not on Jakarta flights, where someone that matters might notice them.

See Guys, It’s Like This
THE Jakarta Globe – great paper by the way, especially now you can find it same-day in Bali – reported this week that air workers are threatening to strike over the conviction of a Garuda pilot for negligence leading to death. Survivors of his negligence will remember that Marwoto Kumar was the pilot of the Garuda 737 that landed far too fast at Yogyakarta airport in March 2007 and crashed, killing 21 people. They may remember that in a great PR coup for his by then former employer, Garuda, he wore his airline uniform at his trial. We’re sure they will be sympathetic to his displeasure at the verdict, which unaccountably showed that even though he was a pilot, he was unable to fly above the law. Undoubtedly they will agree that it was unfair that, despite wearing a pilot’s uniform to demonstrate his skill level, he should then be sent to jail.

The Indonesian Pilots Association is certain that this is a bad thing. It will make pilots worry that if they do something negligent they may be held responsible. The Garuda pilots’ association is similarly concerned that an uncomfortable precedent has been set. They see it as a clear threat to pilots involved in unfortunate accidents that have nothing to do with them if you overlook that they were flying the plane at the time.

Not good enough! In fact it’s outrageous. That’s not why they paid all that money to buy their way into pilot school.

May Day? Or Mayday?
MAY 1 is May Day. That’s the day when the workers of the world are supposed to unite in solidarity (originally with the illusory benefits of a Marxist approach to life, but we won’t go there) and celebrate the victories of organized labour.

It’s sometimes known as Labour Day. The Australians, being ... well, Australians ... celebrate the day on different dates in different states and territories, and some under different names, and honour the principle of labour by taking the day off. In other places, less focused on leisure and of a more martial bent, they celebrate with big military parades. You know, with tanks and things that, the not so subliminal message goes, could be brought out again later if the workers are revolting.

In certain countries, it is a traditional day for rioting. The French have been known to tear up the cobblestones of Paris on such occasions. In England, they get merry and dance round the Maypole. But that’s with a pre-industrial spring in their step and not with the factory floor in mind.

This year, given the GFC, we might more aptly call it Mayday. It is the international distress call, after all. But then, we’re all up the same fast-flowing creek, in the same canoe, and we’re all still arguing over who exactly it was who put the axe through the bottom of the boat and which clown threw the paddles overboard.

In these chaotic circumstances, we might more usefully take our text from the French (not with the cobblestones, though, they’re too expensive to replace). We should all shout “Merde! Merde! Merde!” instead of “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!”

ANZAC Day a Big Draw in Bali
THE annual Australian and New Zealand ritual of ANZAC Day – the two countries’ shared national day of remembrance, held on April 25, the anniversary of the Gallipoli landing in World War I – was marked as usual by a traditional Dawn Service, presided over by Australian Consul-General Lex Bartlem.

It was as always a solemn affair, one not to be missed by nationals of either country who can possibly make it along. This year around 230 turned up – about half of them holidaying Australians, even people here only for a few days.

Bartlem’s efficient crew of official Australians had catered for 200 (the number responding to the invitation). The Diary (and Mrs Diary), who always attends, opted not to pick up the votive candle and red poppy, leaving the few that remained for other, later arrivals.

The Seraphim Choir sang the hymn Be Still My Soul and the Australian and New Zealand national anthems. Students from Dyatmika School and Canggu Community School attended to the lowering of the flags to half-mast.

Cold Cuts for Kev?
AUSTRALIA’S Treasurer (finance minister) Wayne Swan has taken to circulating little primers on the parlous state of things financial down under as a result of everyone else in the world being very, very selfish and terribly, terribly bad and dragging the Godzone into this dreadful GFC thing.

One that popped up last Monday, datelined Washington where he had been contributing a valuable Aussie perspective to the IMF’s WTF debate, provides a handy little pointer to the slash-and-burn 2009 national budget he’s due to deliver on May 12: “This global recession means that we will have to do more, but with far less. I’m sure Australians will understand there’s only room for money to go where it’s really needed.”

Um, Wayne, shouldn’t that always be the rule? But, never mind, there is a silver-service lining. We’re sure one well deserved victim of the fat-trimming will be the expensive requirements of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s special dietary requirements on all his VIP flights. At present a full meal service is provided – even on his 30-minute Canberra-Sydney shuttle flights; Kev, mate, suck on a sav – as a prophylactic against PMT (that’s prime ministerial tension, aka air rage). Cold cuts perhaps?

Read This: You’ll Croak Up
HECTOR got this in the mail from a friend. He considered passing it along to the editor for the jokes column. But ... Nah! It’s too good not to put in the Diary. Besides, there might be a moral in it somewhere given the present parlous state of the world banking industry and the flood tide of toxic assets and bad loans out there.

So here goes:

A frog goes into a bank and approaches the teller. He can see from her nameplate that her name is Patricia Whack; she’s known to her friends as Patty. He says to her: “Miss Whack, I’d like to get a $60, 000 loan to take a holiday.”

She looks at him in disbelief and asks his name. The frog says his name is Kermit Jagger, his dad is Mick Jagger, and that it’s OK, he knows the bank manager. She explains that to get a loan he will need to secure it with some collateral.

The frog says: “Sure. I have this,” and produces a tiny porcelain elephant about 2cm tall, bright pink, and perfectly formed.

Patty is very confused and explains that she’ll have to consult the bank manager. She disappears into a back office. There, she finds the manager and tells him:

“There’s a frog called Kermit Jagger out there who claims to know you and wants to borrow $60, 000 and wants to use this as collateral.” She holds up the tiny pink elephant. And adds: “I mean, what in the world is this?”

The manager looks at her and says: “It’s a knickknack, Patty Whack. Give the frog a loan. His old man’s a Rolling Stone.”

We bet some of you sang that. We did!)

Not Me Writes In
JOHN (Jack) M. Daniels, of Bali Discovery Tours, tells us he would like it to be known that he is not John Daniel, who recently wrote to The Bali Times about rabies. Consider yourselves advised.

GOT SOMETHING TO TELL HECTOR? You can email him at diary@thebalitimes.com. Want to Tweet? See him @scratchings on Twitter. Or visit his blog at http://wotthehec.blogspot.com

HECTOR'S BALI TIMES DIARY [for Apr. 24]

The Bali Times is at www.thebalitimes.com and on Facebook








MOVE inside and age a little: Tattler magazine in its March issue featured Investment Coordination Board chief Muhammad Lutfi as its cover story. On the magazine cover (top) he’s a youthful fellow. Inside (right) he seems to have turned into his older brother.


Garuda Flops Out,
Where Others Fly In
GARUDA’S decision to drop out of Darwin is unwelcome. It demonstrates the continued inability of the national airline to capitalize on its natural advantage. Announcing suspension of the Darwin service from April 24 on the route it has flown for 28 years, it cited the difficulty it faces as a “full service airline” competing with low-cost carriers.

Those difficulties are understandable, but ceding the field to the competition seems a strange way of expanding business. In fact, it sounds like another lame excuse for non-performance. The Qantas offshoot Jetstar has been gifted the route as solo operator – unless the Darwin-based Air North returns to the sector with its Brazilian compact jets, which we hear is a possibility – and Indonesia’s flag-carrier disappears from view.

Indonesia’s national airline – although “notional” again seems more appropriate in the context – will however make two post-suspension flights to and from Darwin, on May 8 and May 18, to accommodate traffic generated by the Arafura Games.

There’s no doubt that the era of low-fare flying presents full service airlines with a significant challenge. Qantas has met this in part by creating its own low-fare airline (Jetstar). But Garuda, which has official benefits no longer available to Qantas (such as government ownership) and a lower cost structure, should critically examine its own performance when asked to justify precisely why it has to pull out of a destination immediately in our neighbourhood and which it has served continuously for more than enough time to have created a sustainable market presence.

One relative newcomer to the challenge of providing air services that people actually want on the Australia-Bali route – Pacific Blue, the energetic Virgin regional international brand that flies from Australia to Bali from capital cities from Brisbane to Perth, though not from Darwin – is hardly looking backwards either.

Spokesman Colin Lippiatt told The Diary this week: “In recent times we have increased capacity on existing routes and we will soon be adding new direct services to Denpasar from both Sydney and Melbourne. This in itself speaks to the strength of demand we are seeing for air travel between Australia and Bali right now and the confidence we have in the popularity of the destination for Australian travellers.”



Heartthrob Alert
JULIA Roberts, who has parlayed her EQ (eye quotient) into Hollywood über-bankability over an extended screen career, is going round again in the naïf-turns-seer role she plays so well – and this time in Bali. According to the Hollywood newssheet Variety, she and actor Richard Jenkins have signed to film Elizabeth Gilbert's international bestseller, Eat, Pray, Love.

The Paramount movie, to be directed by Ryan Murphy and produced by Brad Pitt, will put into visual form the story of the recently divorced author's search for self-discovery during a journey that takes her to Italy and India and finally (best of all) to Bali. Roberts will portray Gilbert, while Jenkins will appear as a Texan spiritual seeker Roberts/Gilbert meets in an Indian ashram. The Bali portion of the story takes place in Ubud – surely the epicentre of the seeking-guru set – where Roberts/Gilbert finds love, healing and the mentoring of an aging Balinese guru.

We hear filming is scheduled to begin later this year. But the real question is: Who will get the role of leg-double for the lovely Julia this time?

Away With the Fairies
JUST a reminder that the Bali Spirit Festival – in Ubud (of course) – offers the chance for a six-day communion involving music, dance, yoga and a whole lot else to anyone with nothing better to do between April 28 and May 3.

The Festival schedule and everything else you could possibly want for a fulfilling experience is available at www.balispiritfestival.com. Do have fun, now. Sadly, there’s no word whether Julia Roberts will be flying in for some pre-movie fieldwork.

Nasty Case of Gastro
THE Diary, on Seminyak-bound trips up Sunset Road, has frequently chuckled when passing the big sign marking the commercial outlet of Gastro kitchen equipment. It’s a visual double-entendre – unintended of course – that temporarily lightens the brain overload you get when driving in Bali, if out of a need for self-preservation you concentrate the mind fully on the fact that for most drivers here the brain is the last gear engaged.

In similar vein, a giggle was forthcoming when we heard that Foul-Mouth Former Celeb Chef Gordon Ramsay's London “gastropubs” have been accused of serving up readymade, delivered, cheap dishes – and whacking massive mark-ups on them while claiming they are largely cooked in-house. We hear he is also selling his prized Ferrari in a bid to raise cash.

Our joy at this intelligence is spoiled a little by the fact that it appeared in the London Sun newspaper, the Rupert Murdoch blot on the landscape that found commercial success by ignoring the sentient and pandering to the insensate requirements of the Dumkopfs.

In the Firing Line
SEAN Dorney, the veteran Australian correspondent who got thrown out of Fiji by Commodore Tinpot Dictator recently, is no stranger to conflict. He is a veteran also of Papua New Guinea, which once expelled him and once, also, gave him a gong for services rendered – an imperial MBE, since PNG is about the last place left, other than the homeland of Queen Elizabeth II (Happy Birthday for April 21, Ma’am), that still hands out these relics of empire.

Given that April 25 is ANZAC Day – Australia and New Zealand’s national day of remembrance – it seems appropriate to relay a lovely story about Dorney told by one of The Diary’s affable mates from Australian military circles. It was during the Bougainville “troubles”. Dorney was sent to the island from Port Moresby by the ABC and our mate was the Aussie escorting officer. A stand-up to camera in front of something burning at the abandoned copper mine on the island was called for. While this was in progress, two shots whistled overhead, unheard by Dorney. His escort officer (and we think the camera man, who had some prior experience of shots whistling overhead elsewhere) kept silent.

Dorney, told later, asked his escort why he hadn’t told him (“Didn’t want to put you off”), then laid into the ale at the Aussie-run hotel he was staying at. Later – much later – the phone rang and it was the ABC seeking a live cross with their man on the spot. Uh-oh, thought our military chap. But what a trouper Dorney was! Up he sprang, from full sprawl position, and gave a first-class, no glitches, on air report. Call over, he resumed full sprawl.

Dorney’s father, by the way, won a DSO as a World War II medical officer.



Sun Sets on a Personal EmpireTHE British writer J.G. Ballard is most famous for his novel Empire of the Sun, in which he vividly portrayed his childhood in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai during World War II. It was a novel that brought the East Asian element of that gigantic conflict into new light and helped underline the crucial importance of children’s memories of great events in the complex process of defining narrative history.

In these days of facile and often self-serving analysis, too many writers are described as giants on the world’s literary scene. But Ballard deserves the accolade. And it is therefore doubly sad to record his passing on Sunday last at his quiet riverside home in the country west of London, where he had lived since the 1960s. He was 78 and had been suffering prostate cancer.

In a career spanning for than half a century, Ballard became a cult figure for a series of dystopian science fiction novels such as The Drowned World. One of his most controversial works was Crash, a novel about people who are sexually aroused by car accidents. It was later turned into a film directed by David Cronenberg.

His agent, Margaret Hanbury, said of him: “His acute and visionary observation of contemporary life was distilled into a number of brilliant, powerful novels.” Empire of the Sun, which Steven Spielberg adapted into a Hollywood film, was by most accounts the best. It was based on his privileged childhood with his expatriate parents in China and, following the entry of Japan into the global conflict in 1941 and the Japanese occupation of the international concession in Shanghai, his experiences as an internee.

Japan’s militarism and expansionary imperialism brought misery to millions and is a dark spot on that nation’s record. But history will one day record – with a measure of equanimity brought by time and perspective – that it was the single most important factor in ending the age of European imperialism, certainly in Asia and most likely globally.

Ballard wrote in his memoirs that his early, often violent, experiences – “I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on, but at the same time we children were playing a hundred and one games” – that in many ways his entire fiction was the dissection of a deep pathology that he had witnessed in Shanghai and later in the post-World War II world that had been irrevocably changed by that conflict.

His youthful experience, revealed in fictional form in Empire of the Sun, showed an understanding of the Japanese and Chinese that until recent times was sadly absent in the Caucasian cultures of the west. For that alone we owe him thanks.

Don’t Torture Us, Jeff
CNN, the once ubiquitous 24-hour satellite news channel now challenged by both reality and competition, continues to surprise. A reader tells us he heard leading network talking head Jeff Tubin tell viewers (well, we know there was at least one, don’t we?) on April 17 that “the US does not engage in water-boarding, unlike some countries, like Indonesia...”

Er, Jeff ... mate ... Read anything out of the Guantanamo embarrassment lately?

Got Something to Tell Us?
WE’RE sure you have, and Hector would love to hear from you. To make this easier, we’ve set him up with his own email address: diary@thebalitimes.com. Feel free to tell tales there, or pass on useful little snippets of information that otherwise might not see the light of day.

HECTOR'S BALI TIMES DIARY [for Apr. 17]

The Bali Times is at www.thebalitimes and on Facebook

THE CORBY SISTERS: Schapelle evidently finds life a bit of a drag, but for Mercedes, there’s no cover-up at all.

Who Said Crime
Doesn’t Pay?
THE Corby sisters – Schapelle Behind-the-Wire and Mercedes On-the-Run – are back in the news. They just can’t keep out of the limelight however hard they try, poor things. Today, if you Google “Schapelle” you don’t get a friendly little query in response, asking “Did you mean Schlappers?” Oh no. You are instantly buried under an avalanche of cyber-guff that comes from everywhere, including from those twinks who are so convinced the moon is made of cheese (no sorry, that’s the wrong fairytale; we mean the one where Schapelle didn’t do it) that they’ve set up web sites to promote her cause and written songs about the injustice of jailing the dear, sweet girl. Ho bloody hum.

Cause of the latest outbreak of inventive publicity is that some dill-pickle Australian government lawyers weren’t quick enough to file suit and therefore serve the public interest by seizing the A$280, 000 Schapelle got from that book she had ghosted in which she claimed little green men from Mars abducted her boogie board bag in flight from Australia to Bali and that when it was examined by customs at Ngurah Rai it had been stuffed with significantly saleable quantities of that naughty weed Bob Marley used to sing about.

Because of this oversight and the place of precedent in Australian law, the courts there may now be disposed to order the hand-back of earlier proceeds of hard-luck stories. That could add up to an additional A$196, 000. It should all help make life (well, 20 years) in Kerobokan a little more bearable. Pay for a few hair-dos. Buy a nice lunch out now and then. Fund a few more get-out-of-jail breakdowns. That sort of thing.

Meanwhile, it is reported that Mercedes drove away with A$2 million from the Aussie tabloid TV current affairs show Today Tonight (she sued the Seven Network for broadcasting her former friend Jody Power saying her former friend Mercedes Corby was a manipulative liar), another A$100, 000 from various media outings, and A$50, 000 for appearing sans culottes and much else in Ralph, the magazine for sad little chaps who don’t get out much. We assume she showed the world her wares after she had spent a goodly proportion of her tittle-tattle-tale-telling take on a new set of boobs.

The Voters have Spoken. The Bastards!
ONE Bali candidate in last week’s legislative elections collapsed and died as the early results came in and she heard she had attracted only a handful of votes. It is not known whether this was a direct cause, but whatever the circumstances, it is a sad event.

Less sad – in fact, rather risibly not so – is the growing panic we hear is afflicting unsuccessful candidates who, having borrowed billions of rupiah to finance their way into plush legislative office, now face the task of paying their loans back without the assistance of the salaries and other perks they were expecting. Democracy’s a pain, sometimes.

Nice to See You, Minister
HASSAN Wirayuda, who might otherwise have been heavily engaged in summiteering in Pattaya, Thailand, enjoyed a pleasant lunch in Ubud last weekend. He was between engagements – not in the thespian sense, which is when you go and serve beers in a bar for dosh – and wearing batik.

Perhaps as our Foreign Minister dined quietly and peacefully he found time to reflect that in Ubud, which like everywhere else in Indonesia that his Australian counterpart, Stephen Smith, still advises people not to risk visiting, no one was actually shooting at anyone. They were in Bangkok, we think. Something to do with red shirts (perhaps the fashionistas are in insurrection?).

The Australians issued new advice for Thailand on April 12 (the last time we could be bothered checking). The advice does now suggest Aussies without compelling reasons to be in Bangkok and surrounding areas should reconsider why they are there. It maintains a “do not travel” status for southern Thailand (but not Phuket). But the overall level of advice for Thailand remains at a low-key “exercise caution” level. Just thought you should know that as you move about ultra-peaceful Bali.

‘Gloombusters’ Head for Bali
BACK in the days when the British had an empire – it’s just a blink in geological time but doesn’t it seem such a long time ago? – it used to be surmised by historians in their cups that the real driver of Cloudy Isles imperialism was the appalling weather you get there. In other words, the “British Diaspora” was the dispersal of people from their homelands because they wanted to see the sun and get a life.

It’s a nice thought and might go some way towards explaining why Australia’s official religion is Hedonism. It also puts into an interesting perspective present-day western perception of economic refugees – you know who we mean, all those guys and gals, many of them Indonesians, who do the heavy lifting at the bottom of the food chain in the economies of Europe and North America, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, and to a lesser extent Australia.

There seems to be a similar, though of course smaller, movement to Bali. We hear that platoons of Irish, English and Scots are heading for Bali escape the doom and gloom of the global economic downturn. That’s on the basis of a brisk trade in new enrolments at the Canggu Community School and – anecdotally – a surge in property acquisitions.

The big draw – apart from the weather, economic and climatologically – seems to be a less expensive lifestyle and education. What these people are doing here, as in earning a living, is unclear. But perhaps they are midlife refugees looking to kick back and enjoy some time on the remains of their formerly plush bank accounts.

They’re Looking For You
SHOULD any of the foregoing economic refugees be of a mind to earn a crust while resident here, they may find additional impediments in their way. The Department of Manpower and Transmigration has announced it will tighten up on permits for foreign workers in anticipation of a coming wave of foreigners seeking work during the GFC.

The Minister of Manpower and Transmigration, Erman Suparno, told the Indonesian language newspaper Bisnis Indonesia last week closer scrutiny of foreign workers was necessary to preserve local job opportunities, particularly in management positions.

Under the rules, foreigners on work permits can only hold “non-strategic” positions while they train Indonesians to take over their jobs. This accounts for the large number of people whose working permits, and frequently business cards, carry the legend T/A after their title (Technical Adviser). Pick up a spanner in anything other than an advisory fashion and you’re toast. Pick up a pencil and they’ll write you a summons.

This is sensible national policy, as long as it recognizes – and accommodates – exceptional circumstances. To achieve this, you need firm rules that are applied consistently. That’s a special skill for which, prima facie, a strong case exists for urgent further remedial training.

According to the Department of Manpower, there were 85,453 registered foreign workers in Indonesia at the end of 2008, an increase of 11.4 per cent over 2007.

Blurred Indovision
HOW’S your TV picture? (The Diary’s is generally blank by the way, by choice.) But if you’re with Indovision and you’ve got the wobbles, well, we hear this is because the satellite is running out of power (gosh, who switched off the sun?) and is wobbling in its orbit. That’s Indovision’s story anyway. They say the satellite needs replacing. Hang on! We’ll just shin up there with a new one, then, shall we?

Indovision’s solution for wobbling subscribers to the screen-obscuring multi-logoed programming they provide is to occasionally realign their receiver dishes.

Still, at least Indovision customers still get a picture. Astro subscribers are a bit in the dark at present, owing to a long-running argument over whether the Malaysian operators are legally entitled to broadcast within Indonesia.

It makes buying your own free-to-air satellite receiver set a much better prospect.

Celebrities Earn a Bad Rap
IT is not often that your Diarist finds himself agreeing with the editorial line of the leftist British weekly journal New Statesman – although this excellent magazine is required reading for its clear thinking and elegant English, as well as for the philosophical points of difference it illuminates. But praise where praise is due is always a good rule, and so it is with last week’s edition, which carried a small editorial on the musical achievements of Eminem, the rap musician.

It drew attention to his latest opus, Relapse, and commended it for the artist’s decision to have a go at a host of celebrities on the album. Eminem, real name Marshall Bruce Mathers III or otherwise Mr Shady (clearly he is a confused gentleman), won applause for his efforts to “deflate the froth of a culture that has elevated fame, earned or unearned, transient or enduring, to a virtue above all others.” The New Statesman, being nannyish, did note that his presentation might be considered as on the crude side – though this is surely no surprise: he could hardly be a rap artist otherwise – but pointed out that others of a more civil bent are joining him in this worthy cause. British journalist Marina Hyde, who writes for the Guardian (another lefty of the print world), has written a book titled Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over the World and Why We Need an Exit Strategy.

The New Statesman’s view deserves wide exposure. It asks: “Is it too much to hope that such a strategy is already, miraculously, falling into place? And that the legions of those whose empty fame lasts barely 15 seconds, never mind 15 minutes, are beginning to be consigned to the margins? It has just been announced that Maxim, a magazine which mirrored the grotesque materialism that spawned celebrity culture, is to close its print edition.”

It is not a joy to record the passing of any print product – the free market in ideas is both advanced and protected by print, after all – but we might make an exception for Maxim. Depriving the in-your-face of even one opportunity to repeat their crude imposition of themselves on others is surely worthwhile?

Fancy a Little Chilean?
YOU betcha. Gracias, eso sería muy agradable. The Diary is very partial to the wines of Chile, thank you very much. They are a habit happily acquired many years ago when the chills of a Chilean winter, on a lengthy South American holiday, made it common sense to obtain frequent warming infusions. Besides, the reds are very palatable indeed. We’re sure the whites are too, but The Diary is a red drinker.

We are thus pleased to report that the Chilean night at the Laguna Resort and Spa at Nusa Dua last Saturday (April 11) seems to have gone off very well indeed, despite the fact that some of guests mistook “resort chic” on the invitation to mean “come in yer scuffs”. Goodness, it’s precisely that unthinking acceptance of No-No Couture that helped drive The Diary into exile from Australia. The Aussies vie with the Brits as clanger-dressers. We noticed the other night, while enjoying the gnocchi gorgonzola at Un’s restaurant in Kuta, an old favourite, that a female person of British persuasion had apparently decided it was fine to dine out in the sort of tiny little bra top that might (if you were really, really lucky) briefly find a place in a bedroom warm-up act.

But we digress (we do that). At Laguna’s gourmet night, the subject of this item, it was a shame that the accomplished pianist was accompanied by a somewhat less tutored singer. And one other discordant note reached our ears. A guest who had gone to the trouble of advising the hotel of specific dietary requirements, and had been given assurances that this was in hand, was served the wrong meal.

Luckily for everyone it wasn’t Kevin “Air Rage” Rudd.

Run Out of Bread? You Twit
TWITTERY – or is that Tweetery? – continues to expand its influence. Hector is a convert, if only because the internet messaging system Twitter reveals the minutiae of life in the cyber age in all its ungrammatical glory and, since he loves being outraged by the outré and irritated by the imbecilic, he gets off on that.

He is tired of trekking up to his local “supermarket” – and what a misleading word that is, given that in Bali supermarkets are never super and rarely markets – to find there is not a loaf of bread to be had. (He long ago gave up on the Thou and the jug of wine.) Thus his gimlet eye was caught by a story on a London bakery that has started using Twitter to tell customers when the latest batches of bread hit the shelves.

The updates are sent using BakerTweet, a small, white bakery-proof wireless device that sends messages to subscribers on the Internet, such as: “Lovely loaves just out of the oven. Hurry.”

Not Good Enough
IT is 10 years since Indonesia’s imperial misadventure in East Timor ended in bloodshed after the historic referendum that helped bring into being the independent state of Timor Leste. What remains of Indonesia’s quarter century in charge of the former Portuguese colony – and by the way, we should never forget that the Portuguese themselves created the conditions that led to Indonesian occupation by cravenly abandoning the place in 1974 when they couldn’t be bothered any longer – is mainly of a monumental nature. The crumbling concrete statue in Dili that still exhorts citizens to be loyal to Pancasila – the Five Principles – is a case in point.

More poignantly, and importantly, in the suburb of Balide the Indonesian military cemetery lies forlorn and overgrown by weeds. That is a disgrace. It would take relatively little to maintain the cemetery as a place of honour for soldiers of Indonesia who died away from home while serving their nation. Ten years after Timor Leste at last joined the community of free nations, and with trade, educational and social links binding the country to Indonesia far more effectively and profitably than was ever the case during the occupation, this can be fixed easily. An agreement could be made with the Timor Leste government and funds provided for rehabilitation and maintenance of the cemetery. Military misadventure may be an embarrassment, but the dead from such events are never so. They deserve a proper resting place.

HECTOR'S BALI TIMES DIARY [for Apr. 10]

The Bali Times is at www.thebalitimes.com and on FACEBOOK

First it was Obama cookies, now it’s the Obama Pizza. Is there no end to Indonesian inventiveness where favourite national stepson Barack Obama is concerned? The latest dish, seen being promoted in Jakarta, is the idea of a pizza chain.

Relax, This Train’s Not
Going to Armageddon
PERHAPS it was inevitable, though it is nonetheless dispiriting, that the Back to Ground Zero nuts came out in force while the G20 meeting was being held in London. This fractious and informal TWT collective – of Thinkers, Winkers and Twinkers – has been emboldened by fantasies of a world without finance and proclaims the end of capitalism and a whole lot more besides.

They need to get a grip on themselves (no, not like that!) and consider the facts. These are not clement. The dereliction of duty by governments everywhere – and, memo TWT, it really is everywhere and not just in the financial driving seats of the west – has been astonishing. The failure of American regulation and the criminal conduct of leading financiers on Wall Street and elsewhere is a rich indictment of the practice of politics and abandonment of social responsibility in the Land of the Free – let alone the principles of governance – and will result in pain for everyone. The supine nature of the much vaunted European Union (a “political” entity without political clout; an “economic” entity without a definably cohesive economy but with a defective common currency) is a warning to all who espouse the alleged benefits of enmeshed collaboration. Equal blame accrues to leading Asian economies which kept producing ever increasing quantities of consumer goods that could be sold only if credit kept expanding willy-nilly.

But this is not the end of the world. What went wrong with the development of credit markets was not that doing so would never work (the theory put forward by some who like to pretend that lending money should not be viewed as being advanced at an interest rate against an actuarial risk), but that its development was largely left unchecked in America and government there left a regulatory vacuum which the stupid and the criminal were only too happy to fill. Of course we need better regulation (that is the sensible position put forward consistently by Australia, for example, the “western” outpost in this part of the world). Of course we need careful coordination of necessarily disparate national policies to achieve this. Of course the Americans must understand that if they propose to remain the world’s chief financial clearing house, then they actually need to make it work, or at least help to do so. (There are hopeful signs that the Obama administration does understand this.)

Governor Kevin M. Warsh of the U.S. Federal Reserve, in a speech on April 5, set out the history of financial panics rather well, and offered lengthy advice as to where we go from here. In essence he said the panic would end before the recession did. Well, it will need to. But what he’s saying is that the next boom is rather a long way off.

That there will be pain for us all, for an extended period, as we all work through the wreckage and rebuild, is inevitable. But we are not seeing the end of capitalism – any more than we saw the “end of history” when the Soviet empire collapsed 20 years ago – and the sooner we start being sensible about this, the better. The bubble that has now deconstructed leaving such a nasty mess is but the latest in a lengthy list of financial implosions. It may be the most complex, but that’s less a function of its stature than of the necessary complexities of modern existence. Time out, people!

A Rose by Any Other Name
ROSES – lovely blooms – have been in the news lately. Michelle Obama was presented with a bouquet of Hillary roses in the Netherlands on her recent visit with Barack in tow. They were named after Hillary Clinton of course – when she was First Lady.

We await the Michelle with keen anticipation. But The Diary’s favorite rose quote of all time comes from Eleanor Roosevelt (there’s another name in the news at the moment, courtesy of FDR, who it is claimed drove a stake through the Dracula heart of an earlier result of excess). Mrs. Roosevelt once memorably stated: “I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalog: “No good in a bed, but fine against a wall.”

Stephen’s Really Cunning Plan
STEPHEN Fry, who surprised us all the other week by turning up at Ngurah Rai International Airport, was here with a BBC film crew (he left again on Sunday, by the way, and, we hear, had not a wink of sleep on his 14-hour Singapore-London flight thereafter, poor chap). He did all sorts of things. He talked to the turtles at Serangan Island, went to Temple (a Hindu temple as he pointed out to his friends on Twitter, some of whom apparently thought he was off to the synagogue), saw a puppet show (he Tweeted to his friends: “Wayang Kulit – sounds like a Geordie trying to break up a fight”); got dressed up in Balinese gear for a lark; and then disappeared eastward for more fun and jollity around Komodo.

The Diary, being a Black Adder addict, has a theory. Fry may officially have been here to film Komodo dragons for the BBC series “Last Chance to See”, on endangered animals, but we conclude that what was really under way was the visible portion of a Really Cunning Plan. Of course, Baldrick didn’t come along – well, not that we know of, but he would never travel with Lord Melchett anyway – and that puts a bit of a dampener on cunning plans, but nonetheless, we suspect plots were afoot.

So Here’s The Diary’s take: Black Adder fans will recall the Elizabethan episode in which Edmund Blackadder, the craven coward who nevertheless sometimes comes to the party in moments of stress, sailed off with Lord Percy (and Baldrick of course; someone had to do the thinking) and a legless sea captain, having been directed by Queenie to do something amazing, or else.

Eventually, they returned, not knowing where they had been (or where they had arrived, until someone looked out of a window and saw Southampton docks). They were minus the sea captain, who had gone into the pot somewhere on a cannibal island.

They went post-haste to London to see the Queen, where Percy demonstrated the funny angular stick they had picked up from somewhere along their route. Edmund explained that it came back if you threw it away. Percy threw it away. Much later in the episode it returned and knocked him flat. It was Europe’s first experience of the boomerang (though not, we fancy, one of those now made on Lombok for the export trade – wonder if they ever come back?).

We believe that Fry/Melchett was actually here at Queenie’s command – she probably told him in one of her fits of pique that if he didn’t do something useful instead of just mooching around being boringly bombastic she’d cut off his head – with the job of filling in some of those appalling gaps on the Europeans’ dreadfully deficient Medieval maps. You know, the ones with “Here Be Dragons” inscribed on inconveniently vacant space.

We reckon there’s a secret new Black Adder episode in the works. In this, Melchett will return from his own voyage of discovery with a map carrying additional detail, including from the mysterious islands east of Java. This portion of the map will carry an amended advisory: “Here Be Dragons ... REALLY!”

Remember: You read it here first.



It’s So Important to Spell
HORSES need spelling (as presidential contender for the Greater Indonesia Movement – Gerindra – and patrician horse and goat farmer, ex-general and ex-Suharto son-in-law Prabowo Subianto can tell us). People need to be able to spell too, even in junior school. Here’s a classic effort by a young fellow – sent to us by an avid reader of The Bali Times in Australia by the way – that shows exactly why.

The Media and Cannonball Kev
AUSTRALIA’S Prime Minister Kevin Rudd makes many rods for his own back. He’s not alone there of course. Being rude to an air force cabin attendant on his VIP plane – will prime ministerial flights henceforth be call-signed Air Rage One? – is one thing. Doing so petulantly because his preferred meal wasn’t available (out of Port Moresby, where a lot isn’t available) was just plain thick.

Similarly, throwing taxpayers’ money back at them as a recession corrective may be good politics (though the point is moot and the economics of it are plainly stupid). And being granted space on the outer edge of great events such as the G20 Save the World conference in London must be galling for a chap whose intellect and argument got the whole thing rolling in the first place.

However, it is hard to disagree with veteran Australian pundit Mungo MacCallum, who in the online scandal sheet Crikey this week observed rather tartly that the travails of St Kevin are now being written up by the country’s media with the same zeal that they showed in creating his secular sainthood.

Just Answer the Question
PREDICTABLY for such anarchic occasions, quiz nights have an Irish origin. We think they preceded Guinness, so that can’t be the reason. They owe their existence, and indeed the word quiz owes its existence, to James Daley and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, some warming drinks, and a Dublin pub called The Bleeding Horse, more than 200 years ago. We assume the pub’s name describes the situation of the unfortunate animal and is not just a blindingly obvious pejorative.

On Saturday (Apr. 18) you have a chance to engage in this fine old Irish tradition at the inaugural 2009 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival Quiz Night. There are some really great raffle prizes, some surprise guests (we suspect they will probably read things, it being that sort of ambience), a tapas menu – no need to speak Spanish though – and a chance to shine if your team of up to six can run the literary race faster than the others in the field. These will be fairly mainstream questions, we gather: for literary buffs, not literary profs.

Entry to the affray, at Indus Restaurant in Ubud (6.30 for 7pm start), is free. Raffle tickets cost Rp 50,000 and since the main prize is two nights at a plush resort, and others involve food, spas and books, it could be a good investment. Details are available from UWRF at info@ubudwritersfestival.com or phone (0361) 7808932.

Stella Is Just Beside Herself
STELLA is beside herself. (Well, she just thought she was until someone told her she’d walked past a mirror. Now that’s not something a girl would normally do, she tells us, with a giggle.) Her little galaxy is in ferment. An opportunity to drink lots and lots of lovely wines including bubbly is about to come upon her. And there’s a chance to be disgusting. Oh no, sorry, that’s degustation. It’s something to do with it not being finger food, she thinks. It’s all courtesy of a three-day course (Hector thinks three-day benders are much more fun) being held at the St Regis Resort and Spa at Nusa Dua from April 16-18.

From Stella’s breathless reporting of this upcoming opportunity to flash the bling and bat the eyelids at passing prospects, it should be such fun. There are two and half hours for lunch each day, for starters. And you get to find out all about what it takes to be a sommelier. That’s a long French word for someone who really knows their wine. Stella thinks she could be a sommelier – she has a soft spot for French, after all – especially since you get to taste all that lovely wine and then pretend to spit it out. How good is that!
What’s more, the whole bash ends up with a fabulous party. That’s the disgusting, sorry, degustation thingy, where you get to eat all sorts of lovely nibbles and show off even more of your bling and bat your eyelids at even more talent. Plus it’s a snip at only Rp 4,950,000. Goodness, even if you do grossly overpay your housemaid, that’s still only about seven months’ salary for the poor dear thing.

Stella is slightly concerned at one of the premium wines listed on the invitation, however. It’s described as a Devil’s Liar chardonnay from that smart little Margaret River wine growing area in Western Australia. Stella doesn’t like people who tell fibbies; well, not unless they’re teeny-weeny fibbies, or unless it’s herself.

It’s a shame it would never occur to her that the Devil, although of course he’s such a big liar, might actually be making his wine in his lair. Hector’s personally preferred fermentation of the grape isn’t listed, by the way, surely a significant oversight. The Misprint red is nicely robust, comes in a handy cardboard cask that doesn’t dribble away to nothing – bar residue – after a couple of quaffs, and goes well with any disgusting menu.

By the way, the Laguna Resort and Spa – St Regis’ partner in the Jamie Cullum Starwood reward points programme – has also gone into the wine business. It had a Chilean experience scheduled for Saturday (Apr. 11) complete with gourmet food (what else?) and just a snip at Rp 990,000 a pop.

HECTOR'S BALI TIMES DIARY [for Apr. 3]

The Bali Times is at www.thebalitimes.com


NO, it’s not Lord Melchett. And there’s not a Black Adder in sight. It’s Stephen Fry, British actor and comedian, snapped on arrival at Ngurah Rai International Airport last Saturday. He was in pursuit of other reptiles – Bali’s famous turtles – to capture on film.
PHOTO: NEIL HEMPSEY

A Comic Turn With
Our Fine Turtles
STEPHEN Fry, the British actor and comedian, has been filming turtles in Bali, from a temporary base in Sanur, where he arrived on Saturday last. Good for him. A lot of foreign visitors film turtles while they’re enjoying Bali’s famous opportunities for relaxation. Fry was doing so professionally and doubtless the commercial result will grace various television screens in due course. We do hope that while under water he forswore any of those Lord Melchett skits with which he peppered the fabulous Black Adder series. It would be a shame to put the turtles off their laying.

He was, we understand, somewhat disconsolate on Monday, after Cambridge lost yet another boat race to Oxford in their historic annual rowing meet on the River Thames in London at the weekend. It’s just a lot of rollocks, really, but fun. Your Diarist is an Oxford man, however, and was thus somewhat more chipper at the start of the week. It all went downhill from there, of course; the week, that is, but isn’t that just typical?

Fry Tweets, by the way: as in, he’s on Twitter. It’s something else Hector shares with him, albeit vicariously, having but only recently succumbed to the fad himself. Unusually, Fry also tweets in person, unlike other celebrities – Demi Moore among them, we understand from other twittering – who employ ghosts to scribble for them. Moore did star in the 1990 movie “Ghost”. Perhaps that’s where she got the idea. Or maybe it’s because she was born in Roswell, New Mexico, where all those scary early Cold War-era intergalactic aliens were discovered. But we digress.

A lesser known side of the incomparable Fry, who is 51 and thus judged (by some uppity young proto-adults) as too old to Tweet, is that he has been a manic-depressive for years. This aspect of his character – and his courageous fight against the condition – has just featured in a compelling two-part series on Australia Network, the Aussie satellite television service presented through the national broadcaster, the ABC, that is required viewing in Bali (and other places) for people who can’t cope with CNN, don’t want to be badgered by Bloomberg, and are bored by the Beeb.

Sultana Wars: Latest
WHILE in Sanur last Sunday – no, we were not catching up with Stephen Fry – a visit to The Pantry, the upmarket deli across the road from Hardy’s in fashionable Jalan Danau Tamblingan, brought forth the discovery of sultanas.

These were not purchased, however. The little packets were on sale for Rp 37, 000 (let’s just say that’s a very generous mark-up on retail prices at most other outlets, unless you’re in Ubud, where the market is even more captive) and moreover were labeled “per kilo”. This was queried, since the packets weighed in at around 250 grams. The explanation: So sorry, our machine can only label per kilo. That, to be polite, is bovine manure. Or if it is true, they should buy a better computer system and labeler. And at the prices they charge, they could afford both.

Vote 1 for Road Hog
AN interesting take on electioneering, Indonesian style: On the Kusamba bypass on Sunday, in a crowded little section of the highway (the usual cause: two yellow trucks in close convoy and occasionally tandem, struggling through clouds of black exhaust fumes up gentle inclines at 20kmh), chaos was caused and accidents nearly created by a PDI candidate’s plush people-mover and escort pick-up truck, when the people-mover set off its flashing roof lights and let’s-play-policemen siren and pushed past the traffic.

On the wrong side of the road, in the face of oncoming vehicles, and hotly pursued by its escort that looked as if it was manned by a party of pirates rushing off to a fortuitous and unexpected rape and pillage opportunity.

It may be that the van driver couldn’t see. The vehicle was so heavily plastered with PDI symbols and slogans that the windscreen – along with everything else, including the candidate if he was on board – was probably completely obscured. In other democracies, all this would be illegal: the bumf, the scary lights, and the get-out-of-the-way-we’re-important siren.

The mysterious ways of Indonesian voting patterns have long shone a strange light on politics in the archipelago. But in most ballot boxes, that sort of bugger off, I’m the boss behavior would lose you votes, not gain them.


PHOTO: PETER DUNCAN
Speaking of Bumf
IT’S not only in Bali that election material is blotting out sections of the landscape – and indeed in several places totally obscuring it. On Lombok next door – next rock to the right, you might say – they’re also doing things in style. As in, lack of style. Here’s a photo snapped by a Lombok correspondent anxious to alert the world to the polluting potential of legislative contests. The display is matched by many in Bali, and doubtless elsewhere, but it’s good to see that we’re not alone in our predicament and that the electoral plague is upon us all. Sharing a great distemper provides some kind of consolation.

Incidentally, as campaigning peaks ahead of the elections on April 9, party flags are spreading like an uncontrolled infestation of noxious weeds. One chap we know, who had been away from home for four days, was driving back to his Des Res on the Bukit this week and almost got lost at his local this-is-an-intersection-let’s-ignore-the-traffic-lights fun spot. He says he couldn’t see it for the forest of flags that had sprouted there since he left.

My Emails are Read!
NEWS that the Chinese are spying on everyone’s emails – well, and their websites and all the other guff that goes around – is actually cheering intelligence. It means that someone is reading our emails and may even be reacting to them. This can only be a good thing. It leaves us feeling less lonely for a start; and certainly much less ignored. And there’s an additional bonus. It might finally convince the Chinese that absolutely no one is a threat to them in any way at all other than in terms of cyber-babble overload.

There might be a further benefit. Perhaps Beijing’s gigabyte boffins can tell The Diary why its private email addresses have been penetrated by people who appear to have formed the wholly erroneous view that we are even remotely interested in things dumb blondes allegedly do with animals (or in dumb blondes for that matter).

Governments are always alarmed at allegations of spying, of course, cyber or otherwise. It’s a great chance to appear important. And they must “be” something, we guess. Alarmed is at least indicative of a greater application to duty than silence. We note that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jakarta bravely claims its computer network is safe from hackers. Such touching faith deserves applause, in much the same way as General Custer won praise from the foolhardy for rejecting those Gatling guns when he was going off to get butchered by Crazy Horse.

For our part, we are sure that the Chinese, if they really are spying on governments and private organizations in 103countries, including Indonesia, as the honest toilers at the Internet based research group Information Warfare Monitor assert, will have found a Bahasa speaker or two to sort out the terigu from the ampas gergaji (that’s the wheat from the chaff, except Bahasa doesn’t really do chaff in the natural product sense; ampas gergaji is sawdust).

According to foreign ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah, however, the ministry’s official network is designed to quickly monitor intrusions. Presumably, if an intrusion is monitored, all sorts of people in the ministry’s employ then run around shouting “Intruder! Intruder!” Well, it would liven up the lunch break.

It is in fact very doubtful that any Indonesian government IT system is as secure as is claimed. A Culture and Tourism Ministry official recently told The Bali Times to email him on his Yahoo address since the ministry email system, like its IT network, was never operational. On the other hand, that’s a protective measure in itself. After all, if it’s mati (dead), it won’t be telling any tales at all.

Travel Warning
HERE’S something we’ve seen around recently. It’s a really useful sticker that puts the Aussie travel warning in its proper perspective. It was on the back of a motorcyclist’s helmet. It showed a map of Indonesia with “Travel Warning” above it and “Dangerously Beautiful” underneath.

Perhaps Stephen Smith, who as Australia’s Foreign Minister has ultimate political responsibility for his country’s continued travel advisory suggesting Australians, unlike Americans and Canadians, still need to reconsider their need to travel here, should have a look at it.

Maybe he could arrange for it to be issued to all the official travelers he keeps sending here, apparently after reading and rejecting his own advice.

Stella’s All-A-Fluster
HAVING introduced our new ephemeral contributor Stella Kloster to you last week, we didn’t expect to hear from her again quite so soon. Her motto is Ennui Forever. But she got back on to us this week, all of a fluster over the fact that those beastly people at The Onion (that essential non-dietary cerebral supplement obtainable on the web at www.theonion.com) have listed the six Most Popular Barbies. In a horrendous oversight, the list does not include Media Star Barbie.

But putting aside such pettiness, she says, she believes readers of The Diary should know that in order of precedence – Stella goes weak at the knees just at the mention of the word – the most popular Barbies are: High Holidays Barbie (30 per cent of the vote – it’s so good to see Barbie still has reality firmly in her sights); Former Child Star Barbie (25 per cent – well, a girl’s gotta dream); Obsessive-Compulsive Outfit-Changing Barbie (15 per cent – but décolleté is just so difficult, isn’t it?); Whatever Responsible View of Women Currently Exists Barbie (11 per cent); Reece Witherspoon (10 per cent); and Employable Barbie (9 per cent – but we think this voting figure has been grossly inflated).

The Diary’s most popular Barbie comes with a Bintang, steak, sausages and a nice salad, by the way. Oh, and onion rings.