More than Moore

After watching Fahrenheit 911, I had almost convinced myself that documentaries were not worth watching. Then my friend gave me a copy of SuperSize Me! I had heard it was good but I had no idea. Morgan Spurlock made the whole think funny but extremely educational. He had a question to answer made the film in such a way to answer that question. Namely it was how much damage eating McD's 3 times a day for a month would be. No one, not even the doctors and nutrition specialists had any idea how bad it would be. Even his website is awesome. Be sure to play the burgerman game!

http://www.supersizeme.com/

To sum up the movies for the week:
Fahrenheit 911 - worst movie of the year (a documentary)
SuperSize Me! - best movie of the year (a documentary)

This has to be the year of the documentaries.

You only thought they came from England

Apparently, scientists have discovered "Hobbits" here in Indonesia. On the island of Flores, they have found the skulls of some very small people. These they have used to create imaginitive drawings to make them look hairy like apes. This might seem spectacular to some but here on Java there are plenty of short people. I'm an average 5'8" tall and when I go out in a crowd, My head sticks up over everyone. I can see how with a little mutation there could be some really short indonesians. Oh, and they hunted Pygmy Elephants. Don't have those around anymore.

Article on Hobbits in Indonesia

Hover Bugs

It is the time of year for the hover bugs to come out. They are little bugs about the size and shape of lady bugs and their favorite thing to do is hang in the air as if hovering. It looks like they are caught in a web or hanging from a string but when you approach them they zip about 2 feet away and hover again. They are quite interesting.

Bald is beautiful

Last night I decided my hair was getting too long (at least 8mm). I decided to give myself a haircut and didn't do a very good job. To fix it I just shaved it all off again. Oh well. Next time maybe I will go to a professional.

Mangos on the beach

There are two things about my childhood in the Philippines that I remember being incredibly good that I haven't been able to find an equivalent for since. One is mangos and the other is the beaches. I have searched in the US, Mexico, Thailand and Indonesia (haven't been to Sulawesi or Maluku yet) and haven't found the beaches yet nor the amazingly sweet and yellow mangos. someday I hope to find these again but in the mean time, a friend here at school just got back from the Philippines to attend a wedding. She brought back some dried mangos for me since I always talk about how good they are there! Not as good as the fresh mangos but better than I have had in 15 years. Thanks so much!

Too hot to handle

This afternoon a few of us went out to see Farenheight 9/11. I was pretty upset by what I saw. Michael Moore made some good points like the connection between the Bushes and the bin Ladens and the recruiting policies of the marines but overall I was pretty upset after watching this movie. I came into the movie with no respect for Moore and left with even less.

I have to admit that after half way through the movie I started getting bored and tuned out quite a bit. The amount of misinformation and factual distortions were overwhelming and my brain shut down. Moore would find a fact and state it and then draw 4 or 5 conjectures from it and state it as fact. Some of my friends left the movie feeling sad and embarassed about being proud to be American. If that was Michael Moore's plan for making the movie than congratulations to him. BTW, I already have voted but it wouldn't have change my vote anyways. I hope Moore runs for president so I can not vote for him.

How much is that extra service?

Yay! Indonesia is slightly less corrupt than last year! Last year it ranked 5th in most corrupt. This year 7th. Talk about improvement. The new president has promised to get hard on corruption. We'll see.

Corruption article

Build your own PVR!

This last week I've been fascinated with the idea of building my own PVR. For those of you who don't know what that is, think Tivo or Direct TV. I've been doing a lot of research, mostly on BYOPRV.com. I've found all the hardware I need to get. The hardest part was getting the TV Guide onto the computer. I found a website where I can download the Guide for Indonesia in an Excel worksheet. I then wrote a program to translate it to the proper XML format. Now I know I can get it in. I'll let you know how it all works once I get it set up.

Maybe if these things are cool enough, I could sell them. I don't think anyone else in Indonesia has one yet.

All hail the chief!

Today is Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's first day as elected President of Indonesia. He is the first directly elected president. His inaugeration yesterday had one very unique aspect to it. The former president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, didn't attend. This was a big snub.

She has reason to snub him though. He was her security cabinet member and while on a assignment in another country she took all his power away. He responded in an open letter that basically said, let me do my job or fire me. She refused and he quit. He then went to trounce her in the polls.

Good luck SBY!

Jakarta Post Article

The Start of Hunger

Today is the start or Ramadan which is the month of the Islamic calendar when Muslims don't eat during daylight hours. According to the Al Quran, starting in the morning when you can distinguish a black thread from a white, you can't eat, drink, smoke or have sexual relations. This ends in the evening after the 5th prayer of the day. Some Muslims take it so far as to spit all day so they don't swallow their own saliva because that could be considered drinking.

This is particularly hard on the cooks at the school since they still have to cook all day long but can't eat anything from around 5:00 AM until 7:00 PM. I don't know if I could do that. You would expect this to be a bad time for restaurants but interestingly enough, it is the best time of the year for them since they get a lot of business during the day from people cheating since they can't go home and everyone goes out to eat at night since they are too weak to cook food. This is also a good time of year to play sports against indonesian teams. They are always really weak from hunger and dehydrated by the afternoon.

This will go on for roughly one month and will end with Idul Fitri or the Day of Power when supposedly Muhammmad got his first Revelation from God. This is also the month when all employees (except us expats) get paid for a 13th month. Kinda like a Christmas bonus.

Fresh Meat

The last new teacher of the year arrived last night. His name is Simon Adams and he will be teaching Kindergarten. I haven't had a chance to talk to him a lot but suffice to say he is English. Best of luck to him. It takes someone special to teach those little kids.

Oops they did it again.

Microsoft today warned of more serious security vulnerabilities in Windows and Internet Explorer. See this news article

Basically, if you are using Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows 2003 or Internet Explorer (the big blue "e" you click on for the internet), you need to get some updates before you get another virus. Head over to Windows Update and get all the relevant patches or enable Automatic Update from the control panel.

And if you haven't already, Get Firefox

Bush vs. Kerry

I got my absentee ballot today in the mail. That means I get to vote. I'm not going to tell you who I voted for but those of you who know me at all probably already know. Of course, since it is an absentee ballot, its not going to be counted anyways so here's hoping.

24 Season 3

I finished up with the third season of 24 last night. It was by far the best season with tons of twists and turns. Don't worry. I won't spoil anything. I gotta say, killing off Jack at the end... Oh sorry. He doesn't really die. But anyways. It is good to have that done with. 3 days is a long time to be watching a show. Now we can move on the other things, like For Love or Money 3!

Wherefore art thou Jackie

Yesterday one of my roommates and our friend went out to see the latest Jackie Chan movie... and well, before I relate my experience, let me give you a brief recap of my history with Jackie.

I grew up catching glimpses of Jackie Chan movies and hearing his terrible accent and I, like so many others, though his movies were some of the worst things I had ever seen. That's saying a lot since I'm a MST3K fan. My second roommate in college was a pretty strange guy. We had a lot of differences, such as, I like Coke, he likes Pepsi. He was also a huge Jackie Chan fan. Of course I made fun of him for a while and then he talked me into watching one. Now, I have this policy that says you can't knock something unless you have tried it (I do have a few exceptions such as necrophilia). This explains why I was a vegetarian for one semester at college. By the way, it sucks. Anyways, we watched The Legend of Drunken Master and I was expecting to make fun of it the whole way through. I was amazed by Chan's ability to convey comedy with martial arts and an intelligent story. I later have seen a documentary on martial arts in movies and they talked about how after Bruce Lee died, no one could top him because he was the best. Chan decided to make it comic since he could do it faster or better than Lee. From then on I was hooked. Some of his films have been better and some a little worse but they are all enjoyable for Chan's clown like style of fighting and creative use of props. I've even enjoyed big(er) budget productions such as Shanghai Noon and Shanghai Knights.

So, yesterday morning we wanted to see a film and checked what was showing. New Police Story is the only one that sounded interesting (the other two were REALLY bad Indonesian movies). At first my roommate and I were a little hesitant because we thought it might be in Chinese with Indonesian subtitles. Our friend is Chinese-Indonesian and he assured us that it was in English so we went. I've got to say, my respect for Jackie has dropped quite a bit after this film. First of all, it WAS in Chinese with Indonesian subtitles. Luckily all of us can read Indonesian fairly well. Secondly, Jackie Chan played a character who is a drunk policeman who can't fight and keeps getting beat up by teenage miscreants. After watching Jackie continually beat up people in other movies, it was difficult to watch him get beat and beat decisively time and again in this film. It was also a little unbelievable. Oh how I longed for the comic fights with crazy outcomes that don't involve Jackie causing all of his friends to be killed by not being able to beat a 15 year old in fighting!

This movie was definitely not made for a western mind. It was stylized in the classic Chinese way of flying through the air but not overly. Fight scenes and gun battles were impeccably unrealistic and the love stories didn't make much sense. We have a mysterious side kick that picks up the comic relief, however badly, that we finally figure out who he is in the last scene of the movie. As an amateur editor, I would have placed that scene much earlier to add more emotion instead of tacking it on the end.

Overall, it was a lot of fun. This was mostly because I only understood about 70% of the dialog and was able to laugh with/at my Chinese friend throughout much of the movie. Should you go see this movie? If you are looking for a date night, definitely not. If you like MST3K, have a Chinese friend to see it with and have it available with subtitles you don't understand, I would say go and see it but don't pay too much.

Update to the correction

I've made an update to the small correction from earlier. It's a long story. Don't ask.

Bandung Belly

I've been pretty sick the last few days with a case of Bandung Belly. Everyone who comes here or lives here has experienced it at one time or another. Basically you get really sick with diarhea and vomiting and get really tired. I'm still really tired and am trying to rehydrate myself after being dehydrated last night. Indonesians call it masuk angin which means you "catch a wind." They are really paranoid about this and wear wind vests while riding motorcycles and taping their bellybuttons while they sleep (seriously). I guess it isn't a whole lot different than "catching a cold" in the western world.

Think masuk angin is crazy but catching a cold is not? Read this website or one of many others about whether or not cold and wet will actually cause a cold.

Similarities?

There must be a conspiracy here somewhere. Thanks to Welly for the comment.

On sale now!

Update* I may have been a bit premature in my anouncement. I'm having trouble uploading the file to the server. I'll let you know when it is up.

The video from the BIC Youth Tour, sometimes called the Sea Tribe Tour, is available online now! Watch it while it is hot!

In order to watch it, you will need the Xvid Codec. Just download and install it.

The video is available here. It is 106 Mb so it may take a while to download.

I will be bringing a high quality DVD of this back with me over Christmas.

Note* If the video is playing but there is no picture (sound only) go back and reread the second paragraph of this post.

It's all in the mind

I've seen some cool optical illusions before. Here is a cool website with a bunch of them plus explainations!

Akiyoshi's Illusions page

Indonesians kidnapped

Two Indonesian women were kidnapped in Iraq a couple days ago. In the Philippines when someone was kidnapped, the whole country erupted. We aren't seeing that here so far. Everyone seems to be waiting to see what will happen. The kidnappers have demanded the release of Abu Bakar Bashir who is the man responsible for those behind the Bali bombing and the J.W. Mariott bombing in Jakarta. He is in prison now after being found guilty. After hearing about the kidnappers demands, he has demanded that they release the women and he refuses to be released because of kidnapping demands. I must say I am impressed with that response from him.

Foxnews story

Smells like teen spirit

Okay, I needed to buy some tioletries yesterday and so I went to a local store. My supply that I brought with me from the US last summer has finally run out. Of course they didn't have any deodorant. It is actually very difficult to get deodorant in this country. I'm not entirely sure why, the people could really benifit from using it. I finally went to a larger store and went to the cosmetics section. They had a couple tiny sticks of deodorant in the back cabinet along with the really expensive stuff like perfume. They won't even give it to you until you have paid at the cash register. I can't figure it out. Why is deodorant such a luxury item?