Jakartass Home thoughts from abroad. Alien thoughts from home.

PT Kereta Api Indonesia (KAI) says it's installing barricades in the form of hanging concrete balls that will knock off anyone sitting on top of an accelerating train.

PT KAI operation area 1 order manager Akhmad Suyadi said that the move was intended to provide safety and comfort to passengers and not to cause harm.

There's a dream afoot to cover the Eiffel Tower in Paris with thousands of hemp or sack-cloth bags that would carry soil and a large variety of plants [which] would be added gradually, working from the bottom upwards in the same way as a plant grows, over the second half of 2012.

This "would symbolize the reconciliation of nature and mankind."

So would this.

I particularly dedicate this song to the punks in Aceh.

At least the police gave them black T-shirts!

Unfortunately, I can't think of anything suitable for the incidents of beheadings in Lampung, South Sumatra. Although they do call to mind the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland who had a habit of crying out "Off with their heads!" when anyone displeased her. Mind you, no-one seems to have carried out her wishes.

Rather than common sense, Indonesia at times it offers up a hallucinatory sense of WTF. Is Indonesia a 21st century version of 'Wonderland'?

I wonder, as do right-thinking Malaysians, why it is Malaysian companies which are involved in the "genocide against Indonesia’s endangered orangutans".

The Malaysian-based palm oil company, PT Silva Inhutani Lampung, a subsidiary of the Sungai Budi Group, allegedly took the land owned by the local villagers whilst the police stood by, and hired security forces. Villagers who remain now live in fear. And no wonder: videos shown this week to the House of Representatives’ Commission III overseeing human rights showed the killing of 30 farmers since 2009, including two beheadings by masked men carrying assault rifles.

The company, which has its headquarters in Wisma Budi, Jalan HR Rasuna Said, South Jakarta, responded, "How could there be massacre and the police did not take any actions to prevent it? Such an incident has never happened. Indonesia is a constitutional state. How could such an event happen?"

How indeed?

It would seem that to bolster their case against the landgrabbers, the farmers' group, which included former Territorial Assistant for Army Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. (ret.) Saurip Kadi, have got hold of a video from South Thailand where there is an Islamic separatist movement.

However, the same question can be asked about individuals and organisations which blatantly ignore the rulings of the highest legal authority in the land, the Supreme Court.

The same question can be asked about the rampant corruption which causes bridges to collapse, for schools not to receive their funding and the corruptors to subsequently suffer from convenient amnesia.

And the same question can be asked about the vandals, more religious nutters, who have beheaded a statue of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in a holy cave in Tawangmangu, an hour’s drive from Solo in Central Java Province.

I have some advice for these and other headhunters: If you want to get ahead, first get a brain.

An occasional series inspired by 'found sounds'.

My co-author Derek Bacon has a collection online, including this seasonal offering. However, he is by no means the first to add real sounds to music. For a fine example, have a listen to the middle section of Bridget St. John's Ask Me No Questions (from 1969) and be transported to an English village green in a summer's evening.

More recently, I've been listening to a number of singers who also incorporate 'found sounds' in their work.

The third album, Végétal, released in 2006, of Émilie Simon from France incorporated the sounds of plants in her songs, as hinted by the album title.

Another singer-songwriter is Hanne Hukkelberg from Norway. Her album, Little Things, made intelligent use of found sounds in the form of glockenspiel, theremin, various kitchen utensils, bicycle spokes and, er … rain. (More here.)

I don't have a 'smart phone' and don't want one as I prefer to engage with life face-to-face. My only recording device is my home computer, so my 'found sounds' are remembered words, a snippet of a conversation which in isolation become non sequiturs which have the essential element of 'surprise', of thought patterns skipping a beat at the moment of hearing.

Others have collections of these, perhaps because they've made an effort to eavesdrop.

The Man Who Fell Asleep has a blog, although he's currently taking a sabbatical from it. In it, he has published one-liners overheard on his journeys on the London Underground. These often made little sense – like this one: "I am going on a guided tour by myself." Do have a browse and be prepared to have your mind boggled.

More recently, Michael Holden has been All Ears for similar moments. If you, like he, overhead "Maybe cucumber would help. Have you tried cucumber?", what would you have made of it?

This is a small selection to start my own collection.

- Way back when, in the inter-regnum between marriages, I went on a blind date to a Vietnamese restaurnat in Tooting, South London. As so often happens on such occasions, we'd paused to think about the next safe topic of conversation to initiate when we heard from a table across the room: "To look at him, you wouldn't believe he's a Jehovah's Witness, would you?"

- "I'd like an iced tea, but hold the ice."

- Me: "I'd like a chef's salad, please."
–Waitress: "Why?"
–Me: "Because I'm hungry."

Feel free to add similar bon môts.

On its face, the (American) Marine Corps doesn’t appear to be an intellectual service and that impression is alive and well in the minds of many who view the Marine Corps from the outside in.

So writes historian Maj. Kevin Kiley, USMC (ret) whose title I have borrowed. He continues by giving a glowing account of other marine historians who have “developed many innovations throughout its history by study and application that have contributed significantly to the study and practice of the art of war.”

I’m no military historian and until recently I had a notionally positive view of Indonesian marines because of their role in preventing a military coup in 1998 and seemingly siding with the rakyat.

However, with the news this week that the Indonesian Marine Corps have caused the inundation of a housing complex in Pondok Labu, South Jakarta, one may justifiably question the intellectual nous of these ‘professional’ peacekeepers.

Residents blamed the inundation on the construction of a new shooting range operated by the Indonesian Marine Corps who reclaimed part of the Krukut river separating the shooting range and their neighborhood, narrowing the flow from six meters to just two meters wide.

Coordinating Public Welfare Minister Agung Laksono, who toured the area, called on residents in the area to prepare themselves for the wet season.

“There will be high intensity rains in the coming days, but don’t panic. The central government and the local administration will work together in anticipation,” Agung said.

“Don’t panic”?

“Anticipation” – after the event?

Last Saturday, the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) forecast heavy rains and strong winds in Jakarta and its surroundings this week, warning residents to be prepared and to keep alert.

Pondok Labu was flooded on Monday.

On Tuesday, Jakarta Administration secretary Fadjar Panjaitan told reporters at City Hall that officials had been caught off guard by the unexpectedly heavy downpour.

“We didn’t expect that localized rain could cause flooding in the area.”

Go tell it to the marines, Pak Fadjar!

Obviously he doesn’t read the same papers that I do, nor does he read Jakartass because if he had he would have known to expect major floods this rainy season.

I wrote the following nigh on five years ago: It is impossible to stop the rain. But it is possible to minimize floods, or at least be prepared them. Unfortunately, what (has) happened in Jakarta (is) just the opposite. It (has) long been predicted that major flooding would hit the city. In 1996, it was severely affected, and then, there was a warning such a disaster could happen once every five years.

This is a consequence of La Niña, the counterpart of El Niño, the ocean-atmosphere conditions which determine our weather patterns. And, as anticipated, La Niña is re-established in the Pacific.
…………………………………………………………………………………
Rain, rain, go away ………

Actually, I don’t mean that. We need rain for any number of reasons:
- to settle the dust.
- to replenish the water table.
- to discover where this year’s roof leaks are.
- to give hope to those afflicted by drought.
- to find out which drainage ditches need declogging.
- to remind ourselves that clearing hillsides of their trees causes landslides.
- to initiate the construction of drainage culverts in main thoroughfares.
- to find out how many umbrellas, recently used as parasols, have been lost.

The rainy season is finally here.

Jolly good.

I'm not a fan of bottled water; our portable potable water is boiled from our source, a well. Yes, I do know that we are doing our bit to empty the water table, but our street isn't connected to mains water and even if it were, we couldn't depend on a constant supply on demand, nor would it be free of e-coli and other nasty stuff.

The failure of Jakarta's administrators to provide clean drinking water (as mandated by the Constitution, Article 33 Paragraph 3) is to be roundly condemned, except presumably by the bottlers of 'mineral water' who resort to all kinds of advertising tricks to con consumers.

I've long been bemused by the purveyors of Wet water. Is there any other kind?

But the latest to catch my eye is this one.

Coolantis a body coolant drink made from herbal extracts (Chrysanthemum and Yam Bean extracts) combined with spring water to provide fresh, light, cool flavor and eliminate thirst quickly.

A coolant is generally thought of as being a specially prepared liquid which is used to stop a machine from getting too hot while it is operating.

So, once again, ad-men resort to dehumanising their targets market sector. They're one group of human resources I'd like to see cast into the nearest junk yard.