Sacha Stevenson

I love this Canadian woman. Here's a video from her, longer than usual, that's for both Indonesians and non Indonesians, more-so the former but great to hear, so it's in both Indonesian and English though the subtitles stop half way through - still a bunch of English after that but you can stop there too. The English translation of the title - It's Nice being Indonesian leaves out "According to a Caucasian." Enak is better than nice and includes tasty. And the Indonesian in the bit below the video says "Are you Indonesian? This is an opportunity to be grateful." She's got a zillion more on You Tube. This is not the first mention of her here. - dc

Happy Day!

St. Stupid's Day that is. If you're near the Bay Area, join it and tell 'em I miss 'em.

Official website page for today

cuke page for past Stupid events

Nyepi stars

Nyepi in Bali was over yesterday morning at six am. Everything dark. No TV signal but Internet continued. Wayan who works here and I covered the windows. With everything closed I turned on the living room AC adjusting it to high. Cheated and went out a couple of times to look at the sky - once at 10pm and then at midnight walked slowly, carefully in total dark over to the pool, slipped in and lay there looking at the splendor of the sky before electricity. Photo off the net supposidly from Changu an hour away. It was even more spectacular but most the photos if one does a searchn image search for "night sky Nyepi" don't capure the brightness and manyness. Wish we had it once a month. Heck - once a week worldwide.

I've made this same sort of post after Nyepi before as I fainly recall. Anyway, we could go a long way toward reducing light polution if we moved toward more indirect light and didn't have lights that shone up to the sky.

The Mother Nature Network has five tips to curb light pollution.

Reza Aslan

I was skeptical about Reza Aslan's new series on CNN called Believer. CNN hyped it so much with adds. But I happened to see a couple of shows and I was impressed with his approach, his openmindedness. His show on voodoo was good. I was looking for it on Youtube when I came across a bunch of clips with him. I have vital cuke archiving to do so I just picked a couple of them

Reza Aslan vs CNN talking about generalizing on Islam - this is two years ago.

Reza Aslan with Oprah - of course with Oprah it gets deeper - there are others with her. My favorite is when he says that the mystical approach of all the great religions is to leave the religion behind - it's just a signpost.

Kelly Walks Away

At the age of five. - My eldest son called me up and asked about this yesterday and here's what happened. - dc

Nyepi!

Tomorrow morning at 6am for 24 hours the silent dark period of Nyepi begins - unique to Bali - everything stops including all flights, a dark island (I'll sneak out to look at the stars which are staggeringly bright and many). Tonight are the sizable Ogoh Ogoh monster parades. My fourth, no - third Nyepi (we were in Japan for the 1st one) but dear Katrinka is with her son's family in Oregon. Just little me alone in the dark. Ooooooooo.

Read all about Nyepi.

Earthquake this morning

I was up late last night and was lying awake in bed a little after seven and noticed sounds coming from the livingroom kitchen area almost like there was someone in there but the screen door is locked so I thought must be some bigger gecko or lizard. Hadn't noticed any big ones living inside recently. I was preparing to get up when I noticed the bed shaking, everything shaking little bit then more and realized what was happening and jumped up and grabbed some shorts I decided to slip into and by the time I got to the door it had stopped. Just didn't seem strong enough to merit nude departure. It was a 6.4 centered in SW Badung, the province on the other side of the southern peninsula - that's where Kuta is. Thought about heading out to get up higher to avoid a tsunami but nixed that.


Later French Blandine came over with her son Max (11?). They wanted to sit and talk which we never do - just say hi and niceties. They were sort of shaken up. I likened the sound of some earthquakes I've noticed to a train. She said exactly, that she'd thought there was a train running at the school next door where all the children were screaming. Max was in bed with his eyes still closed listening to those screams and thought his mother was moving his bed side to side to wake him up. She darted in, grabbed him, and they went running out to the street.

Back to that train sound. I was standing in our front garden in Okayama Japan in about 1990 and thought I heard a distant train, very faint, and immediately thought that it might be a earthquake. Felt nothing else. Later I found out that there was a 3.5 quake centered beyond the other side of town at that time - so slight most didn't notice. Those are old train sounds, not like the new ones.