Month: March 2012
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Bali’s Silent Day: A Time for Contemplating Navels – But Only Your Own
Friday this week (March 23) is Silent Day in Bali – Nyepi, the Balinese Hindu New Year. It is called Silent Day because for 24 hours, from 6am on the nominated day – the date varies, being on a lunar calendar – until 6am the next day, everything stops. Well, not quite everything. Since Bali […]
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HECTOR’S DIARY Bali Advertiser March 21, 2012
Banking on it Janet DeNeefe, doyenne of dinners and instigator of that annual Ubud fixture, the writers’ and readers’ festival, has been busy lately. That was in Melbourne, where she did a stint demonstrating the cuisine of Bali to residents of that alternatively cold, hot, wet, dry city at the southern extremity of continental Australia. […]
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HECTOR’S DIARY Bali Advertiser, March 7, 2012
Dolts Rule It’s always fun visiting the Odd Zone; it’s the very best of your diarist’s former domiciles, for all sorts of reasons, most of them a cause for wry smiles or irritated grimaces. There’s the traffic, for one thing. It largely obeys the road rules and even stays in lane; what’s more, at traffic […]
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AMERICAN POLITICS
From the American Prospect (Monday, March 5) on Super Tuesday. A fine little aide-memoire: CORONATION TUESDAY Super Tuesday once was super. Progressives of a certain age will never forget the fun of the first edition in 1988. Conservative Democrats had dreamt up a March day of nine Southern primaries that would guarantee no “unelectable” […]
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The Carr That Skittled Kevin
Appointing Bob Carr as foreign minister-designate – ahead of the New South Wales parliament formally electing him to the vacancy caused by the unexpected departure of no longer faceless man Mark Arbib – may be just what Prime Minister Julia Gillard needed as a circuit-breaker. There are certainly signs the Liberal opposition thinks so […]