8degreesoflatitude

HECTOR’S DIARY

His diet of worms and other tasty morsels

Saturday, Jan. 21, 2017

THE Bali authorities have accepted a proposal from the Japanese city of Kumamoto to help with rabies eradication, a duty they’ve managed to evade for nine years now despite help from local animal welfare charities, foreign governments and the United Nations.

Two months ago Governor Made Mangku Pastika visited Kumamoto, a city of around 1.4 million people that neighbours the slightly larger Fukuoka in Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s home islands. Now a team from Kumamoto has visited Bali for substantive talks on the issue. The Japanese city has successfully controlled rabies in cats – the disease vector there – through humane population control and properly managed vaccination programs.

The Bali plan involves Kumamoto University, which runs an alumni program in Indonesia, and the Kumamotu Indonesia Friendship Association (KIFA). That connection is facilitated through PT Karang Mas Sejathara, one of the operating arms of the Jakarta based corporation MidPlaza, owned by Rudy Suliawan whose wife Yoko is from Kumamotu. Its Bali enterprises include the Ayana and Rimba resort hotels on the Bukit.

A leading veterinarian who owns the Ryunosuke Animal Hospital in Kumamoto (Dr. Tokuda) said after the Jan. 12 meeting in Bali that the best method of eliminating rabies is to capture animals, vaccinate and sterilise them and then release them.

Of the successful program in Kumamoto, he said this: “Everyone worked hard so we could vaccinate and sterilize 1800 cats each week, allowing us to finish our work in two years. I am convinced that Bali could do the same.”

Well, so it could. It just needs to work at it.

Rabies broke out here in 2008 and is still a deadly threat. Rabid dogs have recently bitten a number of people in Sukawati in Gianyar and Kediri in Tabanan.

Police News

THREE men who until recently were employed as bouncers at La Favela in Seminyak, where a Ukrainian tourist who queried his bill was beaten so severely that he lost an eye, are having to explain themselves to police. This of itself is an advance in law enforcement in Bali.

Police have suggested bars and other places in need of on site security should employ properly trained personnel and not just whomever the locally franchised gang sends along. This too would enhance both public safety and civility.

Meanwhile, traffic police have reorganised the road system in Kuta in an attempt to regulate the area’s chronic gridlock. They’ve even made a map of the changes, which will start with a “socialisation” phase – here’s a map, look at it – and move to enforcement and traffic fines later.

Whether the new scheme will work is moot. Nothing much has in the past. Motorbikes traditionally ignore all the road rules anyway. Taxis cruising for fares at 10kmh have never yet been driven by anyone who would think for an instant that they should move over so non-touting traffic can move on. We’ll see.

The Lunar New Year (Jan. 28) should provide an early test of the gridlock reduction plan.

All Froth, No Lager

THE 45th President of the United States is now in office. President Trump is due the respect of the office he holds (protesting political opponents to note) and the democratic courtesy of a little time to show that he has policies and not just rhetoric to bring to the table.

His opponents must debate him in substance, though in the absence of substance to debate that can be difficult. They should do so with courtesy. Violent demonstrations are invidious and unhelpful. He will of course have his own political difficulties to overcome, given that the working class white population that voted for him doesn’t – now it understands what he was saying in the campaign – want him to take away their free health care, among other things.

It must be said that his inaugural speech did nothing to advance an argument that he has policies that will work. It had more of the echo of a Munich beer hall oration than anything else. And that is a worry.

He chose a song made famous by Frank Sinatra as the tune for his first dance at the inauguration ball: “My Way”. His daughter Nancy Sinatra, who wasn’t at the bash, tweeted that he should perhaps have remembered what its first line says. It says “And now the end is near.”

She later deleted the tweet, possibly a wise thing to do in a country as gun-fixated as America. But it was a delicious line and it gave us a very welcome grin on a bleak day.

Crumbs

SPEAKING of grins, the enigmatic “A”, who crafts the delightful weekly Eat Live Travel newsletter from Medan in Sumatra was at her peak – or possibly pique – in her latest. When it dropped into the in-box at The Cage and we read it, we had a fit of the giggles and had to break for coffee. But no biscuit: Read on to find out why.

Among other things, an article in The Guardian had caught her eye. It was headlined: Jakarta: The unlikely capital city of sex and swinging.

She particularly liked this one for its razor-sharp insights, such as this: “Morality is almost always linked to sexual behaviour, not corruption, say, or mendacity in public office.”

The icing on the cake was apparently supplied by Twitter comments from bamboozled expat Jakarta residents, such as: ‘This makes me see Jakarta in a whole new light”, etc.

She concluded: “Uh-huh. Show me a corner of the earth where people are not knobbing on the sly and I’ll give you a biscuit.”

Well, the Diary likes a challenge, and biscuits, especially ones with oats in them. But finding such a place to cite and thereby winning a welcome crumb might be asking too much.

Oh Clock Off!

THE Diary’s Australian-based Collector of Idiocies made a lovely point the other day. It was that, time-wise, it was either 3am or three in the morning. It wasn’t 3am in the morning. Someone incautious and functionally illiterate – that’s a big field these days – had come to her attention.

She’s been having trouble sleeping, apparently, as well as with the cricket, on both of which points we can certainly sympathise.

It does sound like something people who are challenged might say, perhaps on returning home from a night out on their first-year anniversary.

But in this instance, it seems, it came from a reporter on a television news show at 7am. She notes with a scowl: “They all do it.” And that’s true, sadly. It’s worse in the land of mangled vowels and incomprehensible nouns. As Afferbeck Lauder would say: No more gnus, calm bear klyter.

We’ll just say this, of our favourite CI. She’s the most entertaining that we’ve ever had on the team.

Hector also writes a monthly diary in the Bali Advertiser. The next appears on Feb. 1