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Silence! Well, Sort Of
Richard Laidlaw Bali, Mar. 7, 2019 IT’S Nyepi today in Bali. Tomorrow, Mar. 8, 2019 CE, it will be the first day of 1941 in the Balinese Hindu Caka (say Shaka) calendar of 210 days. We’ve been more or less fixtures in Bali since 1926. Our first Nyepi, back in the Roaring Caka Twenties, was […]
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Let Him Eat Cake
RICHARD LAIDLAW Book Review IT must be very difficult being a political satirist these days. So many politicians, to a man and woman, get underfoot with plots that would outdo a Goon Show episode and leave their writers wringing their hands in frustration: Why couldn’t we think of that? So we owe a deep […]
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A Bitter Blow
HECTOR’S DIARY Snippets from his regular diet of worms THE CAGE Bali Thursday, Aug. 9, 2018 THE second Lombok earthquake, on Sunday evening (Aug. 5), was far worse than its immediate predecessor (Jul. 29), and as finally calculated at seven on the Richter scale the biggest in this area in quite some […]
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The Bludge Report
HECTOR’S DIARY Titbits from his regular diet of worms VASSE, Western Australia Monday, Jul. 2, 2018 WE are, we’ve told friends, having a bit of a bludge. One of them very kindly said we deserved to do this. Many others, perhaps, just shrugged, Atlas-like or otherwise. Some others among them may have […]
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Barely Aware
HECTOR’S DIARY Titbits from his regular diet of worms THE CAGE Bali, Monday, Jun. 4, 2018 THE practice among some western tourists here of going around in their beachwear well away from the beach has caused comment before, among the Balinese themselves though they are polite people and chiefly keep silent, and […]
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The Doolally Squad
HECTOR’S DIARY Titbits from his regular diet of worms The Cage, Bali Sunday, May 20, 2018 IT’S hard to know what to write about the Surabaya bombings. Doubtless there are those who would advise against writing anything about them. But that won’t do. Perhaps we could start by saying that at least […]
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Off We Go
HECTOR’S DIARY Titbits from his regular diet of worms The Cage, Bali | Wednesday, May 10, 2018 IT’S been a while between scribbles here at the Diary’s desk, for all sorts of reasons that really don’t rate a mention. We have heard no complaints, but we’ll ignore that silence and the signals it […]
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Peak Effort
HECTOR’S DIARY Titbits from his regular diet of worms The Cage, Bali | Saturday, Apr. 28, 2018 DIAN Cahyadi, with whom we had the pleasure of working in Lombok more than decade ago, on a little and now extinct monthly newspaper called the Lombok Times, has achieved a new personal best for 2018. Actually, it’s […]
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Absolute Rubbish
HECTOR’S DIARY Titbits from his diet of worms THE CAGE Ubud, Bali Wednesday, Apr. 18, 2018 THE perennial problem of rubbish has yet again raised its head as a topic de jour. The trash that litters Bali’s beaches – it’s not only in the tourist-overburdened south – is something that won’t go away. […]
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Cool Aid Needed
HECTOR’S DIARY Titbits from his diet of worms Ubud, Bali Saturday, Apr. 7, 2018 IT should surprise, though of course it doesn’t, that Indonesia’s pique Islamist bother boots brotherhood, the FPI, has taken issue with a poem written nearly two decades ago and recently recited by Sukmawati Sukarnoputri. It laments the way […]
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