Fire On The Belly

Here I am on fire. It's called 'fire therapy' and it feels good. We went to a nearby acupuncture clinic to check out some of the strange and shocking treatments they offer. First, they rubbed an herbal salve on my bare belly, then they covered it in these damp red towels and soaked them with alcohol. Then they lit my stomach on fire with one of those long barbecue lighters. They repeated the process three times, snuffing out the flame when the towel started to singe. By the third time, the heat from the flame had penetrated all the liquids, and it was very warm - enough to redden the exposed skin. It felt really great, but mostly because I was getting over the trauma of my previous treatment, which is called electro acupuncture. But that's another post...

"Excuse me, could you take our picture in front of this dormant volcano?"

Know-It-All's Guide to Krakatau

1. Bioluminescence: what, why, and how?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioluminescence

What: Based on Richard's sating they were a plankton, I'm thinking the ones we saw were probably Dinoflagellate, which sounds to me like the Latin word for "dinosaur fart". Check out the wiki picture above of these guys in a breaking wave!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinoflagellate

Why: There are four main accepted theories for the evolution of bioluminescent traits: Attraction, Repulsion, Communication and Illumination.

How: Has something to do with "Quorum sensing", which I would have guessed is something City Councils do. Actually, if I'm reading the science-speak right, it's a way for the critters to control their population density.

The glowing blue light is a result of a "luciferase" enzyme, which I would like to suggest from now on we call "Satan's Spit".

Cool bonus fact #1: All cells, including human, emit some kind of bioluminescence, but the wavelengths are more often outside the visible light spectrum. That's cool. That means we glow in the dark, you just can't see it.

Cool bonus fact #2: You might remember Alba The Glow-Bunny in "news of the weird" headlines a few years ago. An artist named Eduardo Kac paid to have Alba's DNA spliced with some "Satan's Spit" -generating DNA from a jellyfish. Here's a sort of obituary for Alba, whose existence "highlighted" all sorts of ethical issues.

2. Effervescence, on the other hand, is a real word that means "the escape of gas from an aqueous solution". Schweppervescence is a marketing campaign for ginger ale and tonic water invented in 1946.

Superfluous chemical reaction example to make me seem more smarter: H2CO3 -> H2O + CO2

Cool bonus fact #1: This guy suggests another definition for Schweppervescence - "thousands of tiny bubbles that last the whole drink through."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8ri56-pkeU

Cool bonus fact #2: Schweppervescence is also the name of a race horse:

http://www.pedigreequery.com/schweppervescence

3. Whirlwinds - what are they?

During the trip I suggested they might be like tornadoes that rotated in the opposite direction. Wrong.

A whirlwind is a class of atmospheric event that includes tornadoes, water spouts and land spouts. Also includes those little harmless spinning wind vortexes popularized in the film "American Beauty". As far as I can tell, only Indonesia's state-run news agency Antara reported the story about the one in Bali over the weekend. Here's what I think happened: Antara often uses strange vocabulary for things, probably because they use an automatic text translator like toggletext. So they called it a whirlwind instead of a tornado. Possible conspiracy theory: they said 'whirlwind' because it doesn't sound as bad as 'tornado'.

http://www.antara.co.id/en/arc/2007/11/12/president-inspects-whirlwind-victims-in-bali/

Cool bonus fact #1: What's a "land spout", you ask? WHy, it's a slang-term coined by meteorologist Howard B. Bluestein in the early 1980s for a kind of tornado not associated with the mesocyclone of a thunderstorm.

Cool bonus fact #2: There's a supervillain named Whirlwind. Last we knew, he was an active member of the Masters of Evil formed by Baron Zemo.

5. Sea Angels. On the way back to the boat from the reef on Sunday, I found myself surrounded by these little translucent thingies with maroon and purple insides and cool little wingey things. They have some at the Singapore Underwater World that are from the Arctic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_angel

Sea angels are small pteropod mollusks of the suborder Gymnosomata. Their feet have developed into wing-like appendages (parapodia) and their shells have been lost, both adaptations made to suit their free-swimming oceanic lives. These adaptations also explain the common name sea angel and the New Latin name of the order; from gymnos meaning "naked" and soma meaning "body." Within the order are approximately eight families and 17 genera.

Cool bonus fact #1:

Another large polar species of sea angel, Clione antarctica, defends itself from predators by synthesizing a previously unknown molecule, named pteroenone. As predators will not eat the sea angel some animals, such as amphipods, take up home inside them. Local population density of Clione antarctica may reach claustrophobic levels; up to 300 animals per cubic metre have been recorded.

Cool bonus fact #2:

The IPCC reports that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide is causing acidification of the oceans which could eliminate pteropods from the Southern Ocean and cause serious repercussions through the food chain.

6. Jellyfish and Pee: Really? Does it work?

Someone filed a story about the whole urine-on-stings idea. Conclusion: not helpful, sort of silly. Go with vinegar. In fact, Wikipedia says "Rubbing the wound, or using alcohol, spirits, ammonia, or urine will encourage the release of venom and should be avoided."

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2283933

And how do jellyfish stings work?

Nematocysts; generally, each nematocyst has a "trigger" (cnidocil) paired with a capsule containing a coiled stinging filament, as well as barbs on the exterior. Upon contact, the filament rapidly unwinds, launches into the target, and injects toxins. It can then pull the victim into its mouth, if appropriate."

Most stings are not deadly.

Here’s a bit from a site called “Jellies Zone”…

“Jellyfish toxins include a poorly understood array of complex chemicals, many of which are proteinaceous. Many have deleterious effects on cell membranes and cause them to rupture. This may, for example, lead to the breaking up of red blood cells, certainly not a desirable response to a sting. Other toxins have disruptive effects on the action of nerve and muscle cell membranes and impair their normal function. Throw in toxins that degrade collagen, break down proteins and lipids, and disrupt cellular influx of ions like calcium, and you can see why jellyfish mean business.“

Cool bonus fact #1: A group of jellyfish is often called a "smuck". Seriously.

Cool bonus fact #2:

Chinese and “other Asians” eat jellyfish. Only jellyfish belonging to the Order Rhizostomeae are harvested for food. The rhizostomes are favored because they are typically larger and have more rigid bodies than other scyphozoan orders. Traditional processing methods involve a multi-phase processing procedure using a mixture of table salt and alum, and then desalting. Processing makes the jellyfish drier and more acidic, producing a "crunchy and crispy texture." Nutritionally, jellyfish prepared this way are roughly 95% water and 4-5% protein, making it a relatively low calorie food.

Cool bonus fact #3: Factoid warning: "sources specualte" that some jellyfish stings have a "Viagra" affect...http://www.boingboing.net/2004/07/21/jellyfish-toxin-prod.html

7. What's up with pumice? Chris gave us a good overview. Here's more...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumice

"It forms when gases exsolving from viscous magma nucleate bubbles which cannot readily decouple from the viscous magma prior to chilling to glass. Pumice is a common product of explosive eruptions (plinian and ignimbrite-forming) and commonly forms zones in upper parts of silicic lavas. Pumice has an average porosity of 90%, and initially floats on water." Yup. Sure does.

Cool bonus fact #1: Pumice is considered a glass because it does not have a crystal structure.

Cool bonus fact #2: (actually this is more of a 'smuck' of facts)

After the 1883 explosion of Krakatoa, rafts of pumice drifted through the Pacific Ocean for up to 20 years, with tree trunks floating among them. In fact, pumice rafts disperse and support several marine species. In 1979, 1984 and 2006, underwater volcanic eruptions near Tonga created large pumice rafts, some as large as 30 km that floated hundreds of miles to Fiji.

8. This is just a really cool site:

http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/Products/Pglossary/pglossary.html

9: Poop in the sky…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppis

9: The Crown Of Thorns Starfish, and the cross it must bear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown-of-thorns_starfish

The cut-and-paste of it:

The starfish is a coral reef predator and preys on the coral polyps by climbing onto them, extruding its stomach over them, and releasing digestive enzymes to then absorb the liquified tissue. They feed alone at night, maintaining a constant distance between themselves and other crown-of-thorns starfish. During times of food shortage, these creatures can live on their energy reserves for over six months.

Notable predators of Ancanthaster planci include the Giant Triton (Charonia tritonis), a species of shrimp, a species of worm, and various reef fish (especially the Humphead wrasse) which feed on larvae or small adults. It is quite likely that the decline of these predators (through overharvesting, pollution, etc.) has been a factor that led to the rise in the population of the starfish, making outbreaks more likely to occur.

Cool bonus fact #1: They're called corallivores because, well, they eat coral.

Cool bonus fact #2: Outbreaks of huge numbers of these starfish are believed to be caused by agricultural runoff which causes algal blooms.

A Tsunami of Stuff

Dear Clutter Wrangler,

I and my partner are radio reporters in a developing country. Last night, there was a series of earthquakes near here, the kind that spurs people in our kind of work into action. Okay, I don’t at all mean to diminish the struggle of people in the disaster zone today, but I have to say the real disaster for me was right here in my home office.

When something like this happens, a lot of people start yodeling for our attention.

We got a stampede of assignments and deadlines and equipment to manage, but we have about the same organizational skills as a saguaro cactus. We end up running around like wild horses in a telephone booth.

We have this one little cubby where we throw our cords. Mic cords, USB cords, power cords, adapters – they’re all tangled in there like a pile of lassos at a roping convention.

O Clutter Wrangler, can you help us rein in the mess?

-Hog Tied in Jakarta

The Year in Pictures 6

The man on the left is giving us a tour of his village, which was completely flattened in the quake.

After the interview, he apologized for wearing a helmet on his head. He’d been wearing it for several days to cover a really nasty open head wound he got from a falling door jamb as he was carrying his children out of the building. He hadn’t received any medical treatment.

Picture taken May 30^th 2006. Earthquake struck on May 27^th. It lasted less than a minute.

The Year in Pictures 5

For a story about the one-year anniversary of the Yogyakarta earthquake, I visited farms in the area that were affected by the quake.

The public relations office of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) set up an interview with the woman in pink on the right. Her farm missed two planting cycles, and the FAO helped her (along with 132 other farming communities) because most laborers were busy surviving after the earthquake or rebuilding their lives. In this fertile climate, the fields quickly grew over with weeds and it took months to get them ready to plant again. In Javanese rice farming, women provide 60 percent of the field labor.

The funny thing about this photo is that the woman showed up for the interview dressed in her best clothes. I asked if there was someone who could show me how the work in the field is done (I wanted to record the splishy sound of rice paddy tending), she immediately took of her shoes, rolled up her pants, and jumped in. Note the muddy feet.

Picture taken May 2007.

The Year in Pictures 4

Hours after Garuda flight 200 crashed on March 7th, the woman on the right waits with her sister at the Jakarta airport to hear whether her husband was on board.

The Year in Pictuers 3

Me interviewing volunteers during a huge cleanup operation following a flood which covered 70 percent of Jakarta in February 2007. Our apartment in the Pejompongan district of central
Jakarta was high enough to escape flooding, but the neighborhood was surrounded by water in each direction for a few days.

The Year in Pictures 2

Trish knee deep (and sinking!) in silt, interviewing fishermen at the mouth of a river where the sludge run-off has killed off most fish stocks. The mud was also full of little pinching crabs. Taken in March 2007.

The Year In Pictures 1

Me in a tippy wooden canoe floating through the remains of a town that was inundated by toxic mud from a botched mining operation. The man in the front, a construction worker named Untung, is showing me the house he built and lived in for 15 years. Taken in March 2007.

Climb On

Yes, I'm climbing again.


This was taken a couple of weeks ago at a spot near Bandung, about a three hour drive from the capital. The rock is a cool mix of limestone and marble. You can see on the right a cave feature which, if I'm not mistaken, was transformed into marble by intense pressure. It's really great rock to climb - I've never felt anything like it - but it's a bit slippery and tiring for the hands if you have to pinch. This route is called "Ani", and it's rated as a "5.10c". That's hard. None of us got to the top of the route, but we had a blast trying.


There's sort of a loose but growing group of foreign and Indonesian climbers in Jakarta, led by our guru Panji, pictured below on the far right.




From left to right: Troy, Chad, John (back), Christian (back), Dave, Panji. Taking the picture is Boi, who is the best climber of the group after Panji. Panji, by the way, is a professional climber and has competed in the X-games. He's really a rock celebrity and we all owe him a lot for giving us his time and expert coaching.

Here’s a good shot of the valley and John taking a big swing over it. I met John before coming to Indonesia because of a question we posted on the expat forum about climbing in Jakarta. It took us just about a year to actually start climbing, but in the meantime he’s become one of our best friends here. You can see that the marble in this area has attracted some industry. The factory below makes marble tiles, and you can see some excavation in the distance where a "v" notch has been cut into the mountain.

If you get a chance, you should also check out Mr. John's blog, linked on the right of this page.

Land of Cheese

Indonesians sometimes say white people smell like cheese.

I’ve asked around.

It’s true that I find Indonesians rarely have any detectable body odor. Every once in a while, I’ve observed, an unfortunate individual smells really, really bad. A good portion of that population have been in uniforms, and I think it might have to do with wearing the thick polyester sometimes used for official Busway costumes or similar positions. Leather jackets sometimes produce the same effect.

In any case, I can’t say I find foreigners smell particularly worse than Indonesians. I’ve had plenty of time standing elbow to elbow on crowded buses to collect data.

So I wonder of there’s something genetic at work here, or perhaps there’s a key dietary difference. Indonesians don’t eat much cheese. In fact, it’s pretty hard to get here. Maybe there are smell-producing hormones in the vegan-bane agent called renit?

Maybe we sweat more before we’ve acclimated to the heat?

I’ve had one Indonesia friend suggest that the PH level in our skin is more acidic.

Maybe they’re just being mean.

I’ve also heard that Japanese people say white people smell like rotting meat. At least here we smell like something palatable. I've dispatched a correspondent, Nick B., to investigate these claims. He'll be spending a month teaching English and polling Tokyo about his olfactory effect.

I’m wide open to suggestions and amateur research projects on this.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to the trip home. It’ll be nice to be in the land where everyone smells like cheese.

Errand Epics

Okay folks, I’m going to post a few entries before I head to Maine with one goal in mind: to head off any whinging about my lack of posts.

So I’d like to start with a short language misadventure story from last week. As luck would have it, my Indonesian visa ran out just five days before our flight to the US. So I had to schedule a quick round-trip to Singapore to extend my stay through next week. We have a favorite travel agency at Plaza Semanggi (or “Planggi” if you’re trying to conserve syllables) one of the more Indonesian-style malls. They’re pretty good, but they don’t speak English. Herein sets the stage for my language adventure.

After some clumsy negotiating, I find a flight for Friday, the last day of my valid visa. The young agent asks in slang-y Indonesian when I would like to return: “blah mau blah kembali blah kepan?” Oh, I say, return the same day; “Hari sama.” Ok, says she, blah blah blah blah Friday? Um, says I, yes. Hari sama. I want to come back in the evening of the same day if possible.

Well, it turns out that I had confirmed a return flight for the next Friday. Apparently “same day” only refers to a day with the same name, not necessarily the same place in time.

That itinerary would put me in Singapore for more than a week. In fact, it would mean that I’d have to miss my flight to Boston.

How does it end? Well I’m back in Jakarta and getting ready to leave on Wednesday. The travel agent changed my flight while I was on my way to Singapore for no extra charge. I had a nice Indian vegetarian lunch at my favorite Changi airport restaurant, and got back to Jakarta in the evening.

There have been so many little errand-gone bad adventures over the last year. It’s a funny class of travel story, because they’re sort of hard to tell. The best travel stories have some kind of real disaster or unintended hardship, but they’ve got to be big enough to bother mentioning. In Jakarta among other expat friends, the errand-gone-bad story has a big market. We swap them all the time. Scary motorcycle taxi rides, accidentally ordering food you don’t want, getting stuck in a traffic jam for four hours in the rain.

“Today I tried to go see a movie but there were no English subtitles. You should have seen the drama that ensued when we walked out and asked to see another movie instead.”

That’s a true story. Happened to our friends. The manager called a meeting and blamed the poor couple for failing to realize their error before the movie started. It ends as well as many such stories do. Instead of a French art film , they saw Spiderman III.

It’s not a Joseph Conrad narrative, but those moments can feel just as alienating and desperate and even exotic. They’re hard. Little punctuated moments in the story arc of our adjustment.

Sometime, I’ll tell you the one about my trip to the post office where I had to check in at seven different desks to mail a letter.

Curiouser

“In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.” - Lewis Carroll

For every story I’ve worked on in Indonesia, there’s a moment when I feel like I’m plummeting down a rabbit hole.

“The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.” - Lewis Carroll

Whether I’m covering something by phone for a quick correspondent report, or getting on a plane to unknown worlds, I often feel that ground rush one feels when one’s ass is about to go over one's teakettle.

“Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next.” - Lewis Carroll

For the last couple of months, I’ve been working on one particularly elusive story.

“There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.” - Lewis Carroll

Each dead end seems to give way at just the right moment. In time to tempt me with more doors. Doors which lead inevitably to a set of dead ends. If there weren’t so many little “eat me” cakes and “drink me” bottles along the way, I would probably have surrendered the story by now. But instead I find myself staring up at the underside of a glass table.

So that’s how it’s been for a couple of months. I’ve been working on other projects in the meantime, trying to outrun the white rabbit all the while. That’s at least part of why I’ve become quiet again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Bali Break

Hello, friends. Back from vacation. I took surf lessons, see? Or falling into the water lessons, anyway.

For those who found me because of my reports on bird flu, my apologies for taking a step back. I’ve done just a little reporting about bird flu over the last couple of weeks, but I’m afraid the demand for updates from the international news marked has certainly slowed. The rate of human infections, however, is still steady.

Anyhow, many of you have posted questions, and I mean to get to them – please check comments from previous posts for follow ups.

And to the rest of you - mostly friends and family - it's been a busy time and going to Bali was restorative. Coming in to Kuta beach from the airport, our first view of the ocean brought a somewhat unexpected wave of relief. I have missed the salt.