Indonesia – General
I’m an old guy. I remember the first commercially successful video game – a 2-dimensional tennis game called Pong on which I used to destroy my friend Tim. My first computer was an Osborne, named after its creator, Adam Osborne. It was the world’s first commercially available portable computer, so heavy it was called a [...]
Graffiti is everywhere, from the subway cars of New York and Bangkok to the streets of Bandung. Here, Aris tells us that at least some of the graffiti is gang-related, as it is back in the states. But my favorite drawing here has no gang connotations at all – it’s just fun. The graffiti was [...]
The first thing you notice as you enter just about any Indonesian city, other than perhaps the traffic, is the smells. You’re not as much assaulted by them as you are beaten over the head by a cricket bat full of all kinds of odors. Standing recently at a mobile Singkong Keju stand (similar to [...]
I’m terrible with languages. Research has shown that children exposed early in life to different dialects are able to learn languages more easily later in life. That gives me a small amount of comfort. As a kid I had a few weeks of French in 4th or 5th grade, and that’s it. In high school [...]
As the saying goes, there’s always more than one way to skin a cat. In this instance, it’s playing a flute. This street musician generates air by blowing through his nose. I guess it’s one way to keep people from borrowing your instrument.
It’s the dry season in Bandung – you can tell by the heat. Since the beginning of May we’ve had many more days where the daytime temperature, rather than hitting the high 80s, has well exceeded 90-degrees. At night, the muggy air in my bedroom never drops below 80. It’s hard to tell that it’s [...]
Advertising for new Hawaii Five-O episodes, broadcast on the AXN cable television network: “The hot bods, in the hot rods! Hawaii Five-O…” Television promotion writers are apparently the same around the world.
One of the great things about living overseas is that you’re sometimes forced to move out of your comfort zone. That’s actually a good thing – as the post-modernist French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once said, “To open our eyes to the absurdity of our own customs is the charm and benefit of travel.” By nature [...]
I had my name up in lights today. I’ve been fortunate during my career to have accomplished things I never dreamed possible when I started in broadcasting as a young kid back in 1974 (every time I say that I feel really old). I anchored NPR newscasts from London during the first Gulf War (the [...]