Report From Big Mountain

It's been one helluva month around the Far Side Sub-Headquarters here on the flanks of Gunung Gede (Big Mountain - yes, it's a real place, you think we would lie to you?).

The big news is that we had our first month over 12,000 hits, thanks in part to rense.com and henrymakow.com, who both posted some of our articles.  We are also closing in on a quarter-million pages served since we started this bit of personal madness back in May of 2010.  Very exciting stuff for a one-man operation deep in the jungles of Borneo.

The aware reader may have noticed that we replaced the PayPal donate button with a BitCoin one.  Well...seems we were up to some suspicious activities.  One generous reader made a significant donation after our interview with Drs. Farrell and de Hart, so I passed some of it on to those two gents.  According to PayPal, that was enough to suspend our account and demand that we send several pieces of identity papers.

Being the ornery cusses that we are, we told them to get stuffed and took up with more liberty-minded folks over at BitCoin.  Sorry, but to our mind, cross-donating a few bux to a couple of Oxford dons does not constitute subversive activity.  Message to PayPal?  Go screw yourselves!  Our privacy is not a commodity to be traded around.

Next of all, we noticed on a couple of web stat sites that the value of our little operation was going up due to all the traffic we've been getting.  That raised a couple of alarm flags, since it was increasingly valuable to own our name (augenguy, a handle we invented in the early 1990s when the internet was still a novelty).  So we immediately locked up augenguy.com/net/org.  Those links are now hot and (for the moment) point back to this blogsite.  Eventually, they will become entities unto themselves, once we figure out what to do with them.

Our efforts have been greatly aided by our generous donors.  Their support has made a lot of things possible around here that may not be entirely obvious, but nonetheless are helping us grow to serve our audience.

Our goal is create a place that is both entertaining and informative, while being sufficiently unique in style and substance from all the other sites out there.  We don't want to be a news amalgamator, and there are plenty of folks offering op-ed material in the mainstream.  Instead, we want to offer stories that are a little larger in scope than just current headlines, while seasoning everything with a little IndoTex wisdom.  It would seem, from the traffic flow, that people are responding to this rather unique blend.

So, our point?  To give a Big Texas thanks to all the good folks who have been faithful readers and donors over the past three years.  Also, thanks and welcome to all the new readers who are discovering our little effort to change things

We also want to make sure everyone knows about our new domain: AUGENGUY.COM, maybe visit and join our various social media outlets, such as the Radio Far Side FB page, @RadioFarSide twit page, the Vimeo and YouTube channels, and the mirror blog at WordPress, if that's more to your liking.  All the links are in the sidebar.

Keep an eye out over the next couple of months as we start to launch the new Far Side look and feel.  We'll be adding features, redesigning the interface and generally overhauling the whole concept.  We're also nailing down some really BIG interviews with truly global movers and shakers.  We want to bring the very best information to our readers.

Just so y'all know, half of our audience is in Asia and South America.  The other half is from the US, Canada and Europe.  We have a truly global gathering happening here and we aim to keep it that way.

Thanks for your support, dear reader, and please let your friends know about us.  Together, we can make the Far Side a place for unique views and experiences.

So head on down to the kaki lima, order up a serving of nasi kuning with durien for dessert, and get ready for the next phase of your favorite Far Side diversion.

Sampai jumpa! (until we meet again!)
The Far Side staff

My Summer Vacation

Thank God vacation is almost over so we can go backto work and get some rest!  If there's a part of the Universe where logic ceases to exist, then Indonesia is the gravitational center of that region.

What we started with...

We just spent the past 10 days wrangling the Far Side World Headquarters-Java Branch into shape.  It was getting burdensome having to take the ferry to south Kalimantan, take the Vietnam-era Jeep as far as the roads could go, paddle the lizard-skin canoes up to the camp, and get all the monkeys back in line to get things running.

Now we have the Java branch that is much closer, much cooler and with far fewer wives to worry us into a tizzy.  Now we just load up the Far Side Micro Bus with cheese and crackers, and head for the mountains.  Only problem is we haven't finished training the monkeys yet, so there's no one to run the cable or pedal the generators so we can get on the internet.

As a consequence, we found out just how addicted to the internet we really are.

Whipping a jungle house into shape is no easy feat.  First off, Nature put all the trees in the wrong place, so we have to move them around and arrange them just so.  After all, you don't want a coconut falling on you during siesta time, right?  And banana flowers make a horrible mess and are relegated to the back 40 where we don't have to step in all that.

Our poor elephant...

Second, Nature rarely provides a putting green, so there was the matter of leveling and adding good coastal grass, not to mention running into the village to choose just the right goats for grounds-keeping.  And of course goats mean fencing, and not just any fencing.  They can get out of any maximum security state correctional facility without even trying.

Third, trying to level out and square up a bamboo hut is not as straight-forward as you might think.  There's a lot of slop in coconut-fiber rope.  As a result, half the doors won't stay shut, and the other half won't open.  What's more, if you get one side of the house leveled up, it pulls the other side out of plumb.  On top of that, First Wife insists on sweeping dirt floors the whole time, so we have to wear breathing apparati which makes it really hard to see (don't ask).

Then there's the whole matter of mosquitoes.  Now, coming from Texas as we do, you'd think we'd have no problem with this.  After all, Indonesian mosquitoes aren't all that big - only the size of vampire bats or so.  Fact is, the little buggers are really strong.  We put in a triple layer of ultra-fine steel mesh strong enough to stop a charging water buffalo, and then electrified it as a secondary measure.  Finally, we sank the edges into three inches of pine resin and buried them in cement.  The bastards still found a way in...

The last major chore was indoor plumbing.  Now, the natives have no problem squatting in the bushes, but we require a proper throne with an ample library and hot/cold running water in the bidet.  We simply cannot abide an ice water rinse at the crack of dawn.

Now you'd think bamboo would make the perfect piping, right?  After all, it's tube-shaped, comes in various sizes, and once it's dried and cured, would give steel a run for its money.  All of that is true until...you have to turn a corner.  We successfully managed to bend the green poles and dry them in position, but at some point, you just have to have a 90-degree angle.  We won't even mention making the traps for under the sinks and toilets.  Needless to say, that took a doctorate in civil engineering along with a lifetime of good ol' Texas farmboy know-how, and a lot of high-octane lubrication to keep the blood pressure down.

Amidst all this fun, First Wife kept calling us out to look at where she had placed the orchids, and did we like the artistic way she had coiled the flamboyan vine around the porch columns, and what was the bast arrangement for the rosemary and lavender bushes?

The finished World Headquarters!

You may not know this, but rosemary and lavender keep mosquitoes away, so we sunk the GDP of some small nations into buying up the entire regional supply.  Needless to say, the Java branch of the LFS World Headquarters smells like a properly simmering pork roast.  We woke up every morning with our pillow soaked from saliva.  If we could just find a pig in these parts...

One of the things that really irks us around here is that us Great White Hunter guys are like walking clouds of inflation.  The locals, for some stinking reason, think we are just endless supplies of money, so all the prices immediately jump when we walk into a room.  For example, a bundle of bamboo wall stiffeners would cost a local guy one coconut and three puka shells.  We come in and VIOLA!  It's now two coconuts and half a dozen clam shells!

For that reason, we send out scouts in advance (First Wife) to determine the real-world price of things.  On top of that, our scouts can pinch a penny and hand you a dime, which is a primary reason we married her.  Of course, we're still trying to train her that low prices on cheap goods is not the same as a good price for quality.  Also, she hasn't quite figured out that getting things on sale is STILL spending money, even if you get more for less.

Thankfully, it's the Dry Season.  It didn't rain a drop the whole ten days, which is a blessing.  The dirt up there is red volcanic clay.  On the benefit side of things, the soil is so fertile, your goats get pregnant without any billies around.  On the negative side, the stuff sticks to everything when it's wet and hardens into solid stone.  When you walk around in it for a while it builds up on your feet, so that by the end of the day, you're a full ten inches taller than when you started.

Another drawback is trying to plant anything around this time.  It takes a jack-hammer to get more than an inch into it.  Unfortunately, First Wife had the poor elephant so loaded down with furniture and snacks that the beast looked on the verge of collapse by the time we got there.  First Wife kept saying that perhaps our gold-inlaid sedan chair with the 362 silk pillows might have made a difference, but we weren't going to sacrifice our comfort for anything.

Besides, we were able to squeeze a few sticks of dynamite in our suitcase, which made planting the mango trees a snap.  And talk about fun...!

The Look-Alike

At any rate, we finally made it back to civilization.  The traffic coming back was mild, though we wouldn't know, since we were lulled to sleep by the gentle swaying of the elephant's stride.  But First Wife said she had no problem guiding the beast through all the horse carts and guys carrying stuff on bamboo poles on their shoulders while wearing big cone-shaped straw hats.  Wonder how much they paid for that bamboo?

So we're back up to our neck in heat, humidity, noise, and pollution.  Thank God!  All that vacationing was about to kill us!  We sure miss the cold nights and fresh well water, though.  Did wonders for our libido.  Or maybe it was all that fertile soil...

At any rate, on Monday, we once again assume our disguise as mild-mannered editor-in-chief and squirrelly, bespectacled Rudyard Kipling look-alike.  None the worse for the wear, we daresay.  We can't wait to get back there in three weeks to continue the adventure!

It all brings a poem to our mind, one penned by our mentor and look-alike:

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Kissing Baboons In The Jungle

Ah, the medicine's taking effect.  Johnny Black straight-up, two diamonds, water back.

Well, another year has passed and here we are celebrating the annual rite of fertility once again.  Happy Ishtar!  Amazing how the Babylonian pantheon still haunts us after thousands of years.  No matter how advanced we think we are, there's these little reminders that we are still slaves to ghost stories and superstitions.

At any rate, as several kind readers have pointed out, I've been on break around here.  After pumping out nearly 400 articles over the past two years (about one every other day), one just runs out of things to say for a while.  Instead, I've been focusing on my books and trying to catch up on email.

Email is my bane.  When you're a professional writer, doing things like keeping in touch with folks on a personal level seems like a busman's holiday.  It's easier to Skype, but that's problematic since I'm 12 hours out of sync with most of the folks I need to keep in touch with.  There's also the biennial Dear Mom letters that, no matter how I try, never fall short of 10-15 pages, 11-point type single spaced with minimum legible kerning.

The other major distraction has been buying a mountain villa.  Getting back to the Far Side Global Headquarters deep in the jungles of Borneo is a major effort, so we've taken the decision to get a Sub-Headquarters in the mountains south of the city.  It's still jungly and all, with monkeys and strange birds and hornets the size of hummingbirds, just a LOT closer, MUCH cooler and doesn't require a two-day 4-wheeling trip through mosquito-infested swamp to get to.  Most people think I'm kidding, but no.

In the hiatus, I have launched a new career.  I'm quickly becoming Indonesia's most famous stand-up comedians.  Now you may think that's no big deal, but in a country where stand-up has only been invented in the past year, that's no mean feat!  Asian humor runs along the lines of Three Stooges, Henny Youngman and Jerry Lewis (though they don't like the Western comedians).  For someone, especially a foreigner, to gain any amount of popularity doing Carlin/Wright/Lehrer-style material is pretty amazing.

At any rate, we're recording the shows so I can cut together a video for you, though I daresay a lot of it will be incomprehensible, since about half is in Indonesian/Javanese, and the rest relies on cultural familiarity.  Indonesians think it's hysterical.  Far Siders will at least discover I'm not just 2-D words on a page.

Some other notes: besides adding video, we've set up a mirror blog at augenguy.wordpress.com, which is slowly growing, though the content is the same (just behind a bit).  I hoping to release the first LFS e-book, which will be a humorous look at life in Indonesia.  With any luck, that will be out sometime this year.  LOL!  We STILL have plans to get the e-Bay store up and running, where folks can buy handcrafts and such that will directly support the craftsmen and artisans in the villages, and not some factory outlet operation.  A lot of woodcarvings and textiles that are completely unique in every sense of the word.

This past week has been rather fun.  A rash of old friends from past lives have popped up.  A couple even said they've been trying to hunt me down for years.  Hell, I said, all you had to do was Google my name!  You'll get a 1,000 hits, including this blog, Wikipedia, imdb, old articles and newspaper stories, even a couple of somewhat premature obituaries.  It's hard to live these days without leaving some trace on the internet, especially when one makes no attempt whatsoever to hide.  As I said to one, I'm all over the net like a bad smell.

It's funny how those things go.  For some reason, a time comes every few years when a dozen people will find you all at once.  The cyclical nature of life never ceases to amaze me.  It's like the spin cycle in a massive washing machine.  People, places and things seem to keep flying around, bumping into you on occasion.

There was a time, no too long ago, when most of the people you knew lived within 10 miles of you.  Now, I spend my days talking with folks in two dozen countries on six continents in a half-dozen languages.  Even when I'm at the Far Side Global Headquarters deep in the jungles of Borneo, I still get text messages, and occasional email, when the monkeys pedal fast enough.

Which brings us back to pagan rituals.  St. Tebow is gracing the front end of Drudge with an 'Easter message' for us, juxtaposed against three crosses, which of course is the logo for the Dutch bankster houses (see Amsterdam coat of arms).  The symbols are everywhere, when you know what to look for.

At any rate, sorry for the long silence, but know that I appreciate every reader more than you can know.  A special thanks to those who wrote in to check on me.  Still alive, for better or worse.  And yes, we'll continue to bring our rather strange view of the world to you on a regular basis, occasional breaks excepted.  And we'll continue to expand the Far Side into every nook and cranny of the internet, because as George Ure says, "Everything's a business model!"

Happy Ishtar and don't forget, there's layers of meanings behind everything you see and hear in the media.  If you think like that, you'll be less likely to fall prey to them.

By the way, a lot of people don't realize how soft and supple orangutan lips are.  I find myself strangely attracted to the beast.  And her breath wasn't too bad, either...

Sampai jumpa!

Back To Borneo, Part IV

A note to our Indonesian readers: Barangkali anda sebaiknya membeli kalium iodide (KI) yang bisa mencegah sakit kena radiasi. Karena reaktor nuklir di Jepang di bahaya, harus pikir kami karena melindungi sendiri dan keluarga-keluarga kami.

As the saying goes, March comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb.  Certainly, that's been true here in the wilds of Indonesia.  In two weeks, we have been to three countries, spoken four languages, and visited five cities.

For that reason, we have retreated to the LFS world headquarters in the jungles of Borneo for rest and rehab.

And we're already regretting it.

Wife #1 is a mean cuss.  She suspects everyone, trusts no one and hates all of Humanity.  Don't know how we landed her, but we wish we could throw her back.  We are seriously considering sending her back to her parents for additional training, which is our right under village law.  If her daddy gives her a thorough spanking, it might have more impact than if we did it.

Wife #3 has been complaining endlessly about her job as goat-tender.  She says the little buggers can get out of anything.  She's even built a bamboo dome over the goat pen, and they just dig out.  We solved the problem by slaughtering all but one ram and one ewe.  That'll teach the little snorkers.

Only wife #4 is quiet.  She is only 15 and was payment for a debt after we installed HBO on the village's only TV set in the square.  She's just happy to be out of the house, we think.  Her job is threshing the rice, and she just sits there all day picking bits of chaffe out of the pile.  One day, we have a plan to teach her how to winnow.  It might speed things up a bit.  For now, we're too tired to worry about it.

Since we have the only generator in the village, we enjoy things like A/C and a cold beer once in a while, when the tiny refrigerator actually gets one cold enough.  For some reason, though, the generator kept popping in the middle of the night, and we couldn't figure out why.  We checked all the wiring and outlets, and everything seemed fine.  Last night, however, we woke up and wanted an Aceh cigarette and a cup of coffee.  The village looked like Times Square on New Year's Eve.  We think we figured out the problem.

It's been raining like hell for a month now.  Normally, we don't mind that very much, but it does have its drawbacks.  When we go monkey hunting, our loin cloth gets all muddy, which just sets off #1 all the more, even though #2 does all the laundry.  It also washes all the poison off the tip of the arrows, so we have to spend hours tracking the little beasts through the tree tops,  Very annoying that.  We are working on a solution to chemically bond the poison to the arrows, but so far, all we've achieved only a new form of chemical preservative, for which we've already filed patents in seven countries.  So far, it's only been found to cause cancer in one out of four people.  That's a damn sight better than most of the crap in the public food chain right now!

We had a little excitement when a 23-foot Kymoto dragon wandered into the village and ate seven dogs and three children before being subdued.  That was a serious impact to the village food supply and we are worried about what will happen when the Dry season starts.

We did discover that Kymoto dragon is pretty darned delicious, especially bar-b-qued in the classic Texas style, slow-cooked in the ground for 24 hours.  We whipped up some baked beans and potato salad, and the entire village was quietly satiated and happy, except for #1, of course.

Not being satisfied with living in an idyllic location, close to Nature and blissfully uncaring about the outside world, we have created a Public Works department, so that we can engineer the jungle to our satisfaction and start sending bills to all the locals for the service.

The first project is a sewer system.  Seems for generations, folks have been taking care of business upstream from the bathing area.  We designed a sluice box to carry the waste down the banks of the river and deposit it just upstream from the next village.

Someone had the gall to ask why we didn't just move the toilets down the river a bit.  We, naturally, pointed out that if it were that easy, why didn't anyone do it 125 years ago?  So now, the village must pay us one kilo of rice per person two times a year for our thinking ability.

This, of course, leads to project number two: building a silo to store all our new-found wealth.

At this rate, we figure we can recreate the US government in roughly 55 years.  We're already making plans for a vastly expensive space program using hollowed-out trees, so we can place warung in every conceivable place in orbit.  We figure this will give the astronauts from all the other countries little stores where they can pick up coffee and cigarettes between supply runs.

We're testing various designs right now using old plastic cups and used soda straws to create pressure suits.  We're not too concerned about radiation, since most folks around here already have plenty of genetic damage from in-breeding.  In fact, our first astronaut-in-training has seven fingers and six toes on each appendage.

And here comes the rain again.  We were dreading that, since all the wives get randy when it rains.  Looks like there'll be four more mouths to feed come December.  Guess we'll have to raise taxes again.

It ain't easy bringing civilization to Paradise.  People resist paying for things they never needed before, and frankly they were pretty happy without.  But, they need to learn that complex systems are the only way to live.  After all, they could never have watched the Super Bowl if it weren't for us pirating satellite feeds off of G-2.  Not that anyone watched, but it's the idea that we COULD have seen the spectacle of over-paid entertainers in bone-crunching competition trying to move a ball from here to there.

The heathens around here like Australian football, because they don't wear pads and all the entertainers are bleeding and toothless at the end of the game.  How uncivilized!

So, nothing for us to do now but wait for the next Bird to pass over so we can upload our musings to the waiting world.  The wives won't leave me alone.  Even #1 is almost being nice to us just now.  That makes us very nervous,  It means she wants extra today.

We just want to lay here quietly in the A/C and plot our next major civilization project, so we can turn this jungle paradise into the Las Vegas of Borneo and make huge piles of filthy lucre so we can fund our aspirations.  Perhaps a giant ice maker down by the river, so we can bring all the glories of modern life to these savages.

Here's hoping you have a lawn to mow, bills to pay and only one wife.  Happy Sunday at the Temple of Plasma Entertainment.  If, during the commercial breaks, you offer a quick prayer to the gods for us poor, suffering conquistadors out here in the jungles of the world, we'd be more appreciative.  We're still hoping for that new Harley-Davidson, so we have an excuse to build super-highways here in deepest, darkest Borneo.

Sampai jumpa!