Report From FSWHQ

We here we are, the end of a rather remarkable year and the beginning of the dreaded 2012!  It's got us so stirred up here on the Far Side that we've retreated once again to our jungle nest, known as the Far Side World Headquarters, or FSWHQ, for short.

Looking like a scene from the old King Kong movie, we moved our clan back to the forest.  The four wives carried my sedan chair, while the kids and animals were loaded with important things, like a new plasma TeeVee, a pedal-free generator and the new Far Side Satellite Telecommunications Center (FSSTC).  We're going deep undercover for the coming year.

Looking back, we marvel that the world limped past the finish line, though technically we still have hours to go.  The US markets battled to a 'flat' return in the closing seconds of the year's market.  The euro ended up as the worst-performing currency in the world, which is why we brought all our euro-bonds into the jungle with us.  Perfect fire starters.

As far as economics go, Asia looks to be standing head-and-shoulders above their western counterparts.  Indonesia, Vietnam and China are red-hot.  Thailand was doing well until the floods.  Japan is white-hot, though for a different reason.  In fact, we've been collecting the new glow-in-the-dark Yen.

What's really been interesting this year, though, has been watching the PTB/W absolutely panicked, as in cold sweats and sleepless nights.  Their reckless and wild abandon in trying to nail down their little Medieval World Order (MWO) has been rather entertaining to watch, as long as you weren't in a country they destroyed to protect their little fiefdoms.  The MENA (Mid-east/North Africa) folks weren't so lucky to have ring-side seats.

One has to laugh, though, since the MWO is positively falling to bits.  The desperate invasions and attempts to control true grass-roots uprisings across the MENA regions have been like watching the Keystone Kops Kapers.  Part of their problem is something that will never change...human nature.

You see, the MWO has been a multi-century pax belli between a bunch of inbred nutcases, who are so rich and so bored, they cooked up this world domination game to have something to do.  The problem is, the closer it got the reality, the more they started fighting among themselves to be the one king on the top of the dung hill.

As fast as the inbred crowd started sniping at each other, the normal humans out here in Reality Land decided it was a good time to exercise some God-given rights.  So as the self-annointted elites tried to outmaneuver each other, the World was out-maneuvering them, and when they turned to try to nail down the World, the elites would shoot each other in the back.  Now, when you stop laughing at the mental image of that, take a look around and see the results.

Egypt was supposed to be a controlled Soros-colored revolution, but then the revolution revolted against itself to get rid of the MWO clowns.  The MWO clowns wanted to install radically fundamentalist Islamic authoritarians, which the MWO control.  But the good and very intelligent Egyptian people wouldn't hear of it.

The same is happening all across the MENA.  Folks just want to be left the hell alone.  They are tied of trading one totalitarian yutz for another of a different stripe.  Real people really enjoy just going about their business, living in peace and harmony with their neighbors, regardless of what building they choose to worship in.

Amazing how that works.

In Europe, folks everywhere are getting fed up with the whole damn package.  They are tired of the German Neo-Nazi unification called the EU.  They are tired of a completely fabricated currency shoved down their throats.  They are tired of having Goldbar Sacks alumni brazenly take over their countries in un-elected coups after watching the banks rape and pillage their economies.

The Irish fought the EU until it was literally rammed down their throats.  They then watched their red-hot economy turn to ash.  Greece and Italy, while not exactly massive industrial economies, had perked along just fine for centuries, until the EU came along.  Spain and Portugal the same.

The US is quite a tale.  The largest, most powerful economic engine ever known completely imploded due to fiat and regulation.  At the same moment the country was shipping its heart and soul overseas in the name of profit, the Puppetmasters were shoving ever draconian regulations through CONgress to prevent competition from springing up naturally to fill the void.  As a consequence, America poured gallons of Round-Up on its garden since they figured they could buy cheaper veggies from the Asian gardens.  Then the Asian gardeners got properous and wanted to keep more of their produce, so now the American garden is dead and the cheap alternatives have gone on to better deals elsewhere.

All that led to the OWS, which originally was a home-grown movement of folks sick and tired of being Rounded-Up by the bankster classes.  Of course, the Giant Sucking Media (GSM) tried to package that movement and give it a little Soros treatment, so the real folks drifted away, and it became another Tea-Licking Party (TLP).  All the real people are flooding into the Ron Paul camp, which absolutely mystifies the PTB/W crowd, because they did such a fine job of hiding Paul from themselves that they can't see what's going on.

In the meantime, the US, once global champion of peace, human rights and economic miracle-cures, has become a rogue terrorist state that is eating its own children and trying to cobble together a controlled economy without any of the ingredients that constitute an economy.  If you get enough perspective on it, it really is quite entertaining.  Harder to see that part when the bastards are auctioning off your worldly belongings in the yard where you raised your children, while you stand in the icy drizzle clutching your photo album watching your neighbors pick through your DVD collection.

Yep, we gotta admit 2012 is going to be a verrrry interesting year, and no, it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Mayan calendars.  It is, though, a self-fulfilling prophesy.  In their in-bred scramble to keep us in terror-induced zombie mode, the PTB/W made up this whole apocalypse thing, hoping it would keep folks busy battening down the hatches, just like Y2K did.  Instead, it is quickly shaping up to be The End Of The World As They Know It (TEOTWATKI).  They have successfully created the Second Coming, only it's coming for them.  Those who live by the apocalypse, die by the apocalypse.  The rest of us are free to sit back and watch with amusement as everything the PTB/W predicted and tried to scare us with comes true...for THEM!

We, however, meaning us here at FSWHQ, will be happy to sit back and watch the whole thing on the new plasma TeeVee being set up in the village clearing.  The kids are busy scrambling up the coconut trees to put the new dish up.  The wives are busily nattering and playing with the new pedal-less generator.  We're preparing for our celebration tonight by tying sparklers on money tails.  It's just so damned entertaining to watch them run through the tree-tops with their tails on fire!

Out here in the jungles of Borneo, nothing changes much.  Empires come and go.  Currencies rise and fall.  Revolutions sweep across the globe.  But tying fireworks to moneys is always the same great fun.

The world is too much with us, as someone once said.  Time to put away our fear, because the PTB/W are so damned terrified that we can all just sit back and watch the in-breds shoot each other in the foot.  Think of it as the Saturday matinee writ large.  We could even open a window in Vegas and start laying odds on which in-bred families will die-off first.

Oh, they're calling us over to the TeeVee hut to do the honors of tuning in the Thai horror movie channel.  Great fun that.

So we'll wrap up the year by wishing all of our great readers a Happy and Fortunate New Year/Selamat Ulang Tahun Baru.  We'll light up a monkey for you!

And thanks for making Life on the Far Side increasingly popular!  We have added hundreds of new readers in the past year from 93 countries.  We will continue to offer arguments and diversions, and we hope you will continue to enjoy them.

Ah, wife #4 just brought us a large shell full of cap tikus (mouse piss), which is fermented coconut milk.  Nasty stuff, but after the third or fourth shell-full, you can eat the fetal deer at the bottom of the jug and not think twice about it.

Don't give the fascist pigs any reason to haul you off tonight, and we'll see you all again in 2012!

Thank God It's Jum'at!

Sehelai catatan bagi Indonesian readers:

Maafkan kami selama-lamanya memakai bahasa Inggris. Kami tahu bahwa banyak orang Indonesia membaca situs web ini dan kami sangat berterima kasih bagi anda datang di sini. Di masa mendatang, kami akan mencoba menulis beberapa artikel di bahasa Indonesia bagi anda, termasuk tinjauan 'Laskar Pelangi.' Kami sedang mencoba memperoleh uang dengan tulisan kami oleh sebab itu kami berharap anda mengerti. Kami mencintai Indonesia dan cinta yang tinggal di sini. Jangan tersinggung jika kami memakai bahasa Inggris begitu banyak. Terima kasih untuk visitng dan kami berharap anda akan menulis kepada kami dengan komentar anda.

So, with that said, let's start the friggin' weekend, shall we?

Here on the Far Side, we worry a lot about the state of the world during the week, but danged if we ain't gonna cut loose a little on the weekend.  After all, a boy's gotta play once in a while.

Our mother is a real dog fan.  We can't stand the animals, but there you go.  We're cat people around here.  We think dog is delicious and spicy and we'd eat it again if someone would bring a plate over to the house.

Anyway, Mom says that if you don't take dogs out once in a while, they get stupid.  We think that pretty much sums them up, in any case, but she's the expert.

Anyway, we just love living here and Indonesia is a really cool place to live (metaphorically, since it's alway summer here), and we love our wife sooooo much!  But, damn if we don't need to get out once in a while and mingle with our fellow countrymen, even if they're Canadian.  It's hard to find Texans, or even Americans, around here.  We're up to our blessed assurance in Brits, Aussies, Kiwis, and Frogs (go figure...guess they don't like France as much as we do).  We've even found a few Germans and Cubans (!) lying around.  Guess we'll have to settle for Kanuks when the going gets tough.

Living overseas is a richly rewarding experience.  You meet a truly diverse group of folks, every day is a learning experience, and you get to eat things that PETA would be all up in your stuff about back home.  Sure, there are the occasional SNAFUs and jam-ups.  Nothing is perfect.  We even miss winter sometimes.  Well, really we miss those fall northers that clean everything out and let you throw open the doors and windows and get some fresh air in.

When we think about home, we think about manicured lawns and no one hanging out in da hood.  Everything is sanitary and the only thing missing is the paper band around life saying, "Sanitized for your protection."  If you don't get out and see how the other half lives, you tend to forget that there are other ways of looking at problems and alternative solutions to things.

By the way, the next time you're out grilling up a couple of slabs of beef on a Saturday night, try this: use coconut shell for the fuel.  It makes a really tasty flavor that is hard to characterize, and it is a nice break from hickory and mesquite.  A good Indonesian sate has bite-sized pieces of meat on a bamboo skewer, which are grilled on a hibachi with a guy fanning the coconut flames with a kipas, which is a woven fan made of palm leaves.  After grilling, dunk them into sweet soy sauce mixed with crushed red onions, chili peppers and garlic (goat and beef), or a spicy peanut sauce (chicken).

Damn if it ain't some good eatin'.  One secret to good sate is to put one piece of fat among the delectable morsels of flesh.

One thing we have introduced to Indonesians is a decent Texas taco.  Oh, sure, they have kebab, which is more or less like a burrito with Mediterranean spices, but the locals really love our down-home tacos with a good Texas sambal sauce.  The only thing missing is a decent corn tortilla, but we're working on that one.  Next we are introducing beer-battered onion rings.  Should be a major hit.

One thing we can rightfully complain about is, enough with the rice.  We are up to our eye-balls in rice.  The rice is killing us.  NO MORE RICE!

Don't get us wrong.  We grew up in Houston, which back in the day, was a major rice producer.  Now the paddy out Katy way are covered with middle class McMansions that flood everytime you flush the toilet.  Serves 'em right for building a house in a field that was designed to flood.

But having rice every damn meal, and not just a helping, but a HUGE damn bowl full, is just too much.  Our body isn't designed for that kind of starch assault.  Being of Irish decent, we like a good spud or two, but can't we use ANY OTHER GRAINS?

Traditionally, Indonesian food, and really most southeast Asian food, is supposed to be eaten with the hands.  Other than sticks, they really didn't have utensils until the European colonization period.  So, instead, you use the sticky rice to make a scoop on your index and middle fingers.  Then you gather up some of the goodies and suck the whole thing into your salivating mouth.  Try it the next time you go out to a Thai or Vietnamese restaurant.  I'm sure the staff will enjoy showing you.

It's actually kind of amusing to watch upper-middle class folks sit on the floor with a dozen bowls of food in the center and each with a bowl of sticky rice.  They didn't have tables here until the Portaguese showed up, which is why the Indonesian word for table is meja, same as the Portugese.  And does anyone really know how to spell portigeuse?

One highly offensive food we have found here is called jengkol.  It looks like a lima bean on steroids.  It's the size of a cat's kidney and not only smells offensive when it's being cooked, but like asperagus, it 'seasons' one's urine and breath for a day or two afterwards.  We try to avoid it whenever possible.

How we got on to this food thing is a good question.  Our guess is that we're hungry, though it's 3am local time.  But we are enjoying a fine Panther Stout, which is put out by the Bali Hai brewery.  They make one of three dominant lagers in the country, the others being Bintang and Anker.  To our tastes, the Bali Hai lager is the best, with Anker a close second.  Most folks buy the Bintang because it's cheap and because the locals like to mix it with anggur orang tua, or 'parental grapes.'

Therein lies a story.  Anggur orang tua is a wine made from red flame grapes and aged about 10 minutes.  It's seasoned with clove and other spices, which gives it a mediciny taste.  It is usually served over ice mixed one-to-one with beer.  The concoction is not unpleasant, but it leaves a nice headache in its wake.

Other local 'medicines' include arak, which is a liquor made from oranges, and the high-end versions are pretty close to Gran Marinier. 

One of the more unusual brews is called cap tikus, or mouse piss.  It is distilled from coconut milk and the real, traditional version has a fetal deer in it, not unlike the mescal worm.  The liquor and the creature are steeped together for two weeks, leaving the cap tikus a pink color (normally clear to cloudy white).  Supposedly, it imbues the liquor with the 'essense' of the deer.  Variations include other critters, with bat being the most common.

One other concoction of note is darah kobra, or cobra blood.  It begins with a mystery brew containing fruit and flowers, with a reddish tint.  You then behead the cobra and immediately drain the blood into a hi-ball glass with the mystery fluid (that looks something like transmission fluid).  The snake is then gutted and the spleen squeezed into the mix.  A quick stir, and viola!

It's quite good, actually, and goes really well with the sate kobra you are about to eat.  The snake you just drank is diced and skewered, grilled and dunked in spicy peanet sauce.  We highly recommend it!

So, enough of all that.  It's Friday for some of our readers, and already Saturday morning here.  Time to get things together for the weekend.  It's payday and the fridge is full of delicious food and beer.  No time like the present to dive in!

Happy weekend, and may all your meals include rice!