Goresan Ngawur

I  have been having a hectic schedule for the past two weeks, sooo many papers to write, tons of reference books to read and some exams to prepare as well. Combination of sleep deprivation and extreme tiredness made me suffered from what Indonesians call masuk-angin-berat. It was last Friday when I started to feel sick. I still invited some friends to play table tennis in my dorm and went to Korean Yakiniku restaurant that night.

Yesterday, instead of taking enough rest and despite freezing day, I stupidly went out again with some friends until midnight. I was almost joining my friends for Karaoke until dawn but I eventually decided to walk back home. I could not sleep last night, numbers in my heater’s remote control already showed 27 degrees Celsius and I already wore 4 pieces of clothes but still felt cold. Time showed 6 a.m, I was still awake, I called my girlfriend to chat for minutes and, later, Anton and asked him to come and kerok me. After three hours of sleep, I woke up and went to church. Here I am now, just returning from church and feeling a bit better. Really sleepy though.

Anyway, I want to say MERRY CHRISTMAS 2008 for those who celebrate it and HAPPY NEW YEAR 2009. I sincerely hope you guys will enjoy your holiday too because I certainly know I am going to have lot of fun in this holiday. : I will be away most of the time until first week of January, so please do accept my apology for not (choose any of these following) visiting your blog, writing comments on your articles or moderating your comments in this blog.

On a lighter note, my friend just told me that there is friendster’s logo in Indonesian 1000 rupiahs bank note. It is in second buttons form the top of Captain Pattimura’s cloth. You might already know this, but I just knew it and found it kind of funny.

Image #1 was taken from here and Image #2 was taken from here.

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People swear to insult others, emphasize something or curse when something bad happens. According to Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, the last one is called cathartic swearing. You swear to express your negative emotions. You may say name of animals, genitals, infamous four letters F-word, etc.

I do not really swear a lot, although I have to admit that I find it really difficult to resist the temptation of doing cathartic swearing. Yeah yeah, I know there are some of you who think that to swear is uncool. I am working on it. Anyway, I personally think that people’s mouth easily becomes like truck driver’s (borrowing Rima Fauzi’s term) when they encounter sudden and unexpected bad things. I have two examples for this. Read the rest of this entry »

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Somali pirates have been hijacking 39 ships this year, mostly in Gulf of Aden. One of the latest attacks was on Liberian-flagged Sirius Star, owned by Saudi Arabian oil company. It carried 2 million barrels of crude oil and its cargo worths $100 million. Pirates had asked for $25 million ransom and kept its 25 crews captive.

I found one interesting article in BBC on how ship owners pay the ransom and summarize it here. After pirates got on the ship, they would hire someone they trust as negotiator to contact the ship owner. Ship owner himself would use professional private security firm to negotiate on his behalf with pirates’ negotiator. They might have some discussion on how to deliver the ransom, be it by money transfer, direct handover (the most common method) or air-drops.

Pirates’ negotiator would get the same share with other pirates. Private security firm would get somewhere around $100.000. This article also mentioned that some pirates do not like dollar printed before 2000 which pretty much reminded me of some money changers in Jakarta. Anyway, it seems that people are making a large profit from this piracy thing. Do you want to risk their life for $100.000 by boarding on ship which is full of armed pirates and handling bags of dollars to them?

You might want to read Newsweek’s Sharks in the Water to have some ideas on how to fight Somali Pirates.

Image was taken from here.

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My professor recommended this book to have broader image of Putin’s meteoric rise to power. I found this book available for 3 days loan in university’s library and just finished reading it.

Vladimir Putin was widely known as mysterious guy when incumbent President Boris Yeltsin suddenly resigned and appointed him to be acting President in December 1999. This book was published in 2000 and contained in-depth recorded six separate interviews (each lasted for 4 hours) between Vladimir Putin and three Russian journalist. Almost the whole interview was written down verbatim in question-and-answer format.

The book itself was quite thin, 206 pages, and briefly covered almost entire life of Putin. His life story was separated into nine parts: The Son,The Schoolboy, The University Student, The Young Specialist, The Spy, The Democrat, The Bureaucrat, The Family Man and The Politician. The Family Man part was the interview with Putin’s wife and their two daughters.

I have to say that I enjoyed reading this book and rate it as a must-read for Putin’s fans. It was especially interesting to know in-detail his opinions on separatism in Chechnya and why he ended up using forces against them. The book might be in favor of him a bit, but I personally think that he and the journalists did not agree on several issues, e.g Chechnya. There are also exclusive pictures of him, his family and his colleagues and 3-lines short introduction of somewhat unfamiliar principal figures in this book. Here are some interesting things I found about him in this book: Read the rest of this entry »

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I am not a Facebook geek and never added those stupid and useless Facebook applications; but this Geo Challenge application is surely fun. I just knew about this application last week and have grown fond of it.

You are given 60 seconds to complete each of three available stages. In Suitcase Shuffle, you have to match countries with their flags. I used to read The World Encyclopedia of Flags and remembered flags there when I was in Junior High School which helps me a lot to pass this first stage with great score. In Map Mayhem, you have to match countries with their geographical shapes. Last stage is City Blitz. You are asked to put pin wherever you think certain cities are located. The closer you put your pin, the higher your score will be.

After they calculated your total score, they will tell you your ranking. There are 35 rankings, ranging from agoraphobe, bus driver, geography student, cabin crew, news anchor, airline pilot, diplomat to superhuman. My high score is 21.091 which made me ranked as cartographer. One guy named Mario score more than 77 thousands and ranked as geography guru.

Anyway, I highly recommend this application for those who are excel in Geography. Even if you are not, you can have some fun and learn something by taking this quiz.

P.S: Some people invited me to be his/her friends on Facebook or even asked me to add them. Truly sorry, I have to reject your invitations since I do not want to have unknown stranger in my friends list. We can still be friend through this blog, can’t we? I appreciate your understanding.

Image was taken from here.

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Lot of experts in the world have been producing works on the relationship between democracy and economic development and I think it will be very interesting to discuss about their theories. One of the most important riddle is how each of them affect another.

More than two thousand years ago, in his On Democracy and Tyranny, Aristotle argued that the best form of government should be dominated by middle class people because they had nothing to covet from upper class and nothing to be coveted by lower class. Government dominated by lower class would feature power abuses and mob rules while that dominated by upper class would be an oligarchic one. Government ruled by middle class, thus was the least likely to end up in seditions and greediness.

Similar argument was made by neoconservative Seymour Martin Lipset who was famous for his “The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy”. He predicted that economic development would have a very strong effect on democratization. Former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, added that people are ready to sacrifice their political freedom and prioritize their economic needs in time of misery. Read the rest of this entry »

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It seems that Obama became hot topics among bloggers recently, be it his interesting multi ethnic background, his deceased grandmother, his campaign for change or whatsoever. You might not find those things here since I am more interested to write on something else.It is moment of bliss for people around the world, from Kenya to Indonesia, from Europe to America. They think Americans had done right thing to vote for Barry. I can see the air of big expectations that he can make better America and eventually better world. I am not saying that I do not trust him, but we must realize that there are lot of difficult tasks waiting for him. Read the rest of this entry »

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The exact day of their execution has not been announced yet, but it will be in early November.

Why kill people to tell them that to kill people is wrong? Yeah, that is exactly what Amnesty International’s members kind of guys always say. Some of you might say it violates human rights and blablabla or biblically argue that only God has right to take one’s life. I am not sure about my own opinion on capital punishment. I am just sure about one thing, I do not like gloating and lack of remorse look in their face. It might be easier to give them forgiveness if they apologized for having masterminded such an horrendous thing.

Remember all the sufferings victim’s family had, the long-awaited execution will be a moment of bliss for them. I remember Metro TV invited one lady who was lucky enough not to get killed in the tragedy but to spend the rest of her life with terrible scars in her face. She was mocked by lot of people because of her face and became depressed. Her husband eventually committed crime in hope he would be imprisoned in Nusa Kambangan like Amrozi, thus he would have chance to kill him. Unfortunately, he was imprisoned somewhere else. I felt really bad to see her facing such difficulties in life.

Well, whatever objections people raise about the execution, it will indubitably take place. Amrozi, Imam Samudra and Ali Ghufron also uttered no complaints, so be it happens??!! What do you think?

Read also Pelopor’s interesting article on this issue here.

Image was taken from here.

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