Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Three Things, Mostly Unrelated Except for a Food Theme

    JMP Update: Everything is going swimmingly in Tangerang.  JMP is having a great time with her students, teaching pianists and violinists how to play the recorder and teaching her three flute students how to become better flutists.  She reports that her students are friendly and quite musically talented–much better than she even expected.  She is the envy of all other faculty at JISMF because she understands Indonesian and can identify unusual foods (e.g., "that’s not a potato, it’s a fish ball" or "this savory pancake is called martabak").

    Food Mistake: Every once in awhile I will order something I’ve never had before at a restaurant so that I can have something new to taste.  Usually it goes well, sometimes not at all.  Yesterday was a "not at all" moment.  I ordered something called sop kikil, which I guess you might translate as ox shank soup.  Ox shanks sound good, I figured it would be a fatty shank bone with some meat on it, sort of like oxtail soup.  What arrived at my table was a bowl full of very spicy and meaty, very delicious broth with fried potatoes and chopped tomatoes and herbs floating on top.  Yum.  When I put my spoon in it, though, I learned that I had the main ingredient was bite-sized pieces of knee joint cartilage, accompanied by some soft fat and marrow.  The fat and marrow were good, but the knee joint cartilage (which you were clearly supposed to eat) not so much.  Fortunately, with all that great broth and a plate of rice, I was happy.

    Found in Translation: I was at a Chinese restaurant the other day called The Grand Duck King.  It’s specialty was fresh fish (of course).  The restaurant was my very favorite kind of Chinese fish restaurant, with a a good fish tank full of living things.  I found some colorful translations of non-native creatures.

    Kepiting laba-laba ("spider crab") = King crab
    Kepiting telur ("Egg crab") = blue crab
    Kepiting banci ("Shemale crab") = I’m not sure what this is, looked like a plain old crab to me
    Kerang gajah ("Elephant clam") = geoduck
    Kerang bambu ("Bamboo clam") = razor clam (this makes sense when you look at one)
    Ikan malas ("Lazy fish") = freshwater bass

  • Pilkada Jateng

    This is a typical Indonesianism: Pilihan Kepala Daerah Jawa Tengah, meaning Gubernatorial Election for Central Java, which took place over the weekend.  We won’t have full results for several days, but the early returns suggest that the ticket from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) will win.  The PDI-P is a nationalist and secular party, and Central Java has a population of about 32 million people, so this election alone involves as many people as elections in the entire countries of Iraq and Afghanistan.  The PDI-P performed much better than the Islamist parties contesting the elections: out of the five tickets contesting, Islamists were 3rd, 4th, and 5th.  The article claims that the three Islamist tickets split the Muslim vote, but this simply cannot be true–to have won 44% of the vote, PDI-P must have won more Muslim votes than these three parties combined.  These elections may reflect what’s to come for the PDI-P in the 2009 general elections: if it can turn out this many supporters in a gubernatorial election, they may be able to fair fare (thanks Mom) just as well across Indonesia when contesting against an incumbent president reeling from inflation.

    Incidentally, there is a funny thing that you can see in the Jakarta Post article that I linked to above.  It references the "Indonesian Survey Circle," or LSI (Lingkaran Survei Indonesia).  I am affiliated with another survey research firm called LSI here in Indonesia, the Indonesian Survey Institute (Lembaga Survei Indonesia).  Needless to say that you don’t want to get your LSIs mixed up.  They even have nearly identical webpages: http://www.lsi.or.id (Lembaga) and http://www.lsi.co.id (Lingkaran) and with two executive directors who have political science PhDs from Ohio State (Saiful and Denny).  Both also employ a technology that they call "quick count" in order to make quick predictions about election winners.  Important to keep these two organizations straight.