Last post for a couple of months. I’ll be back again this summer, maybe with JM again. I’ll close with some final thoughts, with no common connection among them.
- I like all fruits in Indonesia except for durian and papaya. Many people like papaya, but many people do not. It’s too cloying. I think it tastes like dirty rotten trash.
- Qatar Airways has great on-demand music. I mentioned this previously, but I did some more exploring and it’s much better than I thought. In addition to the previous ones I mentioned, I found Pet Sounds, Who’s Next, loads of Beatles/Stones/Zeppelin, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Parklife, Different Class, Joy Division (the second one), Massive Attack (the first one), Doolittle, Odelay, the “big three” of 90s grunge (Nevermind, Ten, Badmotorfinger), and tons more that escape me now. If the list of albums that Qatar Airways had was my entire collection of albums for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t be too upset. I wonder if the Qatari government knows what Lou Reed is actually talking about on Transformer.
- It’s raining here. Didn’t think that happened.
- When Soeharto dies, I’ll write an obituary here, even if I’m in the states.
- It actually is difficult to tell what parties are Islamic parties, even if you use the simple metric we use (do they say that their basis is Islam?). Is a party whose basis is officially Pancasila, but which is a political organization based on a moderate Muslim organization of about 30 million people called “The Awakening of the Ulama,” an Islamic party or not? We’ll let the respondents tell us what they think. This summer, I’ll ask the leaders what they think themselves.
Tom Pepinsky 