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| Your results:
You are Hulk| Hulk |
| 95% | | Wonder Woman |
| 78% | | Iron Man |
| 75% | | Green Lantern |
| 75% | | Supergirl |
| 68% | | The Flash |
| 65% | | Superman |
| 65% | | Robin |
| 60% | | Spider-Man |
| 55% | | Catwoman |
| 40% | | Batman |
| 30% |
| You are a wanderer with
amazing strength.
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Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz
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| Does anyone remember George W Bush's GROUND ZERO / I CAN HEAR YOU pep talk?
Didn't he say something about supporting the volunteer rescue people who were there, working long hours, sifting through asbestos and fiberglass?
Having just seen the movie Sicko, I am flabbergasted that those volunteers have not had the kind of health care and support which they deserve.
Bush and his administration, beguiling the collective American heart, talked us into getting into this senseless war in Iraq. Talked us into showing Iraqis 'shock and awe', which really means 'death and destruction'. Before he could stand trial for and confront the ramifications of all of his crimes, Saddam Hussein was executed with more dignity and respect than we show the cows and pigs that nourish us.
The economy has been driven into the ground, all of Clinton's budget balancing and debt erasure are things of the past. And Bush is richer, Cheney is richer, Iraq is loaded with contractors and subcontractors who don't know what they're doing (except making money), and every day more and more Iraqi women become addicted to Valium than anywhere else on the planet.
I know that ol' Dex is usually an upbeat fella, but memorials are for reflection, for thoughts about the fallen (and who profited), and sometimes for philosophizing.
War, terrorism, violence, hatred: all pretty much the same. Bush may not be a wife beater, but he has ordered the destruction, mass murder, and chaos that holds Iraqi people in a very sad state indeed. An invasion like his... something massive and ugly coming in and killing people seemingly at random... it's gotta feel like... like a hijacked airplane slamming into a city and destroying a whole neighborhood.
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| ...and I don't mean on a desktop product.
Ol' Dexter had a short story in a certain Asian literary review, which is pretty nice, especially because the fat anthology came hot off the proverbial Gutenberg right smack dab in the middle of the Hong Kong Literary Festival. How do you like them mangoes?
Now to work on that novel...
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| Anyone see Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli? There's a scene in which Bergman, playing a European refugee who has hastily married a goodlooking Italian fisherman, witnesses the brutality of netting and retrieving tuna. She's absolutely horrified. The tuna fishing scene is a little bit gruesome, what with the kicking, gasping fish being hauled up on hooks into boats... but what the black and white cinematography failed to show audiences is the blood. Dex got a good dose of that on the BBC News show, Asia Today.
It seems that Japan has been overfishing bluefin tuna in the Indian Ocean, and they are actually voluntarily working with other countries to curb their quotas and therefore give the dwindling stocks a bit of time to recover. I guess I'm glad for that, but it's sad news. The report was aired tonight with footage of fishermen hooking massive amounts of the struggling fish. So much fish blood that the seawater was red. Piles of the dying tuna thrashed helplessly on the decks of the boats. Granted, tuna don't exactly have a lot of facial expressions, but they had the look of desperation and terror about them. It was creepy.
Bali and Lombok magazines have recently printed articles about the "no more fish by 2050" story released in December.
I had a lovely grilled fillet tonight with Komang's excellent sambal Bali. It wasn't tuna, but some kind of delicious local fish. I will definitely have one of these again, but tuna sushi... wow, I don't know about that.
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| Is Mount Agung smoking?
Nice day today, with an unusual south westerly wind that is hot and dry. It's a little odd to see a steady plume of smoke emanating from what appears to be the same place, as yesterday, on the slopes of Mount Agung. Now, it's under the brush and tree line, so it could just be some misinformed farmer burning for the planting season, but it's weird to see it going 2 days straight.
It might seem to be a Muslim holiday. Mobs of Muslims are flocking to the abandoned restaurant foundation at the beginning of Seraya Barat. I'm not sure what the occasion is. There are just a lot of cars jamming the little road. There was also one bus, the elephantine variety, plying its way from Amlapura to Ujung... there oughta be a law against ones of that size using the little roads there.
I find out that it is a Baha'i holiday, the birthday of the founder, I guess. ( Baha'u'llah ). So the big gathering might just be the end of the work week family fun time, I guess.
Last night I went to a charity piano concert given for a worthy cause. More on the music after I edit this blog entry. It was great to pig out on the hors douevres: little crab satay things, spring rolls, crudites, tiny little chocolate eclairs, and all the peppermint tea I could quaff! All these calories were just what I needed after a week of the cook being out sick. I just got over some kind of weird Indian airplane bug, myself. Sidelined me for two weeks, easy. I guess I wasn't eating enough until last night, and I was actually so weak that I had to vigorously convince myself to go to this concert in the first place. I was very glad I went. I felt energized afterwards. And actually, aside from meeting a very jaded sports writer with a lot of cranky comments about some of my fellow writers, I had a good time and met some nice people.
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