Swimming bored

I try to get three sessions of open water swimming in every week now. I want to be able to swim 10k by the end of my time here. I made reasonable progress since starting five months ago but it's been tough going since. I recall I struggled to complete my first 800m in my first week here, hugging the shore of Tanjua'An Beach closely, afraid of being swept out by the current, suffering from the heat and possibly foot cramps.

After about a month, I closed in on 2k (in actually open water, where one has better visibility and less injuries from the corals at low tide in the shallow ends).

Inspite of taking to heart the many suggestions from Total Immersion Swimming, I have stalled at around 6k now. I can't seem to get past this mark: either my nose is clogged up with salt, or my head hurts, or the sun's burned my arms off. I just get back to my starting point, treading water, and I can't get myself to swim another lap.

An hour into all my swims I start to get bored from swimming. Really bored. I'll write about this another time because it relates to the lack of sealife which is a subject for another post.

But one solution is this: there are waterproof ipods and mp3 players out on the market. I know the actual ipod name has a different etymology. But since “pod” refers to “a group of aquatic mammals”, then “i-pod” is simply a single aquatic mammal. Thereby every swimmer who listens to music should rightfully own an ipod, as he or she is forming a pod by themselves. I have taken this idea up with Steve Jobs and suggested Apple sponsors bored swimmers, but he never returns my phone calls.

I was not born in the Alps...

...And it ain't my fault I wasn't born a third to the two über-human Huber brothers, who count among the fastest mountain-climbers in the world.

Proof I would not be the third-wheel though:

My ascension of Mount Batur in Bali took a mere 2 hours from the base camp. My buddies on this one were Patrick and Kai. We ran all the way. Uphill.

This was followed by steamed eggs and bananas. Steamed with geothermic heat, mind you. Breakfast for champions, right there.

Last week we ran up Mount Rinjani. I don’t know how fast we were, but we were greeted at the crater rim with a volcanic fanfare. The funny thing is we saw the fumes rising long before we heard the eruption. One would expect to hear an eruption first and then see the ashes blow, right or not?

From Rinjani (Lombok) you can see all the way to Bali (west) and Flores (east). The morning sky, the colours and the 360° view over the clouds were beautiful. For a minute there I made new career plans to become a Lufthansa pilot.

Apakah kuda anda punya nama?

"Does your horse have a name?"
We Westerners give names to everything, even inanimate objects: Big Blue; the Eiffel Tower; Herbie.

We also give names to our animals. Even the ones we shoot into space. The Albert series (Albert I, Albert II etc.) were a series of rhesus monkeys and mice launched by NASA in the early days of space programs. "Laika" was the name of the dog launched by the Soviets in a Sputnik 2, which was the first animal to orbit Earth. Her original name was Kudryavka (“Little Curly”).

Giving names to animals seems very natural to us Westerners, since we communicate with them. Or think we do. Indonesians typically don't give their animals any names. The Cidomo (Indonesian horse-drawn cart) drivers don't have names for their horses which I find bewildering, since they work as a team together every day and they DO communicate.

Do you remember the peasant in “Dances with Wolves”, the one who takes John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) to his prairie post, and who keeps talking to his mules in a funny voice: “Hoh, little Jim...” Yes, well, Cidomo drivers would give this guy odd stares.

Cognitively speaking, as soon as you give something a name, it becomes something else. So, a horse with a name is something else than a cat without a name. Which you wouldn’t argue with. And is not a horse with a name also something else than a horse without a horse-shoe? And now, in this string of formidable Socratic dialectic, the final stroke: is not a named horse (e.g. Jolly Jumper) a different thing to a nameless horse (insert: horse without a name)?

I wondered thusly, what does a name do for an animal’s self-perception and identity? Do Western cats have - because they have names - different identities and perceptions of themselves than Indonesian cats?

In the wild, surely animals don’t call each other by names. They do communicate. But do they verbally address one another by names, or just by the sound and intonation of their voice? So have we Westerners in fact alienated our cats and dogs from themselves by giving them names that are unnatural to them? Have I forced onto my dog the idea that he could be a “Jerry” when in fact he is a “Jim”?

Sorry, Jim.

Skiduearinosuda!

It has been a very snowy spring in Europe. From Portugal to Italy they have recorded record snowfalls this year.

There has been no snowfall in Lombok yet. But we are hopeful and waiting. Rinjani Volcano measures over 3,700m in altitude, so it should be an obvious pick for snowfall.

And then I had a good idea with Kai. There is a perfect statistical correlation between Olympic winter games and snowfall patterns. Preparations in July for Winter Games in December has always warranted snowfall in December too. Much in the same way that "Christmas card sales Granger-cause Christmas!" which is the Granger-cause theorem. So if we all bought tickets for the Olympic winter games in Lombok, there is likely going to be snowfall in Lombok too. So taking this causal relationship to heart, Kai and I drafted up a petition to bring the Olympic winter games to Lombok in 2020.

But it hasn’t stopped there. Imagine carving down the slopes of Rinjani past three ecological zones: first, a frozen volcano crater; second, green rice terraces ; and third, the white sand beaches off Lombok coast. Thusly, our motto will be “ski at dusk, eat rice at noon, surf at dawn” . We sat down with some creative writers and after a few hours they came up with “skiduearinosuda” which we felt captures the motto justly. With this motto we can in fact hold the Summer and Winter Games in the same year!

What are we waiting for?

Dear Brussels...

Let me apologize for this somewhat populist, Marxist and disgruntled blog entry from the start. But as a EU citizen, you can’t help wonder about Brussels sometimes...

My sister recently forwarded me a link to the EU in Brussels who have posted job vacancies. The EU in Brussels is hiring junior staff for audit, economics, law etc. until April 15th, so hurry if you think this one’s for you.

I looked at the salary structure for these jobs by the name of AD 5. AD 5 level is sort of the entrance level for people with academic background, i.e. Bachelor or an equivalent 3 years of study and more. And I couldn’t believe my eyes. They offer a fancy € 3,900 basic salary for junior staff under the age of 27. That would still be at least net € 3,000. Now add to this figure expatriation allowances (16% of gross) and other benefits again. Really not so bad.

Brussel’s thinking must be that they want to attract the smartest people out there. Now I do realize that the kids who get these jobs are smart. They have gone through an extensive selection process and several assessment centres. But that’s crazy pay, even by private sector standards. I don’t think starting salaries for young people without work experience in their mid-20s should be that high. Besides, the job market really isn’t that rosy, so smart people would apply for EU jobs even at lower starting salaries.

For comparison, the mean net income in Germany in 2006 was at € 18,000. And the middle class income bracket in Germany is defined, according to the DIW, to be 70%-150% of the median net income (which is € 16,000), which means between € 1,000-2,200 monthly net income for a single-person household. That would mean that Brussels catapults twenty-something singles with a basic starting salary of € 3,900 right into the upper class.

Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of upward mobility and that people should be remunerated richly for the work they do. But not at 25! Plus, public servants' salaries should match the overall income level in an economy. European middle classes aren't really as rich as assumed. I know a lot of educated people in their 30s and 40s in white-collar jobs, with tons of work-experience, who don't earn that kind of money. Middle classes across Europe don't earn that kind of money now.

I know this sounds very Marxist, but I think the salary structures in place in Brussels beg the question if we have a union of democratic countries ruled by an upper class? And the upper class seems to think it's alright. Dear Brussels, how about a reality-check?

Wakes and football absenteeism

Today was the second wake in a month I’ve been to with colleagues from work. The first one was the wake of a janitor/gardener from our office who died about a month ago. I was astonished to see that 80 people from our office - everyone - came out. That would never happen in a Western work-place, even with a very special janitor. Then again, it happened during work-time. I’d just got into the office that morning when someone informed me of his death. And then they asked me if I would go to the wake? My reaction was: “What, now?”

Everyone came to pay last respects to him. He was a very likeable person. I didn’t know him well but we exchanged many smiles and I gave him a lift on my motor-cycle once.

Today was the other wake. It was actually for a family member of a young colleague. I’ve never met the deceased person but I know this colleague fairly well. Again, pretty much the whole office emptied out and we paid the visit together.

In Germany, funerals are often a small crowd, no larger than maybe one or two dozen people. Here we are talking of at least one hundred at a wake! Would it flatter or relieve you to know if a hundred people came to pay last respects to you?

Wakes here in Lombok are not a morose and solemn thing. While everyone expresses condolences to the family, there is some noticeable laughing and chatter going on.

And through the chatter, I kept wondering about Taylorism and labor productivity, good governance and cultural differences. This time, I was really intrigued. Is this right, I kept wondering? To my Western mind there is an obvious conflict of interest: we are a government office and expected to be at work. And yet this is what is customary here and - in Lombok at least - most government offices would do. The employees leave work for an hour to go to a wake. They see it as a duty to the deceased and the mourning family. And in the end I guess social customs and duties make a place such as this tick.

Will this custom ever change, I wondered? Imagine you wanted to go to your local citizen center and it was empty due to a staff’s decease? Shouldn’t wakes be attended outside work-time maybe, one might delicately ask? But then, as we know, wakes and funerals are hardly attended by the same numbers in the West at all. Our societal fabric has been broken down and changed since industrialization, and do we have a recipe for other nations to revamp their social fabric in a more harmonic way?

So while I was still thinking about the said conflicts of interest and said good governance aspects, how this could relate to a different culture than my own, I realized the little hypocrisy in my position. While we in the West would say it is inappropriate to stop work to go to a wake or funeral, we will stop work for much more trivial things:

If you are a tax payer in a football-loving nation, beware of 2010. Having worked a summer-job after high-school in the courier service of the Foreign Ministry - this was the 2002 World Cup - I can tell you from personal experience that all work there grinds to a halt when games are on. I had almost no files to send and carry around at all during the 90 minutes of German football matches. Mail-traffic within the ministry dwindled to a 5%, and every file that did go round was marked in red letters with “urgent”. Which tells you that really only urgent stuff got done, and all the other stuff could wait.

A similar thing was noted by economists in England about worker absenteeism during England matches in the World Cup. They calculated that UK businesses lost up to £100m a day as thousands of Englishmen skived work to follow the England matches. Which, to an economist at least, makes it a blessing in disguise if your country comes home early from the World Cup.

What I understood about the biogeography of this place

This past weekend, Kai and I have shortly indulged in ornithology. This happened on the Ashtari terrace which offers a great panoramic view of Kuta valley, and a good view of the close-range vegetation. (We actually strayed outside to see monkeys which you can hear in the near-by banana trees but saw none. So we turned our attention to the birds.)

Here is a list of birds we saw: Blaubruecher (the males are only blue during mating season), Kronklammflecker, Brinkgenustler, and Fallfledderer. We also heard the chirrup and twitter of the Tonmongrel and, more distantly, the Samthefler. These are actually bird names we came up with!

Indonesia is a bird-watcher’s paradise. Some bird species here are indigenous to island groups and have evolved entirely on their own. The Sunda shelf used to link the Indonesian archipelago islands to one another and to Asia during the ice ages. The Wallacea islands that Lombok is a part of, however, lie behind the Wallacea line, east of Bali. Bali shares more of its mammal fauna with East Asia than with Lombok, only some 35 km across the Wallacea line. Because Bali and Lombok were probably never connected during the ice ages - the strait here is too deep - the strait has been impassable for many species from the west, including land birds.

It has also been impenetrable for land birds from the east (Australia-New Guinea) due to Lydekker’s line. (I hope my biogeography is correct here, call me out if not.)

There are so few birds left on Lombok. Alas, some people have made it a sport to shoot down the few ones left. So rarely one sees or hears birds in the sky, which I took a while to realize. But now that I noticed it makes me sad.

Things I have learned about myself

The past five months living in Indonesia have taught me some interesting things about myself.

I spent many hours a week cooking in Berlin. I haven't done any cooking since coming to Indonesia, other than prepare a cheese sandwich or a cup of tea. The strange thing is, I don't miss it. And I thought I enjoyed cooking.

I have not played an instrument since arriving here. I thought I would, hence I brought some guitar picks and a harmonica from Germany. But my house’s walls are paper thin.

I have instead taken up new activities, like swimming. I've never before enjoyed swimming but it consumes most of my free afternoons here now. I’ve also never cared for technical aspects of a sport, like how to swim efficiently, but I do now. I am reading a 300-page book full with illustrations about proper freestyle technique. 300 pages, no kidding. This may be a tautology but I am turning into a geek.

Being a geek, I figured I’d go all the way. So I have given my Mozilla Firefox a new “persona” (as it's called). There is a new layout to every week now.

I write a blog now. Mostly about things that aren't worth writing home about. And yet here I am doing it again.

I've started to enjoy eating food outside. (Possibly, because I can actually afford it.) There is a mall in Mataram in West-Lombok. I regularly enjoy strolling through it - if I can, once a week. I used to hate malls.

I have sinned twice and eaten McSundaes, breaking my 12-years old McDonald's boycott. (They don’t have McCafés here yet.) I have repeatedly been to Pizza Hut. And enjoyed it.

Here are things I miss:
I miss my bike rides. I miss returning home and the last stretch on a summer evening, or in the breezy smell of autumn or winter dark - any season really - across the cobble-stoned streets. I had customary routes through those treacherous cobblestone streets.

I miss sinking into the kitchen chair, the BBC broadcasts, making Rahmspinat with pasta. They have a water-spinach dish here called 'ceh kangkung'. It's excellent. But it's not the same.

I miss bumping into friends in the Kiez. But I don't miss the Kiez. I only miss my friends.

I never thought I was a latté lover but I do miss a good milky coffee now and then.

I miss seeing a good show. May it even be in a smoky bar.

And of course I miss seeing and hearing from all of you!

EZa1G - Entwicklungszusammenarbeit aus einem Guss

The details of the fusion and reform of Germany’s aid organizations GTZ, DED, InWent, and KfW are still discussed, though there’s a draft on the table already. The new organization is due to begin work in January 2011. A lot of people fear that the new organization will favour larger financial projects over small ones. There is also fear that German industry lobbyists will edge their way into development plans and influence BMZ (German Federal Ministry for Development Cooperation) agenda in developing countries. What role will development assistance then have, I wonder? Some people say it has already become an instrument of “soft power”?

Pace

Foreign troops are still stationed in Germany. Since WWII we have Americans, French and British. The Russians have all pulled out. Elvis Presley was stationed in Germany and serenaded to soldiers and Germans alike. I believe also James Blunt’s family lived in Germany.

The American military bases in Germany are said to be of strategic importance. In the movie “Taking Chance” you can see one such air-base, Ramstein. A lot of American military planes go through there. Apparently detained suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists were also flown around the world via Germany.

The problem for Germany is that these were unregistered flights. The American forces have until now also not disclosed details on the flights. As part of Bush’s “war on terror” most of these suspected terrorists were subsequently held without trial, indefinitely, and later tortured in secret prisons in Eastern Europe or Guantanamo. Germany does not support the torture of prisoners. But, indirectly, has given the Bush administration a hand in it.

I’ve only recently heard that foreign nuclear arms are also stationed in Germany, and, not safely at that. German politicians have no real influence over this question (neither does the German people) but NATO does. Germany does not have any nuclear arms of its own and is a member of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

As a sad last news for this blog entry: Germany’s arms industry is thriving. 60 years after the end of WWII and only 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany is the third largest arms exporter in the world after the US and Russia. Our defence budget is also much larger than I thought: in 2008, at $ 46.8 billion, we have the sixth largest defence budget in the world, just behind Russia.

How different

I have a bit of a sore throat this week and bought myself some Ricola. It tastes just the same as in Europe, as it was actually manufactured in Laufen, Switzerland. Some people insist that Coca-Cola tastes different in every country. Is it just the local water, or does the company really provide a different syrup formula for every country? Do Moroccans really want to drink different Cola from Indonesians, says who?

About the remorse of two men

Recently I read an article by Peter Benchley, author of Jaws, who had encountered a great white in the Bahamas (!) while diving for a shipwreck. These were his thoughts after the encounter:

“Back on the boat, when my pulse had dropped below 250 and my skin color had lost its necrotic gray, I began to wonder if the accepted facts about sharks were not facts at all, and I've been reappraising ever since. The process is ongoing and endless, and if I've been able to draw a single, solid conclusion, it is this: The more we know about sharks, the more we realize how much there still is to be learned.

Today there is a Peter Benchley Shark Conservation Award, and shark conservation is actually on the UN agenda, even if, as in a recent UN meeting, a US-backed proposal for shark conservation was defeated by Russia, China and Japan.

Yesterday I watched “The Cove” (a must-see film), which features Ric O’Barry, capturer and trainer of Flipper, and I thought that in a way these two men, Penchley and O’Barry, share a similar fate.

I say this because Penchley, author of Jaws, is probably responsible for our modern-day trauma of shark attacks. He is of course not responsible for the shark-fin industry which is the prime cause for shark populations’ decline. But he has helped to create a monster, a myth. Nobody cares about sharks, they aren’t cute or big-eyed. And that’s why sharks aren’t protected until now.

In turn, Ric O’Barry, as one of the first and once most sought after dolphin trainers in the world, started the anthropomorphic mania for dolphins. Obviously this mania went in the reverse direction than that for sharks but it was similar in size. He was among the first humans to interact with dolphins at that level, to teach them tricks, a pioneer you could say. But a remorseful one at that.

So these two men who are chiefly responsible for putting these animals onto TV and cinema screens, and if you like, are to be blamed for ingraining these animals so deeply in our western society's psyche - the inventors of Jaws and Flipper – are remorseful of what they have done.

Of course, our fear of sharks is latent and much older than Jaws, as is our admiration of dolphins much older than Flipper. Maybe our feelings about these animals go way back, back to the sailor accounts of being shipwrecked at sea and either attacked by sharks or saved by dolphins.

But we also know now that the many gruesome tales of large sea-monsters attacking ships are folklore. And we have erased all these monsters from our fear of swimming in the ocean. And yet the shark remains.

But that's not the point I want to pursue anyways. This blog entry is really about these two men.

O’Barry’s life took a radical turn when one of the female bottlenose dolphins that played Flipper (her real name was Cathy) died in his arms, in captivity. As O’Barry says in the movie, “The Cove”, "I spent ten years building that industry up, and I spent the last 35 years trying to tear it down."

There is somehow a very very deep tragic irony to both these men’s lives. It is almost like O’Barry is working tirelessly for redemption now. Both of these men have tried to rectify the image they have helped create, the shark as a ferocious beast and the dolphin as a joyous, ever-happy animal.

Penchley writes: “When I wrote "Jaws" more than 20 years ago, we lived in a different age. Richard Nixon was President, there was no cable television, no such thing as a VCR, Steven Spielberg was an unknown wunderkind in his twenties, and our knowledge of sharks (science's and the general public's) was still in its infancy. My research for the book was thorough and good, for the time. I read papers, watched all the documentaries, talked to all the experts. I realize now, though, that I was very much a prisoner of traditional conceptions. And misconceptions.”

To see O’Barry in action, go see the film “The Cove”. It is a fascinating though ghastly documentary about the secret slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, that O’Barry along with friends has worked to uncover and now caught, for the first time, on camera.

Software Piracy - when did it start?

I have just watched „Pirates of Silicon Valley“ and I am flabbergasted. We all steal ideas from each other. We have for ages and generations. I knew this. But that Bill Gates, formerly richest man in the world (a Mexican industrialist has just surpassed him), has built his entire empire on stolen ideas was new to me. Apparently, Bill Gates didn't come up with the early Microsoft codes. In fact, he went into an IBM meeting empty-handed and re-emerged a rich man. That was his big coup. He only promised IBM that he had the software they needed, then bought the codes from another software developer (the same day?) and made some tweaks and mods. He also stole (borrowed?) ideas from Apple, who seemed happy enough to share them with him, possibly because they had stolen the ideas from Xerox themselves. Why does everyone say he is the ideal son-in-law type? This man is the biggest poker-face in the history of the planet.

Cashew farmers and Fairtrade certification ambitions

We started this year with high hopes for launching a Fairtrade certification program for Cashew Nut farmers in the south. Fairtrade (FT) gears towards smallholders more than any other producer scheme, hence it was our first choice for the farmers. We had also read a lot of success stories about Fairtrade certification from around the world.

At this point, the smallholders in the south sell their "in-shell" cashews to middlemen, who transport them to a warehouse in Sekotong or to the port in Lembar, West-Lombok. Only a fraction of the cashews grown in Lombok are actually consumed here on the island. From Lembar-port, the cashews get shipped to larger processing centers in Surabaya or overseas such as India (where they are shelled, salted & roasted etc.). There is very little cashew processing industry left in Indonesia. India is the big regional player for cashew nuts, really.

In talking to potential buyers for FT cashews in Europe, North-America and Japan, it became clear to us that most FT importers/buyers like to see a double certification in both Fairtrade and organic standards. That is, if a farmer group goes for Fairtrade certification, they ought to probably also go for organic certification. (Fairtrade products are not automatically organic, though the regulation specifies that producers should gradually phase out use of chemical inputs.)

Fairtrade-traded products that are also organic will always receive a higher price than conventional FT products. So: conventional FT cashew kernels attain a price of US $ 3.30 per pound, while organic FT kernels will score US $ 3.50. These prices are FOB (freight on board), so once the shipping agent and exporter deduct their fees, the farmers will see only a portion of this FOB price. In any case, it is significantly more than they can get at the moment. Which is why the Fairtrade scheme is so popular with smallholders around the world: it actually guarantees fair prices above and beyond the meagre living producers can scratch from their harvests currently.

It turns out that the many "success stories" related to certification need to be read with a pinch of salt, however. The certification process is long and pretty expensive. That's acceptable: the standards shouldn't be lax and compliance strictly enforced. The problem is this: for cashew nuts, producers go through the whole certification process, essentially altering most of their production and organization to meet the standrads, and then they wait for a buyer. That's because demand for certified cashews globally is still too low to make certification profitable for all cashew farmers who sought certification in the last one or two years.

I have written up pretty much all of the buyers/importers of Fairtrade cashews on behalf of the farmer group, to gauge the interest for FT certified cashews from Lombok, Indonesia. There have been no positive responses so far. This current market situation is also reflected in reports from projects/farmers in Sulawesi (who were the first cashew farmers in the world to attain FT certification!) and Flores. That means that we cannot, at this point at least, recommend a certification scheme to the farmers.

This also means that it will be harder to motivate the farmers to revamp their producer organizations, which are institutionally weak and fragmented. For example, the farmer groups are made up of about one-third women but they don't really have a voice. As part of a Fairtrade cerification scheme, it would have been easier to promote the status of women within the group by, for example, writing out a gender policy. Similarly, the democratic process is not entirely transparent to us. For example, is there an annual General Assembly; are there elections for the governing board; does the group hold the leaders accountable? A Fairtrade scheme would have been a perfect "hook" to get the farmers to bear on institutional and technical changes. We were all really excited about the Fairtrade prospects. But for now we need to look around for alternatives. Maybe Fairtrade demand will grow in the next years and our farmers can join in as well.

Appreciating depreciation

It feels like the Euro is in free fall these past weeks since the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain) announced fiscal troubles. Italy might be part of the group too. Conversely, the Indonesian Rp. is appreciating. Which is good news for anyone on Lombok who wants to buy BMWs. When I arrived here in October 2009, 1 Euro was at about Rp. 15000. Now it's down to Rp. 12,500. Of course that's still more than enough purchasing power for my fellow Europeans and me. And I guess if the Euro keeps falling to Rp. 10,000, the upside is it's an easier conversion rate for all of us.

Aarrrgh!

The humidity from the rainy season here did in one of my passport-sized external hard drives. It's officially marketed as 'passport'. It had a lot of valuable stuff from 2008 on it, including most of the files and documents from my stint in Ethiopia. All my pics are lost. It's come to this, that every backup drive needs its own backup. It thusly expired. Just like a passport.

A new scoop on cockroaches

One can smell a passing cockroach. This is official. You can even smell its trail. I didn't believe this at first, but it's true. I will even go as far and say that cockroaches are somehow embedded in our limbic system.

This puts the cockroach in a distinguished group of to-us-nasally-discernible animals with the skunk, and cats after fish dinner. And the fish themselves too. (Though I have heard that a healthy fresh fish doesn't smell like fish at all but more like ocean. This could be a ruse.)

You can smell when a cockroach has sat on your newspaper. When it lingers under the toilet seat (they do linger there, my Auntie knows). And if it has just scurried across your plate. I now know that I have eaten from countless such smelling plates. Which would explain the occasional bout of gastro-malaise. I may have also sat on aforementioned toilet seats, in houses or bars where they had European toilet seats. Indonesian traditional toilets have no seats, so no way cockroaches can dupe anyone here.

Why does insecticide spray kill cockroaches almost instantaneously? I am so intrigued by this question because these are the same creatures rumoured to outlive a nuclear war, if there was one. You'd wonder why they can't stand a bit of spray that, according to directions of use, doesn't even require the person handling it to wear a face mask? I find this puzzling.

Isaac Brock has a notorious penchant for insects, and „doin' the cockroach“ has a new meaning to it now. These are vulnerable animals. But I bet he doesn't know they smell.

Coming soon...

...my Lombok-Blog, or lombolg. i know, really it should be lom-blog but that domain is taken.