(no subject)

via gothcherry666:

( That Xmas Party we had... )

And just to raise the tone even further :

( I am Elegant Lolita )

Aceh

Time for a serious post.

Aceh (Ay-chay) Province in Sumatra, Indonesia bore the brunt of Sunday's earthquake-created tsunamis, as the epicenter was mere 160Km north of Banda Aceh, the proviincial capital which is 5km inland from the northern tip of Sumatra.

Our family has a personal connection to this area, because my wife's grandfather (my son's great-grandfather) was the assitant provincial governor of Aceh under Dutch rule in the 1930s.

Ele's father, Willem van der Reyden, grew up in Banda Aceh, the son of an assitant provincial administrator, with all that entails, servants, monkeys, horses, and a Duesenburg imported frm Europe for official use that was not that useful as the roads in the area weren't designed for cars back then. They made state visits round the island by boat. We have ancient photos and film of these visits in our family archives.

The dominant racial group in Aceh is actually Levantine in origin, descended from a group of people from the area that would become known as Saudi Arabia, who settled the northern tip of Sumatra in the 6th Century.

Willem (or Bill, as he is usually known in New Zealand) remembers the Aceh people as a proud and fiercely Moslem race, but not extremist. While they insisted their own women wear the burkah, they never expected infidels or even different Islamic sects to do the same. They were even tolerant of the Catholic nuns running the local school.

After all, they would say, Jesus was a prophet of Allah just as Mohammed was and all prophets should be revered. There are those within Islam who believe that all men nust have facial hair or must cover their heads, and who is to say they are wrong? Allah may truly want some of his people to live in one way and others to live in another. We all worship Allah in our own way.

Bill especially remembers that one of the tribes named him argum pita, which reportedly means "white friend" after he engaged in kite-fighting with the locals.

Kite-fighting involves taking a kite string, soaking it in glue and running the string through crushed glass or quartz, making a string that has sharp edges, and then using this string to cut the strings of other people's kites, while they try to do the same to yours. The winner is obviously the last one who is left with their kite still under their own control

He got this nickname not because he was European in a hot, humid, equatorial country full of darker races, but because the sun at this latitude had bleached his hair snow white. He felt honoured at being called a friend by these people.

It was probably because unlike his father and the rest of the entourage who had official jobs to do and business to carry out and who felt they had to maintain their dignity, as befitting elders, he, as an athletic teeenage boy, was able to go off and play with the young men of the tribe, in their games of skill that demontsrated manliness to the rest of the tribe.

In many ways, Bill was an unaware cultural ambassadlor, and it is likely that his immersion in the recreational activities of the tribes immensely assisted his father.

Some of Bill's friends there died during the Japanese occupation of WWII. His father narrowly survivied interrment in a Japanese labour camp, but was able to survive partially because of smuggled food and information brought in by the Aceh people. Bill's father never fully recovered from that. Bill himself had been sent back to Holland to attend technical school, and ended up in the Resistance against the German occupation in the Hague.

Now the area is devastated, and thousands are dead. Likely more of those Bill knew have now died as they would be old and vulnerable as he is now. Bill needs a walker, sometimes known as a "Zimmer-frame" to move around easily now. He would not have been able to escape the tsunami.

But in all the death and destruction, one of the more obvious improvements in the world to those who remember World War II is the way in which German and Japanese tourists (among others) volunteered, and were working alongside the Aceh and others to help the injured and clear the rubble.

Creativity & Humour - What a Package!

So I was procrastinating by reading people's LJs, instead of writng my short story (which is due on Friday!) and I found a link to a blog called GapingVoid on elfs page.

As Elf has introduced me to many good things in the past, including Masumune Shirow and good SF erotica (The Journal Entries of Kennet R'yal Shardik), I was interested to see why he thought it was in the top four blogs.

I think I understand now. First read this:

How to be Creative

Then go and look at his cartoons in the FAQ:

about gapingvoid/fave cartoons etc.

I think some of these are absolutely perfect! These two especially :

( The Dream... )

( Wolf or Sheep )