Biggest Game In YearsFor some, such as Jakartass, tonight's game between (who else?)
Charlton and Middlesbrough is the biggest game in years ~ 59 to be exact. Yep, in 1947 when Jakartass was still incontinent, Charlton won the FA Cup. And if we win tonight in our quarterfinal replay in the near-frozen north-east of England, it will be the furthest we'll have gone since.
5,250 Addicks are being
subsidised by the club to fly, train and bus their way there and many millions will be watching the game live on TV. And Jakartass? I don't honestly know. Star TV advertises Chelsea v West Ham at 2 in the morning, although I rather think and hope that they've made a mistake, I don't particularly want to get up to watch a recording of a game that took place a few days ago. Still, if it's not being shown live I'll try and listen to a webcast and watch the recording of the game tomorrow evening, albeit knowing the result.
Of course, following my last post, some of you might have been expecting something more .... how shall I say? ... political? Not
Madame Chiang, certainly. (But good luck in your cyber searching, if you get my drift.)
Anyway, just so
Oigal gets his fix, let me refer him, and you if you're interested, to
Indcoup's latest post about how
four Asian businessmen plotted to buy hundreds of handguns, machine guns, Sidewinder missiles and aviation radar equipment for export to Indonesia, presumably for sale to the military and probably for use out of the public eye.
Papua anyone?
For your further edification, let me also refer him, and you if you're interested, to
a column by George Monbiot. The central point is about 'primitive' people being evicted from their homelands.
Last week Lady Tonge of Kew opened a debate (in the unelected House of Lords)
about Botswana with an attack on the Gana and Gwi bushmen of the Kalahari. She suggested they were trying to "stay in the stone age", described their technology as "primitive" and accused them of "holding the government of Botswana to ransom" by resisting eviction from their ancestral lands.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch ... alleged that something was missing from her account: the trip, he claimed, including first-class air travel, was funded by Debswana. Debswana, a joint venture between De Beers and the government of Botswana, owns the rights to mine diamonds in the bushmen's land in the Kalahari.
George then refers to the Papuans, which, given the continued relevance of Jakartass, is why I've linked to his article.
Three days after Tonge gave her speech, I (George writes)
heard the BBC's Indonesia correspondent telling the World Service that the West Papuans' "way of life, until recently, had more in common with the stone age than the modern world".
He was probably not aware that John F Kennedy approved the annexation of West Papua by the Indonesian government with the words: "Those Papuans of yours are some seven hundred thousand and living in the stone age." Stone-aged and primitive are what you call people when you want their land.
The animal theme comes up quite often too. "How can you have a stone-age creature continue to exist in the age of computers?" asked the man who is now Botswana's president, Festus Mogae. "If the bushmen want to survive, they must change, otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish."
The minister for local government, Margaret Nasha, was more specific. "You know the issue of Basarwa [the bushmen]?" she asked in 2002. "Sometimes I equate it to the elephants. We once had the same problem when we wanted to cull the elephants and people said no."Primitive? Animals to be culled as if prey in a big game hunt?
That's what I feel about self-serving politicians.
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