Hypnotism crime

Apparently a common method used in crime in the second of my worlds is hypnotism. You know, the criminal hypnotises the victim so that they do not see the crime or cannot resist. In our town a guy was arrested by the police last year for stealing motorcycles. When he was released he walked through the police station in full view of a dozen police sitting at desks. He swiped one of the police helmets, in full view of them all, and none of them could lift a finger to stop him.

Recently a TV news station showed footage from a security camera at a convenience store where such a crime occurred. A group of 6 men and women came into the store and pretended to shop but in various ways they also tried to distract the cashier, asking where the bathroom was, asking for change, etc. While the cashier has the cash drawer open and her hands counting change right over it, you can see one of the guys reach over and take a large wad of bills right from under her nose, apparently without her seeing it.

Last year a city newspaper helpfully gave some police tips on how to protect yourself from hypnotism crime. Some of their suggestions included things such as:

- Believe fully that evil hypnotism cannot happen to people who reject it,
because all hypnotism is self-hypnotism where our fear is used by the
hypnotist.
- Beware of people who come up and befriend you because all hypnotism is a communication technique.
- Keep your thinking busy and don’t let your mind be empty when you are alone in a public place because when your mind is empty you are very susceptible to suggestion.
- Be careful when you feel sleepy, nauseated, dizzy, or have tightness in your chest especially when it comes suddenly for no reason because there may be someone using a telepathic forcing on you. Immediately decide to throw off that negative energy to the ground and pray according to the religion you believe.
- If you are suggestible, don’t go out alone or else get over your suggestibility.

I'll try to remember those suggestions the next time I'm out and about! :-)

Where have all the flowers gone?

I recently returned from a month long trip. Our back yard was looking pretty overgrown and since the El Nino has ended and it is raining again, it seemed a good time to do some “bush whacking”. I noticed though that several of the potted plants have disappeared. That is, the pots are still there but no signs of any plants.

I think I have discovered where all the flowers went:

He has replaced the hanging plants!

Such a cozy bed!

Taken before I went on the trip - I should have known!

Even the mama cat now likes the flower pots! Sigh!

Cat in the tree

Last Sunday morning I heard a commotion across the way. The neighbors in the opposite apartment leave their door open a lot and apparently a stray cat had gotten in and they were trying to get it out. The poor cat was trapped in their window and couldn’t get out because of the screen. It was a pretty uncoordinated effort. Two kids were outside poking sticks at the cat through the screen while somebody on the inside was hitting it every time it dropped to the floor. Eventually somebody decided to open the drape on one side and the cat scooted out of the window on the inside and was frantically slipping and clawing on the tile floor trying to get away as they kept whacking at it with their sticks. It finally got straightened out and scooted out the door – only to be met by the family’s big long-haired cat who promptly attacked it. We heard some screeching and then the intruder came leaping across the pavement and climbed up the big talisay tree while the family stood in their doorway laughing at the scene. Their cat didn’t try to follow it up the tree and eventually went inside.

I didn’t think any more of it. The next afternoon a warkman said there was a cat stuck in the tree. When I looked I realized it was the one who had been chased up the day before. It was a young cat, still a kitten really. White and black and quite handsome. A worker who is a good tree climber attempted to get it but it was scared and he said it tried to bite him and only climbed higher up in the tree.

The next morning I could see him out the second story window all curled up comfortably on a branch about 20 feet up. Periodically he’d meow but made no effort to come down. I figured that eventually if he got hungry enough he’d come down, especially at night when there were fewer people and less commotion. But he didn’t come down that day either. I looked on the internet for ideas. Most had unhelpful advice such as calling the animal rescue squad or a tree trimming company, none of which exist here. But they all advised trying to get it down if it had been there more than 12 hours. And several refuted the idea that cats will always come down. They said that sometimes they are too scared and will cling for days until they are so weak they fall. Kittens especially. One guy said he was a tree trimmer and had seen cat skeletons in trees. Of course I get more upset thinking about the poor cat starving to death and having to listen to his plaintive meowing for days. I certainly couldn’t reach him, our ladder didn’t go high enough. Nobody else was interested in risking their life climbing up there and trying to grab a scared cat. The worker tried poking the cat with a long pole but it just climbed even higher.
Since I couldn’t do anything else, I decided to just pray. I know, it seems crazy to pray for a cat, what with a world full of humans who desparately need prayer. But on the other hand, God created cats too and the Bible says He even cares for the sparrows. Maybe somebody’s guardian angel could take a few minutes off during a slow time to give guidance to a poor traumatized kitten in a tree?

Well, the next day (day 4) the cat was gone. No more pitiful meowing and no cat in the tree. Later that afternoon I thought I heard it again and sure enough, there it was eating some leftover rice in front of another neighbor’s apartment- on the ground.

So did God send an angel? Maybe. Maybe He sent mine, because that evening, sometime after I prayed, I got distracted while carrying a bowl of boiling hot soup and spilled it all over my hand. It certainly provided a painful distraction to worrying about the cat! Ha, ha!

Coping with brownouts

The past several months have been much drier than usual due to an El Nino. This island normally gets most of its power from hydroelectric sources but this year the water levels were extremely low resulting in power shortages. In this city they have managed to organize the brownouts such that you can sort of plan your day. The city is divided into three groups which have a rotating schedule of brownouts, not to the exact time but the general part of the day. In my part of town on Mondays and Tuesdays we are scheduled for afternoon brownout of 2-3 hours duration. Wednesdays and Thursdays we have them in the early evening. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays we have them in the morning.

It does interfere with work since it’s too dark inside our house to read or see the computer keyboard, and my second monitor doesn’t work. If we have a brownout in the morning I often use that time to go shopping or do errands because the malls all have their own generators. Or I might go to our office which is on a different rotation schedule. There I can check the mail or photocopy or use the library. When we have an afternoon brownout that is when it is the most difficult because it is not only dark but also very hot. Sometimes if I’m sleepy I take a nap on the cool tile floor. Or else I just sit and sweat and listen to a pre-downloaded mp3 radio broadcast or sermon while playing a mindless computer game until the power comes on. When the power goes off in the evening, I light 3-4 candles, power up the mp3 player and hike laps around the kitchen and living room for an hour.

It has been raining again recently so we hope that eventually the reservoirs will fill up and the power will become more regular.

BREAKING: They just announced a change in the schedule. To be more "equitable" the schedule will change every week. Sigh! Just get a system figured out and they go and change it again.

The most expensive rice I ever ate

Reading glasses are a bit of a pain and since I wear them all day long for computer work, who wants to drag them out at the store? Well, last Sunday I stopped by the grocery store at the mall. I saw some really nice looking unpolished brown rice that I had not seen there before. It was less than half a kilo so I threw it in the cart to try. I didn’t check the price. After all regular rice is about 80 cents a kilo and although brown rice would be more, I figured at most it would be $1 a kilo. It was in a simple plastic bag that the store uses for breaking down wholesale sacks of rice and repackaging into smaller retail amounts of 1, 5, or 10 kilos. The price is on little stickers but it’s hard to read without digging out reading glasses. I had several items at the checkout and tho the total seemed high, well, everything is higher now.

But the next day at home, we noticed the price – amounting to $10 per kilo! Good thing it was less than half a kilo. Was it mismarked????? It’s hard to believe that that could really be the price! We are cooking it now and it does smell wonderful. But it will be the most expensive rice we have ever eaten.
If I ever see it again I will definitely want to recheck the price. I will also plan to dig out the reading glasses when in doubt. (And I will probably be in doubt more often now!)

PS Turns out the rice was some special kind imported from Hawaii!! I saw it again the following week and this time looked at the labels. It WAS very nice rice , but I don't think I'll get it again!

The elephants are still fighting

Now we are in the post-election phase. Losing candidates are busy complaining about the automation machines, challenging results, demanding recounts , accusing the winners of corrupt tactics, and filing lawsuits. The top two vice-presidential candidates have been neck and neck with only a few thousand vote difference so that has been mildly interesting. Both have been very civil about the whole thing. They haven't yet declared a winner but are promising to do so soon.

What's been interesting is the local mayoral race. The Daughter won 65% of the vote for mayor and the incumbant Mayor won 80% of the vote for vice-mayor, or rather, Vice-Mayor. The election committee has long ago declared them the winners. But somehow the Opponent continues to fuss. Rumor has it that he threw huge amounts of money into winning this election but after all he didn't and he can't believe it. I guess he doesn't yet understand the perfidy of people.

He is the one who demanded that the election committee take over the city during elections lest the emcumbant Mayor cheat. The Mayor agreed and so the election committee has been in charge of the city since a couple days before the election until now. Now he is filing a suit accusing the Mayor's party of having 17,000 dead people vote and 40,000 zombie voters (people registered in more than one precinct), and of other irregularities. (Not that 57,000 votes would have changed the election results anyway.) Meanwhile the current Mayor wisely noted that the suit should actually be filed against the election commission, not him as they are the ones who were in control of the city and the election. The head of the election committee is annoyed and says that that was not possible, that THEY were in control and were very strict and weeded out people registered in more than one place. The new mayor-elect, Daughter, said she was expecting about a thousand suits from Opponent. So this is just number 1 with 999 to go. But even frivolous lawsuits have to go through the courts and takes the time and money of the accused.

This has been an interesting election. Apparently many if not most politicians are lawyers who can spend all their spare time throwing legal challenges at each other. I also learned that these elections are deadly serious affairs, and the power struggle is awseome. Reminds me of the African proverb - when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. It may make for amusing news stories, but you sure don't want to get involved!

The first "automated" elections

Two weeks ago was election day for president, vice-president, senators, congressmen, and locally, mayor. It was the first time they used what they called “automated voting”. Each polling station had a machine that looked like a fax machine. Voters blackened in ovals next to the candidates of their choice on the ballot cards and then fed the ballot into the optical scanning machine which was supposed to count the votes and store the info on a flash card. It was then supposed to contact home via satellite with the counts every hour or so. Apparently there were numerous problems with the machines. Some had battery problems, some didn’t work at all, some were just slow and ballots had to be fed in multiple times before they were finally accepted, and there just didn't seem to be enough of them to handle the numbers of people quickly..

It seemed that the print was small for some older folk, and so some brought a grandchild with them to help them cast their vote.

One friend went at 7:30am and after multiple problems with the machine plus the slowness of the whole procedure, didn’t actually get to cast her ballot until nearly 7pm. It sounds like a lot of people gave up and went home without voting so that was frustrating.

Sounds like vote-buying was rampant too, especially by the Opponent of the Mayor. People reported being offered round trip fare if they would sign a list saying they would vote for the Opponent of the encumbant Mayor. Workers were reported as going door to door even on election day, offering up to $22 per household to vote for the Opponent. In some neighborhoods the Opponent was sponsoring roast pork parties on election day. Others whose kids had scholarships thru the gov’t (the Opponent has been a national congressman for a long time and has sponsored many scholarships) were threatened that the scholarships would be cut off if they didn’t vote for the Opponent. It was also reported that in certain precincts the ballots listed two candidates with the same last name as the encumbant Mayor. This was done in the last election as a way of splitting the vote for those who didn’t read the whole name carefully. The interesting thing is, though, that if you download the official ballot form off the national election site, there is only one candidate listed as having that last name. So when was the second name added????

Privacy isn't quite what it is in some other places. Most of the polling places were at schools. People were sitting at school desks in a classroom, several at a time filling in their ballots. A friend said that the print was so small she didn't think anybody could see what another person was filling out. But some people said that at their polling station there were people looking in the windows and they were afraid that, since they had accepted money to vote for the Opponent, those people might see if they didn't vote for the Opponent and so felt intimidated. At other polling places there were curtains at the windows and people felt secure.

The perfidy of people. A number of people reported having accepted money from a candidate but having no intention of voting for him. In a way I kind of felt sorry for some of the candidates passing out candies, t-shirts, snacks, and even cash and hearing people say oh yes, they were going to vote for them and then here comes the election and they lose big time. Then again they aren't supposed to be engaging in vote buying.

There were no reports of violence in this city – though I did hear of one guy who got so frustrated he tried to smash the voting machine. Police pulled him away and then he turned and broke a window so they hand-cuffed him and took him off somewhere. In other parts of the country there were some reports of grenades and gunfire used to scare off voters lined up.

There were daily updates on the status of the presidential candidates but it was a few days before they announced the results of the mayoral candidacy. Apparently the local election committee didn’t want to release any info until all precincts have reported. Eventually it was revealed that the Opponent garnered about 35% of the votes and the Mayor’s daughter won 65% of the vote. (The Mayor has to step down for a term because the law mandates a limit of three terms in a row. He can run again in 3 years time. So in this election he ran for vice-mayor while his daughter, who is the current vice-mayor, ran for mayor.)

My Dengue Journey

Everybody’s writing their Journey stories so here’s mine. This is the fourth time I’ve had dengue fever. According to what’s out there, there are 4 types of dengue. So I have apparently hit them all. Am I a world record or what? So unless they discover a fifth type that should mean that I am done with it and need never fear another mosquito!

Nobody writes much about what the dengue journey is like. You read about the symptoms of high fever, severe headache and backache but not much about the real, you know, experiential part of it all. Today is Day 6 of Round 4.

Headache. Oh yeah. All four times I had a headache. They say it’s often pain at the back of your eyes. Well this time it was the bones above my eyes, the bones below my eyes, the bones of my temples, the bones in front of my ears and my teeth. They hurt so bad I didn’t even notice the back of my eyes! Move your head and unnghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lower backache? Oh yeah. Not as bad as the time I had it in South America when I had to grit my teeth and stop breathing just turn to the other side. This time I could still breathe when turning but it kept me rolling back and forth ever searching for some comfortable position.

Fever? Of course, that’s why it’s called dengue fever. Highest recorded this time was only 39.8 and that’s cuz a friend persuaded me to take paracetamol whenever it got above 39 (almost 103F). The record was the second time when it hit 41 (105+F).

Stomach pain? It wasn’t so noticeable earlier, it was a vague cycling from extremely hungry to nauseous to slightly painful and back around again. Now that the fever has broken those sensations have intensified. I don’t usually vomit as long as I don’t drink too much at a time. And nothing sounds good so no danger of eating too much. Besides, you get a weird taste in your mouth and if you do eat anything with chemicals in it the flavor of the chemicals is super enhanced.

Rash? Today I do have a rash but frankly I couldn’t really have seen whether I had a faint rash before that or not because when my fever gets that high my vision gets dim. Yeah, literally like somebody dimmed all the lights, including the sun, moon and stars.

What I don’t see mentioned in the medical literature is the weird mental stuff. It’s kind of funny but when you’re in the midst of it, it is not boring. Most of the time you’re lucky and just sleep or lose consciousness but sometimes you see weird things. Like, the time when my fever was 41 (105+F) I would see lots of ugly stuff, like heaps of squirming guts, mounds of worms, disgusting nasty things. If I opened my eyes and looked at something real it helped. But in the dark of a moonless night in a remote village you don’t see anything at all even if you do open your eyes. The only thing that helped was praying and forcing yourself to think about beautiful things like flowers, butterflies, clouds, etc. This time there was none of that but my mind was like incessantly nattering away at nothing, like it was busy-busy working on some urgent problem until I finally had to forceably shut it off and think consciously about something else. Later I was reading a weird email so long I couldn’t scroll long enough to ever get to the bottom and I kept finding it embedded and looped upon itself. The person it was from would never in a million years have been so verbose about anything! Of course in reality there was no such email but hey, I was READING it! I could give you a synopsis of it! That’s the weird kind of mental stuff you don’t hear much about.

The next step is wait and see if you get any of the the hemorrhagic stuff with it. So far on this journey I have been blessed and have not had any bleeding that I ever noticed, no gum bleeding or nosebleed or even noticeable rash. May God grant that this (hopefully) last stage of this journey also be so
blessed.

Do not let your cat sleep on your back

It all started one night when I was peacefully minding my business, snoozing on my stomach. For some reason the cat decided to take a nap on my back. Maybe he was lonely or maybe he felt cold, I don’t know. But since he’s hot and heavy I didn’t really want him there so I wiggled a little to get him off. Instead of getting off he dug his claws in. I know at least one claw went all the way thru my t-shirt!

Now a few weeks later, I have a huge, nasty, painful boil on my back – just below the shoulder blade where it is difficult to reach and impossible to see. They say heat is good for bringing a boil to a head. So for five long days I put hot water in a plastic bag, and tied it shut. Then I tied the bag into a sarong and hung it over one shoulder and tied it like a sash so that the bag would be on top of the boil. But after 5 long days it still hadn’t come to a head and I couldn’t lay on my back at all cuz of pain and swelling. So a couple days ago I finally went to a doc. She took one look and ordered a huge dose of antibiotic. Said she since there wasn’t yet(!) a head she didn’t want to cut until I’d been on an antibiotic for three days.

So here I am 2 days and several doses later. The thing has started to drain a little but is still very painful and still huge and I still can’t lay on my back. I don’t think it is an ordinary staph infection cuz the drainage is gaggingly foul smelling! I guess I'll have to go back tomorrow and see if the doc can drain it all at once.

And so my friends, that is why you should never ever let your cat sleep on your back!

PS It was cultured and turned out to be something the doc had never seen - Morganella morganii. But very consistant with something a cat might drag in  - ughhh!!!

Green energy woes

It seems that we really are having an El Nino this year. We seem to alternate years, nothing normal anymore, just El Ninos and La Ninas. It hasn't been raining daily like it usually does and we have had to water the plants a couple times a week lately. We are told that the lake and river which provide almost all the power on this island are very low and so power has been cut back. Luckily this city has an old 40 MW Bunker-fuel plant as well that has helped pick up some of the slack. It is located less than a kilometer from our place and it has been running almost constantly for the last 3 weeks. It is extremely noisy and even at this distance there is a low pitched background thrumming that kind of gives you a headache after awhile. In fact, one of our neighbors is out house hunting right now because he can't sleep. He says not only is it noisy but it shakes the ground and even using ear plugs and closing windows and using air conditioner don't help. So they are scouting out a neighborhood out past the airport.

Today the power company said the allotment of hydro-electric power has been cut even more so they will have to start rotating brownouts of about 30 minutes duration. The local generator can be cranked up to 53 MW temporarily and when it does it REALLY gets noisy! But it can't sustain that level so eventually it drops back to 40MW and the noise subsides - a little.

So much for our green energy.