ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

1. Freshly brewed Kopi Luwak 2. In the packaging of the kopi luwak, the story of its origin 3. The certificate, and serial number of the 10g kopi luwak satchel 4. Rawon dish: salted egg, chili paste, shrimp cracker, cucumber, and bean sprouts 5. The rich consomme of beef and buah keluak the poisonous seed To my many American friends who find their breakfast coffee as unexciting as their Budweiser Light, I recommend a cup of Kopi Luwak coffee. The Luwak, a species of Civet Cat ( Paradoxurus hermaphroditus ) that lives in the coffee plantations of Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi islands of Indonesia has a nose for selecting only the best (in terms of ripeness and nutrition)coffee berries. In the process it deposits the undigested beans on the jungle floor where they are eagerly picked up by the locals. Somehow the stomach acids and enzymes of the Luwak turns these beans into arguably the best tasting coffee in the world. And definitely the rarest. A cup of certified-authentic kopi luwak c...

'72 Fender Telecaster Thinline G&L Tribute ASAT Classic Bluesboy Made in USA guitars are increasingly becoming beyond the reach of ordinary working jazz guitar players. With Gibson jazz archtops priced between US$6000-US$15000, its time to ask if we are paying a premium just for the brand name and the image that goes with it. In fact its time to re-look whether a jazz archtop is de rigueur for playing jazz. It is possible to get that fat mellow tone which is the characteristic of jazz guitar music without using a big hollow-body guitar. A favorite of many jazz guitar players has been the Fender Telecaster, a solid body guitar that is usually associated with Country music. When played with the neck pickup, using flatwound strings and good technique, a Tele with Rosewoord fingerboard can sound pretty jazzy. Ed Bickert, Joe Pass, Lenny Breau and many others have used Teles for their music. Perhaps its that string-through body, that sweet neck pick-up, the brass saddles, or mayb...

1. Stir-fried Mud Crab 2. Beer maid serving Thai Singha beer 3. A hearty fish stew 4. Pictorial Menu Singapore has a reputation as a country where everything works, the streets are safe and clean, and everything has been carefully planned. But there are a few areas in Singapore where the more colorful, unplanned and chaotic side of society can be seen. The enclave of Geylang, once notorious for its Triad gangs, prostitution and gambling has been sanitized, but not totally. Red-light areas have been designated (only permitted on even-numbered roads) and the girls who ply the trade have their hygiene enforced. But the new face of Geylang is as a place where the Mainland Chinese workers and immigrants gather. The large numbers of mainland Chinese come from all regions of China from Jilin in the North, to Central provinces like Hunan and Hubei, Western provinces like Sichuan, and the coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong. Dozens of restaurants and food stalls have sprung up to ca...

1. Indonesian Rock Star: Eross Candar of superband Shelia On 7 with me and my Gibson ES-335 2. 2009 Peerless New York. Street value US$ 1300 3. 1972 Gibson ES-175D: Street value US$4000 At last, after years of looking for an old Gibson ES-175D with the 'Mojo' , I am now the proud owner of a 1972 ES-175D. I must have tried out scores of ES-175D's but they either had no Mojo, or had the Mojo but were too expensive, especially those from the 50's and 60's. How this particular guitar ended up in Indonesia is a mystery since there were no Gibson dealers in Indonesia back then. Eventually it ended up in the hands of of Indonesian rock super-star Eross Candar, who used it for many years before selling it to well-known Indonesian guitar collector Hardianto Thenario also known as 'Ah Lok', the supplier of many beautiful guitars to top Indonesian musicians. On hearing of my quest for a ES175, and having heard me play jazz at a Surabaya club, Ah Lok graciously offere...

Two years ago, I made the acquaintance of a high-frequency algorithmic trader, and was invited to view his operations: In a small, darkened room a few doors away from our office in Princeton, NJ, three traders sat hunched over large multiple-screen computers. Colorful charts writhed across the screens like snakes, and numbers flashed and scrolled, updating in milliseconds. Just recently, such secretive operations were brought into the limelight with the arrest of the Goldman Sachs engineer who stole the codes for an algorithmic strategy. The public is now aware that at least 50 % of the trades on Exchanges across the world are algorithmically driven. That is, no humans are involved as trades are executed at the speed of 500-1000 trades per second. And large blocks of shares are broken up, bought or sold in split seconds to avoid detection. The machines send out probes and gather information to enable them to profit from statistical arbitrage i.e. differences in Bid and Ask of as small...

1. A Black-Naped Tern 2. Two chicks and an egg on the hot bare ground of our oil-rig construction yard 3. The beach front has been filled with discarded concrete waste for a gentle slope for rig-launching 4. Part of the vast expanse of the yard 5. Low loaders bringing yet more of the pre-fabricated buildings 6. Erection of a steel workshop in progress Amid the hustle and bustle in the development of our oil-rig construction yard, on the burning-hot bare ground, Life begins for two Black-naped Tern chicks just out of their eggs. And in the midst of a technical discussion on the Master Construction Schedule, padeyes for winches and load analysis for jib crane pillars, a beautifully irrelevant email conversation insidiously emerges that for a brief moment bonded us with a consciousness of the Beauty of Life and the Greatness of the Universe and its Maker whoever it may be. And for a few minutes, the two little chicks loomed larger in our life than thoughts of 12000 ton cranes, 100 a...

This beautiful and definitely tasty dish is contributed by Honey Smith Walls of Melbourne, Florida. Recipe Honey’s L'Orange Pullet du OinkJune 19, 2008Oven: 400 degrees – Bake at least 45 minutesServe with steaming Rice or delicately done Fettuccine, piping hot Peas, Cold Cranberries, and some chilled White Wine.Ingredients:Chicken breasts (Pounded w/tenderizer) Small Ham Steak (Diced)Egg WhitesOrange Marmalade Lemon Zest (totally optional)Alfredo Sauce (I cheat & use store bought)Chicken “Dip” – Rice Crispies, Parmesan, Red Hot Pepper Flakes, Salt & Pepper, Cayenne, Garlic PowderCheese: Shredded Parmesan, Mozzarella, Manchego, White Stilton w/Lemon, Or exchange Manchego and/or White Stilton w/Lemon for Edam and/or Havarti But add a little Lemon zest.(Chicken Dip Instructions: Crush a bunch of Rice Crispies (at least a few cups) in a gal. Ziplock bag with a full bottle of wine (or a can of beans works too). Add at least a cup (or more) of ...

1. Logo is correct but name on side says Morante 1. A Bluebird taxi or a fake? Windscreen says Bluebird Group but logo on side is different 2. The Bluebird logo 3. A fake Bluebird 5. A Silverbird taxi Any new visitor to Indonesia would very soon be familiar with Bluebird Taxis. The Bluebird Group’s ( http://www.bluebirdgroup.com/ ) blue taxis are as iconic as the yellow cabs of New York. But more than their appearance they are also an icon for reliability, honesty, security and cleanliness. In an industry where rip-offs, smelly rickety cabs, dangerous driving, bad attitudes and robberies are common, Bluebird stands out as being very different from its peers. When a visitor arrives at Jakarta airport, taxi touts swarm around like flies. But if you keep your cool and walk unswervingly to the Bluebird stand, you know you are in safe hands. So great is its reputation that Blue Bird is an unshakeable brand, and its peers in the industry have had to adopt unusual business strategies to ...

1. Soup with cabbage, carrots, fungus strips of rice flour and quail's egg 2. Flat bread with mutton, capsicum, carrot and onion gravy as topping 3. Stretching dough for the handmade noodles 4. Grilling mutton kebabs over a charcoal fire There are about 27 million Muslims in China-more than the population of Malaysia, Taiwan or Australia. The Uighur, Tartar, Uzbek, Tajik and Hui live mostly in the provinces that border Central Asia and Tibet, in the provinces of Xinjiang, Gansu, Ningsia and Qinghai. Except for the Hui they are distinguishable from the real Chinese, the Han; having a more Mongolian look with deeply slanted eyes and a more stocky body. Their food is different too, and mutton forms a large part of their diet- a testimony to their nomadic past on the steppes. In Shanghai, I found a small Muslim eatery next to my hotel, and it was a 24-hour joint, the Uighur family that owned it working in two shifts. The clear soup above was flavored with bits of mutton, and was a r...

1. My Besta 636 language computer: Chinese, English, and 10 other languages. 1. A Perankan lady dressed in their traditional Sarong Kebaya 3. An early Peranakan house in Katong district preserved as a heritage building .Note the ornate tiles and motifs 4. A plate of Kueh Lapis a Peranakan cake with colors of the rainbow, each color a dye derived from natural ingredients such as flowers and leaves. The Beauty of the Chinese Language I am a Singaporean classified as being of Chinese ethnicity in the official personal documents I hold. However, the truth is, I could not speak Chinese [Mandarin] fluently until the last few months, when I did some serious self-study using a Besta language computer. [see picture above] Now, as to why I was not able to speak Chinese, part of it lies in the fact that during my schooling years, Singapore was a British colony, and of course we learned English in school. But the main reason for my poor command of the Chinese language is a confluence of histori...

1. The Hindustan Motors Ambassador based on 1957 British Morris Oxford 2. Charing Cross Road in the hill resort town of Ooty [how quaintly English] 3. Young Indian women clad in colorful Saris 4. The nut and chickpea vendor 5.The Nilgiri hills of western Tamil Nadu 6. Decrepit railway coaches at a decrepit railway station 7. The Tea plantations of Ooty. Recently I visited the hill resort town of Ooty, in the extreme west of the Indian State of Tamil Nadu, about 2700 meters above sea-level I found many relics of the time when the British planters,soldiers and missionaries were here. A town with a name like Wellington, a road called Charing Cross, and a bookstore called Higginbottom's are a reminder of the days when the pallid English retired to the hills to escape the stuporific heat of the Indian summer. But more than the ghost of its ex-colonial status, I found in India many disturbing signs that make me doubt whether it should be put in the same league as China when we talk ...