Hi,
Thanks for the enlightening & humbling murals. It is not always 'U don't know how good your life is'. It may be 'U don't know how come your life is so good'
If we live a better life compared to those shown, it is because we had a luckier draw and stand on the shoulders and progresses accorded to us by some of the people before us and Science (plagiarised from Newton & others, honesty is the best policy).
Many are too unaware and arrogant to recognise that, and try to escape it by imagining it is blessings from their gods found via their great searches (see, it is all because of their own great discovering abilities)
As Zhou EnLai said of the Americans, they are a great people but they have no sense of history. You want to copy this?
As Isaac Asimov said, what have the church got to contribute to all the human progress we have around us the last few hundred years other than cheap words? (actually, also cheap stakes).
Before the advent of modern science and technology, most of the human race lived under difficult conditions. Except the ones at the top of the power pyramids who had the benefit of exploiting the ones below them.
This included the practice of slavery which was rampant throughout history. And the church said nothing about slavery (not the popes as slaves of god but men as slaves of the popes hor.)
Chinamen should know better, most of their forefathers lived that way up till the 20th century!
You don't find such honesty from the church. Perhaps, it's on an 'only god need to know' basis - like super-paedophile cases. Too big for the minds of god's copy, the Copygods.
Asimov lived in an America of Christ (like Chinamen of the same type, before Columbus 'found' it it was not hor) but the same applies whether you suck up to a mullah, monk or priest. Chinaman monks apply for the mail below - Dao or no Dao.
The Chinese has a saying Sou Zhu Dai Tu meaning to watch a tree to catch a rabbit.
The fable behind it is like this: One day a man saw a rabbit run into a tree and got knocked unconscious. So he took it home and had a good meal out of it. After that day, the stupid man attributed his easy catch to the tree and began to sit at the tree everyday waiting for the next catch.
Hah, sounds like Buddha? That Indian fella was a lucky sob too. He had an empire and could afford to sit at a tree waiting for inspiration. He might not have dead rabbits to contribute but he at least taught the world the concept of cause and effect. That's a few thousand years old history.
The Chinese rabbit fable is a few thousand years old too. And from some sharp Chinaman whose great insight speak of the kind of Chinamen I love to apply the dao to.
You see how accurate, despite its age, it is in describing human behaviour.
Just 4 characters, no need for a copius book n songs of copied hot air. Such economy of wisdom is of course unavailable to fools that has no need to copy from history and Chinamen's enlightenment. They don't need to stand on others' shoulders, only that one big fella's hot air.
Flying in the face of hot air sure beats all the kungfu Chinamen like the ones in Hidden Tiger, Crouching Dragon hor? Or was it Tiger Hide, Dragon Crotch? I don't hold old hot air well lah.
So if you want to bless this world, remember those hot air you suck in no can do.
But to be fair, what else do stupid but lucky Chinamen have to offer anyway, hor? Sou Zhu Dai Tu.
And for those that love to be images of super supremes: if you happen to be a heavenly perfect copy of Sou Zhu Dai Tu, it is just a work of those that preside over your heaven. Not your fault. Live with it, they work in copiously mysterious ways.
I thank the people from history
the great minds who were brave.
Torch bearers of rationality
sharp tearers of knave and rave
for a hand in my non-manifest destiny
for what I have without being a slave.
Ah-great-men, not Ah-men
is how I end my wondrous days
I do the reverse only when
I end my ponder of the foolish in daze...
This is just my simple poetry. Cannot compare to the likes of Rudyard Kipling's 'The White Man's Burden' where he exhorts the Americans to take up the 'challenge' and where Chinamen and likes star as 'half-devil, half-child'.
----- Original Message ----
From: Christopher Leong christopherleong2@yahoo.com.sg
To: Chee Khiaw Cheng cheekhiaw@yahoo.com
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 11:10:17 PM
Subject: U don't know how good your life is..!
If you think you are unhappy, look at them
if you think your job is tough, how about him?
if you think your salary is low, how about her?
If you think you don't have many friends, ask yourself if you have one sincere friend...
you think study is a burden, how about her?
when you feel like giving up, think of this man
if you think you suffer in life, do you suffer as much as he does?
if you complaint about your transport system, how about them?
if your society is unfair to you, how about her?
"That which is beautiful is not always good; but that which is good is always beautiful"
xxx
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Only ONE
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-priest1,0,4708989.story?coll=la-tot-topstories
Incredible story around just 1 of the 220 'culprits' and the holey characters surrounding it.
The guy owned up but his 'superiors' (superiority unsubstantiable to me) including none other than the cardinal let him be for years and years, and their god said nothing all the while.
So how many culprits do you think there is?
Nothing happens until some victims started to sue via the God of Wealth (hah, this god is one where Chinamen who 'truly seeked' is ahead of Rome).
Perhaps their deity tried to sort things out via his chief disciplinarian in Rome but they could have crowded their big guy out while they sing their praises?
Luckily, our god of wealth speaks louder than his fellow deity. Ho Seh Ah Chinamen, your god is louder and more effective!
I am singing your praise, of course.
What is too stupid to be spoken is often sung, said Voltaire.
Voltaire was too nice. What is too stupid to be rationalised, is often faithfully respected.
xxx
Incredible story around just 1 of the 220 'culprits' and the holey characters surrounding it.
The guy owned up but his 'superiors' (superiority unsubstantiable to me) including none other than the cardinal let him be for years and years, and their god said nothing all the while.
So how many culprits do you think there is?
Nothing happens until some victims started to sue via the God of Wealth (hah, this god is one where Chinamen who 'truly seeked' is ahead of Rome).
Perhaps their deity tried to sort things out via his chief disciplinarian in Rome but they could have crowded their big guy out while they sing their praises?
Luckily, our god of wealth speaks louder than his fellow deity. Ho Seh Ah Chinamen, your god is louder and more effective!
I am singing your praise, of course.
What is too stupid to be spoken is often sung, said Voltaire.
Voltaire was too nice. What is too stupid to be rationalised, is often faithfully respected.
xxx
Monday, July 16, 2007
A Billion S$ to Buy Respect?
Here is the latest revelation from the houses of the gods. You may call it Dirty John XXX.XX (per the movie ratings hor). As you will see below, even Hugh Hefner cannot beat their rating - Mr Hefner is perhaps too ungodly.
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-priests15jul15,0,3842358.story?coll=la-tot-topstories&track=ntothtml
Though this is not new it should still bother us enough to ask these questions:
1. 508 cases in one city? How long did each case last before the gods reported them to the communions?
Chay, if the communions are too dumb to see, the gods cannot be the same mah. And if even Chinamen can do god-comm, the gods can surely do reverse god-comm right? Hah, not 2-way one ah? Even Motorola from west and Samsung from east can do that you know
What sort of god are they worshipping?
Since they claim that they are made in the image of their god and their priests are supposedly 'closer' to their god, you figure out what their god is like, can?
Can lah. If cannot, it will prove you are nowhere near godlike and lower class than those fellas in the report you know?
2. The supposedly more holier among humans admitted to the abuses and agreed to pay?
What amount of evidences there must have been. Unlike the popes of earlier times, the less holy ones of our time work base on proofs & evidences, and not proof by surviving fire of the stakes, hor.
I wonder if anyone of the communions back then tried telling the popes of stakes-times to take the same proving procedure on their claim that their book is the word of god, hor? (For the uninformed, they burnt people who contradict them based on the excuse that if they were right they would survive the burning.)
We note that neither history nor the book recorded the existence of a walking Char Siew Pope.
With so many jokers making the claim their god was the 'true god', Char Siew Men should be all over the place, no? No, only char siew pao and char siew mien. (For non-Chinamen, 'char siew' literally means 'burnt on stakes')
[Side Note: In one case, during the siege of Antioch in one of their crusades, a fella claimed he found the 'holy lance'. But others that could not get along with him disputed the claim. So he duly submitted himself to the 'test' and was char-siewed but he did not walk. He died of course - his enemies among the crusaders made sure the fire was big enough]
It had been reported that the present pope issued instructions for all their 'leaders' around the world to keep silent on such cases while he was the 'chief disciplinarian' when the other pope was still alive.
You believe his god had 'communicated' that instruction to him?
The fact that that guy still became a pope indicates that he at least has a special place in the heart of their god (if exist).
Hah, you see, their god works in mysterious ways & keeping silent about it is one of them!
Sometimes their god likes to hide, sometimes not. Sometimes their god likes to watch men having fun with kids at the latter's expense in His house? No? How do you know? Your god works in mysterious ways.
3. Apparently a number of parishes in other parts of US declared bankruptcy when faced with similar charges - their so-called 'sins' can perish just like that meh?
Bankruptcy of the monetary nature is the least of their problems, don't you think?
4. So how many cases did they managed to get away with because the poor kids were either too scared or scarred to talk about the abuses?
And their parents/guardians too stupid or dumb (hey, faith can do alot of such things esp. if you add to it the strange ways the god-like ones work) to be aware of it or too ashamed to face up to it?
Or because the kids are now doing the same to others believing that it's normal and perhaps even divine because they practiced it in holy places?
The parents of such kids are to be blamed. For what sort of parents would leave their children with other men with little supervision and prior advice but ones with misplaced notions.
5. US$660 million from 1 city? Where did all those money come from? That much of others' money to buy back respect for the gods' dirty agents?
They call it 'reconciliation' too - wah so nice people I also want to join if I am a paedophile hor?
You know when this set of godly people discovered the great powers of money?
Well, we know that it dates back at least to the great 'protest' when their 'fathers' used to do what is known as 'selling indulgences' where one can have 'sins' cleared by paying the church some money. Kind of turning sins into $ins.
With 2 billion humans or more living on less than US$1 a day, if they stay 'normal' like us unholy people they could have saved a lot of poor souls with that money. But then, like they say, their god works in strange ways.
Of course, those are not 'their' money but that of people who know no better where to place their generosity despite their supposedly godly blessings. Perhaps, they didn't truly search? God-comm link down? (chay so un-AmOne)
6. It was reported that more than 90% of their so-called 'houses of god' in the US have abuse cases. Can you imagine what this world will be like if 90% of the households in this world are like that?
I am not sure we can even find that sort of ratio in the zoos but then wild animals are not made in the image of their god, remember?
In LA alone, 221 fellas were reported to be involved in committing such 'acts' over 70 years. Only 3 fellas doing it per year if we assume 3 other fellas stop within a year (where got so faithful one).
Otherwise, the correct description of the situation is 'it's an orgy'
And you believe it only happened in the last 70 years? OK, let's have faith?
Are all these history irrelevant? I know of fellas that would think so ('think' may be overly generous given the lack of it but I quibble).
It is sad isn't it? Young children paying the price for the stupidity of the very people they trust with perhaps the purest sort of 'faith' you can find? I mean that of trusting in the judgement of their parents. Who, in this case, in all likelihood drew satisfaction in getting their young to ape after them and their misplaced believe in their 'holy brothers' who don't just love but also seem to love to more than fondle His children (of all children His children? how come boh kia si one hor? Perhaps gay, I mean geh one?)
A friend once told me that he was impressed with how accurate his particular book is, despite its age, in describing human behaviour. I told him then that he obviously read little, despite his age (wanted to add more but kia si and pai seh lah).
But just to see if he is right one more time, can someone tell me where in the book did they tell young children to beware of men fondling (under-statement intentional out of embarrassment) them in the name of god and in the house of god?
No can find? Even Marco Polo recorded in his travelogue, despite its age, about Chinamen openly fondling each other in public. Cheap book that one?
But all is not lost, perhaps. We can all call upon those fellas with god-comm ability to do their calls, telex or SMS: 'May god bless them all!'
And all shall be fine? Or fined, if you believe in the great powers of money and selling indulgences.
I cannot be serious, are you?
But one thing I am damn serious about - the next time a pope, mullah or monk dies, please don't ask me to give a minute silence (or demand any sort of respect from me).
The last time such an event happened I laughed at the joker who did that. We should be cheering - that stupid fella should be happy that his pope was 'going home to be with his lord' as they claim! But he whacked my legs on the football field the week after. I said Chinaman's revenge then. But may be that guy was blessed and god inspired? God's reprimand for me (sure si liao)?
In that case, how come no Chinaman is kicking the arse out of those major league xxxx above? (no term in my vocab for those sick fellas)
Or was that Chinaman kicker just on a cheap thrill worthy of this mail?
xxx
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-priests15jul15,0,3842358.story?coll=la-tot-topstories&track=ntothtml
Though this is not new it should still bother us enough to ask these questions:
1. 508 cases in one city? How long did each case last before the gods reported them to the communions?
Chay, if the communions are too dumb to see, the gods cannot be the same mah. And if even Chinamen can do god-comm, the gods can surely do reverse god-comm right? Hah, not 2-way one ah? Even Motorola from west and Samsung from east can do that you know
What sort of god are they worshipping?
Since they claim that they are made in the image of their god and their priests are supposedly 'closer' to their god, you figure out what their god is like, can?
Can lah. If cannot, it will prove you are nowhere near godlike and lower class than those fellas in the report you know?
2. The supposedly more holier among humans admitted to the abuses and agreed to pay?
What amount of evidences there must have been. Unlike the popes of earlier times, the less holy ones of our time work base on proofs & evidences, and not proof by surviving fire of the stakes, hor.
I wonder if anyone of the communions back then tried telling the popes of stakes-times to take the same proving procedure on their claim that their book is the word of god, hor? (For the uninformed, they burnt people who contradict them based on the excuse that if they were right they would survive the burning.)
We note that neither history nor the book recorded the existence of a walking Char Siew Pope.
With so many jokers making the claim their god was the 'true god', Char Siew Men should be all over the place, no? No, only char siew pao and char siew mien. (For non-Chinamen, 'char siew' literally means 'burnt on stakes')
[Side Note: In one case, during the siege of Antioch in one of their crusades, a fella claimed he found the 'holy lance'. But others that could not get along with him disputed the claim. So he duly submitted himself to the 'test' and was char-siewed but he did not walk. He died of course - his enemies among the crusaders made sure the fire was big enough]
It had been reported that the present pope issued instructions for all their 'leaders' around the world to keep silent on such cases while he was the 'chief disciplinarian' when the other pope was still alive.
You believe his god had 'communicated' that instruction to him?
The fact that that guy still became a pope indicates that he at least has a special place in the heart of their god (if exist).
Hah, you see, their god works in mysterious ways & keeping silent about it is one of them!
Sometimes their god likes to hide, sometimes not. Sometimes their god likes to watch men having fun with kids at the latter's expense in His house? No? How do you know? Your god works in mysterious ways.
3. Apparently a number of parishes in other parts of US declared bankruptcy when faced with similar charges - their so-called 'sins' can perish just like that meh?
Bankruptcy of the monetary nature is the least of their problems, don't you think?
4. So how many cases did they managed to get away with because the poor kids were either too scared or scarred to talk about the abuses?
And their parents/guardians too stupid or dumb (hey, faith can do alot of such things esp. if you add to it the strange ways the god-like ones work) to be aware of it or too ashamed to face up to it?
Or because the kids are now doing the same to others believing that it's normal and perhaps even divine because they practiced it in holy places?
The parents of such kids are to be blamed. For what sort of parents would leave their children with other men with little supervision and prior advice but ones with misplaced notions.
5. US$660 million from 1 city? Where did all those money come from? That much of others' money to buy back respect for the gods' dirty agents?
They call it 'reconciliation' too - wah so nice people I also want to join if I am a paedophile hor?
You know when this set of godly people discovered the great powers of money?
Well, we know that it dates back at least to the great 'protest' when their 'fathers' used to do what is known as 'selling indulgences' where one can have 'sins' cleared by paying the church some money. Kind of turning sins into $ins.
With 2 billion humans or more living on less than US$1 a day, if they stay 'normal' like us unholy people they could have saved a lot of poor souls with that money. But then, like they say, their god works in strange ways.
Of course, those are not 'their' money but that of people who know no better where to place their generosity despite their supposedly godly blessings. Perhaps, they didn't truly search? God-comm link down? (chay so un-AmOne)
6. It was reported that more than 90% of their so-called 'houses of god' in the US have abuse cases. Can you imagine what this world will be like if 90% of the households in this world are like that?
I am not sure we can even find that sort of ratio in the zoos but then wild animals are not made in the image of their god, remember?
In LA alone, 221 fellas were reported to be involved in committing such 'acts' over 70 years. Only 3 fellas doing it per year if we assume 3 other fellas stop within a year (where got so faithful one).
Otherwise, the correct description of the situation is 'it's an orgy'
And you believe it only happened in the last 70 years? OK, let's have faith?
Are all these history irrelevant? I know of fellas that would think so ('think' may be overly generous given the lack of it but I quibble).
It is sad isn't it? Young children paying the price for the stupidity of the very people they trust with perhaps the purest sort of 'faith' you can find? I mean that of trusting in the judgement of their parents. Who, in this case, in all likelihood drew satisfaction in getting their young to ape after them and their misplaced believe in their 'holy brothers' who don't just love but also seem to love to more than fondle His children (of all children His children? how come boh kia si one hor? Perhaps gay, I mean geh one?)
A friend once told me that he was impressed with how accurate his particular book is, despite its age, in describing human behaviour. I told him then that he obviously read little, despite his age (wanted to add more but kia si and pai seh lah).
But just to see if he is right one more time, can someone tell me where in the book did they tell young children to beware of men fondling (under-statement intentional out of embarrassment) them in the name of god and in the house of god?
No can find? Even Marco Polo recorded in his travelogue, despite its age, about Chinamen openly fondling each other in public. Cheap book that one?
But all is not lost, perhaps. We can all call upon those fellas with god-comm ability to do their calls, telex or SMS: 'May god bless them all!'
And all shall be fine? Or fined, if you believe in the great powers of money and selling indulgences.
I cannot be serious, are you?
But one thing I am damn serious about - the next time a pope, mullah or monk dies, please don't ask me to give a minute silence (or demand any sort of respect from me).
The last time such an event happened I laughed at the joker who did that. We should be cheering - that stupid fella should be happy that his pope was 'going home to be with his lord' as they claim! But he whacked my legs on the football field the week after. I said Chinaman's revenge then. But may be that guy was blessed and god inspired? God's reprimand for me (sure si liao)?
In that case, how come no Chinaman is kicking the arse out of those major league xxxx above? (no term in my vocab for those sick fellas)
Or was that Chinaman kicker just on a cheap thrill worthy of this mail?
xxx
Friday, July 13, 2007
Indonesian Coffee that Beats Starbucks
No Shit, this coffee bean!
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-coffee13jul13,0,3547326.story?coll=la-default-underdog
$600-a-pound coffee
Indonesia's kopi luwak is a rare delicacy of peculiar provenance -- beans plucked from the droppings of wild civets.
By Paul Watson, Times Staff Writer
July 13, 2007
Bandar Lampung, Java Island, Indonesia — TO connoisseurs of fine coffee, only one is good to the last dropping.
Human hands don't harvest the beans that make this rare brew. They're plucked by the sharp claws and fangs of wild civets, catlike beasts with bug eyes and weaselly noses that love their coffee fresh.
They move at night, creeping along the limbs of robusta and hybrid arabusta trees, sniffing out sweet red coffee cherries and selecting only the tastiest. After chewing off the fruity exterior, they swallow the hard innards.
In the animals' stomachs, enzymes in the gastric juices massage the beans, smoothing off the harsh edges that make coffee bitter and produce caffeine jitters. Humans then separate the greenish-brown beans from the rest of the dung, and once a thin outer layer is removed, they are ready for roasting. The result is a delicacy with a markup so steep it would make a drug dealer weep.
It's called kopi luwak, from the Indonesian words for coffee and civet, and by the time it reaches the shelves of swish foreign food emporiums, devotees fork out as much as $600 for a pound — if they can even find that much. The British royal family is said to enjoy sipping it. A single cup can sell for $30 at a five-star hotel in Hong Kong.
To anyone satisfied by a regular cup of joe with the morning newspaper, it might sound like a lot of hokum. Canadian food scientist Massimo Marcone thought kopi luwak was just an urban legend. Then he did some lab work.
He found that a civet's digestive system does indeed remove some of the caffeine, which explains why a cup of kopi luwak doesn't have the kick that other strong coffees do. The civet's enzymes also reduce proteins that make coffee bitter.
Marcone is one of the world's leading experts on foods that make most people go yuck! He recently wrote a book on the subject. One thing that really gets his glands salivating is casu frazigu cheese, which is packed with so many live maggots that it's not only disgusting, the Italian government outlawed it.
"The rotten cheese has millions of live maggots in it, and it's very highly prized all through Italy," Marcone said. "It sells under the counter for about $100 a pound. As you're carrying your bag with the cheese in it, you can actually hear the maggots hitting the side of the bag.
"People eat the cheese and maggots altogether. There's nothing in there that can cause harm.
"Days before the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck, Marcone was in Indonesia's Sumatran rain forest, where he collected about 10 pounds of civet droppings laced with coffee beans. He now uses it as "the gold standard" to rate other kopi luwaks in his lab at the University of Guelph in Ontario.
Like a forensic scientist reading a bullet's markings, Marcone stares at kopi luwak under an electron microscope, searching for striations that tell him that a civet excreted it. His studies found that kopi luwak drinkers need to be careful to avoid being duped.
"About 42% of all the kopi luwaks that are presently on sale are either adulterated or complete fakes, unfortunately," he said.
Real kopi luwak has a top note of rich, dark chocolate, with secondary notes that are musty and earthy, the scientist said. An Indonesian coffee lover described the scent as the smell of moist earth after a rainfall, with hints of vanilla, that teases the palate for hours after the cup is empty.
Other coffees, such as Jamaican Blue Mountain, may score better on official cupping tests that judge qualities such as aroma, taste and fragrance, Marcone said. But they don't come with quite the exotic cachet of civet brew.
"From the farm gate to the plate, the story is missing for most of our foods," he said. "Part of eating is not only the nutrition one gets, but also the communing with others at the table. Kopi luwak has the advantage of its story.
"And as ice breakers go, coffee from civets is certainly special.
Local lore says villagers discovered civet droppings made for a smooth cup of coffee centuries ago, when they were forced to work on Dutch plantations and hand over everything they picked to their colonial masters. Civets provided the only coffee the workers could scrounge for themselves.
Today, the world's only source for genuine, uncut kopi luwak is Southeast Asian civets, and most still comes from the ones foraging in Indonesia's coffee plantations. That limits production to a craving for coffee cherries, and the digestive abilities, of a shrinking civet population.
A pound of their droppings yields less than 5 ounces of beans. Roasting reduces the quantity by an additional 20%. With just 500 to 1,000 pounds of the real thing coming on the global market each year, demand quickly drives up the price.
Genuine kopi luwak has been difficult to find in the U.S. for years, said California coffee importer Tom Kilty, who traveled to Indonesia in 1989 to find a reliable source. A decade later, Kilty said, coffee coming from a European supplier didn't look the same, so the company he was working for stopped selling it, even though it was going for $120 a pound.
"I am still on the lookout," Kilty said from Redwood City.
THE astronomical value of their droppings should be a boon to civets, whose reputation took a beating in 2003 when civet cats sold in China's markets were suspected of causing the lethal SARS epidemic. The animals are a delicacy in southern China.
In Indonesia, civets are struggling along with much of the country's wildlife to hold on to their habitat as a growing human population encroaches.
To farmers scratching out a living harvesting pepper, cacao, coffee and rubber on an Indonesian mountainside, fresh civet scat lying in the dirt and dead leaves is hardly worth the bother. The animals also have a taste for cacao, bananas, papaya and other fruits, which once digested, are no delicacy.
It's often hard to know what is in the scat. Sometimes even old hands are fooled by squirrel or bat droppings thrown in for weight.
Even if a farmer does know the animal has chewed at his coffee cherries, it's just as likely to deposit the valuable droppings on a neighbor's land.
More aggressive civets also raid families' chickens, and when the animals grow to more than 100 pounds, baring those claws and fangs, they scare a lot of people, too. And because civet meat makes good eating, the way most folks here see it, the only good civet is a dead civet.
"They're a farmer's enemy," said Ponirin Suparlan, 45, a barefoot farmer who earns $600 a year from rubber and coffee trees, and any civet droppings he finds. He would rather eat a civet than let it dine on his crops. "If I find one, I will surely kill it.
"Villagers aren't sure how many wild civets are left in the area, but the population is obviously shrinking because the dung is getting harder to find each year.
Still, small-time collectors such as Suparlan earn about $3 a kilo, roughly twice as much as they get for regular coffee. It's peanuts compared with what foreign buyers earn, often after cutting it with regular coffee to boost their profits in places such as Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and the United States.
Dealing in such an expensive delicacy is a cutthroat business. People who know where to find the dung protect their stakes with the paranoia of Gold Rush prospectors.
Susanto, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, moonlights producing kopi luwak when he's off duty from a government shrimp hatchery. But he says he has lost almost $15,000 of his savings trying to make a go of his business.
He and his relatives have processed more than 440 pounds of civet dung into kopi luwak in three years, enough to be rich by now. They've done it the old-fashioned way, roasting the beans over wood fires in clay pans as big as woks. With a log-sized pestle in a stone mortar, they pounded the beans into dark coffee with the texture of cocoa.
But Susanto says he lost a lot of money handing out the world's most expensive coffee as free samples to potential buyers from Seattle to Russia and Australia, only to wait for contracts that never came through.
He has held out against big-name Indonesian buyers who tried to chisel his price down to a fraction of what they would make selling it abroad, hoping for an export deal of his own.
But he has been cheated by so many foreign and Indonesian dealers that he's on the verge of giving up unless his latest idea starts paying off.
He agreed to let a reporter see his operation, a nearly two-hour drive outside the southern Sumatran city of Bandar Lampung, only on the condition that he keep the location secret.
Susanto thinks the best way to guarantee pure kopi luwak is to farm it. So he captured 17 civets, locked them up in wire and bamboo cages, and gave them names such as Claudia, Helga and Romeo.
They are hand-fed ripe coffee cherries along with grapes and other fruits, and fresh milk. Despite the pampering, a few died in captivity, and others chewed their way through the wire and escaped back into the coffee plantations, where they are free to follow their instincts to the best berries. Only nine remain with Susanto.
He dreams of raising $60,000 to build a kind of nature preserve for civets, where they could eat coffee cherries to their hearts' content, depositing choice, certified kopi luwak in exchange for a nice, safe place to live.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-coffee13jul13,0,3547326.story?coll=la-default-underdog
$600-a-pound coffee
Indonesia's kopi luwak is a rare delicacy of peculiar provenance -- beans plucked from the droppings of wild civets.
By Paul Watson, Times Staff Writer
July 13, 2007
Bandar Lampung, Java Island, Indonesia — TO connoisseurs of fine coffee, only one is good to the last dropping.
Human hands don't harvest the beans that make this rare brew. They're plucked by the sharp claws and fangs of wild civets, catlike beasts with bug eyes and weaselly noses that love their coffee fresh.
They move at night, creeping along the limbs of robusta and hybrid arabusta trees, sniffing out sweet red coffee cherries and selecting only the tastiest. After chewing off the fruity exterior, they swallow the hard innards.
In the animals' stomachs, enzymes in the gastric juices massage the beans, smoothing off the harsh edges that make coffee bitter and produce caffeine jitters. Humans then separate the greenish-brown beans from the rest of the dung, and once a thin outer layer is removed, they are ready for roasting. The result is a delicacy with a markup so steep it would make a drug dealer weep.
It's called kopi luwak, from the Indonesian words for coffee and civet, and by the time it reaches the shelves of swish foreign food emporiums, devotees fork out as much as $600 for a pound — if they can even find that much. The British royal family is said to enjoy sipping it. A single cup can sell for $30 at a five-star hotel in Hong Kong.
To anyone satisfied by a regular cup of joe with the morning newspaper, it might sound like a lot of hokum. Canadian food scientist Massimo Marcone thought kopi luwak was just an urban legend. Then he did some lab work.
He found that a civet's digestive system does indeed remove some of the caffeine, which explains why a cup of kopi luwak doesn't have the kick that other strong coffees do. The civet's enzymes also reduce proteins that make coffee bitter.
Marcone is one of the world's leading experts on foods that make most people go yuck! He recently wrote a book on the subject. One thing that really gets his glands salivating is casu frazigu cheese, which is packed with so many live maggots that it's not only disgusting, the Italian government outlawed it.
"The rotten cheese has millions of live maggots in it, and it's very highly prized all through Italy," Marcone said. "It sells under the counter for about $100 a pound. As you're carrying your bag with the cheese in it, you can actually hear the maggots hitting the side of the bag.
"People eat the cheese and maggots altogether. There's nothing in there that can cause harm.
"Days before the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck, Marcone was in Indonesia's Sumatran rain forest, where he collected about 10 pounds of civet droppings laced with coffee beans. He now uses it as "the gold standard" to rate other kopi luwaks in his lab at the University of Guelph in Ontario.
Like a forensic scientist reading a bullet's markings, Marcone stares at kopi luwak under an electron microscope, searching for striations that tell him that a civet excreted it. His studies found that kopi luwak drinkers need to be careful to avoid being duped.
"About 42% of all the kopi luwaks that are presently on sale are either adulterated or complete fakes, unfortunately," he said.
Real kopi luwak has a top note of rich, dark chocolate, with secondary notes that are musty and earthy, the scientist said. An Indonesian coffee lover described the scent as the smell of moist earth after a rainfall, with hints of vanilla, that teases the palate for hours after the cup is empty.
Other coffees, such as Jamaican Blue Mountain, may score better on official cupping tests that judge qualities such as aroma, taste and fragrance, Marcone said. But they don't come with quite the exotic cachet of civet brew.
"From the farm gate to the plate, the story is missing for most of our foods," he said. "Part of eating is not only the nutrition one gets, but also the communing with others at the table. Kopi luwak has the advantage of its story.
"And as ice breakers go, coffee from civets is certainly special.
Local lore says villagers discovered civet droppings made for a smooth cup of coffee centuries ago, when they were forced to work on Dutch plantations and hand over everything they picked to their colonial masters. Civets provided the only coffee the workers could scrounge for themselves.
Today, the world's only source for genuine, uncut kopi luwak is Southeast Asian civets, and most still comes from the ones foraging in Indonesia's coffee plantations. That limits production to a craving for coffee cherries, and the digestive abilities, of a shrinking civet population.
A pound of their droppings yields less than 5 ounces of beans. Roasting reduces the quantity by an additional 20%. With just 500 to 1,000 pounds of the real thing coming on the global market each year, demand quickly drives up the price.
Genuine kopi luwak has been difficult to find in the U.S. for years, said California coffee importer Tom Kilty, who traveled to Indonesia in 1989 to find a reliable source. A decade later, Kilty said, coffee coming from a European supplier didn't look the same, so the company he was working for stopped selling it, even though it was going for $120 a pound.
"I am still on the lookout," Kilty said from Redwood City.
THE astronomical value of their droppings should be a boon to civets, whose reputation took a beating in 2003 when civet cats sold in China's markets were suspected of causing the lethal SARS epidemic. The animals are a delicacy in southern China.
In Indonesia, civets are struggling along with much of the country's wildlife to hold on to their habitat as a growing human population encroaches.
To farmers scratching out a living harvesting pepper, cacao, coffee and rubber on an Indonesian mountainside, fresh civet scat lying in the dirt and dead leaves is hardly worth the bother. The animals also have a taste for cacao, bananas, papaya and other fruits, which once digested, are no delicacy.
It's often hard to know what is in the scat. Sometimes even old hands are fooled by squirrel or bat droppings thrown in for weight.
Even if a farmer does know the animal has chewed at his coffee cherries, it's just as likely to deposit the valuable droppings on a neighbor's land.
More aggressive civets also raid families' chickens, and when the animals grow to more than 100 pounds, baring those claws and fangs, they scare a lot of people, too. And because civet meat makes good eating, the way most folks here see it, the only good civet is a dead civet.
"They're a farmer's enemy," said Ponirin Suparlan, 45, a barefoot farmer who earns $600 a year from rubber and coffee trees, and any civet droppings he finds. He would rather eat a civet than let it dine on his crops. "If I find one, I will surely kill it.
"Villagers aren't sure how many wild civets are left in the area, but the population is obviously shrinking because the dung is getting harder to find each year.
Still, small-time collectors such as Suparlan earn about $3 a kilo, roughly twice as much as they get for regular coffee. It's peanuts compared with what foreign buyers earn, often after cutting it with regular coffee to boost their profits in places such as Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and the United States.
Dealing in such an expensive delicacy is a cutthroat business. People who know where to find the dung protect their stakes with the paranoia of Gold Rush prospectors.
Susanto, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, moonlights producing kopi luwak when he's off duty from a government shrimp hatchery. But he says he has lost almost $15,000 of his savings trying to make a go of his business.
He and his relatives have processed more than 440 pounds of civet dung into kopi luwak in three years, enough to be rich by now. They've done it the old-fashioned way, roasting the beans over wood fires in clay pans as big as woks. With a log-sized pestle in a stone mortar, they pounded the beans into dark coffee with the texture of cocoa.
But Susanto says he lost a lot of money handing out the world's most expensive coffee as free samples to potential buyers from Seattle to Russia and Australia, only to wait for contracts that never came through.
He has held out against big-name Indonesian buyers who tried to chisel his price down to a fraction of what they would make selling it abroad, hoping for an export deal of his own.
But he has been cheated by so many foreign and Indonesian dealers that he's on the verge of giving up unless his latest idea starts paying off.
He agreed to let a reporter see his operation, a nearly two-hour drive outside the southern Sumatran city of Bandar Lampung, only on the condition that he keep the location secret.
Susanto thinks the best way to guarantee pure kopi luwak is to farm it. So he captured 17 civets, locked them up in wire and bamboo cages, and gave them names such as Claudia, Helga and Romeo.
They are hand-fed ripe coffee cherries along with grapes and other fruits, and fresh milk. Despite the pampering, a few died in captivity, and others chewed their way through the wire and escaped back into the coffee plantations, where they are free to follow their instincts to the best berries. Only nine remain with Susanto.
He dreams of raising $60,000 to build a kind of nature preserve for civets, where they could eat coffee cherries to their hearts' content, depositing choice, certified kopi luwak in exchange for a nice, safe place to live.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Where the Earth is ....
Hi,
Thanks for the nice pictures. Hopefully, people get a small picture of where we stand in the context that the gods deal with.
Note that the comparison herein is just one between a few stars & planets, a comparison of entities in the sub-virus dimension to the gods' realm. Probably meant to aid the less imaginative super-submini-viruses who cannot 'see' despite their claimed 'great searches'.
And note that those are 'balls' we are dealing with hor, not flat discs unlike what some supposedly god inspired fellas no less than the Pontiffs (and their predecessors the Pontifex Maximus and likes) insisted for a few thousand years till Copernicus, Galileo and the likes (commonly known as the 'heretics' then) enlightened them otherwise. And only after a few of the latter's predecessors were burnt off by the former for 'lack of respect'.
There are many ways to show how these fellas lack depth - this flat out missing out of 1 entire godly dimension is just one of the more obvious ones.
Only after that, of course, did Columbus and the likes dared to sail beyond the horizon and started the phenomenon known as colonialism with people like Chinamen, Indians, Africans and more starring as sub-humans to be enlightened, in more ways than one (is that why we are doing this?).
That's also why you don't find Chinamen 'finding' the god of Rome until the last couple of centuries (the converse is also true, but we have a smaller bubble there to burst).
Useless Chinamen hor? So many centuries cannot find the 'true god', must wait for Columbus, Jesuits & likes.
Or if you choose to protest, you of course have to thank the presumptious Germans who ended up getting whacked in the World Wars and that English king who wanted to dump the Spanish King's relative to have another woman - all of which was against the Pope's inspired choice (political and not divine hor).
So inspiring, such histories...
Aiyah, these are all history of course and boh pakai claimed some Chinamen who at the same time draw inpsiration from some low-end fiction from further back in history.
In the order of the universe of the gods, the biggest star you see here would be no where near a pixel. So it takes a lot of bull & balls for some people to claim they are special to the gods, doesn't it?
If it is this super-submicro-virus, I'd stay real low. But I think the others get away with it because the gods really don't give such trivialities a damn - regardless of whether the claimed sub-virus-to-god communications are done weekly or 5 times a day, at-meal or off-meal.
Thanks to science, their huge egoistical bubbles are now big flat discs unlike what their predecessors held so dear- what with all the hot air taken out.
Hey, certain books say that life came into being when the gods gave some clay mixture some of their 'breathe'. Hot air, in earthly speak. Indeed ...
Rgds
CCK
Forwarded Message
From: "Tham, Louis Tuck Peng" Louis.Tham@sg.standardchartered.com
To: Chee Khiaw Cheng cheekhiaw@yahoo.com
Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 8:58:53
Subject: FW: Where the Earth is ....
something that you are already aware of.. and has been discussing....
now the visual representation. i think the last pic explain the physical significance of earth where the sun is represented only by a pixel...
Now, THIS is really fascinating - I've never really given this any thought whatsoever, but it's rather dazzling to see it is presented this way.
I certainly thought this was enlightening. Didn't even realize we knew much beyond our sun .... It's a big universe.
Antares is the 15th brightest star in the sky. It is more than 1000 light years away.
So... See how insignificant we really are, in this heavenly arrangement of the Almighty but still we have a place, space & very well known existence.
So Friends....make your stay on this planet, a really worth while.
Thanks for the nice pictures. Hopefully, people get a small picture of where we stand in the context that the gods deal with.
Note that the comparison herein is just one between a few stars & planets, a comparison of entities in the sub-virus dimension to the gods' realm. Probably meant to aid the less imaginative super-submini-viruses who cannot 'see' despite their claimed 'great searches'.
And note that those are 'balls' we are dealing with hor, not flat discs unlike what some supposedly god inspired fellas no less than the Pontiffs (and their predecessors the Pontifex Maximus and likes) insisted for a few thousand years till Copernicus, Galileo and the likes (commonly known as the 'heretics' then) enlightened them otherwise. And only after a few of the latter's predecessors were burnt off by the former for 'lack of respect'.
There are many ways to show how these fellas lack depth - this flat out missing out of 1 entire godly dimension is just one of the more obvious ones.
Only after that, of course, did Columbus and the likes dared to sail beyond the horizon and started the phenomenon known as colonialism with people like Chinamen, Indians, Africans and more starring as sub-humans to be enlightened, in more ways than one (is that why we are doing this?).
That's also why you don't find Chinamen 'finding' the god of Rome until the last couple of centuries (the converse is also true, but we have a smaller bubble there to burst).
Useless Chinamen hor? So many centuries cannot find the 'true god', must wait for Columbus, Jesuits & likes.
Or if you choose to protest, you of course have to thank the presumptious Germans who ended up getting whacked in the World Wars and that English king who wanted to dump the Spanish King's relative to have another woman - all of which was against the Pope's inspired choice (political and not divine hor).
So inspiring, such histories...
Aiyah, these are all history of course and boh pakai claimed some Chinamen who at the same time draw inpsiration from some low-end fiction from further back in history.
In the order of the universe of the gods, the biggest star you see here would be no where near a pixel. So it takes a lot of bull & balls for some people to claim they are special to the gods, doesn't it?
If it is this super-submicro-virus, I'd stay real low. But I think the others get away with it because the gods really don't give such trivialities a damn - regardless of whether the claimed sub-virus-to-god communications are done weekly or 5 times a day, at-meal or off-meal.
Thanks to science, their huge egoistical bubbles are now big flat discs unlike what their predecessors held so dear- what with all the hot air taken out.
Hey, certain books say that life came into being when the gods gave some clay mixture some of their 'breathe'. Hot air, in earthly speak. Indeed ...
Rgds
CCK
Forwarded Message
From: "Tham, Louis Tuck Peng" Louis.Tham@sg.standardchartered.com
To: Chee Khiaw Cheng cheekhiaw@yahoo.com
Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 8:58:53
Subject: FW: Where the Earth is ....
something that you are already aware of.. and has been discussing....
now the visual representation. i think the last pic explain the physical significance of earth where the sun is represented only by a pixel...
Now, THIS is really fascinating - I've never really given this any thought whatsoever, but it's rather dazzling to see it is presented this way.
I certainly thought this was enlightening. Didn't even realize we knew much beyond our sun .... It's a big universe.
Antares is the 15th brightest star in the sky. It is more than 1000 light years away.
So... See how insignificant we really are, in this heavenly arrangement of the Almighty but still we have a place, space & very well known existence.
So Friends....make your stay on this planet, a really worth while.
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