If I had no sense of humour, I would long ago have committed suicide. ~ Mahatma Gandhi ~  Is there any real correlation between higher acquired intelligence (through education) and sense of humour? Research has it, there is. But maybe not really? Time and again, hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars in industrialized countries had [...]

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I have decided I am going to be completely honest with everyone from now on. No more lies, no more pretence. When I meet people I don’t like, I’m going to punch them in the face straight away. When someone asks me a stupid question, I’m not going to answer politely any more, I’m just [...]

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We expatriates must admire the Indonesian ability of putting things in perspective and to talk things down, because it could have been so much worse. Just recently a friend told me about a worker in his garden who was building this brick wall. Suddenly a brick came smashing through the window, missing his 18 month [...]

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40 years old. All of the people who are on the way to pass over this age say that it’s nothing. I am on the way, today, to be over this bloody number. And believe me, all those people are big bastard liars. Let’s be clear.. it s an horrible time and this is it..!! [...]

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We are, most of us, living far from our families, which is good for some people and sad for others. As my family will read this article, I have to say that I am extremely sad to be far from them (and I know that none of them will believe me, even my own mother). [...]

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My friend Tony and I were coming back from a party late one night on his Suzuki 250 motorcycle when he misjudged the angle of a tight left-hand bend and hit a three-foot high graveyard wall at almost 50 mph. I remember using Tony’s back as a ramp as I flew into the air and [...]

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That’s the most stupid fake date on earth! When I was a teenager in Europe, it even didn’t exist (or maybe it did but I didn’t notice). We didn’t used to celebrate this date despite that it basically comes from the Roman Empire. Then when I was 20 or something like this, America sent us [...]

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We call the magical device we have in our pockets a “phone”, but it really should be called a “communicator”. Amazing advances in technology in the last few years have turned the simple phone (which was amazing enough in its day) into a multi-platform multimedia communications device that gives us the ability to communicate in [...]

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I have been living here for a while now, but I realised that I am totally ignorant about the Chinese New Year celebrations. Except good food, some red lanterns hanging everywhere and a special animal per year, this is basically my only knowledge. Thank God we have BlackBerry so I broadcasted a message to 38 [...]

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I woke up early on Christmas day 1984, seriously hung-over after an inpromptu party the night  before. The planned party at my place had been abandoned due to a lack of real beer (see previous issue), but we had made the best of it and had a great time with all the other revellers down [...]

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