First I’ll deliver the latest dispatch from the MadDog/TELIKOM War. Today’s skirmish was a brief exchange of peace offerings which occurred at my house. Two technicians came and got my Internet connection going again. As a peace offering, I agreed that, as long as it worked, I’ll not display any more images of shoddy workmanship, no matter how many I find. I think that’s pretty fair. We’ll see how long that cease-fire lasts. One of the technicians promised to come to do data error tests from my office to the exchange this afternoon. He has not shown up yet. I may have to fire another volley to get some action going again. UPDATE: He is here now, but I had to go pick him up in my car, as you will note below.

I must admit that my ring of spies in TELEKOM is growing nicely. In return for anonymity, I’m getting surprising information and remarks. Today’s revelation, from three independent sources, is that some genius at TELIKOM has forgotten, refused, or otherwise failed to release funds to register all of the TELIKOM vehicles. Therefore, TELIKOM workers are obliged to hoof it to their work locations. Needless to say, some sorry customers will not receive service as walking distance to and from will exceed the six or seven hours usually allotted to a working day.

Another tidbit that delighted me was a remark by a TELIKOM technician concerning management. “They’re making us look stupid!” His  words, not mine!  It came as a response to my comment that I believed that the technicians were willing and capable to do first-rate work if given the proper equipment and supplies.

Okay, enough of that.

Why are some corals considered brainy and others not so? Maybe it has to do with the general appearance. They all have that squirmy, vaguely disgusting look about them. We’re not really supposed  to actually see  our brains, are we? So, of course, they’re not designed to be attractive, unlike other body parts I could  name, but probably won’t. For instance this Brain Coral (Goniastrea australensis)  is sort of brainy looking, but more like the brain of the alien from Alien,  if you know what I mean:

Sigourney Weaver would squish this with her boot wearing her long-johns, if she got the chance.

This is still brainy looking, but somewhat less disgusting. It’s a Leptoria phrygia  brain coral, which means absolutely nothing to me. I looked it up in a book – probably incorrectly:It looks as if it may have been removed from a Conehead. Possibly Dan Aykroyd, who is now, not coincidentally, a minor wine producer in Canada. I’ve tasted his plonk. It’s quite drinkable.

Now this is a brain! Mister Spock would have had such a magnificently squiggly nugget in his noggin. It’s a Platygyra lamellina.  and a fine one, at that.I’d be proud to have such a well-rounded and obviously classically educated brain. I’d be proud to have a brain at all.

But, what about the less mentally nimble corals? Need we dismiss them? No, of course not! For, like blondes (there, I’ve finally said it and my wife will have my hide for it), corals need not be excessively bright to have their . . . attributes. For instance, this young Acropora cerealis  is as pretty as a picture (nasty pun there – sorry) and need not fear for its future because of a lack of mental acuity:Likewise, this very young and most rare Solitary Coral (Fungia costulata)  possesses an ethereal beauty that far exceeds its more intelligent cousins:The identification as a little tricky here. The colouration had me stumped. It wasn’t until I noticed that the radiating ridges (each called a septum, if you care) are considerably thicker in the center that I was able to pin it down. With other Solitary Corals, this is not the case. I’m such a clever boy, I am.

Finally, we have the dumb corals and the dumber corals. The one which is being engulfed is some kind of Acropora,  I think. I don’t know what the one which is encasing it is, but I’d give it the edge in wit:So, there we have it. We’ve covered the entire spectrum of intelligence of corals in one simple, easy to remember lesson.

All that need be remembered is that they are all as stupid as stones.

Well, now I’m only two days behind. No thanks to TELIKOM. For some reason known only to God and the local manager, I got a call this morning from a guy in the business department. He seemed to want to sell me a PABX system to fix my problem. I asked him if it had any copper lines going to the exchange. He didn’t know. I asked him if he knew anything about the USB wireless adapters that were announced for sale in April and still don’t work. He said he didn’t know. I asked him if he knew anything at all. He said he wasn’t sure. I think the local manager is trying to avoid me. Every time I call, he has “gone to pick up his kids at school” (funny thing for a manager to be doing in the middle of the day) or, “just stepped out”, or “in a team meeting”. Hah! Since his office is only a few steps from mine, that makes it a little easier for me. I can station one of my spies in the parking lot and he can inform me by walkie-talkie when the guy comes to his office. My means are many and nefarious.

I will not let this matter rest.

Never mind. I’m soon going to set up a wireless link between our big radio tower at our office and my house. I’ll have a fast 24/7 connection for absolutely nothing! I’m going to take my two TELIKOM handsets and throw them into the ocean where they will do the fish more good that they have ever done me. I’ll set up some Skype phones in the bedroom, lounge and our new J&E Enterprises Limited office and say “Goodbye and thanks for all the fish!” to TELIKOM forever. How glorious it will be to see the day when none of my communications have to pass through a single piece of TELIKOM’s crummy gear. Digicell will do me nicely for a portable. TELIKOM’s cell service doesn’t work half the time anyway.

I should possibly apologise to my readers who do not live in PNG and therefore do not understand the agony of trying to get simple phone service. My good mate Trevor Hattersley’s phone has not worked for five months. Most people simply give up and buy a cell phone. In fact, I believe that is exactly what TELIKOM wants. They want to abandon huge sections of copper cable that are so old that they can’t support even voice service. This leaves outlying small businesses stranded with no phones. Imagine owning a hotel (Such as Jais Aben) if your phones do not work half of the time. Yet TELIKOM offers no business alternative.

Okay, okay, enough for today. The pictures aren’t that great today either.

Today’s music is Pink Floyd’s Pigs on the Wing  from the ethereal Animals  album of 1977. It’s strangely in tune with my mood today. I also like Dogs  from the same album. Some of the lyrics bring tears to my crusty old eyes for their timeless poignancy. The guitar riffs are stunning.

Do you have to deal with people who think like this?

And after a while, you can work on points for style.
Like the club tie, and the firm handshake,
A certain look in the eye and an easy smile.
You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to,
So that when they turn their backs on you,
You’ll get the chance to put the knife in.

Sure, we all do. Sadly, some aspire  to that philosophy.

Never Mind. My task is only to show pretty pictures.

Here’s a little mob of Striped Catfish (Plotosus lineatus)   who, happily, never have to make a phone call: Lucky little critters, eh? You’ll probably have to click to enlarge them.

This is one of the prettiest Feather Star images that I’ve managed:The lovely Lamprometra  seems to be in a state of grace, all curly and calm.

This is a sort of throw it out and see who likes it shot. It makes me think of looking down into a particularly nice aquarium at some friend’s house. He must be very good at his hobby:It’s a bunch of small Anthea  of some species that I can’t identify.

Some of you will recognise these Bigeye Trevally (Caranx sexfasciatus)  from many other posts here. I shoot them whenever I get the chance:I think “conformists” when I look at this image. I don’t like the feeling. If I stare at it long enough I can see them moving. Must be all the drugs I’ve been taking the last few days.

I usually strive for natural colour. Of course, that’s not what you get from the camera. They usually look more like this:Sometimes blue is what you need.

From Animals,  I leave you with Sheep:

Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away;
Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air.
You better watch out,
There may be dogs about
I’ve looked over Jordan, and I have seen
Things are not what they seem.

Peace.

Yesterday I was so sick that I couldn’t come to the office – first time since I can remember. I’m usually very healthy. However, when I do catch a cold, it almost invariably attracts an opportunistic bacterial infection and I get very sick in only two or three days. I started Cipro yesterday morning and today I’m back to work.

I’m now so far behind (it’s the 19th here now – the last post is dated the 16th), that I don’t know if I’ll catch up. I thank TELIKOM for that. If I can find a cheap shyster in Madang today, I’m going to file a million Kina lawsuit against the clowns just for the sake of harassment.

Here’s this morning’s sunrise, the first nice one for several weeks:Since I had nothing better to do than to harass TELIKOM yesterday, I insisted that a data technician come to my house and do a data transmission test from there to the exchange. The results were exactly what I’ve been telling them for the last five years. The decades-old cables are totally incapable of transmitting data. This morning, when I got up, I didn’t even have a dial tome.

Here’s a typical shot of a TELIKOM junction box:What have we here? Hmm. . . Among other items that don’t belong there are water, buai spet (the horrible bloody-looking stuff that is spat from the mouth when chewing betel nut), various bits and pieces of garbage, and someone’s shoe. I have seen worse. They seem to make a convenient place to, ah, . . .  how can I put this . . . take a dump. I wonder if this is a matter of bodily necessity or a comment about TELIKOM. I’ve been tempted.

Need more TELIKOM goodness? How about this shot that I took only this morning outside my own office:Well, that certainly doesn’t look quite so messy. However, close inspection shows some serious no-no items. First is the continual flooding. I’ve often seen this box full to the brim with water. Check out the silly attempts to plug the thing up with scraps of tape. The black bulb contains all of the junctions between the wires. It is supposed to be water-tight. Does it look water-tight to you?

I’ve had it with TELIKOM.

From now on, it’s WAR! Starting TODAY.

I just read back over my post of yesterday.  I take back nothing that I said about Telikom, but I must have been bombed out of my skull. I remember taking the photo of the “Dog in the Red Dress” in my neighbour’s yard, but how I made the connection to Telikom is beyond me. Blame it on the toxic cocktail of cold remedies.

I’m still steaming about not being able to get a phone. A technician came to my house yesterday and finally admitted that there is not a single copper pair to the entire area of DCA that is clean. They all have faults. When I get an incoming call the phone just goes “brrrp” once. That’s what it sounds like, “brrp”. When you pick it up, it is dead silence. I must have gotten twenty calls today, since tomorrow is our big party for our 45th wedding anniversary. Sorry, folks, I can’t answer my phone. It won’t let me.

Anyway, I blew away the time when I felt like getting our of bed to work on some sunrise shots that I hadn’t gotten around to yet. I did find a few interesting ones:

I like the waves in the one above. Also notice that the towering cumulus cloud just to the left of the rising sun is casting a shadow in the thin layer of cloud that appears orange from the glow of the sun and allowing the blue sky to show through.

This shot is the same sunrise taken a few minutes earlier:

The towering cumulus hasn’t grown tall enough to cast as much of a shadow, but you can see it developing.

There’s not much to say about this one. It’s darker and moodier. However I like the purple cast. The lights of town are very nice on the water, also. This was about a ten second exposure. That is why the water looks smooth and silky:

I think that I may have shown this one before. I reworked it this morning because I wasn’t satisfied with the colours.

Of course, few of the colours in my sunrise shots are as bright in real life as I depict them in my interpretations. Even mom nature can stand a little improvement around the edges. When I do shots like these, I’m not even thinking of them as photographs. I’m thinking that I’m painting with light. I can’t paint or draw at all. I have no artistic talent. However, give me a camera and a computer and I can create somethign beautiful. You can. Anyone can. That’s the beauty of photography today. Anybody with a camera and a computer can do what the great photographic masters of the past would have thought impossible.

Well, I’m as sick as a dog and stuck at home. This is going to be short, because I can’t stay on line with the decades-old copper wires that Telikom laughingly calls a phone system.

Telikom is a Dog in a Red Dress:

Don’t ask mye why this strikes my as funny. My head feels as if it is stuffed with wet cotton (may be, for all I know), and I’m doped up on enough decongestants and antihistamines that I can’t actually tell where my fingers end and the keyboard begins. It’s like some kind of weird direct connection. Maybe that’s why I’m typing so fast. Man, I can’t ever remember typing this fast.

Anyway, back to the blood-sucking beast that we call Telikom. They keep telling me how much they are improving. Okay, they gave us some fancy little (cheap) desktop wireless phones that are supposed to connect us to the internet also. Guess what. The drivers won’t install. The local manager Mike Yandt (yes, I’m naming manes) told me on Monday morning that he would have my phone at home fixed the next morning. I asked him if he was sure. No worries was the answer. It’s now Thursday and still no phone that will stay connected. What kind of progress are they talking about . . . precisely?

I’ve given up on the normal means of trying to get things done. I’m going to start writing to anybody who will print what I send them. The Post Courier, The National, radio, tv, I don’t care. I’m going to raise as big a stink as I possibly can. Those of you who know me understand that I can stink mightily.

I’ve been trying to get a decent phone here in DCA for twenty years. Telikom can’t (read won’t) do it.

Okay, if that’s the way it’s going to be, then the gloves are off.

It looks as if most all the problems of moving Madang – Ples Bilong Mi are in the past. I still have a few issues with old images not showing up and there’s something wrong with the gallery plugin, but I can get back to regular posting now.

The image below is from yesterday in our front yard. It’s not the QE2, but it’s a big cruise ship. We didn’t see it when we left the house. Sometimes, we don’t notice what’s right in front of us. When we drove into town we could see it sticking up at the end of Modilon Road, and we wondered how we’d missed seeing it at home:

This reminds me of the time that an Air Niugini jet ran off the end of the runway right in front of our house and we didn’t notice it in the morning: (this image has appeared here previously)

Yesterday evening I was sitting in my “reading chair” with a beer and a cigar and I heard very loud Italian opera music coming from outside. This is not something that is normal in Madang. In fact, since 1981, it has never happened. I don’t know about before that, since I wasn’t here.

Anyway, it was that one that goes, “Da-da-daaaaaa. Da-da-daaaaaa. Da-da-da-da-da-daaaaaaaa.” Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a Philistine. I don’t mind opera. I just don’t understand Italian and I can never remember the names of them.

Anyway, I got up to look out the door. Just then, the cruise ship tooted very loudly three times (the standard signal for “leaving port”) and pulled away from the dock.

If the above doesn’t amuse you, let me try this.

TELIKOM turned off all of our phones (probably about twenty) because they messed up again in their billing department. Never mind; it happens now only occasionally. It used to happen every month. Of course, they want you then to pay a reconnection fee, but we learned long ago to thumb our noses at that nonsense.

So, to get my weekly jab in at TELIKOM, I’ll show you this beautiful (and typical) “work in progress” shot of our connection box in front of our office:

Messy, eh?

Fortunately, it wasn’t raining yesterday.

Dougie, you’ve won both of my recent challenges. Never mind that you were the only one to respond to either.

I owe you a K20 Digicell card for your response to the “What Does This Sign Mean” contest. I should have inspected the sign more closely. The key to the puzzle was right in front of my eyes.

The slogan “Always There” should, of course, prompt any PNG resident to come back with the sassy response, “Always There, Never Here!!!” How very astute of you.

Next time I see you, remind me to hand over K20 to you. I don’t imagine a Digicell card would be very useful to you, except possibly as a trophy. You won it fair and square.

Concerning the second prize-winning answer – Of COURSE it’s a Tiger beer – brewed in Singapore. It was just too easy. Sorry there’s no cash prize for that one, but you do have my undying esteem for presenting yourself to the world as a cultured person.

You have a lot of mates back in old Madang who long to see you. Come back to our little family whenever you can, Dougie. Eunie’s waiting patiently for a big hug and a juicy kiss from her Teddy bear.

And thanks for being a loyal reader. My little daily ego stroking exercises cleverly disguised as a weblog are important to my well being, no matter if anybody reads them. It’s nice to know that someone does – and actually enjoys doing so.

Cheers, mate!