The venerable Jakarta Foreign Correspondents Club is stuffed by bright young and not-so-young journalists, many of whom would not hesitate to deplore the standard of English in this country.
Surprising it was then when Unspun chanced on this email from the JFCC that was a blurb on it’s coming luncheon talk with Mayor Fauzi Bowo.
“Dear members and friends,
He is the lighting rod for all of Jakarta’s problems: traffic, pollution, flooding, unchecked development. But how much is Governor Fauzi Bowo to blame for what ails our fair capital? And what about his accomplishments since taking office in 2007? Then again, there’s his own controversial record, including a decision to push ahead with a land reclamation project despite a Supreme Court ruling against it, and allegedly cow-towing to the Islamic Defenders Front.”
What is this new sport of cow-towing and does it involve any cruelty on the bovine residents in the city?
Unspun 
I like the idea of a lighting rod. How does that work exactly?
LikeLike
Unspun’s puzzled too but it must obviously be something out of our grasp because the JFCC guys corrected the “cow-towing” mistake but left the “lighting rod” in a cover-your-ass email to members today. You wonder who they have writing their copy. Surely not a senior member of the foreign press corps?
LikeLike