Botswana Meat Commission FC bring home the beef. (Is this right? - ed.)

Here's an end-of-season update from Meatland - the league actually ended last month, but I didn't get around to firing up Soccerway and my many other sources (OK, it's Facebook) before now.

BMC's away form in 2014 was, to be charitable, not outstanding. In fact, the Meat Men's last away victory was against TAFIC just before Christmas. After that they only managed to pick up 2 points on the road.

But their home form was enough to secure 9th place, with BMC undefeated in their last 6 home games. The last two matches of the season were home wins against Motlakase Power Dynamos (4-1) and UF Santos (3-2), which were enough to keep BMC 7 points clear of the drop and, crucially, put them 2 points ahead of the hated Extension Gunners with the win on the final day.

When you take into account all the crazy stuff happening at the beginning of the season -- the sell-off, the ownership dispute, that time two teams turned up to a match both claiming to be the real Botswana Meat Commission FC -- 9th is a pretty good finish, especially if you manage to stay ahead of your rivals.

This year's champions, by the way, are the Township Rollers - who only lost twice in the whole season. Just 5 points separated the top 4 at the end, with a big drop of 20 points between fourth and fifth. Very English Premier League.


These were the team's end-of-season awards:

Player of the Season
• Mosha "Fanta" Gaolaolwe

Most Improved Player
• Tshepho "Mahindra" Maikano

Young Player of the Season
• Unobatsha "Doc" Mbaiwa

Players’ Player of the Season
• Sageby "Sagy" Sandaka

Top Scorer
• Sageby "Sagy" Sandaka, 15 Goals

Most Valuable Player
• Tshepho "Mahindra" Maikano

Chairperson's Award
• Thabo "Festivale" Leinanyana

Supporters' Player of the Season
• Tshepho "Mahindra" Maikano

Malandros, episode 1 (part 2)

Aranha meets Jose at the quay, where he's making minor repairs to his boat. He wants her to find out what's going on with the redevelopment plans, and see if she can do something about them. Aranha stalls - she feels like this is beyond her grasp.

Later the same day, Aranha and Sem Parar, leader of the Sao Francisco parish Nagoas, meet on the beach at Praia Beijaflor. Sem Parar starts the fight, but Aranha ends it. When he goes for her, she pulls out one of her signature moves, the rasteira, and sends him sprawling onto a patch of rocks, then kicks him while he's down.
With their leader half dead, the Nagoas decide not to push things. Some of them drag Sem Parar away; about 8 of them decide to join Aranha's gang.

At a party hosted by Pedro, Rosa gossips with her friends. Pedro hoves into view and eventually works his courage up enough to ask her to visit his family home near Fortaleza de Minas - she agrees.

Meredith follows up on the lead about da Silva's visit to the girl on Flower Street. For the price of a shoe-shining, a local shoeshine boy gives him the lowdown. The one da Silva went to see is called Joselita. She live with her older sister Paoletta. They were orphaned, and it's hard to see how they're making ends meet since Paoletta lost her job at the factory.

Rosa goes to ask her father for permission to visit Pedro's place in the country. Having obtained reassurances along the lines of Pedro's parents being home, and Rosa's promise to behave, he agrees.

On her way to Santo Antonio square, Rosa is accosted by a strange man - it's Jose. He wants Rosa to put some pressure on Aranha to give up her wayward lifestyle. Since she's not listening to him, maybe she'll listen to her employer. "Well," says Rosa, who knew Aranha was tough but not that she ran a malta, "you may have just cost her her job."

At the market, Aranha talks to the traders and tells them about Senator Cruz's plans to demolish the area. Some firebrands want to go directly to the rioting and window-smashing stage of proceedings, but Aranha talks them down. There's no need to go that far -- yet.

Early next morning, at Senator Cruz's palatial residence, a stiff-collared butler brings the morning papers on a silver tray. We still haven't seen Cruz yet, so all that's visible is his arm on the rest of a high-backed chair. The front page is all about the demolition plans.
"WHO DID THIS?"

Credits roll.

Malandros, episode 1 (part 1)

PCs:
Aranha, gang leader
Jose Costa, fisherman (arrives later in the session)
Meredith Cane, grifter
Rosa Victoria Rocha Santos, slumming aristocrat


At the campaign office for Councillor Santos's national election run, the loyal retainer Erineu da Silva quizzes Meredith about some money missing from the accounts. He suspects - correctly - that Meredith used it to pay gambling debts. Cane doesn't take responsibility, and the old man leaves more suspicious than ever.

Cane meets Aranha at the marketplace near Santo Antonio church. She agrees to have one of her men follow da Silva around for a day to dig up some dirt.

Rosa is at the well-heeled Artemis Club downtown. She meets the wealthy but thick Pedro, eldest son of a Minas Gerais dairy tycoon, and successfully angles for an invitation to the fashionable Duchess's ball next week.

Aranha finds her lieutenant Bacalhau at a run-down boteco just off Santo Antonio Square. He's initially reluctant  - it sounds like a lot of boring effort - but eventually agrees to trail around after da Silva and report back.

At home, Rosa's father insists she attend the decidedly unfashionable Governor's ball instead of the Duchess's. It's important for his campaign that she be charming to influential people. They come to a compromise - she'll attend, as long as she can bring Pedro.

Cane spends the afternoon at a cafe frequented by the staff of rival candidate Senator Cruz, eavesdropping on their conversations. Cruz has secured powerful backing by promising valuable land which he'll acquire by demolishing Santo Antonio market and the slums around it.

At the same time, Rosa is out dress shopping for the ball, accompanied by several of her posh friends and Aranha, who - by day - is Rosa's maid and chaperone. After discussing the prospects for the ball and Pedro's eligibility, she decides she'll go to the Governor's ball but leave as soon as possible.

As the group leaves the dress shop, they're accosted by a number of uncouth young men. To Rosa's surprise but not dismay, Aranha handily beats one of them up. She gives Aranha the rest of the day off, and some spending money.

Just as Aranha is counting the cash, her teenage neighbour Tico-Tico comes running up calling her name. His Uncle Ze's cafe is being smashed up by the Nagoa gang from Sao Francisco parish. They say he owes them protection money, but he lives on Aranha's turf.
Aranha finds Bacalhau and sends him and Tico-Tico to gather the troops.
They arrive at the smashed cafe too late to catch the Nagoas. 

Meredith and Rosa meet outside Santo Antonio church to discuss the progress of their plan to swindle Rosa's brother out of his inheritance. Disagreements break out over who is supposed to be doing what, threats are made, and the alliance seems like it's starting to fray at the edges.


Bright and early the next morning, Cane meets Councillor Santos at his quayside warehouse and watch a cargo of coffee being loaded onto a ship bound for Europe. Santos is concerned that his honesty will be no match for Cruz's dirty tricks. Cane proposes a little underhanded work on their side, to which Santos reluctantly agrees, and gives him some discretionary spending money. "This is just between us," says Cane, " so if anyone mentions cash being missing, we know where it went but we won't say anything, right?" Right, says the Councillor. Cane uses the money to patch the gambling-debt hole in the accounts.

At the Santos house, Rosa goes to da Silva with the news that Cane has threatened to blackmail her, saying he'd expose her plan to steal her brother's inheritance. Which is preposterous, of course. Da Silva grimly replies that he will look into Cane's activities - he's been sure the man is a rascal all along.

At the pier, Jose talks with his niece Aranha while he prepares his boat for sea. Frederico's warehouse was demolished a week ago and he only got a pittance in compensation. What's next? Aranha promises to find out what's going on.

Bacalhau makes his surveillance report to Aranha and Cane. Da Silva looks clean, even dull in his habits. The only possible item of interest is that he visited a young woman on Flower Street, at the house with the blue door.

Later, posing as a possible backer, Cane gets a tour of the marketplace from Senator Cruz's banker, who describes in glowing terms how wonderful all the new buildings and plazas will be once the poor people have been kicked out. Cane gets a signed quotation for a parcel of land.

Aranha waits till the banker has gone and asks Cane what's up. He explains what's going down.

it's a week later, at the stuffy Governor's ball. Rosa feigns a dancefloor ankle injury, not very convincingly. Unwilling to make a scene, her father allows her and Pedro to leave early, on the proviso she goes straight home. She doesn't, of course.

(Part 2 to follow.)

Babies have a tough time of it.

Found in an old Gmail chat:     what is cot and buggy? 

  one is for sleeping in

the other is for sitting in while your parents push you around

  I mean like they push you around for transport, not that they constantly tell you what to do

  although that also happens to babies

MyLifeWorld

Powered by the Apocalypse 

Lunchtime Hiking
When you decide to go for an exploratory walk on the mountain paths near your office looking for a shortcut back, roll +Sharp.
On a 10+, both. On a 7-9, choose one:
- you find a little-used path that leads where you want to go.
- the route is short enough you don't get back late from your lunch break.
On a miss, what you hoped was a shortcut turns out to be a lengthy dead end.


I used this move today. Rolled a 5.

MY POST-"TWIN PEAKS" HELL

I have fond(ish) memories of Twin Peaks, which rumour now suggests may be making a TV comeback, although I am not sure why anyone would do that.

I've only seen the first season, and bits & pieces of the 2nd. A friend of mine had Season 1 on DVD back when I lived in Beijing.

I used to go round his place of an evening, we'd watch an episode or two, and then I'd enjoy a David Lynch-style nocturnal journey into terror on my way home. Hence only fond-ish.

 To get back to my place, I had to go down to ground level in his building's creaky lift complete with flickering lightbulb, then along the darkened street past an old Buddhist monastery before getting to my block.

The building I lived in had sound-activated lights, so I'd get the freight elevator up to my floor and walk along an echoing concrete corridor that was pitch black until I stamped my foot to activate them. They'd click on one after the other down the length of the corridor. If I'd ever encountered a midget in a suit on the way. I'd most likely have had a heart attack. Or, at the very least, a panic attack.

So, good series, but not the best viewing before a trip through a moonlit urban landscape. 

Highlander guest stars, in order

Best "hey, it's..." appearances so far. We are about halfway through season 4.


19 Barry Pepper
18 Rae Dawn Chong
17 Tamlyn Tomita
16 Vanity
15 Peter Firth
14 Andrew Divoff - the Russian guy in LOST

13 Robert Ito (as two different characters)
12 Roland Gift out of Fine Young Cannibals
11 Marion Cotillard
10 Brion James - the replicant at the beginning of Blade Runner
9 Sheena Easton
8 Roddy Piper
7 Michael Preston - the bloke out of Mad Max 2
6 Callum Keith Rennie (twice, as different characters)
5 Martin Kemp
4 Roger Daltrey
3 Joe Pantoliano
2 Anthony Head

1 Joan Jett

And one that my wife knew but I didn't:
Dustin Nguyen - the bloke off 21 Jump Street
 

The Inevitable Round-Up

Looking back on the books I read in 2013, the first thing I notice is there's quite a lot of them.
According to my Goodreads stats, which I think are pretty accurate, I read 42 books this year, clocking in at 12,872 pages. The page count is a bit iffy, since a lot of them were on the Kindle, but still - the main thing I notice is it's a lot more than last year. Before that the count is hard to compare, since I wasn't keeping track of my reading as I went along.

I attribute this increase in volume mainly to more sensible working hours. I owned a Kindle in 2012 (it was my birthday present from my wife), but while it helped me read more on the way to and from work, I was often too cream-crackered to do any reading.
That's still sometimes been the case this year, but in general I've been reading every day.

Looking at the spread of ratings, I am quite pleased. Mostly 3 out of 5s, and bear in mind that 2 is "it was OK" and 3 is "liked it", with 11 4-star ratings, and five 5-stars.
My theory is that if you give too many ratings over three, you just aren't being a very discerning reader. Having said that, the ratings are based on how I felt when I finished them and, like Roger Ebert's film reviews, try to compare the reading experience to books of a similar type. In other words, I don't seriously think The Time Traveller's Wife is better than Swann's Way overall, I just enjoyed it more on the bus to Aberdeen.

So, I don't know, maybe I do think it's better than Swann's Way. (And I nearly gave TTTW 3/5 anyway, except when I'd just finished it, I couldn't bring myself to mark it down for the earlier clunky bits.)

At the other end of the spectrum, my grand unified book-ratng theory holds that if you don't have at least a few ratings below 3, you're staying too much in your comfort zone when selecting your books.

So, half a dozen merely OKs, including the very disappointing The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - I'd rather have read your actual memoirs, Umberto.
And mercifully only one outright bad book this year - Redshirts, by John Scalzi, which reads like the novelisation of a forum discussion thread.

Those 5-star books:
The Death of Mao - James Palmer
A bit of log-rolling for a mate, this rating, but it is properly a good book. I must admit I enjoyed it less than his 1st book, The Bloody White Baron, since the subject matter is less pulp-adventure stuff and more like the sort of thing I used to have to read at university and then for work. Still, good book.

Everything That Rises Must Converge - Flannery O'Connor

Well worth finally getting round to.

The Hittites & Their Contemporaries in Asia Minor - J.G. MacQueen
I nearly gave this less than 5/5 but then wondered, well, what am I marking it down for? Being a bit dry? Not helping me out with pronouncing Turkish place names?  So, full marks as an introduction to the Hittites.

Watership Down - Richard Adams
I was of course familiar with the film, and picked this up expecting something of a light distraction, the sort of thing you might get from The Wind in the Willows or a Wodehouse novel. Instead I got a very moving, gripping epic and lots of useful information about rabbits.

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
My book of the year. I had avoided reading this for absolutely ages, put off by descriptions of the book's structure that made it seem dour, daunting and abstruse. Instead it's a page-turner that's grand and silly and sad and everything else.

So there you go.

Pretty narrow to begin with

Tea Leaf Nation runs a piece on the resignation of Chen Hongguo 谌洪果 from Xibei Zhengfa University, quoting his lament on the "narrowing path of academic inquiry".

Getting on for 10 years ago I interviewed a professor of anthropology at Peking University who was keen to stress the limits of expression in his own field. The example he used was that you couldn't talk about any downside to "development" (in the "development studies" sense), because promoting just that was Party policy. You could say what you wanted about things the Party didn't concern itself with, but you didn't get to challenge its decisions.

That a legal professor is feeling the CCP pinch now, rather than years ago, makes sense. Although politics has always been touchy, law and the study thereof has been a boom industry since, oh let's say the 1990s - between 1949 and 1972 only one detective story was officially published in China, because "crime" wasn't a thing, only counter-revolutionary activity, and it wasn't until the 90s that lawyers in China became really numerous. And you can carve out a lifelong career without getting into issues of whether laws are righ or wrong or actually enforced.

Once you start talking about legal reform, though, you're talking about changing things on Party territory. And you still don't get to tell the Party what to do.

Malandros

Much to my surprise, I appear to be working on an RPG with the intention of getting people I don't know playing it.

The high concept pitch: Gangs of New York meets The Wire. In Brazil.

(The high concept pitch needs work.)

People I do know are mostly away for Christmas but in the New Year I hope to arrange some playtesting. The basic structure of the storygame part is OK, since it's based on the DramaSystem SRD - and Hillfolk already exists, so we know that works.

But I need to sit down and try out all my guesstimated difficulty numbers, character generation, and so forth.

Then there's just the small task of explaining in writing what the idea is. 


(Picture from the exuberant Salve A Malandragem! blog.)

A Separate Reality

I've been reading a bit about latter-day Carlos Castaneda, after setting up his cult compound, Tensegrity, all that business.

The events after his death are a Delta Green scenario waiting to happen.

E.g. http://www.salon.com/2007/04/12/castaneda/

This bit -
"He’d become disillusioned with another hero, Timothy Leary, who supposedly mocked Castaneda when they met at a party, earning his lifelong enmity."

- made me think of Johann Hari. another writer of imaginative veracity, who took umbrage when the Dalai Lama made a (pretty tame) gag about him being fat, and heaped scorn on said lama in print whenever a paper-thin pretext present itself.

Carlos Castaneda vs Johann Hari. Maybe our parents were right and the 60s really were better.

Dissident Nostalgia

There's been a fair amount of to-do on HK's streets this past week or so, not as much as in Singapore*, but at least demonstrating political engagement rather than the usual grievances about how capitalism doesn't guarantee you'll get your money back.

If you were shown this photo of the future in 1996, would you believe it possible?

Probably yes, but I think you'd jump to some very different assumptions about just how Fascist China had decided to handle things from 1997 onward.

I don't think the old flag got this much play when it actually was the flag of Hong Kong Across town, a pro-China activist was ripping it up as the standard of traitors.


* The Guardian claimed "this kind of violence is unheard of in Singapore", which is, well... unheard of done to the cops, sure.

You can't take it with you

Over at Big Lychee, a commenter holds forth on the topic of Hongkongers' widely-expressed reactions to the death and deprivation in the Philippines in the wake of the recent typhoon:

HKers abject lack of compassion for victims of the typhoon, and rather venal approach to the bus tragedy, is shameful. I believe the resentment comes from the fact that the Filipinos who live here reflect an uncomfortable truth: you can be happy, you can experience joy, without constant striving for material wealth. And when HKers witness this – joy for the sake of joy – it makes it so much harder to pretend that the new car, apartment, gourmet meal, fulfills and satisfies the soul.
And so, rather than using the uncomfortable feeling to spur contemplation of the nature of true happiness and life fulfillment, HKers choose to judge and hate and deny the only really happy people who live here. Sad.

Gravity

We (that is, EXPLODATRON) have a done a new song, called Gravity
Why not give it a listen?
It's about space stuff, although that might all be a metaphor for human relationships - it usually is!

Remembrance Day

The man on the right of this photo had the same name as me, give or take a middle name. In 1942, aged 23, he was shot down with the rest of his crew over the IJsselmeer by Reinhold Knacke, a fighter ace who would live less than a year longer himself. 

W/Ag Sergeant Thomas McGrenery's body was never found. His name is inscribed on the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede. 

The idiotic opinions of my youth

Thanks to the internet digging of a friend, I recently gained access to a cache of stuff I wrote when I was at university. Some of it even earlier, in fact, as I believe the drinking game (remember when that was an internet thing?) designed to accompany viewing the BBC 2 programme Late Review was devised with some friends in the Sixth Form.

There's a set of capsule reviews of films I watched in the year 2000 that provides supporting evidence for the contention that everyone's an idiot when they're 21. The tone of all of them makes me cringe, as does the implied presumption that anyone would want to read a paragraph on what I thought of Barry Lyndon or The Third Man.

That said, I think I stand by the last sentence in the bit about Blade Runner: "How Ridley Scott then went on to make G.I. Jane eludes me."

The Golden Mile

I recently watched The World's End. As advised by a friend of mine at a recent pub quiz, it is indeed a bit of a mess. It's good but by far the least of the three "Cornetto" films.

Probably the key misstep is that it goes too quickly from the Body Snatchers paranoia period to the running-away-from-aliens bit. Staying there a little longer would have helped the pacing and made the continuation of the pub crawl more believable.

Speaking of pacing, that speech-making at the end felt like it went on forever.

Still, as I say it was fairly good. I might have enjoyed it more, too, if it hadn't been filmed in Letchworth, which made me see the real geography instead of the fictional town you're supposed to see.

In the spirit of the film, I've created a Golden Mile pub crawl for Hitchin, where I went to school: http://goo.gl/maps/VP5VM


View Larger Map
On reflection, it might be better to do it in the reverse of the order there, going from H to A instead. Partly because you'll want your wits about you on Nightingale Road, and partly because there's just not so far to walk between pubs in the town centre.

Shanghai 1930 errata

Blood on the Snow, the companion book for Robin Laws' game Hillfolk, contains a series pitch called "Shanghai 1930", which is about pretty much what you would expect.

Despite being well done for the most part, whoever wrote it went off the rails in a couple of places and just started making up random stuff.
Here's a little in the way of unofficial errata:

p. 45 (replaces the first 3 paragraphs, up to "The Western interests...")

Western Characters

As part of the humiliating settlement the Western Powers forced on China after

the Opium Wars, Shanghai became a treaty port, where British citizens were permitted to trade with anyone they chose and to rent land. The British were soon joined by the Americans and other foreign nations in gaining similar privileges, and a parcel of land outside the old city of Shanghai became the International Settlement. 

Not a free city, nor a colony, the International Settlement exists in an odd legal limbo wherein every resident (or at least all of those from a country with Most Favored Nation status) is subject only to the laws of his own land. This does not stop the foreign settlers (chiefly the British and Americans) from calling for military aid from home in times of crisis. The International Settlement is the hub of the city and is what most people think of when they think of Shanghai. The Settlement maintains its own police force (the Shanghai Municipal Police) and volunteer armed forces, and is governed by the Shanghai Municipal Council, which is elected by qualified residents (defined mostly by land ownership) and consults with international consuls. 

Chinese law does not apply to any citizen of the following nations: Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United States. These foreign nationals are instead tried by a consular court if they are accused of crimes under their home countries’ legal systems.They can also, of course, get done for breaching the Settlement's own bylaws.

To the south of the International Settlement is the French Concession. Unlike the Settlement, this actually is sovereign French soil, and French law applies to all within its boundaries.

p. 46 (replace whole paragraph on The Bund)

The Bund: The western shore of the Whangpu is built up with European-style granite

skyscrapers. The name of this stretch of the International Settlement comes from the Anglo-Indian word bund, meaning an embankment. It rhymes with “fund”.

Pale Fire connections

Nova Zembla
is the name in Dutch for...

Novaya Zemlya
where in 1961 the USSR detonated history's largest nuclear explosion...

the Tsar Bomba.

Bombycilla
is the genus of birds better known as the

waxwing.

The Bandung Octopus House

Ever since my wife first told me about a "weird house with a scary octopus on the roof" where people say witchcraft is practised, I have been somewhat interested in this locus of lurid rumour -- though not quite enough to go to Bandung just to see it.

Located on Pasteur Road, the house has a statue of a large black cephalopod on its roof, grasping the house with its tentacles -- the design of the house itself suggests a submarine being grappled, and has seaweed-like ornamentation in places, which implies the sculpture was always part of the design.

The house dates back to the 1980s at least. According to some sources, the octopus was originally pink, but the paint has mostly peeled away. You can still see pink paint on the suckers, in some photographs. The peeling paint and general disrepair of the house's exterior is often cited as one of the things that makes it so creepy.

I say 'cephalopod' because neighbourhood residents say it's a squid, not an octopus, according to this Bandung Citizen article: http://citizenmagz.com/?p=2451

That article also features an interview with the head of the neighbourhood association, who says it's just an ordinary house, the octopus is a decorative cover for a water tank and he's never had any complaints.

Rumah Gurita from a distance

 

But then... he *would* say that, wouldn't he?

Stained glass windows - and a cross between
seashell and submarine designs?

Also noted by internet commenters are a number of stained glass windows, featuring playing card designs (picture at right), Jesus, 'figures of antiquity' and an inverted cross (I have yet to see pictures of any of these).

Another recurring feature in accounts of the house is that it has "no door", or even that it can only be viewed from a distance and disappears when you approach -- one account describes the writer and his friends becoming groggy and disoriented, finding themselves on an unexpected street, defeated by some kind of magical barrier: http://cerita-misteri.reunion.web.id/2011/10/misteri-rumah-gurita-di-bandung.html

How this squares with accounts where people claim to have knocked on the door and spoken with a caretaker is unclear. The neighbourhood watch guy in the article linked above says that they used to get a lot of people ringing the doorbell for a prank or a dare, so the people inside don't answer the door any more.

This blog entry - http://ryanz-grill.blogspot.hk/2009/04/rumah-gurita-di-bandung-sebelum-tol.html - describes a 2009 visit where the door was answered by a portly Chinese man who said the owner used to be a sailor, and that he spends most of his time in Jakarta.

A year earlier, the blogger "Manson Davis" had a similar visit, but when his videoed the conversation with the caretaker, his phone developed a mysterious glitch and the video file was corrupted. Manson Davis' blog is now offline and not on archive.org - just because it was on Friendster, or something more sinister?

In fact, the house was raided by the cops in May this year - http://news.liputan6.com/read/601498/diduga-tempat-ritual-seks-bebas-polisi-periksa-rumah-gurita.
As you might expect, they found nothing. A police spokesperson said it's just a normal house with three people living there.I suspect this will do little to affect the Octopus House's reputation.

Pink suckers - allegedly the original colour
of the whole thing

The most common theory about the house is that it is a church of Satan. Typical stories include a woman going to the house and leaving the next morning "sick and covered in scratches" -- and presumably with only hazy memories of what happened, although this isn't specified.

The more detailed, prurient accounts generally involve evangelical protestant minsters, naive girls and parties at the house that start with worshipping the Devil before going predictably Eyes Wide Shut. Here's an example -- note the use of larger, different coloured text for what the writer considers the key words: http://iseng-posting.blogspot.hk/2012/01/misteri-rumah-gurita-bandung.html

This is tediously unimaginative but seems to be the only narrative with traction on Indonesian forums. One or two places suggest a link with the Illuminati, which is slightly more interesting but still not much off the beaten path.

I hope someone can step forward in future with a new, compelling, mostly implausible but not outright falsifiable story that will give this piece of unusual architecture the occult, conspiratorial urban legend it deserves.