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  Bob Couttie 7:48 am on April 29, 2009 | 0 | # |
  

  If you enjoy Bob’s writings you’ll enjoy his new book, Chew The Bones: Maddog Essays On Philippine History, Bob Couttie’s third book,now available on Amazon.

  Says the blurb: “Take a time-travelling journey of a thousand years of adventure and romance as you explore the unknown highways, byways and strange ways of an almost forgotten world. Dip into a unique, eye-opening collection of true stories they didn’t tell you at school. In this world slaves get benefits worthy of a corporate highflier. A redhaired hard-to-handle Hong Kong-born Irish teenager marries a man determined to change his country’s destiny. England’s Queen Victoria is given the world’s most expensive wedding dress, made by Filipinos. The last cavalry charge in American history begins with a hangover as the first Japanese bombs drop on the Philippines. A Scots-American widow find a new purpose protecting and building lives for the indigenous Aeta people of the Zambales Mountains.”

  A review says: “Bob Couttie writes with an absorbing, lively sense of fun, fascination and scrupulous research. You come away from this book with a feeling for the romance and adventure that made, and is making, the Philippines what it is today.”

  It is available immediately from Amazon here

  If you live in the Philippines, a special low-cost edition is available and you can get a personalised signed copy for just 300 pesos

  To order one, email bcouttie@gmail.com

   

• Bob Couttie 7:19 pm on January 18, 2016 | 1 | # |
  Tags: Blount, E. San Juan, Franklin Bell, Gore Vidal, James M Bell, John M Gates, Ken De Bevoise, Luzviminda Francisco, Stanley Karnow

  Philippine Genocide? The Numbers Don’t Add Up

  (The following is based on several discussion on the Facebook Philippine American War groupⁱ, we are grateful for the immense wealth of expertise and enthusiasm in researching this issue.)

  We cannot know for sure how many died during the conflict of 1899-1902. Estimates of actual combatants range from 25,000 to 36,000 but the main controversy relates to how many civilians died during the conflict, estimates range from 200,000 to 3 million and whether those were deliberate or unintentional.

  No estimate has been made in the available literature of civilian casualties during the 1896-1898 revolution nor of civilians killed by Filipino Republican forces during the Philippine-American Warⁱⁱ.

  Census figures are immensely problematic especially when comparing the census carried out under the Spanish regime for pre-1899 figures and those under the American regime for the post-1899 period due to different methodologies. Some of the issues are covered in a briefing for the Senate Committee on the Philippine of 1902 (See Appendix). (More …)

   

• Bob Couttie 8:56 am on June 12, 2014 | 0 | # |
  

  Looking f9or the facts about the Balangiga Massacre? Check out Hangt The Dogs, the true Targic Story of the Balangiga Massacre

  Or try a history road with  Chew The Bones

  Gret writing, great history Here!

   

• Bob Couttie 4:22 am on January 25, 2014 | 0 | # |
  

  Drum Roll
  Rimshot
  Here it is!

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HZN1UAY
  Plus,
  https://www.authorgraph.com/authors/BobCouttie
  Yes, you can have your own ‘signed’ Hang The Dogs

  Also check out the webpage here
   

• Bob Couttie 12:29 pm on October 3, 2013 | 0 | # |
  

  Preface

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Part Six

  Part Seven

  Part Eight

  Part Nine

  Conclusion

   

• Bob Couttie 11:39 am on June 10, 2013 | 0 | # |
  

  Sunday was a fruit day and I’m officially jealous. The fruit started around 6am when I wandered around to a little market around the corner from my apartment. I had not really visited the place before. There, amid a phalanx of motorcycles like varnish ebony guardians outside the cafes, were women with floppy hats, other with the headscarfs that identify them as Cham, with fruit and household sundries on rush mats.
  One woman sat on a low stool in front of a brazier made of a terracotta cauldron set at angle angle and filled with burning charcoal. She would take a flat, thin white disk from a pile beside her and juggle it with a pair of instruments made of narrow, long wire fans. The disk doubled in size and puffed up into something like a poppadom, which she placed on a pile next to her.
  Small watermelons the size of a small child’s head were piled by the roadside. I bought three for 1,000 riels, the equivalent of 25 cents.
  On another mat were rambutan, round red and hairy, still hanging from the twig and beside them were rows of Dragon fruit, pitaya, like fist-sized flames burning neon pink and green. The Cambodian name for them, Sror Kaa Neark, apparently means dragon scales.
  I’ve never been impressed by dragon fruit, they’ve always had a shy insipid taste for me but when I tried these the taste was stronger but still light, and pleasant.
  I bought a couple and along with the rambutan paid something nominal for them.
  Next was a trip to see a fellow voice-worker, Haylie, he husband Tom and three-year old daughter Bodia.

  Halylie, an energetic English woman, and her Danish husband acquired land and fruit trees on one the most beautiful spots on the river. They are building their own house with the help of a Cambodian construction team. One of the team cooked duck with chilli and we all sat around crossed legged on mats eating the deceased duck puntuated by cried of ‘cho-moy’ and clinking of cans of Angkor beer.
  I am officially jealous of Haylie and Tom.

  Haylie records advertisements, intros and station IDs for radio stations in London, very similar to what I do in a different sphere.

  The final fruit of the day came after I returned home. There was a knock at the door, which I opened, to find a neighbour with half a durian. I smile enthusiastically and took the gift. It was dark so I couldn’t eat it outside so I took it into the kitchen and closed the door. Within a minute the smell of the durian, smelling like a gas leak, permeated th apartment and it had to go. Feeling a little guilty I put it into a plastic bag which I put into a rubbish bag, and took it outside to the rubbish bin – one made of an old truck tyre – in the road outside.
  It had been a fruity day.
   

• Bob Couttie 12:06 pm on January 3, 2013 | 0 | # |
  

  Some people are only comfortable doing what they’ve done before. My approach to film or video has always been “What do I want to do?” and, second “What haven’t I done before?”. “I don’t know how to do that” is not excuse for not doing something. Of course, it helps having a lot of experience – sometimes one instinctively knows something can be done, something can be fixed, without knowing exactly how – because there are so many options. A bit like life.

   

• Bob Couttie 3:59 pm on November 26, 2012 | 0 | # |
  

  Now up to page 54, so moving onwards. As usual, read online under Development Script on the top menu or get the PDF under downloads.

   

• Bob Couttie 9:49 am on November 11, 2012 | 0 | # |
  

  The development script has been updated. There has been a delay in moving forward. Hopefully now back on track.

   

• Bob Couttie 11:27 am on December 24, 2011 | 0 | # |
  

  If you’ve ever tried to get a Huawei E160E working with Ubuntu, succeeded, then been faced with futzing around all over again when you update Ubuntu, there may be a simple answer: instal Wammu.

  The history of this is that while still working with Windoze I found I needed two wireless modems, one, a ZTE MF626 for Smart bro and a Huawei E160E with Globe, to cover the patchy coverage. I then got the Huawei unlocked so I could use both SIMs in the same modem.

  Fast forward, I switched to Ubuntu on my laptop to discover that it recognised the ZTE modem but not the Huawei. That locked me into Smart Bro, which is unusable in Upper Cubi, SBFZ where I spend a lot of time with a client.

  I did discover that if I started up my laptop with both modems plugged in, both would show under network manager. A bit inconvenient but it worked.

  I then decided to install Wammu so that I could send and received texts like a cellphone. Having installed Wammu and configured it to recognise the Huawei E160E I found, whoopee, Ubuntu now recognised the modem under network manager without a problem.

  So, if you don’t want to mess around with usb_modeswitch files installing Wammu might be the answer.

   

• Bob Couttie 11:55 am on December 12, 2011 | 0 | # |
  Tags: philippine history, philippines

  Chew The Bones is now on Kindle! Just found out. Covers what it was like to be a slave in the Philippines, the last charge by a US cavalry unit (at Morong), how did the US colonisation change the Philippines? Find out what the CIA thought, and how Queen Victoria got to own a bit of Manila. The book is here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B006K1OJCI

   

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