In a Nutshell

Inflatable hammers
Fizzy yoghurt
15 minutes of fame for PN
Trots want friends
Clarification: Nigeria

Inflatable hammers

Thirty years after the Year of Living Dangerously--when the Communist Party of Indonesia was outlawed and a million people were killed for being suspected members--it seems they're still looking for Reds under the beds (or in other unusual places) in Indonesia. Police in Semarang have recently started seizing Nintendo game cartridges because the 20^th frame (out of a total of 1200 frames) contained a hammer-and-sickle motif. Meanwhile, in another town in Java, inflatable hammers have been declared illegal. In the rest of the world, such air-filled tools are merely considered silly--and perfectly useless at banging in nails, to say nothing of denting the nosecones of Indonesia-bound Hawk fighter-trainers.

Fizzy yoghurt

Meanwhile, one side-effect of the cold war between the USA and Iran is the sale of those famed poisons of modern capitalism, Pepsi® and Coke^(TM). Wire-service stories recently reported the banning of soft drinks in the Islamic Republic. We can only hope the decree was aimed at imported soft drinks, rather than being a crackdown on fizziness per se: one of the most refreshing and healthful drinks known to humanity is yoghurt and soda-water lassi, which my book on Middle Eastern vegetarian cookery credits to the Iranians.

15 minutes of fame for PN

Last month's Nutshell about telephone numbers past and present for MI5's spymasters gave (as a parenthetic aside) a number which really did enable one of our researchers to get connected to the secret service's switchboard. Nothing too remarkable, as it happens ... Imagine PN's surprise, then, when the Independent on Sunday rang our offices wanting to know about M!5's number being posted on the Internet.

Well, yes, the number was on the Internet, but it was also in good old-fashioned black and white in the pages of PN. The excited and exciteable Sindy article was followed by a request for PN admin worker Chris Booth to give his views on government secrecy on BBC's Radio 1. Yes, the medium is the mess--or something like that.

Trots want friends

The UK Foreign Office keeps a useful database of all sorts of British organisations, so that official foreign visitors who want to make contact with a particular segment of British society can be put in touch with the right people.

Knowing this, the "Campaign Against Militarism" (that's the one run by the Revolutionary Communist Party, not the peace movement one -- see various past Nutshells) wrote to the ministry asking to be on the list.

The Foreign Office bureaucracy wrote to the Campaign Against Militarism asking for more details. However, since they have such an efficient database -- perhaps courtesy of MI5 and MI6; or maybe they use the Housmans World Peace Directory? -- they sent their reply to the real CAM at the Peace Pledge Union. This was the first the PPU knew of the possibility of their hosting visits by foreign delegations, so they were very grateful to the RCP! The PPU duly returned the mistakenly sent letter, together with their own request to be on the list; and they pointed out which CAM was which. Now the Foreign Office has the option of putting the other "CAM" on their database too if it wants--but presumably under its true colours.

Clarification: Nigeria

The January 1995 Peace News carried an article by Peter Moszynski on the political situation in Nigeria, titled "Will Nigeria lurch from crisis to disaster?". We have been asked to point out that Momodu Kasim Momodu, who was quoted in the article, is not "one of the leading opposition figures in exile" mentioned in the lead paragraph.

The quote used in the text was from a British Amnesty publication and appeared in Peace News without Mr Momodu's knowledge. We apologise for any confusion which may have resulted from this article.