Eating Out

The river Chao Phraya meanders through Bangkok. Alongside it are numerous restaurants. From amongst one of them, two tunes rang out into the pre-New Year’s Eve sky tonight, played by a band with a female singer in a hazel dress: “I don’t mind spanking everyday” as in Maroon 5’s She Will Be Loved and “Eat My Hat”, a rendition of Zombies by The Cranberries.

Crapping victoriously

Losers must leave this latrine with soiled behinds.

Salvation is nigh!

Soon to come here - how:
- to be happy, find peace and understand the classic Thai word “farang”
- to take a shite and ---WIN!!

"Politicians are a lot like diapers. They should be changed frequently and for the same reasons." Robin Williams as Tom Dobbs in Man of the Year. (Overall an average flick if it wasn't for Robin Williams, mind you.)

Revealed: Vogon to be PM of Thailand

http://www.worldsoffantasy.net/cutenews/data/upimages/vogon.jpg
http://www.thekoratpost.com/Images/Samak.jpg
(Vogons are charaters in Douglas Adam's The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The
picture above is taken from the 2005 film adaptation)

Democracy has returned to Thailand

The despotic Gulag-torture-pistol-to-your-head days are over! At last sleep without neighbors being dragged out of their homes and disappearing into oblivion. No more screams behind closed doors. No more extrajudicial killings in broad daylight. That’s what it was like before December 23, 2007 – because that’s what military dictatorships do, isn’t it? So it must have been that way.

Conversely, today the sun is smiling even warmer than ever on the country which is Thailand. Democracy has returned and the dark days are over. It’s a time to rejoice, a time to celebrate those sweet freedoms which has been missed so dearly – so far only the one to visit adult web sites for the first time in years, but everything will be pure and good under a democratic government. Just the way it used to be.

For those who have reservations: A flawed democracy is still better than none, as repeatedly mentioned in this context. As a matter of fact, this is a lesson for all aspects of life. Next time you have pneumonia, don’t bother looking for treatment. Accept it. It could also be lung cancer.

Erection Day

Today is what former PM Thaksin Shinawatra in a CNN interview once referred to as “Erection Day” , after which “everything will be good.” Apart from that, people in Thailand also cast votes on this December 23. Let’s hope with the same firm outcome.

On this occasion Housewife Somjit Hongthong, 53, told AFP news agency: "I'm glad we're having this election today, so we can hold our heads high to show the rest of the world that we are a democratic country." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7157829.stm)

From this concludes: a) democracy is a necessity not because it provides better standards of living for the majority, the right for people to express their opinions, equal opportunities, justice and liberties etc. etc. – but because otherwise the “rest of the world” will frown upon you.

b) An election is enough for a democracy. Two things come to mind: firstly, that even the most despotic regimes used elections as legitimization for their grip to power. Secondly, the words of Gael García Bernal: Democracy should be practiced not every six years, but every day.

Hence: One swallow doesn‘t make a summer, one erection not everything good and one election certainly no democracy.

Without pondering on the swallow-erection pun forcing itself on, it can only be hoped the Thai electorate won’t be jerked around too much.

Looking for Love - Thai Brides

This video is part of Louis Theroux' documentary series Weird Weekends (2000). In the episode posted, Louis visits agencies for arranged marriages in Bangkok, as well as talks to customers and owners.

Another drought or: The Fountain has run dry

A couple of years back I watched “ π” , directed by Aronofsky and it’s been one of my favorite movies ever since. Cinematically speaking, I fell in love with this B/W depiction of a quest for the world formula.

Then came “Requiem for a Dream” which I liked even better with its great score (I use the title theme as personal ring tone for people I really like; yes, I do!), its close-ups and its sober sadness-emitting story line. A copy of it would be one of the items I named if asked the cliché question about having to choose items to take with me on a deserted island.

Recently then, I saw “The Fountain” , Aronofsky’s most recent film – and previous joy of watching his movies did not occur. The reason has a name, Ladies and Gentleman: Hugh Jackman. I honestly don’t know what it is about him that makes me rather want to watch a Kevin Federline concert than the, indisputably, good movies he’s acting in. Probably it is because is the straight personification of “lame”: lame looks, extra lame personality, turbo lame acting.

Once I read an interview with Hugh Jack-off in one of those magazines for men which tell you how to work out, eat healthy, screw better and build a “300” physique within a month. It was in one of those Men’s Health’s where Shmuh-Hugh explained his gym routine as extremely noisy; something like “I scream like a pig”.

I always thought it might be a fine idea to remove those mirrors.

Politically correctness...

...Seen at some Colonel Sanders’...It is worth mentioning that somebody behind me pointed this out with the words: “Well, apparently it’s campaigning time in full swing.”...

The drought is over!

Over the weekend, alcohol sales in Thailand were suspended due to pre-elections. The same will be the case next Friday till Sunday midnight when the actual elections are scheduled.

The measures makes sense, considering that recruiting sailors soldiers used to be done by filling them up, letting them enlist while they were hammered and then the next morning they found themselves sailing the seas; and those were not the ones of cheese. And that’s about all about it which makes sense.

A claim by various groups ever since the last coup d’état has been to restore ‘genuine democracy’ in Thailand. The question must arise how ‘genuine’ a cracy can be which consists of a demo which values its right to vote so little that it sways to the ballot boxes and let’s Bacchus lead their hands in such decisions? And how must their maturity be evaluated – a key element of democracy – if such a measure can keep them from stocking up the days preceding the ban and still turn up rat-faced?

Maybe patronizing the electorate like this is what leads to increased alcohol consumption before elections – in light that people realize their suffrage is about legitimizing rules and not about participation. Who could blame them for despairing over that and hitting the bottle?

Wedding Dinner Entrée which carries some resemblance to road kill

(seen recently at a Thai-Chinese wedding. Only the thin, stripy bits of skin on the back are
meant to be eaten during this course; a fact that may not increase one's appetite.)

(strumstrum) There must more to life (strumstrum) than stereotypes (strumstrum)

The caption to this blog reads “Blog from Thailand - about Thailand, the rest of the world and some of the things in it. “. By this I don’t mean that I will occupy web space to join the sullen voices condemning Thai political life with nothing but smugness.

The internet provides a great way to voice opinions, particularly in countries such as Thailand where public participation and debates are as scarce as pork loin in Saudi Arabia. Instead of wasting time and resources on posting emotional outbursts those people would never dare to utter publicly. Instead, egos should be taken back a wee bit and substituted with constructive criticism. ‘Constructive’ does not imply hate speech, disrespect and feasting on one self’s -perceived eloquence and wittiness, which are in fact little more than insults wrapped in pseudo-Americanisms. It bores the crap out of people, to use this jargon, with an imbalanced, single-sided mindset and misses the chance to comment in constructively on the subject matter.

Conversely, there is little need to provide another elongated hymn on the beauty of Thailand, the friendliness of its inhabitants or the outstanding qualities of its cuisine etc etc blablabla. Experience suggests the following: Every country has places of supreme beauty and utter ugliness. Period. The same applies for the former Kingdom of Siam. This, of course, should by no means imply that Thailand sucks. Au contraire! It is a lovely place – but certainly not in the washed-out terms in which it is commonly described. Sadly, there are no nice peoples per se: Assholes of the world, unite!

On "These Things" by She Wants Revenge

On These Things by She Wants Revenge

The song "These Things" , in the same way as "Tear You Apart" by the same artist, can be aesthetically placed in the vicinity of Nabokov's "Lolita" and Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice". It is obsessive, obscure, yet somehow beautiful in its obscurity. It is deepest, yet most entertaining track on She Wants Revenge’s eponymous debut. "These Things" is vague. Neither is indicated what "these things" are, nor do the events depicted allow to pin down from whose POV they are told.

The 'you' standing in line, the 'I' and the object of obsession are all centered on a somewhat schizophrenic narrator who addresses people in the crowd, envisions how the girl 'pleasures herself' in the toilet and makes fiendish plans of arson with his alter ego. The girl has a Popsicle, clearly a phallic reverence - At least that's how the obsessive character interprets it. The nymphet has an irresistible attraction for him, he understands that she is trying to seduce him. But she 'locks him out', prefers to masturbate instead. That implies that she actually "needs it" or "wants it", in the eyes of the person who can't take the refusal and, consequently, sets fire to the building she's in.

However, he is not really guilty in his own opinion: The lines "I'm not a bad man, I'm just overwhelmed" direct some guilt away from him. It's not him, it's "because of these things". Yet, "these things" seem somehow self-explicatory. A vague apology for which there is little or no rational explanation - Solely unsurpassable obsession; reminiscence of Peter Lorre's depiction of a pedophiliac in the film noir "M" in which, too, desire is 'overwhelming'.

Apart from the aspect just mentioned, there appears to be another theme
in the song, that is: is futility of relationships. Lovers want to numb their pain, yet they are "gripping tightly to something they will never own". Those who are alone are so by "choice" or " some reward"; both terms with a positive connotation, not the negative ones commonly associated with solitude. Hence the advice is that just a moment of boredom should not drive you
to commit yourself to someone else.

"This is the time of your life you just can't tell" suggests all happiness is within the own self, not 'out there'. And most certainly not in attachment to something or someone you can not own anyways. It might be noteworthy that the setting of "These Things" seems to be in front of a club: a 'crowd walks by' and the 'you' is standing in line and the girl is in a bathroom. However, if the location 'bathroom' is considered in a British English sense rather than the usage common in AE, the element of privacy of a private home is introduced. The 'line' mentioned earlier, in this context, could be seen as a reverence to the inevitability to escape loneliness. A 'joke' - or happiness- can not be shared with anybody, "you have to laugh by yourself"."

Piracy kills

Alas! Piracy is a crime. No doubt about that. It is theft. Plain and simple theft. Just like steeling a handbag, a mobile phone or a DVD from a store. You take something away from somebody without that person’s consent. That individual is left without its property. When steal a handbag, the owner can no longer use the items stored in there - of course, since you took it; and in the act of stealing possibly also deprived that person of sentimental value. You made her sad. That’s why theft is bad. The same is the case when you nick a mobile phone. The owner can no longer use it. You have it now. Period. Stealing a DVD is not much different. When there used to be 10 in stock, after you bag one, there will be only 9 left. One is lost. Gone. Disparu.

Copying movies or songs is piracy. It is theft and theft is a crime. Always been, always will. The Qur’an suggests that the thieves’ hand be cut off. According to the Common Law of England, until recently, theft was a capital crime. No laughing matter at all, you see. Neither is infringing on copyright protected material! You download an album illegally, you steal. The songs are gone; you take them away in the process of downloading, away from somebody else who can’t listen to them anymore because you took them away. That’s why using file sharing and P2P networks is a criminal activity and people who engage in those activities are nothing more than common thieves. Only fair if your ears are cut off when you download music or your eyesight is take from you when you watch a copied flick.

But this does not have to happen. One can repent. One can make amends and move out of the shady valley of illegality and into the rigorous realm of DRM, short for Digital rights management. No guilty conscience will spoil your delight when you listen to tracks which will only belong to you and no one else. No one can take them from, as they only play on your player and nowhere else. Plus, you don’t have to bother about records or CDs with real covers anymore which you will still have in future decades. It is only fair to pay 1 $ per song for being spared this sort of nuisance, and left instead with nothing but a bunch of intangible files for the price of a double CD a few years earlier.

These are a truly ragged times we live in. Gone the days when not a single soul taped songs from the radio and nobody made mix cassettes with their favorite songs for a loved one. Gone like The Fall Guy and the Red Threat. But, praise the Lord, real heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jackie Chan make a case for ‘hunting down the bad guys.’ This is oh! so more important, considering that the people who produce pirated movies are the very same ones who counterfeit medicine! Our only hope can be that they get here in time and destroy the Axis of Piracy once and for all.

(see the clip at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf4pnY1wFiU)

1 Park 2 Prices

The National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation Department has cut the entrance fees for foreigners to national parks countrywide in a bid to lure more overseas tourists, writes the Bangkok Post. (http://www.bangkokpost.com/topstories/topstories.php?id=124283) May this measure turn out successfully, so that the travelers from overseas (as distinct from travelers from adjacent and other Asian countries, mind you) can indulge themselves in the floral and faunal abundance of the Thai national parks – whilst still paying up to 10 times the fee for Thai nationals.

The main argument for this is a simple one: You rich, we poor. You pay more, we less; an explanation widely accepted within the country and often eagerly defended by middle aged gentlemen who have chosen the Kingdom as their domicile for cultural reasons and indifferent to the younger, female population. Get really, mate, or so they go, and benevolently and politically correct add:” Get over it and pay the man,” citing minimum wages of 192฿ .

A logic of its own, one might find. Whilst it is true that the per capita GDP of Thailand, $9,200, is lower than France’s ($ 31,200), it is also a fact that neighboring Singapore’s is yet higher, $ 31,400. On the other hand, Thailand beats Serbia significantly. $ 4,400 was the average share of output per person in the East European country in 2006, less than 50% of the Thai figure. Slight doubts about the lucidity of the main argument for double pricing may arise.

So should the notion of ‘overseas tourists’ and Thai citizens. Who are they, the ‘overseas tourists’? Frenchmen or Serbs? Can the income gap be bridged by such a simplification? And who are “the Thais”? Are they the deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra who recently purchased Manchester City for 90 odd million Pound? Or are they the rice farmer in Isaarn who indeed may live on even less than the above mentioned minimum wage ?

The solution? Pay the man! Don’t replace the discriminatory policy of double. All is lost if a Thai family of five in a Lexus SUV doesn’t have to pay less than 50% of what the student from ‘overseas’ in the back of a travel operator’s pick up truck has. May I further suggest a transcontinental task force should be established in order to design a comprehensive study on variations of entrance fees to national parks around the world based on purchasing power parity?

From this, global standards of entrances fees can be deduced and equality will triumph at last. This way, the nation state persists in the form of a determinant of entrance fees and regional identities are protected from globalization’s ghoulish grip - as well as from the reach of reason.

Then again: double pricing could become standard for all transactions. Different prices for gas, CDs, latte macchiato, canned soup – depending on nationality. One Big Mac? That’s 3$ if your are Thai, and 17$ for the folks from Luxembourg.

A primate in Khao Yai National Park, Thailand

Admission (as of November 2007)

• Thai Nationals: 20฿
• Overseas Tourists: 200฿
• Apes: free of charge

(100฿=$3.29)