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This is going to be photo-intensive, so I'll put it behind a cut, but first, some simple directions. Click on the thumbnail to pop up a bigger version on my flickr page. Or you can just go clicky clicky here to see the whole set there. Vote for the three you wouldn't mind having on your wall.
( Poll starts here )
- Where::home
- Deep Feelings::
curious - Musika::You Ought To Be In Pictures
Bill Sykes
Originally uploaded by how3ird.
My latest nostalgia project was to scan in all the slides and cast materials from the Bangkok Community Theatre 1975 production of Oliver! in which I played Bill Sykes. This is a self-portrait taken in the dressing room pre-makeup. Follow the flickr link to see the rest of the set.
My theater friends will especially get a kick out of the tech letter - a letter from our tech director "inviting" us to help build the set.
It was an interesting show. Haydn Stradling, who played Fagin, was a superb actor from New Zealand, Nancy was played by Rosemary Hazell, who had a flute-like soprano voice, taught me a couple of fun British and Aussie folk songs, and worked in the British embassy. During the run of the show her fiance was killed in a car crash, and the director (Sally Anderson) filled in the part for that weekend. Rosemary returned for the final weekend, but it was very difficult for her, for all of us, especially the final reprise of As Long As He Needs Me.
- Deep Feelings::
nostalgic - Musika::My Name
On another album, Dangerous, there is a very beautiful song in Thai which is titled in English Love Song in the Wind. It is one of those rare songs where the tune is gorgeous and the words match. And it has a little gimmick at the end which I just adore.
My Thai is not that good, but the song's lyrics are mostly pretty simple, so I'll take a stab at it:
Hear in the wind which blows everywhere
A song may enter your heart
and also bring tears
(something about the heart)
Can you remember when we used to meet?
I didn't know if you would leave or not
Chorus:
One word only
I wanted to say to you
Held in my heart till we meet
That word is love
I love you
But speaking (something something) you, do you agree?
Could speak to many people, one person would hear
I've seen that, but it's stingy(?) love
I'll give it to the wind which blows, floats by
Repeat Chorus, change the last line to:
I love only you
Repeat last verse
[Singer takes a deep breath, pause, blows]
It's not a complete translation, and I'm sure I've got bits wrong, but the general idea is there. I'm a sucker for romantic songs. Especially romantic songs about LDRs.
Listen to it here. (it's a big file, wait for it to load and to find an MP3 player). Let me know what you think. IMHO, you don't need to understand Thai to enjoy it.
- Deep Feelings::
contemplative - Musika::Love Song on The Wind - Tata Young
That done, I fired up the PC and it only showed 3.2GB of RAM. Should have shown 4GB. So I go on the ASUS web site, and they have a FAQ note saying my BIOS will allocate almost 1GB of RAM for background use - especially for my PCI-Ex video card. That's okay, sort of, but I'll probably be buying a non-ASUS motherboard in the future.
The new mouse is very right-handed, and a bit large. I don't like the tilt or the size. The keyboard is whacked - they have tiny function keys, and have put the Print Screen key in line with the Fkeys. The DEL key is huge and vertical - 3 keys tall. Bummer, but at ZZF's prices I can put these in the closet or donate to a friend (if you're going to be at Silicon, and want this, let me know and I'll bring it along) or maybe the local senior center.
This morning I picked up two packages, one is a contact sheet holder which I will try to use with the scanner for my old B&W negatives. I wonder if there are any darkrooms around I could use to print about 100 contact sheets? Probably not. And who needs the dark, the fumes and all that standing? The other package was from eThaiCD, my favorite vendor of Thai music and video. Lightning-fast and cheap shipping, and reasonable prices. Got the latest Tata Young CD, and her music video DVD to go with the Greatest Hits CD set I already have. It includes the video for Cinderella, which I am almost as interested in seeing as the one for Naughty, Sexy, Bitchy.
As I write this I'm listening to the second of 4 compilation CDs, and have found a couple of artists I will buy albums from. N&J (if I make out the tiny Thai script their names are Niw and Jiw), Fahrenheit and Mike & Golf. One of the songs has a very sweet name - it would translate as something like My Tears are for You. It sounds better in Thai.
The songs make me aware of how much Thai I have forgotten, to the point where I keep trying to translate the words into English, instead of just thinking in Thai.
- Deep Feelings::
complacent
Talking about Thai politics is like declaring variables in programming. What Americans think is a global variable is, in the case of Thailand, a local one. Some Thail local variables:
1. The King was born and raised in the US. He did not want to be king, he wanted to be a doctor like his father was. He also wanted to be a musician (he played well enough to jam with Benny Goodman) and composer, and he's a world class photographer despite having lost an eye in a car accident in his teens. He has tried several times to bring democracy to Thailand during his 60-year reign. It's a constitutional monarchy, with similar powers to England, the difference is for 60 years he has done a lot more than cut ribbons and wave at the tourists.
2. The military is incredibly pro-US, has been since the end of WWII. The bases where the US bombed Cambodia and Vietnam from? Provided by the Thai military, near the Thai section of the Mekong River. Many if not most of the general staff are West Point grads, or have solid relations with their US counterparts. Like the US general staff, they are strong protectors of democracy,while at the same time being fiercely loyal to the King.
3. The Parliament was very much like our House of Representatives - a decisive majority belonged to the far right wing (a party whose name literally translates as "Thai loves Thai".) TRT. Since Thai can mean either the Thai people or Thailand, it's a very catchy title, and very very very much like the hard-boiled partisan Republicans we are cursed with.
4. Prime Minister Thaksin (sounds like "toxin"), made his billions founding and running Thailand's biggest cell phone company, which he sold when he became PM, as a ploy to make people think he was getting rid of a conflict of interest. He actually sold the shares to his wife, and other close relatives. In January, in another attempt to duck criticism, he had his his family sell their shares. First of all, he waited for the price to go up, and secondly he sold them to a branch of the Singapore government. The $2 billion sale put such a dent in the balance of trade, the Thai currency value went down. This caused a political furor, there was a vote of no confidence and he lost.
So with that background, the rest of the story. Thaksin called new elections. The Thai constitution says if a candidate for parliament is running unopposed, there needs to be a certain percentage of voters coming to the polls in that precinct before the election is valid. When there are opposition candidates, there is no such requirement. Thaksin and his party hired bogus candidates to be on the ballot in scores of provinces to get around this rule. The courts threw out the results and called for new elections, but the resources of one of Asia's 40 richest men and a Republican-like national party organization assured TRT would win a huge majority and Thaksin would be back in power. Though he had promised to step own in the interim, he did not.
To put this in perspective, TRT "won" 460 out of 500 seats in the fraudulent election. 1/3 of the voters boycotted the polls, which had something to do with it.
So, with a completely corrupt, power-hungry PM whose party had an unbreakable lock on government, democracy in Thailand became as big a sham as it is in the US. The difference is they have a military which has the balls to do something about it. Bear in mind that nobody would dare make a move without the King's permission. In 1973, the King went on TV and suggested people protest the government's dropping the rice and pig subsidies and a million people showed up the next day. He is even more loved today.
Thailand will have elections in a year or so. Hopefully by that time the acting government will have broken Thaksin's hold - he'll probably stay in exile - and the TRT party will be broken up enough so they don't have a strangle hold on Parliament.
<hr>
Some history. When I was living in southern Thailand in 1976, I had come to Bangkok for a Peace Corps Volunteers rep meeting, and was on my way to Thammassat U, where the national museum has a display I wanted to see which debunks the book Anna and the King, the basis for The King and I. As I was walking through Yoawarat District (aka Chinatown), busloads of "village scouts" started rolling by, headed in the same direction. And busloads of vocational students. This would be like the KKK and the Ag college ROTC teaming up. They were out to get the liberal arts students at Thammassat who were protesting the corrupt government and the US (Vietnam was still a war, though the US was no longer officially in it).
As I passed a TV store, I saw tanks on the video screen, and pictures of vocational school students lynching Thammassat students on the lawn in front of the University. I decided to stay and watch on TV. Especially after seeing a bazooka fired at the U by a soldier.
Hundreds of students were killed, many machine gunned while they tried escaping by jumping into the river behind the campus (the Chao Prya is almost as wide as the Mississippi).
The soldiers chased away the Village Scouts and the vocational students, and while this was going on at the U. tanks had surrounded Parliament. What caused the coup was Parliament and the PM's inept non-handling of violent student protests.
When the smoke cleared, the top generals formed an administrative committee and started re-making the government. They threw out the corrupt/inept/old boy cronies of the PM and stocked the cabinet with people who actually knew what they were doing. What I remember hearing on the radio included:
The head of the ag university was made minister if agriculture
The head of the biggest teacher's college was made minister of education
A law school dean became justice minister, and the chief justice role went to someone similarly qualified.
And so on.
The committee changed heads several times, usually without any bloodshed, and eventually they re-established Parliament, and brought it up from rubber stamp to actual authority.
Thailand has a history of the politicians screwing up democracy, and the military, with the King's blessing, fixing it. I kind of wish we had that here.
<hr>
I hope my facts are accurate. If you have first-hand knowledge to the contrary, leave a note here. Messages to this post will be screened, excpet for my friends' list.
- Where::Starbucks
- Deep Feelings:: pedagogic
Room With a View
Originally uploaded by how3ird.
Chengdu Airport - I've uploaded some of my photos from Sechuan, where I traveled on business during my Thailand vacation. Much photo goodness on Flickr
Batik: ocean2
Originally uploaded by how3ird.
Lower res versions of this have been posted before, but today's Flickr goodness is high-q versions of some batiks.
Silly Tourist
Originally uploaded by how3ird.
I've made my Thailand photos into a set on Flickr, because I'm letting the folks at work experiment with another set of photos I took when we moved to our new location. We have a product under development which could allow our customers to see their Flickr photos on their TV sets. I've helped them iron out most of the missing technical details, but they still need to get Yahoo's buy-in. Since our founder is now a Yahooligan, it may happen.
I'm done posting my Thai people and scenery, and I've started adding the best close-ups of batiks I bought there. Will also put in embroidery and sapphires.
Then I'll post any China photos I think would pass muster on NikonStunningGallery. And will fake it from there.
Rock Star ?
Originally uploaded by how3ird.
In the park across the street from the grand palace. Another 6 photos on fllickr
Suzie Wong
Originally uploaded by how3ird.
More Flickr photos. I can't remember her name, but I do remember I was staying in a hotel on Soi 19, a quick walk from Soi Cowboy, one of the lesser known bar alleys in Bangkok. She was luring customers into her bar, I decided to see if she wanted to come back to the hotel with me. Which she did. But all she did was pose in front of the curtains, and help herself to most of the munchies and a couple of drinks from the mini-bar. Somehow the bangle on her right wrist ended up on the floor, which I didn't notice until my girlfriend Noi came over later that night. I managed to pick it up and put it in my pocket before Noi saw it, and it's sitting on my desk as I write this.
Suzie Wong is Thai slang for any bar girl, from the old American film The World of Suzie Wong starring William Holden and Nancy Kwan.
Soi Cowboy has some history for me. When I lived in Bangkok, for a while I lived at the end of Soi Asoke - which is Soi 21 off Sukhumwit Road, a main drag from the center of the city to the eastern border. At the time Soi Asoke was a narrow street with a few fruit and vegetable shops, and ended at a canal which was black with pollution. For about 3/4 of a Baht I would take a one-passenger wanter taxi (a small skiff) across the canal to my dentist's office.
Today Soi Asoke is The Super-Highway, complete with tollbooths, and Sukhmwit is the street which hosts the skytrain. The house I lived in is still on Soi 21, but now it has a multi-storey hotel built around it. My room is just another room in the hotel.
Soi Cowboy is a one-block-long alley between Sois 21 and 23, and there was one particular bar there which was relatively quiet, and became my "local". I met someone there who became my girlfriend for several months.
Inter-cropping
Originally uploaded by how3ird.
More photos on Flickr - this one is dear to me not for the green or the beauty or the perspective, but for a more selfish reason. My second year in the Peace Corps, 1976-77, my job was to make slide-tape shows to teach rubber tree smallholders (owners of small plantations) how to grow other crops between the rows of juvenile rubber trees while they waited out the 7 years for the rubber trees to start to produce.
More than that, Malaysia had just developed a new strain which would produce 10 times as much as what was currently being harvested. The Thai government was giving away free seedlings to any farmer who would commit to digging up 1/8 of his plantation per year, and re-plant their entire holding with the new strain over an 8-year period. So they would have some cash coming in, we were teaching them inter-cropping, planting other crops in the spaces between the trees. Rubber trees have the be grown far apart so their big canopies don't collide when they are mature.
We would go to provincial fairs and play the slide shows for anyone who was interested. My boss was an advertising genius - we set up a TV and a videotape player and started our presentation by playing the 15-round Ali heavyweight fight. That would gather a crowd - Thais are enormous boxing fans - and at the end of each round we would play a couple of minutes of the slide show.
I guess it worked, because 30 years later, here's a scene which could have been right out of my photo set.
Funny Valentine
Originally uploaded by how3ird.
Some more flickr photos, one not work safe (two if you don't think this one is. Depends on where you work, I guess).
I thought this was just another picture of an earphoned, sunglassed topless sunbather till I saw the title of the book...
Way to a Man's Heart
Originally uploaded by how3ird.
It was a long wait for the train to leave, two sisters and one boyfriend were seeing mother off. Little sister is admiring big sister's technique, I think.
He's Dead, Jim
Originally uploaded by how3ird.
The boy did not fall, he was posing for his pals. Note the kid in the foreground up top, who seems to be flying.
Uploaded six more to Flickr. Why six? Because that's the daily limit for the NikonStunningGallery which got me started on Flickr.
Chanthaburi Cathedral on the River
Originally uploaded by how3ird.
Six more photos on Flickr. This is the church which gave the city of Chanthabury, Thailand, its name. I don't know if it looks anything like the Canterbury Cathedral in England, but apparently someone did about 100 years ago. Maybe more.
Modern Art
Originally uploaded by how3ird.
Another 6 pix on Flickr - this time things, not people, in Bangkok
