This week is the final week for both my regular and weekend classes; the last final for my last class is tomorrow and I just threw a pretty good one together.
I will make a rather blanket statement here and say that Thai students are pretty bad cheaters. Not only is cheating rampant, it’s so rampant that I suspect it must be ignored or even allowed by some of their other teachers*, hence the students are quite bad at it.
I was a pretty good cheater when I went to school(which is not to say I cheated a lot, just that I never got caught – except once when my dad busted me with a “borrowed copy” of a Teacher’s Book for pre-calc in high school), so I know what I’m talking about. And (hold on, let me get on my high horse here) since I’m here to give these kids a well-rounded education, I basically throw down the gauntlet by telling them: I don’t care if you cheat. Cheat all you want. But don’t get caught. It will end badly for you.
To date, I’ve caught two.
They’ve never been seen or heard from again (I sent them to the cornfield, yo).
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*Not only do I suspect it; a teacher was apparently found to have helped a large number of students cheat last term… and wasn’t fired.
Category: Thai Society/Culture
Ant Infestation
They appear with no warning
When they sense the rain coming (and they are never wrong about it), ants can move an entire colony inside the house overnight, as happened here. I sat down to type out some morning emails, and a thousand little dots erupted from under the keyboard, spreading out in all directions. I flipped it over to find this – it was pretty much one of the creepiest things to wake up to, ever. Previous infestations have sprung up in laundry pilers on the floor and in my inkjet printer – I was printing out sheets with little black ants embedded in the paper for weeks after that (it was actually a cute stationery effect, although no one actually asked me where I bought the paper).
A Hyperlinky Ode to a Damn Fine Fish – Soft Tilapia Pr0n
Oh, Tilapia, how versatile thy be!
You are on my plate nearly every week, and my favorite New Years repast.
In fact, you are farmed in such numbers, so misused for pest/plant control, and just so damn tough that you threaten every natural environment you visit.
Some even call you the farmed fish of biblical fame.
However.
Now they can make your skin into leather.
… And can hence be used for bust control.
THE END
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Link to the online retailer of tilapia skin products mentioned in the latter Reuters article linked above: angie&penny
I finally found the video most of the graphics used above were pulled from (the others are mine or from Google Images):
Tokay lizard caught off-guard
I swear these are the ugliest, trippiest looking things you’ll ever see… Here’s my previous post on them, with facts aplenty.
Funniest Misspelling
From one of my student’s speeches this year: “I much prefer the wide open rice fields and simple homes of my country village to the confusion and chaos of Bangkok, where the skyline is broken up by ugly skycrappers.”
…Another proud graduate of the School of Justin.
Some of the coldest words I’ve ever said…
…and I can’t take them back, so I might as well make them public:
“If you make my wife cry again, I’ll make you cry.” * **
So this is what it feels like to be Jack Bauer…
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* This offer expires never.
** Get yours while supplies last!
“Sweet Christmas!”
I saw a two-ton water buffalo almost get hit by a speeding two-ton pickup this afternoon. I couldn’t help but wonder who would have walked away from an accident like that. Maybe Luke Cage. Of course, if Luke Cage drove in Thailand, he’d be getting out of the car every five minutes to smash the shit out of people who cut him off, suddenly decided to pull a U-turn in the middle of the street, or some other unthinkably dangerous shit. Homeboy would be poppin’ off like firecrackers, yo.
Note: It seems that John Singleton is making a Power Man movie called “Luke Cage”. (The gem on that page: “This plot synopsis is empty.”)
1971 Toyota “Kujira” Crown S60
I need another car – just a reliable beater to convey me around town – since I want Nam to drive the Cefiro (and its newfangled safety features) when we move to the new house. The new house is within walking distance of my university, but I need something for rainy days and whatnot. I think I’ve found a good candidate:
Behold the Kuj
That’s an honest-to-god classic car (4th generation S60), with prices to match both in Japan and the states. I think I can get this one for about a thousand USD. There are a lot of classic Japanese cars being driven around on a daily basis in Thailand. One of the reasons is that maintenance and repairs are so cheap. Another is that they often aren’t considered classic here, just old – which is a shame for the cars, but great for people who love them.
The Toyota “Kujira” Crown was apparently not very popular in Japan when it was released, except among Osaka taxi drivers (according to one of the links above). It also got some airtime on TV shows at the time, but the avant garde looks were just too kick-ass for that stiff-upper-lip generation of Japanese sheeple, I guess. Oh, well.
This particular specimen has a secret under the hood that should make it anything but a whale (kujira = “whale”) on the road: A “silvertop” Nissan RB20DE !!! That’s the non-turbo powerplant for a type 32 Skyline!
It also has the matching drivetrain and 5 speed manual gearbox.
I promised myself I would think about it for at least a day, but I’m having a hard time waiting until tomorrow… The first thing I’m going to do is put the wing mirrors out on the hood like they oughtta be… Then I’ll have the body restored (there’s a bit of rust in places, the owner says) to look something like… this.
What say you?
UPDATE: I’ve just talked to the owner and it sounds like he’s taken very good care of it. I told him I want it; now it’s just a question of enacting the sale and slogging through any related paperwork, which I have no idea about. Yay!
UPDATE: This is what my MS-60 Kujira Crown looks like now: http://cosmicbuddha.com/2012/03/the-toyota-kujira-crown-reborn/
Dragonfruit in Bloom
Four or five months ago, Nam’s mother had couple of pitaya plants shipped back from her hometown of Surin (famous for their annual elephant festival and silk weaving). They were pitiful little things tied to a curious looking concrete dais-in-a-planter type of setup. I kept meaning to take photos of them back then for before and after comparison photos, but it was only a few weeks before they started shooting up, doubling, tripling, and growing to ten times their original size…. And they aren’t even full grown yet.
The thing is, we kind of forgot about them sitting there in the yard, because aside from their utterly alien appearance close up, they were just green plants on a green background, and truly unremarkable otherwise… during the day. Last week we went out for a drink for the first time in a while and returned around midnight. This is what was waiting for us:
Feed me, Seymour!
Get outta my way! – Survival of the fittest.
God must have been going through his “Giger” phase
(all photos by Nam!)
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Bonus “strawberry pear” trivia: In Thai, they call the pitaya (aka dragonfruit) a “dragon’s egg,” which is probably the most apt name for anything, ever.
Fugu me? No, fugu you!
From the “you shouldn’t be eating salmon in Thailand anyway” department:
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) – Unscrupulous vendors in Thailand have been selling meat of the deadly puffer fish disguised as salmon, causing the deaths of more than 15 people over the past three years, a doctor said Thursday.
Although banned since 2002, puffer fish continues to be sold in large quantities at local markets and restaurants, said Narin Hiransuthikul of Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University Hospital.
“Some sellers dye the meat of puffer fish and make it look like salmon which is very dangerous,” Narin said.
Narin said over the past three years more than 15 people have died and about 115 were hospitalized from eating the fish.
The ovaries, liver and intestines of the puffer fish contain tetrodotoxin, a poison so potent that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it can “produce rapid and violent death.”
The fish is called fugu in Japan, where it is consumed by thrill-seeking Japanese gourmets for whom the risk of poisoning adds piquancy.
Every year, there are reports of people dying or falling sick in Asia from eating puffer fish. Eating the fish can cause paralysis, vomiting, heart failure and death.
(Full story)
I call bullshit on this story. It sounds like an urban legend. Color aside, puffer meat neither looks nor tastes anything like salmon meat… and anybody that unfamiliar with the fish in question wouldn’t have to be convinced that it was salmon in order to buy it. It could just be sold cheaply, as is. Why go to the trouble of dying it?
Also, the second to last paragraph about Japanese eating fugu for thrills is something oft-seen in the foreign press, but was never evident in all the years I was living in Japan (everybody I knew ate fugu because they liked the taste). I’ve even heard claims from Japan know-it-alls that fugu chefs leave just enough tetrodotoxin on the flesh to give a thrill (but not enough to kill), but I never saw any evidence of this either. The two fugu chefs I asked about it laughed at the question. They also stated that the chances of convincing a licensed fugu chef to prepare fugu livers, ovaries, or intestines for a customer’s thrills are pretty much zero these days.