Month: March 2010

missiles

I was browsing teh intarwebs and stumbled upon this pic:
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…and all I could think of was a photo we took a few years ago on the beach in Sumoto:
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I say “we” because I don’t remember who was using Kana’s point-and-shoot (EXIF says it was a Casio EX-Z500) for this jump series; it was probably me or Kana or Faye. It took me a while to find the photo because I couldn’t spot it in my archives, so I ended up logging into Flickr for the first time in two years (A long story in itself. Basically, the Yahoo login system is fuxxored.) and looking for it among the earlier photos we posted in the might as well jump photo group. Even though I’d basically given up on the NEW! IMPROVED! and utterly soulless Flickr experience after wholeheartedly embracing its awesome start up and being within the first few users to upload over 10,000 photos, many people have stuck with it – that group really grew when I was gone.

Stevie on Sunday


…because it’s our day to chill and listen to YouTube music. Max got to see twenty vids, now it’s my turn for one. Actually, there is a version with an actual music video here, but the audio sucks.
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It’s funny, I played this song a few months back when we were setting up a PA, and my coworker Bruce suddenly stood up and announced he hadn’t “heard this since it came out!”

Blue kapom (Calotes versicolor) (correction: Calotes mystaceus)

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It took me three years to find one of the blue ones after I heard about them (and possibly ate them as well). This lizard is known in standard Thai as ginka and in Isan dialect as kapom. It has many names in English, including Oriental Garden Lizard, Eastern Garden Lizard, Changeable Lizard, Bloodsucker Lizard, Crested Tree Lizard, Garden Fence Lizard. They are Agamids, from the family Agamidae, commonly called dragons or dragon lizards. Here’s an informative passage from this page:

Changeable Lizards are related to iguanas (which are found only in the New World). Unlike other lizards, they do not drop their tails (autotomy), and their tails can be very long, stiff and pointy. Like other reptiles, they shed their skins. Like chameleons, Changeable Lizards can move each of their eyes in different directions.

I saw it on this tree at a restaurant my coworker and I were having lunch at, and it must have been mating season because there was another blue one, a half-red one, and one changing from tan to tan with spots before our very eyes! It was quite a sight, and I’ll definitely go to see them again sometime.
Note to self: I’m not sure of the restaurant’s name, but it’s in Maha Sarakham, out on the bypass between the crossroad to Borabu and the one to Wapi Pathum, 200 hundred meters before the road to Rui Sap (where my cop student got drunk on pineapple brandy and waved a glock around at everybody) on the left.

Update March 2023: Although the name of these lizards are the same in Thai and Isan languages (กะปอม/กิ้งก่า gabpawm/ginggaa), the red ones and the blue ones are actually different species. The red ones are Calotes versicolor, commonly known as Oriental Garden Lizard, etc. The blue ones are Calotes mystaceus aka the Indo-Chinese forest lizard or blue crested lizard; some of the research online (which I refuse to link to because it’s on a pay-to-access pseudo-academic research site) seems to indicate that these blue ones weren’t officially recorded in a nearby province (Ubon Rachatani) until 2018! I originally posted this article in 2010.

I’ve written some further information on a new post: Blue vs Red Kapom/Gapom Species

close call

On my way to pick up Max from school today, I almost killed a female university student who evaded a police checkpoint by speeding straight at me from the opposite direction. I stomped on the brakes as she almost went down sideways, but then her half-raised kickstand caught on the asphalt and inertia righted her scooter as if by magic. She rode off with a bovine smile on her face, perhaps oblivious to how close she had come to dying.
The ironic thing is that the cops were trying to stop her for not wearing a helmet.
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It’s funny, right before the slow motion adrenaline effect kicked in, the only thought that flashed across my brain was about how late this was going to make me. After it was over, I yelled out “stupid bitch,” and three policemen waved me on as if to say, “move along, nothing to see here.”
I’ve seen people escape from the cops here so many times, mostly because the cops don’t need to work too hard – they’re not even bothering to pretend that their ticketing is to make things safer, it’s straight out money making time.