Over at the Bangkok Post, I just stumbled upon the reason why Play Bar, De Loft, and Image club in Maha Sarakham shut down at the same time a few years ago – they got busted for serving minors: 11 pubs ordered closed for 5 years in Maha Sarakham
Memories, yo.
One day, Play Bar was just gone. Like, knocked down and smashed into rubble. We heard the guys running it opened another place, but it just didn’t have the same history as Play Bar… That was one of the first chill outdoor places here, and it all started less than ten years ago. Now there’s twenty places like that.
Driving down a main street toward Mitraphap Road in Khon Kaen, something caught my eye…It was a broken down bicycle with trailer (or maybe a tricycle with a bed?) being used as a mobile fortune telling booth!
Little things like this still blow my mind every day in this country – it’s part of the charm.
Fortune telling is still a huge part of the culture, and for some reason, tarot cards seem to be getting very popular from what I see online.
She’s older than all the others combined, and will probably still be running after they have all gone.
This is my parking lot at work. Our building used to be the administration building, which is why we have a flag pole in front. A military reservist comes to raise and lower it every day.
Last year, my trusty Citizen fell casualty to careless banging on steel door handles when rushing out of classrooms, so I decided to replace it with something a little more fun.
I was watching a video of my son Max’s choir group back home in WA performing “Rose, Rose, Rose” (a kind song known as a round, where one group starts off and the next group start to sing the same song a bit later, like “Row Row, Row Your Boat”), when a certain line hit me: ” Still, I will be merry…. “
I was suddenly transported 25 years back in time, back to one of countless nights spent around a bonfire in the cold hours before sunrise, high up in the mountains of Japan. My friends had taught me a Japanese folk song, a round with a catchy part about being cheerful even though you have nothing to eat and no place to stay…
Which sounds a lot like:
Meat, nor drink, nor money have I none Still, I will be merry….
Hunting for videos of the Japanese version of the song (Watashi ha Yadonashi de) is where it gets really weird. The original version of the song by Masami Mizuno is not to be found anywhere, which is not really surprising since dinosaur music companies in Japan tend to threaten everyone for sharing even ancient recordings. So the closest we have are computer synthesized recordings utilizing Sinsy:
Strange, but in a good way.
The second noteworthy video I found of Yadonashi contains synthesized verses in both Japanese and English! Perfect!!
Found this in my Gmail outbox and was like WTF… Apparently, messages like these are generated when you unsubscribe from some mailing lists (as a unique identifier, I guess).
I think that Google should be pushing Maps into social media harder because it currently controls the majority (the number I’ve seen recently is ~70%) of the online map market, but is getting undercut, mainly by Waze. For Thailand, outside of urban centers, Waze is complete trash (as are all other competitors except for dedicated GPS systems like Garmin). Plus, there are already 30 million Local Guides worldwide according to Google.
If Google Maps would integrate the user-contributed traffic and police reports of Waze into an optional view of the current system, it would just be SO GOOD… Or how about attacking social media from a location-centric (specifically maps-centric) standpoint? And reinstating all the functions/data of Google Reader as well? Before Facebook and Insta cause the collapse of all non-soc media websites? kthxbai
