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):
Category: Photos
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.
Coolest Company Name/Logo – Double Hanuman
A clothes hanger company. No web presence AFAIK.
Do you know Hanuman? He is so kick-ass that they named one of the most devastating Muay Thai moves after him – behold the hanuman thayarn! (actually, that’s a poor example because he missed and didn’t keep his guard up – but it’s the best photo I could find)
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.
Undetermined Payload
Sometimes you run into the strangest sights on the road.
Crab on Baked Earth
Crawling around the building site of our new house.
Carabao Bike & Death Merchant
Yesterday, on the way to check the progress of the new house we’re building, we came across a couple of awesome motorcycles, one right after the other.
First up was a kid riding the Buffalo Bike (aka Carabao Bike):
Next was the Death Merchant (I talked about his trade before in this post: Banks and Blades and Monster Geckos):
All photos by Nam.
My New Baby Alligator
I rescued him from a wet bathroom floor when I was painting.
Precursor to official Ubon Candle Festival post
I don’t have time to go sift through all the photos I took at the candle festival we saw in Ubon Ratchathani last weekend, but I wanted to post a couple that caught my eye.
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If you can come up with a caption for either of these photos, you win a kiss from the person in the bottom one.
On the Road 2007 (Part 6) – The Animatronic Chicken Roasters of Rayong, Thailand
On a previous trip to Thailand, I wrote about the most delicious roast chicken I have ever eaten. I have many special memories of Rayong, and the awesome roast chicken stands by the roadside are certainly counted among them. I had been looking forward to reevaluating the chicken itself since the last time I visited, to be sure it hadn’t been a fluke, or just how hungry I had been at the time.
The chicken stands to which I refer are concentrated along a half-kilometer stretch of a long road into town, from the east end of Mae Ramphueng beach. We scoped out the whole stretch a couple times and stopped at the one that caught my eye.
This stand had the best chicken illustration on their sign (important!), as well as the freshest-looking birds.
Aloha shirt, ski goggles and mask, and a straw hat! What’s not to like?
Grinding away in the heat – this guy’s job really sucks
The entire setup is powered by an electric motor drawing power from the lines directly above the stand.
If shirts could talk…
My man here is styling, too.
As it turns out, this wasn’t the only stand with animatrons, but it was the only one with multiple animatrons. I saw other stands that already were, or were in the process of being semi-automated with motorized spits, and most had the automatrons as well, so I figure the same man or crew may be creating them for everybody on that strip – whoever he is, the guy’s a genius.
The non-automated spits actually require a person to turn them, which is just torture in the midday heat amplifying the heat of the coals. The stands still of course require humans for all the other tasks, and this one was manned by a mother/daughter team:
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I came for chicken and by god, I got chicken (and sticky rice, biooootches!):
The sauce from this stand was good, but not great. The funny thing is, this chicken is so good, it doesn’t need sauce.
Mandatory “glistening fat” closeup:
That bottom right part is the neck – mmm, mmm good.
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All links for the On the Road 2007 series:
On the Road 2007 (Part 1)
On the Road 2007 (Part 2)
On the Road 2007 (Part 3) – Koh Chang
On the Road 2007 (Part 4) – Overloaded
On the Road 2007 (Part 5) – Tamnanpar
On the Road 2007 (Part 6) – The Animatronic Chicken Roasters of Rayong, Thailand