In an effort to destroy the cattails, because her son is allergic to the snowy fluff it produces this time of year, the development manager instructed her minions to burn them. On a windy day. With gasoline.
Fucking oops.
Nam says that once they realized the fire was out of control and blowing towards said manager’s newly-erected wooden houses (as in, houses she built to live in herself) they called out all the workers in shouting distance to form a bucket brigade. That had no buckets.
Oops again.
Luckily, the fire eventually burnt out when the wind died down. I just I wish I could’ve been here to see it too, so I could educate the natives about a few things. Like how cattails were used by Native Americans for kindling (so maybe they should use less gasoline or something). Or by people around the world for food as well as down for stuffing. Or how cattails are being used in pilot “carbon capture” farming schemes. Then again, I probably would have just stood there laughing wickedly as the world burned just across my pond and attacked the intelligent beings who started it.
Luckily, the red-tailed pheasant-like birds seem to have returned and don’t seem to mind roosting in their newly-roasted environment. I need to get a photo of one someday I suppose…
Category: Thai Society/Culture
Thailand Gas Crisis?
It’s not unusual to pull into a gas station up here in the Northeast region only to find your favorite petroleum formulation (95 benzene, 95 gasohol [E10 / E20], 91 benzene, 91 gasohol, diesel, palm diesel, B5 [5% biodiesel], LPG [Liquified Petroleum Gas], and CNG [Compressed Natural Gas], which is one of the two kinds of NGV [Natural Gas Variation]) sold out, or in the case of 95 benzene, no longer being sold at all, or in the case of LPG and especially CNG, simply not yet available.
At the PTT station in front of my university (the uni actually owns it) this morning, they were out of everything (they sell 91/95 gasohol, 91 benzene, straight-up diesel, and 5% biodiesel fomulation). There were ad hoc “sold out” signs taped to each individual pump (maybe 24 in all) and the staff were all sitting around on the pump islands. They didn’t even bother telling the cars pulling in for gas that they were out, they would just laconically point to the signs in between slacking off and playing grabass with their coworkers.
It made me wonder why they didn’t just put a big sign up at the entrance so that people didn’t pull in and waste their time, but as they say, This Is Thailand.
P.S. Until now I’ve very rarely posted negative commentary on this blog regarding my country of current residence, for one simple reason – If there’s one thing I hate it’s the recent arrivals to a country complaining about this and that and I vowed never to be one of them long ago. Having almost been here two years now though, I feel I can begin complaining with a bit of authority. ; )
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Related link: Retail oil price list from the Energy Policy & Planning Office of Thailand’s Ministry of Energy
Murasaki Inu
A lifetime ago (13 or 14 years ago to be a bit more exact) I sat in a stuffy classroom in Tenri, Japan, and started penning my first essay in Japanese. Not having yet learned any kanji, I wrote it entirely in the phonetic alphabet known as hiragana. It began something like this: One day I walked to the main worship hall and saw a purple dog…
Thus, the legend of the murasaki inu (purple dog) was born. It was a recurring theme in later essays (four years worth to be exact) as well as many blues/enka jams (anata ha tashika ni aru / watashi no murasaki inu) when Cosmic Buddha would rock abandoned parking lots, smoky music studios, and our guitarist’s cram school late at night.
Well guess what?
I saw a purple dog today. A purple dog, here in Mahasarakham, Thailand. (Nam and I were taking my mom to see the fish sanctuary, so I have witnesses.)
I don’t think it was naturally purple. It looked like purple iodine solution (used for disinfecting wounds) had been liberally applied to a shaggy white dog, but that’s not the point. It was a purple dog.
That is all.
random morlam remix
– Just because the scenery in the background looks like the kind of riverside restaurant you often see driving the highways around here. There’s nothing like the funky beat and syncopated yowling of molam to make you feel happy and at home in Isan.
Adventures in English Teaching
So you might have noticed that I don’t talk about my job here much, and there are several reasons for that. It’s mostly because I’ve read a lot of people blog about teaching and I personally found it less than enthralling, and that was before I was teaching. My not blogging about teaching definitely is not an indication that I don’t enjoy it… (After writing the previous passage, I realize that the only thing less enthralling than reading about English teaching on a blog is reading about why an English teacher who blogs doesn’t blog about work.)
Anyhow, today I had the hardest time figuring out what a student was trying to write about for an in-class assignment on what he had done for summer vacation. The words that caught my eyes on the page were “I went home and bred my niece.” Haha, I thought, and pointed out the mistake. He immediately corrected the sentence to “I went home and breed my niece.”
I told him to look up the word in the dictionary, which he did, and then turned quite red with embarrassment. Great, I thought, now I’ll finally figure out what he was trying to say. He corrected the sentence for the second time, and this time it said, “I went home and breeds my niece.” By this time I was feeling really quite sorry for his niece and decided to drop it altogether; I corrected his sentence to “I went home and took care of my niece.”
I’m still a bit unclear about what he was trying to say, though.
There – I’ve gone and blogged about English teaching, and the world might even be a bit better for it. Watch your nieces, though.
90-day report
Pretty much every foreigner in Thailand on a non-immigrant visa is supposed to report into immigration every 90 days. This may be in the form of a letter, except if the immigration officer tells you to report in person (or send a representative from your organization in). Of course, all the teachers at our school got stuck with the latter method, and the girl who usually goes in for us (we have to report to immigration in Nong Khai, on the border with Laos) was busy, so a coworker and I went in a university car. Nam also came along with us to help clear any snags that might come up (none did, luckily).
(My mom came out all the way from the states yesterday to stay with us and the baby for a month and a half.)
(We have a new nanny, who just started coming over last week.)
So we had to leave the baby at home all day with my mom who speaks no Thai and our nanny who speaks no English, and it was the longest time Nam has ever spent away from the baby. So you can probably guess the recurring topic of conversation in the car, three hours there and three hours back.
Of course, we got back home and everything was fine. Mom is still mom, nanny is still nanny, and baby is still unconcerned about the rising price of oil, so all is well.
Solar-barbecued chicken
This sounds interesting.
As a sidenote, Thailand is more “green” in some ways than first world countries. For instance, they sell B5 diesel here at major gas station chains – B5 is 5% biodiesel. And Hi-octane gasoline (95) is all but gone around these parts, supplanted by its E20 (20% methanol) equivalent. Whether this is truly better for the planet in the long run or not is up for debate. It sure isn’t better for some older cars!
I met a fellow who has made a small-scale biodiesel production facility in his garage; this is an area I am interested in.
I also want to try building a solar chicken barbecue array – as cheaply as possible. Maybe I’ll attempt an Archimedes’ death ray out of bits of broken mirror.
hisashiburi no kabe
So in Japan-speak, a bunch of us ran headfirst into a cultural wall yesterday, and it was a rather bracing slap in the face after having conquered so many other challenges in the semi-distant past…
We went to the sports college next to my university, most famous for being the alma mater of the “Jackie Chan of Thailand” (Tony Jaa), in order to start a thrice-weekly regimen of swimming in their Olympic-sized pool. So we paid 40 Baht (adult price, about $1.20) admission fee, and were promptly rejected entry int o the pool for “not wearing swimming suits.” But the thing is, we were wearing swimming suits. So it ended up being a huge argument with us on one side showing mesh liners and insisting that these were, indeed, pieces of swimwear, and some hick-ass PE teacher on the the other side insisting that they were not (I’m convinced this backward inaka motherfucker thinks that mesh liners are just built-in underwear.).
Anyways.
We fought the law, and the law declared that only skin-tight swimsuits are suitable for use in this particular pool, i.e., the law won. Fags. What kind of sickos want to see my fat ass in a speedo, anyway?
P.S. I must admit it feels kind of dirty cursing on the same page I post the baby’s photos. I guess I’ll just have to pretend he isn’t looking at me.
Real life neko bus
craigslist rocks. One of the things I miss most about Japan is Yahoo auctions. Thailand, or for that matter, most of the rest of the world simply has too fiendish a mentality for any kind of shopping/auction system employing the honor system to work.
Water in the damn line again
If they ever get around to making a hermetically sealed telephone line in Thailand, I might have a decent net connection. My line is down again, or perhaps waterlogged as the telephone monopoly keeps telling me. I’m not desperate enough to be online to go to net cafes or anything, but I may check on email every few days when I happen by an open hotspot. Dammit.