RIP Harry Harrison
The Stainless Steel Rat series is one of my all-time favorites. Also, he inspired me to learn a bit of Esperanto when I was quite young. I did a mail-in course I found advertised at the Huntington Beach public library, and ended up wondering why English supplanted French as the international language, instead of Esperanto. Then again, if shit like this was decided by common sense, we might have been playing on 100 meter football fields for the past 50 years.
YouTube Sanction Appealed
Got this in my inbox this morning:
The YouTube Community has flagged one or more of your videos as inappropriate. Once a video is flagged, it is reviewed by the YouTube Team against our Community Guidelines. Upon review, we have determined that the following video(s) contain content in violation of these guidelines, and have been disabled:
Cockroach Reanimation with Electro-stimulation – (cbuddha)
Your account has received one Community Guidelines warning strike, which will expire in six months. Additional violations may result in the temporary disabling of your ability to post content to YouTube and/or the permanent termination of your account.
For more information on YouTube’s Community Guidelines and how they are enforced, please visit the Help Centre.
Received: 15 Aug 2012 | Acknowledged: 15 Aug 2012 | Appealed
The video, which was up to around 260,000 views, showed me zapping a dead cockroach with a racquet-style bug zapper in order to elicit nerve response. I guess there are some die hard cockroach activists out there.
I have appealed the sanction and am awaiting a response.
Nok Krata (Thai Jungle Quail)
Note: The words “Thai” and “Jungle” were included as descriptors in the title and are probably not part of their real name (which eludes my lazy Googling at this point in time). Rather, I found them for sale at a roadside market stall surrounded by dense Thai jungle in a town called Koi Mek, in Kalasin province, on my way home from Nong Khai a couple months ago.
They were about 60 baht (less than $2) a piece, and the old lady who sold them to me said they were caught that morning. I took the birds and chased Max and Mina around with them, then gave them to our nanny to have her older sister cook at home. The next day, she brought a Thai basil stir fry prepared in my least favorite way – chopped in small pieces, bones and all – which was still mighty tasty if not entirely edible.
arena RMU thailand
This is a test post. Please ignore. This post is about Arena Project RMU Thailand.
Birthday Photo
8/6 Atomic remembrance, baby.
You know that feeling?
The one where you want someone else to see all the cool clouds floating by exactly the way you see them, but they just look up for a second and say, “yeah, cool?” That shit used to make me sad, but then I realized that clouds aren’t as cool when you’re holding bubbles, and you don’t hold bubbles as much when you’re older.
School daze – intro
Blackboards, writing on desks, teachers losing their shit and going full psycho on a class full of monkey-goblins – this set of entries is a log of my SCHOOL DAZE.
On top of being a full-time lecturer at Rajabhat Maha Sarakham University, I am now a part-time teacher/herder at our attached elementary/high school. For the most part, it is fun. Some days are better than others. Overall, it probably makes me more pleasant to be around since I’m always thinking about what those crazy kids are doing and it makes me smile.
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Just the other day, though, I held up a flash card with a photo of a monkey on it (a full-body photo, not an illustration of a monkey face) and asked the class of nine-year-olds, “What is this?”
No less than half the class yelled back, “PAUL SMITH!!!”
Fuck globalization, yo.
Ascetic
Taken at a Buddha sculpture workshop along the highway to Khon Kaen. This sculpture has a real… presence.