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I Saw the Queen of Morlum (and Molam and Mawlum and Morlam)
Her name is Banyen Rakgan, and here I must quote Wikipedia: “Banyen was the first national mor lam star, whose appearances on television in the 1980s brought the form to an audience beyond its northeastern heartland. She bridges the gap between traditional and modern mor lam, normally appearing in traditional clothing, but using electrified instruments and singing luk thung and dance influenced songs.” The basic story of how I found myself ten feet away from Banyen performing live is simple: It was serendipitous. //////////////////// I work at Rajabhat Mahasarakham University. There are many Rajabhat universities located all over Thailand. A few days ago I went to the Rajabhat in Ubon…
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Thumb Piano Beatbox
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teef
This totally does not look like him, but the camera catches funny faces sometimes.
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Escolar aka Butterfish aka Hawaiian Walu aka the Ex-Lax Fish…
…aka Oilfish aka the “It” Fish aka Shiro Maguro aka Abura Bozu aka Abura Sokumutsu aka Mutzu. I have finally found a fish that Japanese won’t eat (raw, at least), and is in fact prohibited to be used for that purpose in Japan, and it turns out it’s all because eating it may make orange jets of oil (specifically, indigestible wax esters) shoot out of your ass. And yes, I speak of that as a bug, not a feature.
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Word Macros I Have Loved and Almost Lost
I’ve recently had to convert MS Word files with tons of zenkaku English text in them to all hankaku so I could forward them to people on non-Japanese language-enabled systems. Luckily, I happen to have written a macro during my salaryman days that does just that. Looking at the code, it seems I could never figure out how to get a few symbols working (such as the “degrees Celsius” symbol), but other than that it works very well. If you have the need for such a macro, drop me an email.
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New Years in the Fields
As promised, here’s the whole story: On the second day of the new year, our nanny invited us to her village for the bi-annual emptying of a communal fishpond. We piled into our trusty ’71 Crown, picked up a Japanese teacher who wanted to experience village life, and headed out deep into the rice fields. Actually, we first stopped at our nanny’s village so we could follow a pickup out to the final destination. I always carry rubber mats, wooden planks, and a shovel in the back of my car to get out of mudholes and sandy spots encountered in the back country, but with the family along for the…
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sppon man
I tried to write “spoon man” above, but it came out how it is… I think I like it this way better. Anyway, here’s sppon man: I think I like his facial expression even better than his guitar skills.
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Typical Northeast Thai Temple
This is a “side attraction” at Wat Srisawat, located on Srisawat road in Mahasarakham. The other side of the building pictured above features a collection of concrete animals. I took photos of them last year; I’ll try and dig them up.
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Water!
Nam was trying to sleep in this morning as Max has been keeping her up at night for the past few weeks, but the funniest thing happened: A man selling jugs of distilled water drove his pickup by the front of the house yelling, “nam na krup! nam na krup!” (water! water!), so Nam came running out of the bedroom a couple minutes later rubbing her eyes and asking who was here… When she saw the guy selling water down the street she asked me to please kill him.
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Facebook chat
Is it just me, or does the chat function on Facebook feel like it was written about 10 years ago?
