Why you never question a drunk

Via osaka bill:
I was shopping at the local supermarket where I selected:
a half-gallon of 2% milk,
a carton of eggs,
a quart of orange juice,
a head of romaine lettuce,
a 2 lb. can of coffee, and
a 1 lb. package of bacon.
As I was unloading my items on the conveyor belt to check out, a drunk
standing behind me watched as I placed the items in front of the cashier.
While the cashier was ringing up the purchases, the drunk calmly stated,
“You must be single.”
I was a bit startled by this proclamation, but I was intrigued by the
derelict’s intuition, since I was indeed single.
I looked at the six items on the belt and saw nothing particularly unusual
about my selections that could have tipped off the drunk to my marital
status.
Curiosity getting the better of me, I said, “Well, you know what, you’re
absolutely right. But how on earth did you know that?”
(punchline after the jump)

Continue reading “Why you never question a drunk” →

Our New Thai House Part 1 – Picking a Plot

I’ve put off posting proper photos of our new house since we decided to build it, that is, for the better part of a year. What can I say? We were busy getting it finished (this is a home builder’s joke – a new house is never finished).
Getting this house built took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears… We really honed our powers of persuasion, pleading, and cajoling. I learned how to effectively threaten someone in Thai, and Nam learned that being visibly pregnant is a great way to have people do things for you. We both learned that government officials in charge of the positioning of power transformers, who knock away a hand offering an envelope and loudly claim to be unbribable, are merely asking for more money. Life lessons, these.
If I had tried to blog about all the problems we ran into during construction of this house, all of you would have stayed away for the duration, believe me. There was simply too much to bitch about, so I ended up breaking a lot of scrap wood and taking it out on random tailgaters instead. Life is sometimes too crappy to effectively document, anyway.
I have so many photos for this particular subject, I’ve decided to break it up into several posts, which should be generally chronological. I hope you can enjoy reading this series as much as I will writing it.

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Coming to Thailand in October of 2006 to live in a house I helped pay for in advance ended up not working out real well. This was due to a certain insufferable alcoholic-in-law who treated himself to our house before I moved here from Japan. My wife and I therefore decided to move out as soon as possible.
We searched for houses and apartments alike, debating whether to rent or buy. We searched all over Mahasarakham, which is a large area, and sometimes, for comparison, we would even look in neighboring towns. Our search took us all up and down the banks of the Chi river, since I wanted to live close to the water (a sort of compensation for living in dry country). To make a long story a bit shorter, we could find no suitable houses and no suitable land on which to build a new house.
In mid-2007, I revisited a new neighborhood just starting to be built between my university and Nam’s. One of the lots was situated right in front of a natural pond (with some reinforced banks). We fell in love with the sky and decided to build a house there.
20070616banhouse0022.jpg

20070616banhouse0050.jpg
END OF PART 1

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Our New Thai House entries:
Our New Thai House Part 1 – Picking a Plot
Our New Thai House Part 2 – Foundations
Our New Thai House Part 3 – Groundwork
Our New Thai House Part 4 – Roof and Walls
Our New Thai House Part 5 – The Blessing Way
Landscaping Our House – Before and After

fuxxxor the beijing olympics

beijing_2008-olympics-resized-500.gif
Is it just me, or have the Olympics seriously gone downhill since, say, the end of the Cold War?
I mean, let’s face it, the television coverage is usually so bad it really wouldn’t matter if nobody made an effort watch at all.
It occurred to me that this year’s games are perhaps the closest thing to the 1936 Summer Olympics we will ever see; on the flip side what that means is that we seriously need a modern day Jesse Owens with Tibetan ancestry.
The following passage is from the Wikipedia article linked above:

Hitler removed signs stating “Jews not wanted” and similar slogans from the main tourist attractions. Hitler desired to clean up Berlin, the German Ministry of Interior authorized the chief of Berlin Police to arrest all gypsies and keep them in a special camp. Nazi officials ordered that foreign visitors should not be subjected to the criminal strictures of anti-homosexual laws.

I’m just saying…
(brilliant logo via)

Forgotten wood

I forgot to mention that when the nice lady doctor at the clinic was viewing with ultrasound a couple weeks ago, the baby let loose with a spontaneous boner. He didn’t seem overly concerned to have observers, either. For some strange reason, I felt very proud about this magnificent display.
Heh.