It’s fine to be home…..

Lovely bunch of quotes from Chris Knox over the years, courtesy of Gary Steel.

I like this one:

“When I was a kid of 15, I would put ‘Revolution Number 9’ (The Beatles) or John Cage (experimental composer) on the turntable, and put as many radios as I could find in different stations round the room, turn the TV on, turn all the lights off, and lie on my back in the middle of the room and listen to this smorgasbord of noise. That was a little ritual I did on a Saturday night when my parents were out!”

But I would….

Coming back from Kanchanaburi on the bus the other night, the sky opened up. The four of us, Brigid, her parents and myself, had wandered around the mostly deserted tourist trap with an even darker past under the shadow of huge black clouds which dribbled a little but didn’t really belch out the hot rain until we got back to the bus, the local Kanchanaburi to BKK Express, which we deemed fortunate.

The fortune was tempered by the breakdown, as far as we could tell, of the windscreen wipers at some bus-stop in some rural Thai town, complete with the endless tractor and pick-up showrooms, which remains still nameless to me, and the seeming inability of the bus driver to turn the air conditioning below sub arctic, so much so that the hot air was condensing on the outside of the glass as we roared through the endless motorways into inner-outer Bangkok and the Southern Bus Terminal, which, not really oddly since we are in Asia, is not South but West of Central BKK. People in the bus were plugging and covering the air vents increasingly desperately. Few in Thailand carry a cardigan, just in case. Read the rest of this entry

This new Opinionated Diner dedicated server is kinda live now, with much work to do. The theme is a temporary one as I’m trying to teach myself wp theme authoring, but it will suffice right now I guess. It’s like a new toy and the delay in moving has just been from a sense of looming disaster when I finally clicked the buttons, but it has surprised me just how easy and, so far, painless,  it really has been.

The old blogspot pages are still there but mostly the archives, less some images, are also here now.

It’s been the best part of a month since I’ve posted, but post I will.

And the image? I found it in a box a few days back and thought it was vaguely appropriate. Vulcan Lane, Auckland, NZ. 1994. It was a compilation I put together back in the latter part of that year. I just wish I had a copy of the disc itself.

S

The lack of posts here can be attributed to the impending move of this blog to my own server and to wordpress. It’s a scary thing and I’ve continually put it off as I ponder several bigger projects which are taking all my time right now.

On all these, I’m almost there….

Either way, these pages will remain as archives.

What a very odd few months it has been.

What a surreal few weeks.

Both gross understatement I think, but better that than gross overstatement. I think odd and surreal describe the extended period better than any adjectives that imply bloodshed, disaster, civil mayhem or urban warfare.

There have been those much reported moments of awfulness too but mostly those were limited to four bloody bursts with extended periods of stalemate, which when they came were truly horrific, even sitting on the outside looking in as a (close) observer who could, this last week, see the smoke rising a few kilometres away, whilst, however, pretty much everything in our almost completely Thai suburb, seemed day to day to be as it always was, which of course gave it another level of surealness.

And indeed that was the way for 90% of this city, where life was largely unaffected until the very last few days when a curfew and the curtailing of train services finally intruded into the rest of the town.

However if you read the voluminous posts from much of the international media you could be forgiven for thinking that Bangkok, and indeed Thailand, had turned into some huge war-zone, with The Times in one report calling Bangkok a 21st Century Sarajevo for god’s sake, which was not only inane but plain irresponsible. CNN said Bangkok was almost unrecognisable after four days of clashes. Really? I guess the ten million or so here missed that bit as they mostly went about their daily lives, although for others, inside the more troubled zones, life changed a lot, and, even more so for the thousands who were trapped without power and water for 48 hours or more as chaos ranged outside their doors.

Read the rest of this entry

How many of the world’s armies travel with mobile Karaoke trucks?

h/t to ThaiVisa