Archive for December, 2009

She who must be obeyed has been working over Xmas, and has to work today and tomorrow in order to accumulate some days for a trip we intend taking in January. But yesterday was a rare day off so we found ourselves, as is usually the case, sitting in a coffee shop.

I could see her looking around at the slick surroundings in a slick shopping mall, and then came the question: “How has life changed since you were young”?

Apparently this was initially intended as a rhetorical question, because she then amused me for fifteen minutes with stories of her youth, when there were no coffee shops, no shopping malls, and the best she could manage was to stand in the only local store with a one baht coin and ponder for a long time what sweeties to buy (nothing much has changed over the years with regards to her pondering duration). Climbing trees to gather mangoes, going to her grandmother’s house to enjoy her cooking, it all sounded like a pretty good childhood.

“And how about you” she asked, “do you remember the old days in black and white”?

She always refers to my childhood as “the old days”, and as the only photographs she has seen of those times are in black and white, maybe she thinks my recall is also in monochrome.

But it was a difficult question to answer. There are so many variables in life. Of course the world changes, but so does your personal perception of that world. Your circumstances change, your lifestyle changes, and each time you move to live in a different country you have to partially reset the perception counter and start again.

I told her I thought the world is a less gentle place than it used to be, but also that I was less naive than I used to be, and maybe the world has always been a dangerous, unpleasant place and I am just more aware of it now. I told her I remembered waking to a choking yellow mist outside our home in Teesside, enthusiastically produced by the ICI chemical works on a regular basis and probably poisonous; an occurrence that would not be tolerated in today’s society (unless it happened in another country in which case nobody would really care). I told her that anything more than 3 baths a week would have been considered a waste of water (looking back, given that now I consider anything less than two showers a day as unacceptable, that was pretty disgusting). But most of all, I told her, the biggest change has been in technology, and I don’t mean the introduction of cup holders in cars (although they have become an essential part of civilised living).

It’s the internet. Nothing else in my lifetime has permeated and changed my everyday life to the same extent. Of course, first we had to have computers, and they came along in a household friendly size at just the right time to start my three year old son on the path to the technical maestro he is today. But it’s the internet that has most altered my little world.

In my youth I would retire to the toilet with my father’s copy of The Daily Mirror newspaper and absorb whatever it was that the editor was trying to make me believe. Nowadays I can retire to the toilet with my phone and get the news as reported by Al-Jazeera, The Guardian, or a blogger sitting in Afghanistan. Provided I stay away from Fox News, all theses sources are providing an element of the truth and I am left to decide which to accept as fact. In “the old days”, I would eagerly await for a letter to drop through the slot in the front door. Now, I am slotless, and correspondences arrive almost instantaneously from anywhere in the world, and I can read them anywhere there is a phone signal.

And for much of my life, the television has served as the main source of entertainment and information in the home. The moon landing, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers and Blackadder; all my defining cultural moments of the last century came out of the small box in the corner (your defining moments may differ).

And there is still good stuff to be found on the TV. James May’s Toy Stories has been a recent delight. Yesterday I watched the latest Top Gear in (sort of) HD. And plenty of excellent series from America to enjoy; such as House M.D. But I don’t get them from the TV, I download them from the internet. I don’t watch the news on TV anymore, the internet has better coverage. I don’t watch three year old, generally crap, movies on the TV, I download a rip of the DVD from the internet. I don’t keep a personal diary any more, I have Pattaya Days (actually, I never kept a personal diary for more than three days into a new year after someone gave me a diary for Xmas “to record your thoughts in”. My first thought always being “why didn’t you give me cash instead?”).

And now we don’t watch TV any more. She who must be obeyed would occasionally watch the Thai news, or a mindless celebrity entertainment channel; but now she is straight onto the computer when she gets home to pick flowers, tend to pets, plough fields and undertake all the necessary tasks required to manage her various Facebook games. And I stopped watching a long time ago. So it is time to say goodbye.

Our television service is provided by True – UBC, and it is truly horrible. There are many, many channels, but they are all junk, or in Thai, or both. The last few months I only ever switched on to watch the Grand Prix races, but the commentary was so dire I have instead been downloading the excellent BBC coverage and watching the race on the following day. So I called up UBC and attempted to cancel.

Sawadee krap, I would like to cancel my UBC subscription.
Yes sir, it expires at the end of this month, would you like to renew?
No, I want to cancel.
Oh, can I ask why?
Yes, all your channels are rubbish.
Well perhaps you would like to move to a cheaper package with fewer channels?
So I would get fewer channels, but they would all still be rubbish?
Yes.
No.
Oh…. Well perhaps you have a friend and you could transfer your subscription to them.
I don’t have any friends.
Oh.
So please come and take away the satellite dish.
Oh. Well, I can’t actually authorise that, but someone will call you back to arrange this. Thank you for using our service.

Of course nobody has called me back and I suspect they never will. Still, we can always turn the satellite dish into a wok; now that’s something your couldn’t do in the old days.

But nobody seems to have told these two; or maybe they just don’t listen:

Or, from the same musical source and perhaps more appropriate given that we are talking more Chinese gods than Buddha: Paint it black.

Having not had a chance to play much with my new camera, I took a little trip to Viharn Sien this morning. a pretty Chinese temple next to the lake featured in the Pattaya Days header image.

It’s a good place to take visitors for an hour or so, the best bit being the collection of statues on the roof; which to the untrained eye (i.e. mine) are cast in bronze.

So most disappointed to discover that they have now been painted black.

This must be a recent change, because there was man with a pot of black paint going round touching up in case any bronze was showing through. Maybe this is some form of Chinese custom and in due course they will be restored to their real colour; but it did rather spoil the photographic opportunities, with dark shadows everywhere. Took a few shots though, using black and white in many cases as there was not much colour on offer.

Loved using the GF1; image quality was excellent and the ability to easily switch to manual focusing was very useful when trying to focus on the eyes for this shot:

Inside there are some painted walls. A bit dark, but no problem for the GF1 with an F1.7 lens attached; this one at F2.0

What a fine little camera. If I could wean myself off action photography I would sell all my big camera gear and shoot only with a camera like this.

Regular readers may recall the collision between two boats earlier this month which resulted in two deaths.

As predicted, the overhaul of safety procedures and prosecution of the owners of the boats never happened; but the unwitting drivers of the boats were promptly arrested because it was their fault they were employed without being properly licenced…..

There has now been some more “action”. A meeting was held yesterday morning at Pattaya City Hall, attended by a cast of thousands where, according to Pattaya Daily News, it was stated “that the city needs co-operation from all of the boat owners to strictly control their staff in following the rules. Police officers and rescue teams, including Harbour Department officers must be on patrol and arrest any illegal boat or boats that break any rules. Boats must be fully checked before leaving the pier and life jackets must be provided for everyone.”

Given that the owners have happily ignored the rules for years, and government officials have let them (and yes genuinej, I suspect some symbiosis going on); it is unlikely that a gang of officials sitting round a table making grand pronouncements is going to make the slightest bit of difference.

And in other news:
Yesterday a boat carrying tourists sank and seventeen people were injured. The boat had had a second storey added, and when most of the passengers went onto the top deck, the boat became top heavy and was capsized by a “large wave” (I was out sailing yesterday, there were no large waves). Opinions have been expressed that the boat did not have the certification for the modification; hardly surprising because few of the boats have certification for anything.

Good to see that the city hall pronouncements are having the expected effect (i.e. none at all).

Consider the cow.

Look deep into the eyes and what do you see? A soulful being pondering existence and yearning for a mountain top and clear air? Unlikely, unless you are on drugs. At best it is ruminating about why it has to ruminate and manage a four-compartment stomach just to process grass. Most likely it is just being, and waiting to be a steak.

But imagine how Dick McDonald would have felt if he had awoken one morning and decided that such a gentle, placid creature should not be destined to be substantial component of a Big Mac (along with worms, cardboard and the general detritus swept off the floor at the abattoir). Imagine if he dedicated the rest of his life to righting his perceived wrongs.

Meet Richard O’Barry. Those of you old enough and sad enough (that excludes me of course), will have seen him in the TV series Flipper; something to do with a dolphin who did wonderful deeds, a sort of aquatic Lassie with more water and less barking. O’Barry was a dolphin trainer and worked on the show and trained dolphins for aquariums; until he suddenly decided that dolphins in captivity were a bad thing and dedicated the rest of his life to freeing his new friends.

Problem was, as a direct result of the popularity of Flipper, dolphin shows were springing up all over the globe; and increasing numbers of dolphins were having their afternoon swim interrupted by men with nets and bad intentions. In a futile attempt to close the Pandora’s box he had opened, O’Barry has spent the last thirty years in a cycle that involves him illegally freeing dolphins; followed immediately by the law locking him up for a period. And then he found the cove.

The Japanese have no qualms about killing almost anything that swims, including whales, but not apparently dolphins. But they do herd vast numbers of dolphins inshore at a place called Taijii; and then select those most likely to be good at balancing a ball on their nose for shipment to oceanariums around the world. But then the remaining dolphins are not set free, but herded into a nearby cove from which they do not reappear; but the water coming out of the cove does change to a suspicious shade of red. What’s going on? Dolphin paintballing?

The Cove documents the efforts of O’Barry and a team of various specialists to penetrate the tight security around the cove and film what transpires to be not paintballing but the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of dolphins annually. The meat then gets slipped into supermarkets marked as whale; although it is quite different from whale meat in as much as it contains dangerous levels of mercury. Not that you would know that until your hair fell out and you started to feel really heavy (my knowledge of the effects of mercury poisoning is limited).

The first half of the documentary is the set-up and we meet O’Barry’s team and the not at all welcoming Japanese fisherman whose livelihood this is. We also get the full “dolphins are wonderful” treatment, and of course they are. They surf, they are friendly, it looks like they are smiling, and you can teach them to do tricks (but that is wrong nowadays). The actual penetration of the cove, with subsurface cameras and sound equipment, and with video cameras hidden inside false rocks, is reasonably exciting; a bit like Ocean’s Eleven, but with more ocean, less barking and nobody that looks like George Clooney.

Of course the slaughter is very unpleasant to witness, although I expect no worse than what happens everyday in a shed somewhere near you to a hapless pig, cow or llama.

In its favour, The Cove is interesting, at times exciting, and laced with surprising humour given the subject matter. And the ending is a lovely example of “sticking it to the man”. But I can’t help thinking it is rather overstating the extremity of the act; given all the other shit that is happening around the world. But just to show my solidarity, I vow never to eat a dolphin burger again. Or a Big Mac.