Archive for July, 2010

But some of the stations are quite picturesque.

Panasonic GF1

It has been brought to my attention that there is a sporting event underway which has worldwide attention. It goes on for weeks and is being contested by sportsmen whose strength and stamina are almost beyond belief. Along with the sporting action, there are injuries, intrigue and deep strategy. It is totally absorbing and I am following the action whenever possible.

I am not, of course, referring to the World Cup of men chasing around a pitch for ninety minutes and then going to a night club. I am absorbed in the spectacle of more than a hundred athletes, battling on the roads and mountains of France for a couple of hundred kilometres every day for three weeks. C’est Le Tour de France.

When I was a lad, my father forced me to save some of my meagre weekly pocket money. The objective was to accumulate enough cash to purchase a bike. I had no problem with the scheme because I was keen on the concept of cycling and very much wanted my own machine. Come the day when enough funds had been saved, my father took me down to the bike shop. This was a bad plan because we came out with something he had chosen. It was called a Hercules; a straight handlebar tank of a bike designed for shopping; whereas I was hoping for racing machine designed for Eddy Merckx.

Not a problem, I just waited a couple of weeks and then took my nearly new bike to another shop and swapped it for an ancient, scruffy machine which had a Reynolds 531 tubing frame, and gears and brakes that would have received the Merckx seal of approval. The transaction did not receive my father’s seal of approval; but he eventually forgave me, and the bike served me well for many years.

Just like the Tour de France riders, I could cover two hundred kilometres a day; although it would take me three times as long and I would need to rest for a couple of days afterwards. But I could, and did, cover a hundred kilometres a day with no problems; although at the time we called them “miles” and there were less of them. Nowadays I would struggle with any sort of distance unless the unit of measure was metres, but the interest in cycle racing remains.

The recent super-hero of the tour is Lance Armstrong, riding for the final time (again) this year. Struck down with cancer in 1996, Armstrong survived brain and testicular surgery and extensive chemotherapy, threw himself into an unbelievably intensive training regime; and went on to win Le Tour in 1999, and six time after that. If you want to know what it’s like to go from lying on the floor vomiting after chemo, to winning the toughest sporting event in the world a few years later, “It’s not about the bike” is an inspiring read.

The first couple of days of this year’s tour have taken place in the Netherlands and Belgium where rain, cobbles and steep descents have contributed to more than the usual number of crashes. If you are living in Europe you can no doubt watch every moment live. If you live in Thailand you can download the highlights and enjoy them the following day.

Le Tour every day, and the British Grand Prix this weekend. Who needs that World Cup thingie?

A rainy day, so an ideal time to visit some property developments and pour scorn where appropriate (Spoiler: it was appropriate everywhere).

Out of town and headed south. Much further south than their brochure would have you believe; but finally we arrived at The Beaches.

This project has been touted for years; but it really made headlines last year when one of the directors of the project made off with about a hundred million baht of deposits from eager investors. Of course the company took full responsibility and announced it would honour any contracts distanced themselves from their director and told the customers to sue the thief directly.

Since then, all has been quiet, so it seemed time to go and check out progress. There will be hotels, condominiums, a water park, spa, tennis academy and a host of other world-class features. After a year of construction, maybe some of these facilities would be nearing completion?

In summary, no. In detail, there were some workers moving around some mud; but as all this was happening in the vicinity of the sales office it was not clear whether the mud was being moved for show or as part of the very early stages of construction.

We went into the sales office which was spacious, as sales offices tend to be. There were indications of people in rooms, but nobody came to greet us. We waited ten minutes and examined various posters and a rather shabby model of the development. Then a man appeared and asked what we wanted. I told him we were interested in buying a condo. He told me he was responsible for the water park. I told him I was not interested in buying a water park; at which point he wandered off. We waited a little longer but nobody else seemed interested; so we left.

Still, they don’t really need a sales office because they recently announced that they were going for a new approach to marketing. Not for them the usual flashy Flash based sites because “most real estate projects use Flash technology that presents brilliantly-animated images but fail with their eMarketing efforts because of it.” Instead, The Beaches “will be the first large-scale real estate development project in Asia to employ Web 2.0 as its online publicity vehicle.”

If you don’t know, and I didn’t, Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as being “commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web.”

Pretty cool, except The Beaches website offers the standard flashy Flash based site which presents adequately animated images but zero collaboration. A shame, I would have liked to have gone interactive on their asses and told them their sales office sucks and that I have no interest in paying an exorbitant amount of money for what is currently a small area of mud.

Back towards Pattaya and White Sands Beach.

In 2005, Grande Asset announced a project to construct a condominium to be called The Sails; and very smart it looked too. Sold well initially by all accounts and construction got underway.

Then the project was put on hold, for reasons that were unclear. The CEO of Grande Asset sold off his shares and formed a new company called Apex. A few weeks later, Apex announced a new development next door to the partially completed and abandoned Sails project. The new condo was called White Sands Beach with a design that looked very similar to The Sails. You couldn’t make this up.

Construction started more than two years ago so we were excited to see how things were going. They weren’t.

On the right is what remains of The Sails project. On the left is nearly two and a half years of construction progress on White Sands Beach. Five years of fucking around with two projects; and this is all they have to show for it.

Still, there was a sales office and there was an actual sales person who greeted us very nicely. She had no brochures “because the designs had changed”; but she did have a price list which indicated obscene prices. I asked her when the building would be complete and she said “two years”…… She also told me that construction of The Sails would start again soon. I guess she just has to repeat what she is told.

The day wasn’t going very well in our search for a believable sales pitch; so I decided to play it safe and visit the offices of Raimon Land, one of Thailand’s most respected construction companies; or so they tell us. This took us to The Avenue shopping centre and the swanky sales office for The Lofts project. I remember going there a couple of years ago and being shown a sales chart with many units already sold or reserved; what a success story! But now the sales office, whilst still outwardly proclaiming the project, is closed, so no chance of meeting an eager sales executive. And a check at the construction site confirmed that the project is dead (the condo in the background is not The Lofts, it is a development by a company that actually built something).

One last chance for a sales pitch to brighten our day. Off to The Waterfront. I will admit I have been hard on them in the past, more than once in fact; but here was their chance to wow me with their proposal.

Checked on the construction site and no real progress since the last time I looked; maybe the grass was a little longer:

Walked down towards the sales office; but there wasn’t one. The project is abandoned.

What a disaster. Never mind, tomorrow I will go to the Ocean 1 sales office; that should be good for a laugh.

Serious note: Never, ever, buy anything here that isn’t already built.

My recent bout of man flu (recovered now, thanks for asking) meant that my usual routine of jousting, extreme rock climbing and midnight street luge had to be put on hold, and I was reduced to reclining in front of a monitor and allowing it to feed me flickering images of entertainment.

There was one particular movie I was keen to watch; but my usual torrent based supply kept feeding me junk files which were probably intended to infect a Windows machine; but on a Mac they just made it clear that what I had was not a movie. Eventually I did what I have never done before, I went to iTunes and gave that very nice Mr. Jobs $3.99 for the privilege of renting an HD movie. Had to leave it overnight to download; but the actual HD movie experience was excellent and it seemed a reasonable price to pay. I shall rent again.

The movie in question was Shutter Island and I wanted to watch it because it was a Scorsese movie; and he usually comes up with something interesting. He had dragged along Leonardo DiCaprio (again), which didn’t particularly thrill me; he seems to move his face around more than he actually acts. But never mind, Scorsese did not disappoint; it was cracking movie. The cinematography of every scene was just wonderful (watching in HD makes a difference), the acting was admirable (Ben Kingsley does his quietly threatening thing and DiCaprio moves his face a lot), and the script and story keep you guessing till near the end. And just when you have decided you know what is happening, the last sentence of the movie gives you something to think about and discuss for many hours afterwards (at least, that is the effect it had on me). Now I know the story, I want to watch it again; but of course the rental period has run out so it is back to torrents.

If it’s a Paul Greengrass movie then it may be slightly political (Bloody Sunday, United 93), it might feature Matt Damon (Bourne Supremacy/Ultimatum) and it might make you vomit from the extensive use of cameras being whirled around on a piece of string (everything). And so it is with Green Zone, with Matt Damon as an American Marine charged with searching for weapons of mass destruction, and instead unearthing a conspiracy which (shock, horror) would reveal that the Yanks knew all along that there were no WMD. There is plenty of action, all filmed using the camera at the end of a bit of string approach. There are weighty discussions on topics which will please you if you are of a mind that the official rationale for the invasion of Iraq was a cover for a lust for oil and personal revenge. It is two hours of reasonably riveting entertainment; after which you can forget about it and go and have a cup of tea (or vomit, depending on your reaction to what is optimistically called “extensive usage of hand-held cameras”).

Extensive usage of hand-held cameras can be forgiven if that is all that is available to the cameramen; and shaky footage can be accepted when we understand that the cameramen will be thrown in prison if caught by the authorities. We see them shakily shoot the growing protests from people dressed in red. There is an increasing army presence, tear gas is used and eventually live rounds. The government complains about the scenes of violence being shown by international media. Eventually, the government clamps down, the protesters are arrested or dispersed and the protest goes underground until the next time.

Sounds like Thailand, but it was in fact the uprising of the monks in Myanmar. An underground movement of journalists used cheap video cameras to secretly film the protests and the resulting footage was smuggled out of the country, edited and released as a documentary called Burma:VJ. It’s all very well watching Matt Damon leaping around somewhere that pretends to be Baghdad, but this is real footage shot by real people whose freedom was on the line just for holding a camera. It’s sobering stuff. Thailand may not be at the same level of brutality and suppression; but it troubling to note the similarities between the two countries. It wouldn’t take much….

She who must be obeyed found my choices to be a little on the heavy side, so a chick flick was demanded. I deal with this in the way any man should. I either pretend to look for it and then announce (with a voice tinged with sadness) that it cannot be found for download; or I allow the occasional choice to be made available on her computer and I retreat to my machine and look at photos of girls in lingerie that have inadvertently stumbled into a shower.

And so it was with She’s out of my league, the everyday story of a dork who manages to hook up with a really hot girl. The storyline is of course the same in all these movies. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl get on really well. There is a misunderstanding and one of them storms off. They get back together in circumstances that require some degree of running and tension (Will they? Won’t they? Of course they bloody will!).

But I have to admit I was drawn away from my perusal of shower booths and towards my wife’s computer. Yes, the movie was as crap as these movies always are; but at least it was also very rude and I will admit to chortling a couple of times. Not that I am in anyway recommending this movie; much better you stick with www.wetlingeriegirlsintheshower.com.

(I bet you checked…)

Man flu cured and we decided to go watch a movie on something bigger than 24 inches. Knight and Day was someone’s choice, a buddy/thriller/comedy starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. That pretty much sums up the experience and it was as good/awful as you might expect that experience to be. It’s been a while since I have seen Cruise in anything, and he sits in my mind more as a lunatic Scientologist than an actor; which rather spoils things. Cameron Diaz still has that smile and she sits more comfortably in my mind as someone who would probably do OK in one of those inadvertent shower meets lingerie scenarios. Not a bad way of spending a couple of hours; totally forgettable five minutes later.

The endless previews at the cinema included a trailer for Inception, the latest from Christopher Nolan. I have been a fan since Memento, one of the best mind-fuck movies ever; and The Prestige was not far behind. After the success of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Nolan can choose his projects. This latest offering was written by him and I am hoping to be led deeply astray for the two and half hour running time. I might even forgive that fact that rubber-face DiCaprio stars.

Last, and by no means least on whatever scale you choose, Toy Story 3 arrives this month. Bliss.