An American in Asia: His Quest for Cosmic Truth (or at least a Decent Espresso)

 

Asbestos, Alien Worms, Atomik Circus and Christians in Thailand

For those who may be harbouring feelings of envy over my tropical island location, you can cheer up. It's raining.

Using my superpowers I got this overhead shot of the weather

The rainy season is well and truly upon us Phuket Islanders and at this very moment, buckets are coming down on my backyard. However, before you get to feeling too smug, I should let you know that it's nice, warm rain that's fun to run around in. There's nothing stopping me from throwing on a swimsuit and hopping into the ocean. Though the waves are pretty big and occasionally a riptide tows overconfident swimmers back into the ocean's watery womb.

The thing to do now is not swimming, really, but surfing. Lately when I've been down to my favourite beachfront cafe, I've been eyeing the surfers with a bit of envy. Phuket is famous in the surfing world for being no fun at all. No gnarly curlers here. The beaches just don't have the gentle slope that allows a wave to build height and cruise along for a while. They just jump out of the depths and crash unceremoniously ten metres away.

But during the monsoon season the offshore (and onshore) storms whip up some impressive waves and surfer's stuck on the island can have a bit of fun.

Now lightning is ripping some impressive holes in the sky in the far hills and thunder is rolling over my house in Sensurround™. Luckily I'm a seasoned North westerner and I know exactly what to do when it rains: have a hobby. So when I've finished with the day's writing tasks, if it's still raining, I'll take up the guitar and fire up the computer recording studio. One my reasons for choosing Phuket as a place to live is for my writing career. The nine-tailed whips of boredom are a powerful motivator to work.

Likely as not, however, the rain will just sweep over in fifteen minutes and the humidity will crank up to eleven for the rest of the day. And now for the news.

Lung cancer anyone?

I don't know why I assumed, just because everyone in the world knows asbestos causes cancer and it's been banned for decades in the US, European Union and Japan, that its use in new buildings would have ceased in Thailand.

I was again reminded that I live in a third-world country by an article in The Nation newspaper, which stated the country continues to import 200,000 tons of the stuff annually for construction, auto parts, insulators and textiles.

Thailand's priorities on the relative values of human life and cold hard cash are laid out in a quote from the director of the Industrial Works Department's Hazardous Substance Control Bureau, Ms Srichant Uthayopas: "A substitute for chrysotile (white asbestos) would be costly, and I see no reason to pay more for one. Safety and environmental protection are important, but economics is more so." At least I know where I stand.

Alien worms attack

H. G. Wells (sorta): "No one would have believed in the first years of the twenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's" - and that they would look like jelly worms.

Newspapers and TV stations around the country embarrassed themselves this month featuring stories of an invasion of alien jelly worms. It seemed to begin with a man in the country town of Uthai Thani, who found an object that looked like worm of clear jelly with a white centre, the length of his forearm. Starving newsmen moved in swiftly and proclaimed the beginning of the end, an apocalypse of jelly worms that, with "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us." (H. G. again).

The story had become a hoax by the time the English language dailies got it however, their lagging coverage rescuing them from joining in the Wellesian (Orson this time) embarrassment. The Nation story revealed the object for what it was: a water-logged hospital gel sheet used to cool fevers. Apparently when these sheets are soaked in water, the gel coating on one side expands and curls the sheet into a cylinder.

Who needs aliens? The local fauna is weird enough. I call this one Nose Beetle.

This kind of episode happens every so often in Thailand, when rural sections of the country freak out over impending doom from space. On my first trip to the upcountry region called Isaan, I came across tuk-tuk taxis the locals referred to as "Skylabs". My guide explained that, at the time the Skylab space station was falling to Earth, there was a general panic throughout the countryside and people were convinced that the satellite would wipe out the whole region. Concurrently, a local tuk-tuk company was searching for a name for its newest model and, in a typically Isaan stroke of humour, Skylab it was.

Space movie

Speaking of space, the eccentric guy who slaps on pirated DVDs at Phuket's cable movie channel (operating from somewhere in a well-hidden corrugated tin shack) entertained me for an afternoon with a really odd French film called, Atomik Circus. With punky lounge music by Vanessa Paradis and the Little Rabbits, featuring such tracks as "Aliens with 2000 Assholes" and "Highway to Space", it was kind of like if the '70's animated movie feature, Heavy Metal, was made instead as a live-action film in 1989 by the French. Good for a rainy afternoon in a head shop.

Christians in Thailand

Speaking of movies (isn't this flowing nicely?), in a rather weird show of cultural sensitivity, Thai censors caved in to pressure from international Christian groups, cutting the final ten minutes of The Da Vinci Code movie for its showing in Thailand. Of all the parts of a suspense thriller to cut: the last ten minutes? The last ten minutes are the whole purpose of sitting through a thriller.

While the decision has since been repealed and the movie will be shown uncut, with some significant changes to the Thai subtitles, the incident lended credence to another story carried in national media. Hollywood media powers are claiming that draconian censorship is a major contributor to Thailand's massive DVD movie piracy problem.

Thai censors regularly cut or blur scenes that show characters smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol or holding a gun to someone's head (a gun to any other body part is acceptable, as are actual scenes of bloody carnage and footage of unconvicted crime suspects on the nightly news).

In typical beaurocratic style, while one hand censors for Christians, the other is ignoring local movie makers who are cranking out culturally offensive movies left and right. The Cambodians are now up in arms about Ghost Game, a film about a reality TV game show where contestants have to spend a night in a haunted Khmer Rouge death camp, and the Laos are upset about a Thai soccer movie that depicts a Lao soccer team as a bunch of idiots who could only win because of their Thai coach.

It's a little known fact that Thailand is one of the world's major producers of Irony.

Final thought: A Barometer of Success

While we're patting ourselves on the back over the accomplishments of Civilization and how much easier it is to survive since the Stone Age, consider the little children. Formerly kids learned the art of survival the way young animals do, through games and playing around all day. Now life has become so complicated that our childhood, when we have more energy than at any other time of life, must be spent strapped to a chair eight hours a day, plus homework. I'm not sure about this Civilization stuff.