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Gibbons, Mosquitoes, and the Prince of Bhutan
Then, I'm caroming the car around the corner by the elephant camp and my wife shouts, "GIBBON!!!", and I have to swerve around a monkey the size of a large German Shepherd. This happened last week. A few days later I noticed a headline in my local paper, "Gibbon problem returns to Patong". I didn't know we had a gibbon problem. I pictured parties of raiding gibbons, running around, bellowing out great gibbon hoots and biting chunks off unsuspecting tourists. That put a smile on my face. However, reading the story, I discovered there was no Planet-of-the-Apes-style revolt going on. The actual problem is that unscrupulous Thais are capturing gibbons and wheeling them around Patong Beach, where unscrupulous tourists pay to take pictures with them. Ah well. I can still dream my dream of worldwide monkey domination. Weekly environmental tirade The rainy season continues, reassuring Phuket residents that a costly solution the chronic water problem can be put off for yet another year. As with any other island, despite the fact we get torrential downpours, we just don't have enough land to create the runoff needed to fill our limited public reservoirs. A desalinisation plant has been under construction for ages in Patong but most believe the popular beach has already developed beyond the mooted plant's ability to supply fresh water. Meanwhile residents from Thailand's farming regions wonder why Phuketters don't use gutters to collect the rainwater that falls on rooftops like the farmers do back home. Most fresh water in Thailand's rural areas comes into the house via a corrugated tin roof and a large ceramic cistern. A few Patong hotels process their own wastewater for use in watering gardens, but just as many - if not more - dump their untreated wastewater into the bay, where it is much appreciated by the algae that likes to eat it and then fester in stinking pale green lumps along the beach like couch potatoes after a pizza binge. US Jazz doesn't Jam In my last installment, I wrote wonderful things about my new car, the Honda Jazz. The information there needs a bit of an update. Since then I have read the unfavourable Car and Driver Magazine review - or rather pan - of the Honda Fit, the version of my car that's being sold in the US as a 2007 model. In the interest of preserving my credibility, I'd like to point out that, while I still love my Honda Jazz, the Honda Fit is a piece of crap. In the process of making the US model, Honda (or more likely the US automotive industry interests) took all the joy out of the car. Nearly everything I like about my car is missing in the US model. No continuous transmission thingy, with five fixed gears instead of seven, one spark plug per cylinder instead of two, and stupid old fuel injection instead of cutting-edge computer-adjusted valve timing. The Car and Driver article clocks the US model at a sluggish 10.4 seconds from 0-60mph, while the model sold in the rest of the world does it in 8.15 seconds (verified by myself today in a bit of fun on an empty stretch of road). I am still very happy with my car in Thailand. Happy enough that I was going to get another one when I went back to the US. But not anymore, thanks to either Honda's lame export policies or US auto industry pressure. I wonder if I can bring my right-hand-drive Honda Jazz back to the US when I leave Thailand.
The funniest joke in the world In a bit of news not related to Thailand, scientists have discovered the funniest joke in the world. Actually, researchers at LaughLab should restate their results as the "most popular English language joke", since the study was only conducted for English speaking countries. Check out the website if you want to know what the funniest joke is. While the study is kind of interesting, I would be more curious to see the results of such a study conducted to include China, India, Japan, Russia, African countries, Italians and Spanish-speaking countries. Oh yeah, and the new Eskimo country of Nunavut, where they have thirty thousand different jokes about snow. However, such a global study might prove impossible, as any bilingual speaker will tell you it is extremely difficult to translate a joke. In the end it's even less funny than the painful exercise of having to explain a joke to someone who's slow on the uptake. In addition to listing the top joke across English speaking countries, the site lists the top joke for each country polled. The Canadian favourite predictably pokes fun at their southern neighbours: When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300 C. The Russians used a pencil. My personal favourite (and Scotland's): I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers. Among various odd findings in the study, the group learned that the funniest jokes contain an average of one hundred and three words, and that ducks are the funniest animals. I would have thought tapirs or maybe gibbons.
Jeffrey Studebaker has been (in no particular order) a SE Asian correspondent for a Singaporean travel magazine, a teacher, consultant and translator in Japan, a guitarist with the band, Swoon 23 in every city of the US of A, a coffee roaster in Seattle, a bike messenger in Portland, a marine fire system repairman in Seattle, an osteoporosis clinic researcher in Providence, a mental ward counsellor on the night shift in Portland, a brief success in New York, and he has now returned to the US after nearly a decade in Asia to pursue a publishing career. All material on this
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