The year is 2014, the month is September. Last weekend, there was no march to mark the 2006 military coup. It’s been illegal for more than three people to gather for as long as we can remember. Plus, the army’s new anti-riot guns that simultaneously fire tear gas and play the national anthem at ear-splitting levels have proved pretty effective at discouraging would-be offenders. They’re also darn expensive, but what the heck, the military budget has doubled since 2010, just like it did between 2006 and 2010. Anyway, Dr. Pornthip has promised they don’t cause any real lasting damage to people’s feelings, as long as you don’t watch the clips on YouTube.Not that anyone can watch YouTube anymore. Even 3G has become a distant memory since the country switched to a text-based intranet where only the government and licensed sources can post material. BK lost its publishing license in 2012 over a roundup of the best clinics to get penile augmentation. The story made a passing remark on how maybe the generals might stop buying big useless toys if they got an extra inch. They didn’t think it was funny.Elsewhere, things are looking up. Cambodia now hosts gCircuit (gay tourists stopped coming to Bangkok after police threatened to raid the party in Sep 2010) and its casinos are packed. Last year, the number of visitors to Cambodia overtook Thailand’s for the first time. Vietnam’s industry is steaming ahead, too, and they’ve bought up any Thai businesses that weren’t already Chinese-owned. Vietnamese is now the second most studied language after Mandarin. Chào!We’re still tight with Burma, but the junta kind of spoiled things a couple of years ago by holding a free election and respecting the results, making our system increasingly isolated. We, of course, never got around to those elections. The spate of terrorist attacks on BTS stations in Aug 2011 extended the state of emergency indefinitely. Abhisit, his ideals shattered, eventually stepped down and was replaced by a retired general appointed by the CRES, disappointing those who thought Abhisit’s cute nephew would get the job.Things in the South are so bad, there are threats of military intervention by the UN. But Thailand is confident Russia will veto it, since we ended up sending Victor Bout back to Moscow along with a big order for some lovely new weapons. All in all, life in Bangkok is not that bad. Malls are busy, even if we often settle for the lesser-quality Made in Laos products, and traffic is so jammed people are walking a lot more. One complaint you do hear a lot, though, is people talking about the good old days. “You didn’t have homeless people sleeping in front of CentralWorld,” they recall.