Radio DJs are popping up on the airwaves faster than you can say The Flying Dutchman’s real name these days.
SCORPIO (Oct 23-Nov 21): “Dear Mr. Sensitive Astrologer: Let’s get one thing straight. I don’t want peace of mind! So stop trying to talk me into going after it! It’s impossible to have it on this earth. Got that? And another thing. I don’t care about your time-consuming emotional resolution stuff! I’m not interested in chasing after the unrealistic goal of being a nice person. I just want pure, raw, naked success—the kind of glory that makes me feel really proud of my powerful effect on people. That’s it!
This week we shift our attention from tanks to toilets with the start of the World Toilet Expo & Forum.
The Singapore Land Authority (SLA) recently announced that some vacant state land will be up for tender, and zoned for “agri-tainment” (that is, a mix of agriculture, recreation and entertainment). According to SLA, agri-tainment can be defined as “nature education, outdoor and/or recreational sports, rustic guest accommodation, spa facilities, arts and handicraft, art studios...fruit orchards, vegetable and food crops, and toad and frog culture.”Good news, right?
Assets are a funny thing. When you’re young, you can never get enough of them. You want to grab as many as you can, play with them. You could just sit on them, but they’re more fun to show off—that is, when they’re not that big. You take it for granted that your assets will always be nice and compact. But anyway the shape of your assets doesn’t matter much because you’re young and no one seems to pay any serious attention to them.When you get a bit older, however, those assets really start growing. In Thailand, especially, successful businessmen see their assets grow at impressive rates.
If a visitor from another planet were to set down in Bangkok, he might assume that progress is measured by the amount of land occupied by shopping malls, freedom by how much time it takes you to reach the mall nearest to your home or office.
If he flew over the Siam Square area, with CentralWorld, Siam Paragon, Siam Center and MBK all in a 3km radius, it might look to him like one huge mall with a few boutique shops between them. Even our pride and joy, Suvarnabhumi, is basically a sprawling shopping mall that also has planes (filled with potential shoppers) flying in and out of it.
Like zombies we’re sucked into these monuments of consumerism, where we are taught to associate spending with happiness and to confuse “need” with “want.” We develop a taste for the homogenized, the uniform and the non-challenging. We learn to find beauty in polished concrete, glass and steel, piped in pop music and fast food.
There’s an argument that shopping malls exist because the public likes them. But what gives us the willies is the feeling that we only like them because we’re running out of alternatives. A stroll through a long public park along the banks of the Chao Phraya River sounds great, but that doesn’t exist so we head to Paragon instead. Hey, what ever happened to that Arts Center?
So say goodbye to Suan Lum Night Bazaar—no points for guessing what will likely rise up in its place.
We love our iPods and our PDAs, but it’s terrifying how much of what is important to us is now contained in little chips, SIM cards and servers, sometimes by people who don’t have a clue how to keep that information secure (us included). Identity theft scares the crap out of us. Phishing, email viruses and the sheer amount of junk email in our mailboxes every Monday morning is pretty damn frightening, too. And don’t even get us started on what holding mobile phones to our heads 24/7 is doing to us.
Trying to get some is not just hard: It’s scary. Because the thought of eating alone, sleeping along, having sex alone (webcams don’t count), growing old and dying alone drives us to do some seriously scary things:
Blind dates: Too busy to find a mate on your own? Better be brave.
Posting our measurements, photos and innermost thoughts on the Internet for all the world to see.
One-night stands: Through your beer goggles she looked pretty sexy. And her voice seemed a lot higher. Damn you, hormones!
And then there are scary people:
Men who have read The Game: Who knows how many guys have taken this supposedly true story about life as a pick-up artist as a bible instead of the anthropological study/voyeuristic pop pulp non-fiction that it is. Seduction as a foolproof science with which they’re able to lead someone to bed with just a few well-rehearsed lines? That’s a bit disturbing.
Women who have read The Game: Equally scary—they already know where all your lame mind games are headed.
Natural beauty? Love it. Inner beauty? Fantastic. Synthetic beauty? In the wrong hands, scary. Some of the badly nipped and tucked and botoxed faces you see on the social pages of Tatler give us nightmares. As do those of Michael Jackson-inspired luk thung singers. And sometimes we’re afraid for them, like Tata and her breasts. See #5, below.
Our obsession with beauty scares us, as do some of the popular conceptions of beauty. Just look at all the waiflike young people chillin’ around Siam Square. Diet pills—scary. Stuff that makes you shit all the nutrients out of your body—yuck. And what’s with this obsession with white skin? Whitening products are terrifying.
Cops: Even when we haven’t done anything wrong, when we drive past a cop on the street we get goosebumps every time. With roadblocks, it’s goosebumps on goosebumps.
Oops: You’re hungover, your hairdresser is hungover, neither of you has had coffee. S/he’s chopping away and suddenly you hear, “Ooops!”
Holes: Holes in sidewalks are dangerous, for sure, but what scares us more is what crawls out of them. Same thing for those holes in the stalls in public restrooms.
Really expensive cars or really cheap cars: You’re at a crosswalk. You’re safe with that Honda. That Toyota, too. But that black widebody BMW barreling towards you? Don’t even test him with one toe on the crosswalk, because he … will … not … stop. In fact, he’ll speed up. The same goes for that punk driving the beat-up old pickup delivery truck. Get the hell out of his way.
Clueless taxi drivers: There seems to be more and more of them every day.
Don’t get us wrong here: Teaching is a noble profession, perhaps the noblest, next to being a lifestyle journalist. As a whole, educators are underpaid, overworked and underappreciated. But that doesn’t mean they can’t scare us. Even competent teachers can be scary—and do you know what it is about them that scares us most? Their damn enthusiasm. Think about it: Would you want to meet Ajarn Yingsak, Khru Lily or Andrew Biggs in a dark alley when your homework wasn’t finished?
And then there are those in a completely different category who seriously scare us, freaks like John Mark Karr, obviously, but in a more general way foreigners who come here and get teaching jobs even though they couldn’t write an essay to save their lives. They’re not all incompetent misfits without teaching skills let alone social skills who put their own interests above those of our children, but what scares us is that there are a disproportionate number of them out there.
Still, you know what scares us most of all? Not them as much as us for being so shallow and so easily impressed by foreign skin.
Actor/politician/boxer-turned-singers: Many celebrities don’t know when to stop. Tao Somchai, Sorn Ram, Mam Kat, Paris Hilton—this means you!
Lookalikes: Striped Ts, tight jeans and dirty Converse—show how “indie” you are by looking like everyone else!
Tiny sex symbols: Moms, dads, quit scaring us by dressing up your little kids to look like their slutty pop idols.
It’s certainly easier to distract everyone with talk of our society’s moral decay and supposed remedies—early closing times, advertising restrictions, censorship—instead of going after, say, corruption. What scares us is that a few zealots are having success imposing their morality on the rest of us.
The least traveled president of the United States in recent history is now in office with a foreign policy that many consider more than a little scary. Having somebody like George W. Bush in command of one of the world’s most powerful military machines, and at the same time, having Kim Jong Il testing nuclear arms in North Korea in direct defiance of U.N. sanctions and U.S. threats is a recipe fraught with danger for every living thing on the planet.
A bit closer to home is the violence in the South that has been flaring unabated for years now. As more and more people are killed, regardless of their age, sex, or religion, one has to wonder how a resolution can be found. Thai people have a reputation the world over as being some of the most peace-loving on the planet—if we can’t stop killing each other, is there hope for anyone else?
And tell us you aren’t scared that a bunch of these dinosaur politicians will somehow manage to slip into the power vacuum and take over like the old days. We’re not saying that Banharn and Chavalit are evil—but they still scare us. So do Sanoh and Sanan. And Vatana and Chalerm.
Nothing makes us realize how small and powerless we really are on this planet more than Mother Nature. Tsunamis, floods, draughts, typhoons—one little twitch on her part and hundreds or thousands of lives are lost. And recent reports are indicating things are getting worse. The number of category four and five hurricanes has doubled in the last 30 years. Typhoons are for the first time being seen in the Southern Hemisphere since the planet was formed. It’s all in An Inconvenient Truth. And in the newspapers.
Nothing is scarier than not knowing what we are really capable of…until we do it and surprise even ourselves. How many times have you gotten home from impulse shopping and thought, “Wait a second, how much money did I just pay for this completely useless thing?”
Everyone knows what it’s like to spend a day in the office completely useless because you had a long night. And yet why do we continue to go out and drink with our friends on weeknights? Because it’s fun … right?
And then going home and drunk dialing.
Especially when they come on at closing time and you see what people really look like.
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It takes a wise man to handle a lie. A fool had better remain honest.—Norman DouglasEveryone lies and if you claim to be innocent of this little sin, then all you’ve done is just prove our point. What really struck us though is that more people seem to be getting caught recently—and not just for little white lies either. Don’t get us wrong—it’s not that we condone lying, but it’s as if no one even tries to lie properly these days.
SCORPIO (Oct 23-Nov 21): In his book A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative, Roger von Oech quotes one of his clients, an architect: “Play is what I do for a living; the work comes in organizing the results of the play.” Make this your guiding principle in the coming weeks, Scorpio. Ask the universe to give you lots of opportunities to mess around and improvise blithely and resurrect your playing-in-the-sandbox consciousness. Come up with good excuses to let your attention wander and explore previously off-limits fun and games.
A white-hot light suddenly appeared on Silom Road and two strangely dressed individuals stepped from it—one adult and one child.“Whoa, where are we, Dad?” the smaller one said.“This, son, is Bangkok in the year 2006—300 years in our past,” the bigger one replied.“It doesn’t look so good…” the smaller one remarked, “and what’s that smell?”“Come along, son,” the adult said, and they began walking down the street. Soon they came to a motorcycle taxi stand where some men sat waiting for customers.“Daddy, Daddy, what’s that coming out of their mouths?” the boy asked.
Young Members of Parliament—or the P65s, as they’re called on “the streets” (well, in the papers, at least)—are forming a hip hop outfit to perform at next year’s Chingay Parade, in an attempt to appeal to youths. Yet, the most glaring misconception in this idea is that you can’t make someone cool. If you’re an MP first, and a hip hopper second, then that’s the natural order of things. What we would suggest the government do, if they want to appeal to young people, is to turn things around a little. Why make an MP hip ...
