Recently my friend Fardley Nerdwell and his girlfriend Noy moved into a new condo. This event was not without traumas, as Fardley revealed afterward over beers:
Fardley: There are lots of intercultural differences between the foreign male and the Thai female that the books don’t tell you about.
Me: No kidding! Why don’t you write a [...]
By now everybody has heard that airports throughout the world are imposing drastic new security measures to detect suicide bombers. Some of them are installing full-body scanners, a kind of X-ray machine which will enable security guards to inspect every nook and cranny of every passenger’s body.
This has evoked anxiety and horror in many airline [...]
A recent news article reported that a New York advertising man named Peter Arnell wants to rebrand Thailand.
Arnell has an impressive record when it comes to designing makeovers for existing products. According to the article, last year he invented the new design that’s now used on all Pepsi cans. For this little favor it [...]
CURRENTLY visiting Pattaya is famed futurologist Master Aisee Yoo, a Singaporean adept who describes himself as an astrologer, crystal-ball gazer, Tarot-card reader, feng-shui expert, I Ching interpreter, black-belt Scientologist, clairvoyant, prophet, mahatma, revelator, and seer.
Eager to learn what this great man predicts for 2010, I managed to arrange an interview at his posh digs in [...]
CURRENTLY a great controversy is raging about the proliferation of environmentally unfriendly plastic bags. To curtail it, some environmentalists have proposed that supermarkets, department stores, and shopping malls should charge a small fee—say one or two baht—for each plastic bag they provide to customers.
Indeed, on a recent visit to Taiwan I discovered that some stores [...]
RECENTLY the Phuket Gazette published a story about a public-spirited German tourist who took it upon himself to clean up a really filthy public toilet that he passed every day on his way to the beach.
The toilet had been built by the Tourism Authority of Thailand, but unspecified local authorities had failed to maintain it [...]
As a young GI in the 1960s, and later as an English teacher, I lived on the island of Taiwan. People called it the Bao Dao, the Precious Island; and indeed it was. It was my first introduction to Asia, it was a fine place for a young man to sow his wild oats, and [...]
