Thailand Update

Well, although I am here in the U.S., the drama that is Thai politics goes on. Here are a couple of interesting developments.



Bail Jumper



Former PM Thaksin had returned to Thailand to face financial malfeasance charges against him. He was out on bail with his wife, who was awaiting sentencing on her tax fraud conviction, as well as other new charges against her.

Apparently PM Thaksin questioned whether he would receive a fair trial in Thailand and decided to skip bail and go to England. He had spent a considerable amount of time since he was deposed in England where he owns the Manchester City soccer club.

Being a billionaire bail jumper is a lot better than those of more modest means. Instead of hiding out in cheap hotel and looking over his shoulder for Dog the Bounty hunter, PM Thaksin continues to live a luxurious and public life.

Protesters

Some of those involved with deposing Thaksin in 2006 were not happy with the government that Thais elected in late 2007. The People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) have been protesting since mid-May against the current government.


This past week, the PAD protesters stormed seven government agencies in an attempt to shut down the PM Samak government. They briefly took over a government television station, taking it off air for an hour or so.

While protesters have been largely non-violent, they have blocked some streets and caused some disruption. I believe that some of the buses to ISB (my children's school) were cancelled due to streets blocked. The protests were not, however, near Nichada (my neighborhood) or ISB.


The PM is seeking help from the military to end the protests. Of course the last time the military got involved in Thai politics was the coup of 2006. I'm sure that's not what PM Samak has in mind.

Update

I had to move my trip back to Thailand from 8/30 until 9/8 in order to get everything finished on time. I hate moving.

Good to Be the King

Thailand's King Rama IX is the world's richest monarch with a fortune of approximately $35 billion dollars. He is also probably the most popular monarch on earth (among his subjects).

Most Thais are Buddhists, and they believe that your station in life is based on how you were in a previous life. Those who live a wicked life might come back as a beggar, or even an animal of some sort. Those who are good will come back in a better position. If that is to be believed, King Rama IX led exemplary previous lives.

In addition to reincarnation, Buddhist do believe in a heaven and hell. The concepts are somewhat different than in Christianity. Of course heaven is bliss and hell great suffering, but in Buddhism, one does not end up in one or the other. They recognize that we are both good and bad. Each person would spend some time in heaven for the good they did, and time in hell for their sins. So even someone who lived a very good life would spend some time in hell, albeit they would have earned a much shorter stay than someone like me. After you do your time in heaven and hell, you return again to the earth, at least until you reach enlightenment.

I like the accountability for your sins, even if you ultimately are a good person. Additionally, I like the recognition that even people who are by and large bad usually do something good.

Packing and Cheap Tripods

Today Dave and Joe came over and helped me to load some of the furniture into the pod. The whole packing experience is just not very much fun.

This evening I went to downtown Cincinnati for an hour or so to take a few pictures of the suspension bridge. I left my nicer tripod back in Thailand figuring that the cheap one that I had here would suffice for a few weeks.

The difference between a cheap and a nice tripod became very apparent today. I was shooting over a chain link fence at one point, so I had to fully extend the tripod. I was also using my heaviest lens (Canon 70-200 2.8 IS). The tripod was actually swaying and I had a hard time keeping it stable. I actually got some blurry pictures using the tripod.

I was pretty disappointed in the overall quality of the pictures, so I won't post any.

The Dark Knight

Tonight I finally saw the latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight. The biggest surprise was not how much I enjoyed the movie, but how long it took me to finally see it.

I really enjoyed The Dark Knight and think it was the best movie in the Batman franchise to date. In fact, its one of the best super hero movies ever made. It captured the darkness of the Batman character and his villans. The movie was about two and a half hours long, but unlike some films, it didn't seem like it.

Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker was infinitely superior to Jack Nicholas'. Of course, some of that may be a result of the scripts or the overall tone of the respective films. Ledger's Joker is down right creepy and I liked it.

Of course, like any super hero movie, a certain amount of suspension of belief is required. Not the kind of suspension that you need to watch a guy fly around with a red cape or swing through town on a web, but a little more than you need to follow Jack Baeur through a day.

Even if you are not a a super hero fan, if you like action movies, I think you'll like The Dark Knight.

A Bit Sad

While Aleena was very excited about starting at ISB this month it was a bit sad that she was not longer going to school with her best friend McKayla. I never really understood how three year olds could be so close to each other, but those two girls were two peas in a pod. They were in a race at Magic Years last year, and they actually held hands and walked with each other instead of running.

ISB's cutoff date for children's birth is 9/1. Aleena just barely sneaked in under the wire (August 21), while McKayla missed the date by a few months (November birthday). Interestingly, Nalin's birthday is September 8th. Fortunately Nalin had already completed Kindergarten in Ohio where the cutoff was the end of September. Since she had already completed Kindergarten, ISB let her start first grade despite missing the September first deadline.

Apparently McKayla is taking the separation pretty hard. Tim said that McKayla has been crying at school because she misses Aleena, and that she is writing ten cards a day to Aleena. They do get together for play dates though.

Packing...

I'm in the middle of packing the house up so that we can try to rent it out. I hate packing. It sucks. Did I say that I hated it?

Bengals Preseason

Today I went to the Bengals preseason game against the Detroit Lions. One of the things that I do miss while in Thailand is attending Bengals games. They have another game that they refer to as football. I call it soccer, and am not very interested in any game in which my children are not playing.

My new wide angle lens arrived this week, so I decided to take it to the game. Some pictures are here. These pictures were taken with my Canon 40D and a EF-S 10-22 mm lens.

The game was fun. One nice thing about being a season ticket holder is that you generally see the same people each week. Well, I guess its nice for me in that the people around me are pretty cool. I sit in section 151, row 44, seats 3 and 4. Three of the seats behind me are occupied by Jack, Kim and Megan. Megan didn't make the game, but I got to catch up with Jack, Kim and Kim's fiance Chris.

I left about midway through the fourth quarter. The Lions had just scored a touchdown to put them up.

Gencon 2008

On Thursday I took a road trip to Indianapolis Indiana with some friends for the Gencon 2008 convention. Gencon is one of the largest gaming conventions in the country. Fans of collectible card games, role playing games, miniature games and board games all find plenty to do at the con.

The pictures are here.

Back in my younger days, Dave and I would head up to Gencon when it was in Milwaukee Wisconsin. We would play RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons twelve or more hours a day. I look back on it sometimes and just shake my head. Look, I was young and experimenting. If I ever decide to run for public office, I'll probably have to answer if I've ever rolled a twenty sided die. Perhaps someone will dig up one of my old character sheets and ask if I ever used the aliases Jack Brash or Ho Bo.

Okay, enough for the jaunt down memory lane. I didn't play any games at this Gencon. I hung around with my friends consuming some adult beverages. I also took in some independent films showing at the convention.

The first film was A Great Disturbance, a mocumentary about four young men attending Celebrations III, a Star Wars convention that was held in 2005. The movie was laugh out loud funny. They did a great job of presenting these four over the top star wars fans. After the screening, some of the cast and crew answered questions. They talked about how they get such a different reaction at different showings. At Gencon, a lot of the viewers were Star Wars fans who "got" a lot of the genre specific humor. They told us that at the Indianapolis Film Festival, many of the viewers didn't have the same background and didn't find the same humor. I ended up with a free copy of the movie.

The second film was called Captain Blasto, a film by the makers of A Great Disturbance. They are distributing Captain Blasto as webisodes and they can be viewed here. I enjoyed Captain Blasto, it was a clever film. The entire budget for the film was $7,000. To put that in perspective, at one of the independent film festivals they attended the next cheapest movie had a budget of $130,000.

The final film that I saw was named Gamers. This was not made by the same people as the previous two films. Gamers was a comedy about a group of DND players on the cusp of breaking the record for playing the longest ongoing game. It was a pretty ridiculous, but funny movie. While A Great Disturbance and Captain Blasto are family friendly, Gamers is definitely not.

Are You Kidding Me

I think I blogged about my problems in Chicago on my last trip to the U.S. with the kids. To recap, my flight to Cincinnati was cancelled and I was able to get on a flight to Dayton instead. I tried to get in touch with my family to let them know of the change, but couldn't. I didn't have my cell phone with me, so I was using a pay phone. Finally, I called my friend Dave. I ended up calling collect because I didn't think of buying a calling card until after I spoke to him. Laugh if you want, but I'd been up about 24 hours straight with the three kids. In any case, Dave accepted the charges and was able to get in touch with mom and dad. They were able to pick me up and as the saying goes, all's well that ends well. Well, not exactly.

Last night I was having dinner with Dave, Robyn, Joe, Barb and Anna at the Cafe Mediterranean. Not a bad place, by the way. Dave asked me to guess how much he was billed for the collect call. After I made a few errant guesses, he told me the charge was $41 for a three minute phone call. That's almost fourteen dollars a minute unless my St. Philip honed math skills are failing me.

Dave was rather displeased by this charge and called the carrier. They told him that the charge was collect, and that surely he and I had been informed of the cost at the time of the call. That would be false. Dave told them that he was not paying the bill. The told him that they would drop it if he agreed never to accept a collect call from them again. I know it had to be a hard decision for him. Gee, not a real hard decision.

I guess its a good thing that we didn't decide to catch up while on the phone. I mean if we had talked an hour, would the bill have been over eight hundred dollars?

Overall its a pretty shitty practice. Who would expect to get billed $41 for a three minute call? I'm sure that the proliferation of cell phones has killed the pay phone business, but its hard to feel a lot of sympathy with business practices like that.

As a side note, I bought a $20 calling card and used it several times at the pay phone. The per minute charge was pretty reasonable, but for each call originating from a cell phone they charged $1.50.

Got Twenty Grand

A few of our friends went to the Olympics in Beijing. I was talking to one mom who said that they had wanted to go to the opening day ceremonies. She balked, however, when the price of tickets for a family of five would total $20,000.

Back in States

I got back in the states a few hours ago. This trip was a bit easier than my last trip. Even though the kids were good last time, it was so much easier to travel that far without them.

I flew Northwest this time. If you are considering flying Northwest to Thailand, know that for the longest leg of the flight, that the entertainment is pretty lame. Unlike a lot of airlines, the Northwest 747 traveling between the U.S. and Tokyo does not have individual screens in each seat. Instead, there is are screens throughout the plane where movies are occasionally shown. When you compare it to the video on demand that other airlines have, and that Northwest even offers on the airbus that flies between Tokyo and Bangkok, the flight is really lacking. Having a some choices on entertainment is really nice on an eleven hour flight. You fail Northwest.

More GTA in News

There was something in the paper yesterday about crime related to video games. I really get annoyed with stories that claim that kids are committing crime because of what they see in a video game.

A few points. First of all, Grand Theft Auto and other "mature" games are not meant for children. They contain adult themes and are meant for adults. Do they portray criminals in a glamorous light? Sure they do, as do TV shows such as the Sopranos, the Wire, and the Shield just to name a few. I would not want my kids exposed to Grand Theft Auto like I wouldn't want them to watch the shows mentioned above. They are not ready for those shows. Do I think that watching the shows would lead them to a life of crime? No, but I think they are not ready for such dark and conflicting themes.

So parents should rightly keep their kids away from GTA and its ilk until they are in their teens. There is an additional challenge here in Thailand, in that a lot of kids play the games at Internet cafes. The fix is easy, at least in theory. The Internet cafe owners need to implement and enforce a policy against letting young children play mature games. I know in a land where everyone turns a blind eye to things that might be a challenge, but its better than the alternative.

As an American, the whole idea of restricting something like a game is pretty repugnant to me. Even if you believe that the games can cause violence in younger people, is that a reason to prevent anyone from playing? Does anyone honestly believe that if I played Grand Theft Auto, that I would go kill a cabbie to steal his cash and ride? Are my forty year old friends going to go cruising around town shooting people to simulate the game? Its not going to happen.

We are not hearing of hundreds of stories of video game inspired violence. When such an occurrence is claimed, it is trumpeted all over the world, so we would definitely know about it.
So the problem, if it exists at all, is isolated to a very few people. Why should we take the choice out the hands of responsible people.

Okay, Brian, but what if we just save one life? Wouldn't it be worth it then? Frankly, no, it would not. Of course if it were my child whose life was saved, I would undoubtedly think differently. If saving just one life is a justification for regulating behavior, we should wear helmets and Michelin man type outfits as we drive around in our cars at 25 mph. That would save a heck of a lot of lives.

School Starts & My Gripe

Jacob and Nalin started school yesterday. I am pretty happy with both of their teachers. I was talking to a few of Nalin's classmates' moms from last year, and when I told them that she had Ms. Pucci, they all said that is who they had wanted.

I met Aleena's teach named Ms. Patty. Aleena drew and colored at the table while we talked. She is pretty enthusiastic, which is good.

One thing about ISB that really annoys me is their collection of data. I have no problem providing the data that they need for the kids. After the fourth time I provide the same information for a child on yet a different form, I get more than a little annoyed. Is it an enormous burden and effort? No, but it is annoying and makes me believe that they do not do a good job sharing information.

Aleena & Reading

One of my responsibilities while staying at home with the kids is teaching Aleena to read. Sometimes is challenging to motivate her, while other times she is a willing pupil.

Aleena knows how to spell her own name, and recognizes the letters in her name. She recognizes about 12 or so letter, usually because they are in the name of a family member or friend.

Like her sister, Aleena loves to write on a whiteboard, so I use some laminated sheets with letters on them. Aleena then traces the letters, identifying the names and sound. Another trick is one I learned from Tim. I draw the mommy (capital) letter and the baby (small) letter, and have Aleena draw a line connecting them. I think she used the technique with Nalin, but I'm not sure about Jacob.