This just in from one of Bangkok's daily English papers ... get a load of the very last line. Some copy editor had too much of a good time with this ...

Sudarat returns source: The Nation
Sudarat Keyuraphan, ousted agriculture minister, returned from Germany Sunday afternoon. She arrived at the Dong Muang International Airport at 2:30 pm in the LH772 of Lufthansa Airlines. Her family, Thai Rak Thai Party members and reporterswere waiting for her. She said she would halt political activities and would provide full cooperation to the Council for Democratic Reform under Constitutional Monarchy. She said she was ready to have her assets probed.

Just finished covering an anti-coup protest -- at the shopping mall -- organized by a bunch of professors and students at Chulalongkorn Univ. but attended by an assortment of people who said there are more like them but people are afraid to come out against the coup.

Military government starting to crack down on media, bbc.com story on Thailand blocked, random transmissions of CNN and BBC blocked.

Screw this ... the website of an anti-coup group that is planning to stage a demonstration Friday night (at a shopping mall, this is Thailand after all) has been blocked. Reminds me of China days. Spent my second day interviewing Thais and foreigners out in the streets ... plus a stop off at Pat Pong where the hookers are still hard at work but there are noticeably fewer tourists. Which everyone I spoke to there confirmed for me. They are worried.

Here is the website in case it is ever unblocked ten years from now: http://www.19sep.org/ ... or wait I guess it isn't blocked outside of Thailand. I don't know, I've never completely firmed up my total understanding of how the World Wide Web of the Internet actually works. My half-assed understanding of it, however, is quite firm. Oh I like that.

I got interviewed by a national radio program in the U.S. at two in the morning yesterday. It was a perfect cap to my surreal day.

Yup so it's martial law and there are no gatherings of more than five people at a time allowed but don't tell that to the thousands of Thais hanging out with the tanks and soldiers today, festooning both with flowers and showering the soldiers with yummy snacks. Was it surreal? Yeah, but anything with tanks parked in the background is surreal, no matter what, and better funny poses with little kids and dogs in front of personnel carriers than the alternative.

So I spent the day out reporting and below I pasted a story about tourism that I wasn't able to place in time -- in the breaking news world old news is stinky, useless news. But the quotes are PRICELESS and I couldn't have done better if I had made them up. And it was fun trolling the streets, except when the thing at the end happened ... ensuring now that you have to read to the end of my story which doesn't have a headline because I hate writing headlines ...

By: You Know Who
Soldiers and tanks may have been parked around Thailand's Government House and Parliament yesterday after a military coup last night declared martial law and ousted Caretaker Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra,but, less than a mile away, life went on as usual on Khao San Road, the heart of Bangkok's thriving backpacker scene. There were fewer people and many shops were closed, but travelers expressed a business-as-usual attitude mixed with some confusion.

Two Australian women on the start of a three-monthAsian and European holiday were picking over a tiny stall offering Thai silk wallets and brightly covered headbands when they learned from a journalist that the army had staged a coup the night before.

"Are we in danger or anything?" asked Ellie Eade, 18,who, with her friend Katie Taylor, 19, had just flown into Bangkok from Tasmania Monday morning. They had noted a startling amount of police in the area the night before but had no notion that tanks were rolling through the Bangkok streets and a Constitution overturned as they enjoyed their second day night on Khao San Road, which is famous for its bars, clubs and cut-rate youth hostels.

Finally, the two women shrugged off the news and said they would stick to their plan of a 10 day trip in Thailand's mountainous north."Tourists are always pretty safe," said Eade, adding that news of a possible coup in Fiji didn't keep her from vacationing there in January.

By late last night foreign news channels had been blocked on Thai television and local channels broadcast only patriotic songs and footage of the Royal family. This, says some travelers, has added to the confusion.

"They cut off BBC," said Claire McKee, 21, a University of Newcastle, U.K., student who is traveling through Asia with her boyfriend, Oli Burdick, 23. "You don't know where to get your information from."

The couple said they first realized something was amiss while hanging out at a Khao San road bar last night. Suddenly, street vendors began to hurriedly pack up their wares and rush off. "We thought there was a storm," McKee said.

Later, McKee, who is Canadian, called her Embassy where the woman who answered assured her there was nothing to worry about. Indeed, most of the tourists interviewed said they were reassured by the taxi drivers, bar owners and travel agents they had spoken with who seemed to be taking the overthrow of their elected government in stride.

"Thai people were very calm," Burdick marveled.

Thais weren't the only people to shrug off martial law.

"We just finished a war in Israel so it doesn't reallybother any of us," said Jenny Shnedman, 22, who sat on Khao San getting her long, dark hair carefully arranged into dozens of tiny braids wound through with neon green string by two Thai women. Shnedman said she first learned of the coup the night before when she received a cell phone call from her mother in Israel. "She said 'Something's going on in Thailand,'" but her mother wasn't overly concerned, Shnedman said. "It's not supposed to affect the tourists."

One of Shnedman's braiders, Poin, agreed with Shnedman. No worries, she said, no worries.

Most business owners in the areas refused to speak about the coup and its possible affects on business. However, there were noticeably fewer street stalls today and all government offices, banks and money exchange places were closed following an announcement of an offical bank holiday. Shnedman and others said they had definitely noticed fewer tourists on the streets as well and one travel agent said she booked tickets for half a dozen travelers who to cut their trips short and leave.

Masa Mitsuhashi, 22, got a phone call about the coup at midnight last night while hanging out in Pat Pong, Bangkok's well-known red light district. Mitsuhashi and two other acquaintances visiting Bangkok from Japan waited for their orders of fried rice to be dished out at a street stall in the Khao San area. Kei Onuma, 22, and Norimasa Noguchi said they left Pat Pong after hearing the news in order to snap photos of tanks and soldiers as they passed by Bangkok's central train station.

Indeed, walking through the main streets separating this backpacker ghetto and Thailand's Parliament and Government House, one is struck by the number of foreign tourists excitedly taking photos of soldiers and tanks. A visitor from Korea moved to the front of a crowd when soldiers jumped a Thaksin supporter protesting at Bangkok's Democracy Monument in order to get a close up.

"What does 'antarai' mean?' she asked when one of the soldiers began shouting the Thai word for "dangerous" at a journalist.

My first military coup ... it's official, Thaksin is OUT!

Now that the fifth anniversary of 9/11 has safely passed by, I think I will write about it.

At right you will see a photo of a Central Park Zoo polar bear, although not the one that I went to watch swim in neverending, mesmerising circles several days after 9/11 when the search was still on for non-existent survivors and smiling to yourself or having a pleasant phone conversation meant treason to whoever might be buried below a mile away, scratching at the rubble above (I'm not being sarcastic, this is how it felt). No, the one that Meghna and I watched was much bigger than this, and its size made its neurotic episode that much more interesting and creepy. We had just come from looking in at an empty display that was supposed to house a bird of some kind; there were no birds, just little mice scurrying around on the ground who, I helpfully explained to the little kid pressing his face against the glass below me, had probably eaten whatever bird was once inside. Meghna said this was a mean thing to say to him but it put me in a much better mood and the kid didn't really seem to mind.

Anyway, we wandered over to the polar bear pool which that afternoon (it was Saturday, September 15, five years today no less!) was inhabited by just the one bear; I suppose the other two were hiding away in their cave. He was a big beautiful fluffy thing, so fluffy and pure white that all you wanted to do was carefully lower yourself over the fence and hold him tight in a big fluffy bear hug. Nancy later explained to me that polar bears are very aggressive, hungry animals and I would have been immediately torn to pieces and my brains and entrails greedily feasted upon and that this one in particular, Gus, had been seeing an animal psychologist for some time. (She also brought me in to see the penguins one night after midnight, long after the zoo had been closed down, in their little polar auditorium. They all stood perfectly still and upright even as they slept, all of them facing out through the glass and toward us, the audience, and illuminated in a strange blue light. My best date ever. This all happened much later of course, since I hadn't even met Nancy yet.)

So Gus was big and fluffy and cute and he was also certifiably insane. At first we were like, oh look the supercute polar bear is taking his exercise and being frisky and we watched as he methodically swam in a circle in his little pool, stopping only to lift himself half out of the water onto a rock and then plunge back down into the water. He also made sure to always touch the submerged viewing glass where people could watch from below. We wandered down below and saw that he was still doing his little routine, with nary a change. Oh look, we said, he's still doing it, isn't that funny. Fifteen minutes later, it was the same: rock, swim, touch glass, swim, rock ad infinitum. No, seriously, ad infinitum. Finally Meghna started getting weirded out and said we had to go, so we moved on, only checking back about an hour later to discover that yes, Gus was still doing his crazy thing.

I suppose it was as normal of a day as one is allowed to have with those smoking ruins and possible survivors (not) waiting to be uncovered not so far away. Being freaked out by a neurotic polar bear and wondering what happened to those birds while waiting for them to call off that stupid, horrible search. Frank Rich had a bitch fest the other day in his New York Times column about a photo taken on 9/11 showing young people hanging out on the Brooklyn waterfront, smiling and talking, as the horizon burned away. He said something to the effect that maybe these people had lost someone or really were saddened but you would never know by the look of it and that that's what Americans do, they move on, especially the young ones.

People are having a fit about that one, probably because they all recognize a little of themselves in that photo, especially the New Yorkers. I mean, WTF are you supposed to do? There were as yet no survivors for our blood, there was nothing for us to do as volunteers, and as for me, I didn't even have a job then (I had cleverly quit my job next door to the South Tower the Friday before). Like most people I didn't even remotely know anyone who had died, so I wasn't sure exactly who or what I was grieving for, or if I was even supposed to be grieving. So I went to the zoo. It seemed logical at the time, better than sitting around and feeling sick. There were a lot of other people there too and it was pretty festive, let me tell you, in this strange and removed, sometimes horrible way.

And now it's five years later and I ask myself: is Gus still crazy or has he stabilized through a helpful mix of therapy and drugs? Was he able to handle the death two years ago of Lily, his polar bear girlfriend, from cancer? Why are we at war in Iraq again? (sorry, had to slip that one in) Where DID those birds go and did I scar that little kid for life? How do you decide when to stop searching for survivors, and who decides? Is there a particular number of days, hours, minutes, seconds that you allow? Is there a formula? Is it okay to be sad about the death of thousands of people who never touched you and to enjoy yourself in the face of the death of those thousands? Hmm, I could probably google half those answers, and find the other half on wikipedia, but maybe most of them are best left unanswered ...

This just in from my brother via email:

A slight correction to your blog. We're not going to die in 2056. We're in fact not going to
make it past 2036 when the giant asteroid hits.

http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/news_detail.cfm?ID=165

So live it up and don't worry about global warming. Because there's
going to be some extreme global heat in 2036...
JP

Thanks JP! It's always good to keep things in perspective!

Went out of my way to watch "The Inconvenient Truth" last night at the movie theater with my fellow journalist/yogi friend Joel (pronounced "Jo-elle" in Thailand) and it is as I suspected: we're all going to drown and then freeze 50 years from now. Great. And the US is responsible for most greenhouse warming but China is on its way. And Al Gore sounds like my dad which is why not enough people voted for him says Jo-elle (sorry dad). But maybe they will this time around after they watch his movie and learn that they or their offspring are going to die 50 years from now. Or maybe not.

The best part of the movie was when Gore used nifty graphics to show what would happen when the polar ice shelf melts (or just half of it and half of Greenland, which, by the way, is mostly melted already and can't freeze back up should temperatures plummet again in case you are wondering). He showed a map of Florida first (poor Florida) and inky blue water made my hometown of Crystal River disappear. I think even Ocala was gone. Then San Francisco, poof. Then Manhattan, and I was happy to see that our apartment in the Bronx was safe. THEN we'll see who is sitting on a rental goldmine. Next was all of Holland -- that's what you get for building BELOW SEA LEVEL PEOPLE. And the Dutch think they're so smart with their special cheeses and bicycles everywhere. Then he went on to all those third world countries where the other 40 million people would die or be displaced, but who cares about those places. Although I will note that it appears smarter to build up than out in Shanghai. And Beijing.

Okay cynicism aside I came out supercharged and ready to make sure my vote count since I already don't own a car. Unfortunately, when I called for my absentee ballot today at the Embassy I learned in the recorded message that consular services are only open for an hour and a half a day. Well at least they make it easy for you. And in case you are wondering, no, I'm not going to vote for Hillary. Okay that's a lie I am because I don't want the Republican to win, whoever the poor silly schmuck is, but I won't ENJOY voting for her. (I guess I should have voted in the primaries but I forgot all about it.) I WILL enjoy voting for Eliot Spitzer for governor. He's an honorary gay in my book.

Not that it matters that much since we're going to all die in 2056. This is why I only watch romantic comedies. Or funny Holocaust movies (see "Life is Beautiful" and "Everything is Illuminated").

Okay and I lied a little, consular services is open for a few hours in the morning, but only for an hour and a half in the afternoon, which is when I usually leave my cave. So it might as well just be an hour and a half.

This salon.com article about the passivity of US airlines in the face of ridiculous security checks and hysteria really got my juices flowing, especially since I have done my share of international and domestic flights in the past month, all of it on the tail of the London liquid bomb foil.

First of all, on the plus side, none of the six flights I boarded required a very long time for security. I always got there two hours ahead of time and always, always had an hour to wait around at the gate. This is including a recent flight out of NYC and another out of LA less than a week after the London stuff. So I am not so convinced that the wait time for security purposes has been that vastly increased. Passengers seem pretty organized and there are plenty of very clearly marked signs in all of the many airports I visited to let you know exactly WHAT you could and could not bring on. And I even got a bow from the security guy at Korea after I walked through the metal detector. What?!!

Saying that, the whole experience reminded me of the absurd and meaningless security checks I had to undergo daily while working for a news agency at the RNC in Manhattan in 2004. One day I was not allowed to bring in my daily yogurt, under no circumstances could I bring that yogurt in and it was dutifully taken away from me. (I bought a replacement at the in-house cafeteria.) Another day it was fruit. No fruit, absolutely no fruit and my apple was seized and thrown into a bin at the security checkpoint. (I bought my replacement fruit at the in-house cafeteria.) On a third, particularly rainy day, every reporter had their umbrella seized and thrown into a mounting pile of umbrellas, never to be seen again. No matter I thought, I'll just use the GINORMOUS umbrella laying around in the makeshift office used by the news agency. The umbrella which was apparently overlooked by the teams of security people sweeping through during the security lockdown a day before the convention began. They also missed a random razor blade I found next to my computer. Maybe it was a test.

The hardest part was keeping my mouth shut. Because at that moment in time, you did not under any circumstances ARGUE with these people or you'd get netted (i.e. have a giant net thrown over you) and thrown into a makeshift prison. Think I'm joking? Two employees of the news agency were "netted" while running errands in the streets around the convention and thrown in jail overnight; my partner's friend was "netted" and thrown in jail when trying to get to his apartment (the NYPD didn't believe him; better to err on the side of utter stupidity I suppose). I finally couldn't help myself and had to ask the NYPD officer who checked my drivers license every day at checkpoing number one blocks from Madison Square Garden what, exactly, was the point in checking my driver's license? To make sure that I could drive a car? To ensure that I had an identity? My RNC pass didn't have a photo of me nor did it carry my name. He said it was because on my way out they would check it again. I said well, actually no, this is the only place and time I am ever asked to haul out my driver's license. He said no, they check it again on my way out. Well, who can argue with such a fact? It was like living in a dream. But one of those pointless, afternoon dreams you have when you're napping where all you do in the dream is read a book or wash dishes.

I'm not saying these security people were stupid. Oh wait, yes they were. What I'm saying is that fascism is a bottom-up phenomenon. We let it happen. When some Jet Blue passengers freaked out last month because a guy of Middle Eastern descent had on a shirt that said "We Will Not Be Silent" in English and Arabic and the airline refused to let him board until he took it off ... well those other passengers who knew the whole thing was too lame for words and yet kept their mouth shut, THEY are the ones responsible for this mess. Dude, where's MY Arabic t-shirt. And yogurt. And tube of toothpaste.

Oh yes, did I mention that I smuggled toothpaste into a flight out of LA.? Toothpaste that had been given to me on a previous flight. I threw it away at the next airport and wondered, what does it mean that I successfully smuggled toothpaste into the U.S.? Absolutely nothing, I decided, and looked forward to my next in-flight semi-delicious meal which, by the way, was sure to include shiny, sharp metal forks!

Well, I am back from my whirlwind, three week tonsilitis-tour of the States ... I was sick in both Phoenix AND Tuscon, Arizona, and then proceded to be sick in Westchester and downtown New York as well. What I would call a particularly successful and enjoyable trip home. Meanwhile a third bout of tonsilitis has surfaced but who cares because I have my own lovely sheets to roll around in now and no one to let down because I can't be social. Yes, I know I should have those little boogers ripped out of me sooner rather than later but who wants to think about that now that I have my silky fine sheets?

So I have been posting about my trip to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat for awhile now and it looks as though I may have finally exhausted my seemingly inexhaustible supply of overexposed photos. I just want to finish by explaining what it was about Angkor ... and Cambodia ... that moved me so deeply and left me with the feeling that I have to return, at least once more. My trip to Angkor was actually my second trip to Cambodia -- about a month before I had flown to Phnom Penh for a few days with a friend. It wasn't quite what I expected from a national capital: no high rise buildings, just miles of dusty streets, crumbling French colonial buildings and more people on motorcycles than in cars. Although what struck me was how few people there were (although there were plenty of desperately begging street kids!). The streets were wide -- the sort of French-styled boulevards you might expect -- but there were few cars rolling down them and few people on or around them. And that's when I started realizing that the Khmer Rouge's legacy is still very palpable and very real. Up to 3 million Cambodians were exterminated in its camps or from plain starvation between 1975 and 1979, many of them targeted because of their association with the previous government. Artists, monks, commies, the educated, anyone who could speak foreign languages, all of them sent away to these death camps. Most of these people came from Phnom Penh. To put this in perspective, today there are around 11 million people in Cambodia, one million of them in Phnom Penh.

Anyway, I seriously doubt whether I have anything original to say about the Khmer Rouge or Cambodia's very recent, very violent past. However, it is impossible to go there and pretend that it hasn't happened. I mean, my tour of Angkor Wat and all the other temples included rather vivid stories from my guide Chiev about what bullet holes in which stone god's body came from which skirmish between Khmer Rouge and other government factions. Violence literally did not cease in the jungle until 1997, so while 1979 could potentially seem a long time ago (depending on your generation, I mean I was three, sorry) 9 years ago ... well that's still less than a decade. Everyone you meet has lost someone, everyone. It's a big amputated society, emotionally and physically, as literally evidenced by the many "landmine bands" you see during your Angkor tours, groups of armless, legless, eyeless musicians playing for tourist pennies along the sides of pathways leading to what was once the glory of Southeast Asia. A thousand years ago that is.

During my trip to Phnom Penh, I jumped all over my hotel room's cable tv like a monkey to water (whatever I like monkeys) and found a channel playing these slow, lovely Cambodian love ballads accompanied by badly made modern videos. The songs sounded like they came from another era, and indeed, some of them crackled as though recorded right off one of those things, what are they called, RECORDS! So when I was in Siem Reap I asked Chiev about that music and he knew exactly what I was talking about and promptly brought me to an outdoor cd store on the road and plucked a cd from one of the shelves. On the cover were four singers, two men and two women and he pointed out the three who had died in the late 70s in the Khmer Rouge camps. One of them was that beautiful lady pictured above, Ros Sereysothea, a Cambodian pop singer who got her start in the 60s singing with one of the two men, Sinn Sisamouth. They loved the r&b and rock and roll coming out from the states, but the result sounds foreign -- or Cambodian -- to me with an eerie, subtle nod to these other, American influences. In other words, it wasn't globalized, imitative crap, it was Cambodian music in its own right. Anyway, all the movers and shakers of that era were wiped out more than 25 years now, and what you see on Cambodia's OTHER music channel is ... globalized, imitative crap.

I wish I knew how to upload music to this blog, but since I am too dumb for Internet words you will be left to imagine -- or search out for yourself -- the lovely, haunting melodies that really define, for me, my experience in Cambodia. Luckily they exist, none in their original form, because some French people smuggled copies to France before the Khmer Rouge had the chance to burn burn burn the originals away. I hope you decide to at least visit Angkor some day, if not the rest of Cambodia, but I hope one thing I've gotten across is the utter impossibility of separating past from present in this beautiful, sad country. It is a place that refuses to let you be a tourist, remote and safe, and perhaps that is why I like it best!