Return

For reasons we won't go into right now, Marcia and I have returned to Brisbane, and look like sticking around for a while.

In other news, Cam and Cait arrived from Melbourne today, and they, Marsh, Zac and I met up in the food court of the Myer Centre. I got my lunch from a joint called "Mongkok".

Heh heh.

Victory!

That's what we told everyone when we got back to the office after the basketball match. Of course, we were bullshitting.

52-24 was the final score. None of the 24 points were mine, although I'd like the record to reflect that:

(i) I was involved in a number of sexy assists;
(ii) I absolutely creamed one player when going up for a block (unsuccessful, but that's hardly the point now, is it?)
(iii) Thai cheerleaders wear some weird outfits. Mini-skirts, stockings, way too much make-up... these are thirteen year old girls we're talking about. Now I'm as prepared as the next man to make molesterous jokes, but come on...

But the strangest thing I saw yesterday - stranger than the cheerleading outfits, stranger than the drinking-milk-from-a-baby's-bottle race, stranger even than the billboard promoting heterosexuality (it's a girls' school) - were the young girls in T-shirts that had a big swastika on them, and the name "Adolf Hitler" printed above it.

Clearly there was no pro-Nazi malice behind the wearing of these shirts - the Thai people would hardly be "Master Race" material, as far as old Adolf was concerned. If anything, the T-shirts were being worn with the same kind of ignorant "hey that's a cool picture" attitude that exists in the minds of almost anyone in a Che Guevara t-shirt - but holy crap it was a strange thing to see.

Verification

Comment spam, like all spam, is the work of the devil.

Of course, from even the most nefarious and evil of intentions, some good may yet spring.

Without comment spam, there would have been no need for comment verification.

Without comment verification, I would never have seen this little gem when replying to Cam's comment on Gourmet Sand:

Marvelous

Las Cacho seems to think his food prices are pretty damn good...



But his internet prices? Well, they're OK, I guess...



That cracks me up.

Filler

This post is mostly just here so that the really long post title from a few weeks back ("Krungthep...") disappears off the bottom of my "I Said" recent posts list over there on the right.

Call me an O.C.D. motherfucker, but it's been bugging me.

Silence

The astute reader may (if they give a shit about such matters) have noted that the 27th of November has come and gone without any report regarding my performance in the Bangkok marathon. It's true, I was a lamer, and didn't train enough for it, so "run a marathon" is still sitting there on my "Things To Do Before I Die" list, uncrossed-out^[1].

On the topic of "Physical Pursuits For Which Dayne Is Vastly Underprepared" however, the school at which I work (Khemasiri) is having their sports day this Friday. The company for which I work (who place me at that school) is entering a team, and because they're largely English, there are quite a few decent football (soccer) players among them.

Of course, Khemasiri learned its lesson on that score last year, apparently, so we've been assigned to play basketball against the Thai teachers, and despite being shit-house at basketball^[2], I've been volunteered ("Hey you, you're kinda tall"). On paper, this looks like a walk in the park (a team of 6'-plus twenty-somethings vs a team of 5'7" folks of varied ages), but you don't understand - these fuckers have been training constantly for the last three months, whereas I slipped out once during a cancelled lesson to shoot a couple of hoops. And I think that means I've now played more basketball than most of the rest of my team...

I'm also pretty sketchy on the rules (the guys in the same colour as me are my "team", right?), so I'm bound to be a source of endless amusement/frustration on the day as well...

Details to follow this weekend, I guess.

[1] I'm sure that's not a word, but whatever.
[2] As you'll know if you've ever shot hoops with me before... any of the three times in my life I've done it.