Stickman Readers' Submissions August 4th, 2012

Thai Thoughts and Anecdotes Part 339

Dana note: "Opium, an equivocal luxury in the beginning daintily approached, becomes ere long under the clamorous demands of a perverted appetite a dire alternative, a magisterially controlling power." — Alonzo Calkins

Quick, by a show of hands; how many who say they are Thai fluent can say this in Thai?

Hello Stickmanbangkok.com fans and Dana acolytes (couldn't resist–I never use this word). Today we start with the Dana Quote Contest number eight and then some Bits and Pieces. Those of you who have followed Thai Thoughts and Anecdotes
from the dinosaur past know that sometimes we dip into the department called Bits and Pieces. Small ideas and stories served in small doses but great quantity.. We are going to do that for the next couple of months then we will return to essays
and stories of more traditional length I am right now working on a 180,000 word essay on where you can buy used underpants in the Kingdom. They don't call me Cheap Charley for nothing.

He Clinic Bangkok

Dana Quote Contest Number Eight

All procedures, policies, paperwork, and prizes will go through Dana Enterprises. Do not contact Stickman. He's too busy making bank runs, doing deals. and entertaining powerful people. I'm the one who loves you. It's always
been me. No prizes awarded to members of the Dana Fan Club. They have an unfair advantage.

"Pinpricks of light in our souls. That's what we steer for. It isn't gravity that runs the universe, or dark matter that determines the tumbling future, or chaos theory stabbing at the soul chilling randomness of the whole
thing; it is hope springing eternal. The spiritual perpetual motion machine that powers our hearts. Surgeons love to say that our hearts are electrical devices residing in pumps. No. Our hearts are witnesses. Witnesses to hope."

CBD bangkok

Dana Enterprises Note: and now, starting with DQC Number Eight we will have two quotes instead of one quote. The second quote is a bonus quote.
Get the first quote and the bonus quote correct from DQC Number 8–DQC Number 15 and your
application to the Dana Fan Club will receive most favored application status by the girls here in the office.

Bonus Quote:

"The result is that bargirls are on the ascendancy as a species. The notion that they are fellow homosapiens is all part of the past. Nobody believes that anymore. Are they mammals? Yes. Are they humans? Not sure. We know they are
different and the evidence is that they are leapfrogging ahead of the farangs in power and knowledge. In fact the farangs seem to be losing ground faster than the enemy's successes can account for. Maybe it is all part of some grand plan.
Maybe God has way way too much spare time or he's gone over to the other side and he and the Devil are playing butt darts behind a harp factory in heaven. Anyway, as usual; it is the results that count not the speculation. And the result
is that with each succeeding generation the farangs pay more for less and engage the bargirls with diminished expectations. These are not the actions of winners."

and now . . .

wonderland clinic

BITS AND PIECES

Introduction:

I'm leaning into the experience of looking at the early morning tableau of wing parachutes being pulled by motorboats in the weak blue Pattaya sky while simultaneously wondering about the physics conundrum of particle-wave duality,
when I hear Mookie say:

"You want ab nam or boom boom?"

God, I love this town. But that is not really what I want to talk about today. What I really want to talk about today is:

HISTORICAL BENEFITS OF POVERTY

It's hard to know how you are going to be affected by history; by commission or omission. In Thailand's case they won the omissions sweepstakes. No colonizers like the Germans, English, French, Belgians, Spanish, or Portuguese
decided that Thailand had something they wanted and were willing to die for. That does not mean that Thailand escaped abuse and humiliation: read about the Burmese and the Japanese in the Kingdom. But they never stayed to suck the last bit
of marrow out of the country. Colonists on the other hand operate on a guiding principle of staying; not the same as, but similar to the Malaysians of today who are infiltrating southern Thailand. At any rate, Thailand's poverty of natural
resource riches was it's cultural savior.

The territory of Siam-Thailand didn't have anything else that anyone else wanted so after the male misbehavior (rape, looting, burning, etc.) was over it was time to go home. It was a negative that saved the country's ass. Early
development agrarian societies can not defend themselves and luckily Thailand was not required to do so against colonial powers. The historical dream of the Belgians or the British with their accurate high powered rifles, organizational skills,
home country financing, European-Christian ethic, and bottomless unstoppable racism just did not happen in Siam-Thailand. And it is a very good thing. It would have been a cultural and population slaughter. So being poor turned out to be a
very good thing for the Thais.

Modern Thais anxious to be competitive on a world stage in the riches and power departments should be thankful for their country's historical poverty. It saved them from centuries of historical mortar and pestle grinding them fine
and stealing their dignity. Modern Thais with their ignorant big talk strike us as pathetic and comic but we wouldn't them to have the wisdom that comes from generations of rape, murder, genocide, arson, slavery, cultural disembowelment,
and theft. This historical wisdom can create a people very difficult to deal with.

It's true that Thais were never colonized in the way we usually use the word 'colonized' but it is also true that in many cases a primitive agrarian society can not take the credit for this. It was just luck. They did not
appear to have anything a thief wanted. The should just be happy to be lucky and concentrating on going forward in a productive way. They should also be planting millions of land mines and stringing millions of miles of concertina wire in
the Three Pagoda Pass. History has a way of repeating itself.

and finally in today's Bits and Pieces . . .

SILLY JOKES AND SILLYISMS AND SILLY PUNCHLINES AND FA

Ok guys (and guyettes) we are going to try a double experiment. The first part of the experiment is that I am going to post some jokes. Jokey stuff has never appeared on this website. The nice thing is that you can write stupid funny
stuff drunk or sober. I am also going to post some of the jokes that Fa came up with that she thinks are jokes. Danger. Danger. Danger. You may lose control of your bladder from laughing.

The second part of the experiment is that I am going to try and give Fa some responsibility. She has been asking if she can work in the offices of Dana Enterprises on South Road. So don't mail your funny stuff to me, give them to
Fa on the boardwalk. We'll see how she does.

Dana

P.S. No jokes or sillyisms should be about Stick. I tried this about eight years ago and he sent me an email that was hotter than a broken steam pipe in a submarine movie. I know, I feel your pain. I have about thirty Stick jokes in the
vault and I do not know what to do with them.

Question: If Thais were squirrels what would they do?
Answer: : Put spice on their nuts.

Question: What do Thais call box seats on a bamboo raft?
Answer: Innovative technology.

Question: What do you get when you combine a farang and a bargirl?
Answer: Wild elation and sullen compromise.

Question: What do Thais call roadside litter?
Answer: Nature.

Question: What two words have seven letters?
Answer: Bangkok and Danakok.

Question: What would Dana and his transvestite girlfriend's baby be named?
Answer: Miracle

Question: What are yelling and screaming and crying in a Thai soap opera?
Answer: Plot devices.

Question: What two words both have six letters?
Answer: Farang and Sucker.

Question: In Thailand if you have a leper on a sled, what does the government call the sled?
Answer: A social welfare benefit.

Question: If Thailand is the Land of Smiles–how come you never see elephants smiling?
Answer: No idea–I just think about elephants a lot.

Question: What does Dana use as a comeback remark when bargirls turn him down?
Answer: Beats me–it has never happened.

Question: Why does a soi dog lick his balls?
Answer: Because he can.

Question: Why does Dana lick Fa's feet?
Answer: Because he can.

and finally . . .

Some examples of Fa jokes. I think you will be able to see that she is not 100% comfortable with the concepts.

Question: What is the difference between a farang with money and a farang without money?
Answer: A bear shits in the woods.

Question: I once met a farang from Nantucket. He had had no money so I said:
Answer: Fooley maak cum bo bo ron narry. (Note: I think that is what Fa said. Her mouth was full of fried insects.)

Question: Knock Knock
Answer: Who's there?

Dana: Fa that is a Knock-Knock joke and it is not complete.
Fa: Fuck it.
Dana: Fa, that was the punch line for the 'Nantucket' limerick.
Fa: 1000 baht.
Dana: I'm not paying 1000 baht and I'll meet you
on the boardwalk tomorrow morning at 9:15 a.m.

So, as you can see; Fa and limerick-like or standard construction format jokes are perhaps a dream right now. She plays along for a little while in the farang's stupidass language then gets back to money. If she had some English
language skills she might say:

Dana comes for me at nine.
Smiles at me and it is sunny.
Holds me, laughs, and . . .
All I care about is the money.

Ok, it is not Shakespeare and it is not really a joke and it is not a limerick, more individual social commentary; but it is an improvement to her saying 'A Bear Shits In The Woods' to everything. Here is an example of a good
Fa start and a bad Fa finish:

Fee Fie Fo Fum
My ten o'clock customer couldn't cum.
A bear shits in the woods.

She ran this little beauty past me one day as I was channel surfing through Thai soap operas and Thai game shows while lying on her bed with a big meatball in my mouth. Nearly choked to death. She topped that with:

It isn't easy being me
Too many customers to see see see
A bear shits in the woods
1000 baht

She thought my choking, arm waving, and red face was farang approval so she tried:

There once was a whore named pussy,
Who met a bear in the woods.
1000 baht.
Is the Pope a Catholic?

I nearly died.

I love my Fa. As we lie next to each other in bed in her apartment I work on my delicious home-made meatball while she stabs a nail file at a plastic-wrapped snack food package of octopus parts. The bed is now covered with meatball phlegm
from my near death choking incident, octopus parts, children's toys, and wings and feet spit out from a paper bag of Isaan fried insects. The sheet is pulled up to her chin because she is 'off-the-clock' and she is sticking
two lit cigarettes in her nostrils to try and scare me. If you looked up the word Stupid in the dictionary there should be a picture of this scene. But it doesn't matter and I don't care.

I love my Fa.

or

I love my Fa
But she is dreaming.
I'm not paying 1000 baht,
In spite of her scheming.
A bear shits in the woods.

GET ON WITH IT

Sometimes great men use too many words and would have benefitted from an editor. Example:

"God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable, particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed
them." — Optics (1704), Sir Isaac Newton.

What is Izzy (I call him Izzy) really saying?

'Matter equals particles.'

All else is frosting on the cake. No need to wonder why Sunday sermons in those days lasted for hours. Learn from Newton. Use fewer words when you write. You don't need twenty adjectives and nineteen commas to describe a Thai woman
you pick up on the boardwalk. Just pick her up and get on with it.

nana plaza