MangoZeen

Pattaya attracts pensioners and old geezers by the thousands. Rents are cheap, food is plentiful, drinking is less than the west, and you can drive drunk. Not always successfully as a Finnish man discovered on 3rd Road this week discovered after a head-on crash with a Honda Civic.

DOA.
He had been coming from a wedding.
Will his […]

Yesterday no one in Pattaya mentioned JFK’s bad day in Dallas.

Neither the BBC, International Herald Tribune, nor Bangkok Post wrote a single line about the November 22, 1963 tragedy. As you get old you forget as you get older you are forgotten, however 44 years might be a long time for some people, but I can remember exactly what I […]

The Golden Triangle has been a source of opium since the 1800s. Tribesmen in the mountains grew it for a cash crop as well as a source of comfort after a long day in the rice fields. The French controlled the overseas trade until the Commies took over in China. Mao had the opium dealers […]

Every week the Pattaya Media highlights another farang dying from suicide. Favorite methods of self-demise tend to be jumping from a condo, poison, or hanging yourself with a plastic bag around your head, but few people ever comment on the most popular technique ie drinking yourself to the grave and this is because the process […]

I never met Princess Diana, although a friend of a friend, Victoria Underwood, married her brother. Diana would have been at the wedding. I never received an invitation. No great loss, because the Princess of Wales wasn’t my type, however I viewed her death as a blow against the empire of goodness.

I arrived in London […]

My wife isn’t in Pattaya often. She prefers living in Ban Nok. Rice paddies, family, and probably a lover. This means eating out for me and most of my meals are taken at Chez Michel on Soi Buffalo. Cheap and cheerful. Two nights ago my dinner companion was Jamie Parker. The New Yorker had finally […]

With its climate and cheap prices Pattaya is livable, despite missing several vital ingredients for a sophisticated life. The most glaring omission is music, mostly since so many of my years have been dedicated to the appreciation of music; rock, jazz, folk, ethnic, classical, country, blues et al. Here you only get techno in the […]

Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.

James Brown sang those words to the entire nation.
Even the KKK heard, but back in the 1960s not everyone was listening to the singer of PLEASE PLEASE ME, since black music could only be heard on the far ends of the AM radio spectrum. I twisted the knob beyond […]