MangoZeen

I have a Toyota Altis 1.8. The poor man’s BMW, although my Thai relative refer to the car as a souped-up taxi cab. Normally I drive from Pattaya to Chai-Nat detouring onto Route 7 to avoid the predatory cops on the elevated motorway, although sometimes when the traffic is light I zoom through Bangkok to cut 50 Kms off the trip. Once I was stopped by the police at the tollbooth. I had done nothing wrong, but the officer said something was amiss with my license plate. He tried to negotiate for a 1000 baht fine. I told him I had 100 baht. My wife had the rest. He waved me on with disgust.

Farang kee-neo.

The Nation reported that the motorway police have enlisted a new weapon into their repertoire.

The radar gun, so anyone going over the 120 KPH speed limit will be subjected to a fine, since the actual speed limit on the Motorway is 80 KPH.

Years ago I drove to Berlin through East Germany. The speed limit was 90. Any faster and the DDR cops stopped with with machine guns drawn to extort the $100 fine. This announcement by the Thai cops mean they will be turning back the clock to the time of Emil Honecker, the DDR dictator.

“Do not fear, we will not be going after anyone traveling faster than 120,” the leading police officer assured the public. “We are only after habitual speeders.”

Habitual means everyone.

In 2007 over 29,000 speeding violations were prosecuted to the fullest penalty of 500 baht. More than 5000 were women and the police said nearly 61,000 violators were caught by radar, meaning you have a 50/50 chance of not having the fine by blowing past the cops if you can outrun them. The fastest radared by 227 KPH, which is well below the European record set by a BMW 7 series at 325 KPH on the French Autoroute outside Strasbourg. The fastest I’ve driven on the Bangkok motorway is 170 KPH and I once drove a VW GTI Golf at 240 on the Belgian highway. I thought the speedometer was broken.

Not to worry too much about this new crackdown. The police are targeting cars twice a day, twice a week or four times a week at rush hours and never on Saturdays and Sundays when they’re recovering from hangovers financed from their unreported traffic stops plus the police are supposedly going to post signs saying ’speed traps ahead’ in Thai and English.

Doesn’t get any better than that.

For a related article click on this URL

http://www.mangozeen.com/decisions-decisions-decisions.htm

PM Samak has been speaking his mind freely and certain people have been telling the PM to hoop barg or shut up. He even went so far as to cancel his weekly interview supposedly because his wife told him he was making as bigger fool of himself than Obama’s Reverend Wright.

Some reporters suggested that it wasn’t his wife but pu-yai or big people who suggested that the fiery PM shut his hole, but he said, “Nope, just that dumb bitch, my wife.”

For a related article click on this URL
http://www.mangozeen.com/samaks-loose-cannon.htm

I like Campbell’s Tomato Soup, especially if you add milk as suggested by the directions. It almost tasted home-made and everyone ate it in 1964. The rich, the poor, the in-between, so I was pleased to read in Life Magazine that a New York artist had painted large portraits on the popular soup can. My mother thought Andy Warhol’s works was funny, but my father regarded the paintings as trash.

“I bet you could do as a good version with your crayons,” my father said the same thing about movies without ever letting me touch his Bell & Howell movie camera. He bet my next-door neighbor $5 I could replicate the painting to perfection. After all my grade in art at St. Mary’s of the Foothills. I got out my crayons and a large white sheet on paper as well as a ruler and a compass. I wanted to do this right, because while the big paintings cost $1500 an autographed can of the real soup only cost $6 and I already had $2.

Andy Warhol had only used four colors; red, black, white, and gold. I had no trouble with the first three, however couldn’t get the gold stars right no matter how much I tried and forget the gold inlaid into the word ‘SOUP’. My ten attempts to mimic his paintings ended up thrown into the trash can. Andy Warhol was a real artist like Van Gogh or Michaelangelo and the entourage surrounding him in the factory were like circus entertainers without the lions, tigers, and trapeze, although one long-haired poet had a whip. They made movies about nothing. Sometimes the girls were naked. Other times the men. None of these films appeared at the South Shore Drive-In and I wanted to runaway to New York to join the freaks, except I was trapped in a suburb south of Boston. I was only 12.

Continue reading » 15 Seconds with Andy Warhol

Nothing says you’re screwed in a foreign country more than getting arrested by the police, although in Thailand if you have money then you’re luckier than most, because you can pay your way out of jail.

Bail.

But nothing says you’re fucked more than getting send to prison and for a good blog of this subject go to the following URL

http://www.thaiprisonlife.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=74&Itemid=99

This is as close as any of us want to go.

No beds, no forks, no freedom and close living quarters.

Certainly not another day in paradise.

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http://www.mangozeen.com/fat-guys-in-prison.htm

Frank Sinatra had little respect for the Press, especially after a female Australian reporter slept with him to get a story. It wasn’t about his toupee. Old Blue Eyes later caught flak for saying, “All reporters are whores.”

Most politicians shared this sentiment and none more obvious than Thailand’s Prime Minister Samak who asked a female reporter, “Did you have sinful sex last night?”

She didn’t lower herself with a retort, probably since most Bangkok professionals, male and female, have sacrificed their romantic life for careers and also she might have been stumped as to what constituted sinful sex or pet sam-pan ga-lee the last word referring to Shiva’s wicked wife, Kali.

The prime minister confessed that he was a straight talker, but didn’t see anything wrong with using sexual connotations in his criticisms of reporters or his use of crude language such as Tham (Low), Heng Suay (Suck) or Laeo (Bad).

“I call it as I see it.” This attitude has earned the respect of the lower classes who hold the media in contempt.

And with good reason.

Anyone who has been told too many lies can never believe the truth.

For a related article click on this URL

http://www.mangozeen.com/zen-and-wisdom-of-life.htm

The now not-so-new Thai government has been pushing for the legalization of casino to reap the ill-gotten gains of the various casinos dotting the Thai border. 8 casinos in Poipet alone and none of them as glamorous as Reno, because no one goes to Poipet for the magic.

Thais love to gamble whether betting on football games, boxing matches, the lottery or playing cards. The nation loves Man United for its winning ability to beat the point spread and rail against Man City’s failure to repeat their crosstown rival’s propensity for victory. Chok dii or good luck is considered as valuable as a good education and Thais go to extraordinary lengths to assure their fortune, such as mystical tattoos and spiritual penis amulets. Many gamblers ask monks to divine numbers for the underground lottery or huay dtai din through an astute regard for how many times a dog wags its tail to the number of eggs a chicken lays. Anything to keep chok raii or bad luck at bay.

It’s estimated that 70% of the adult population gamble. mostly playing pok deng, a simple card game where two cards are dealt and then a third to see who gets closest to nine. Gambling is illegal in Thailand and the police routinely raid villages to arrest small time card sharks. Sometimes with only several hundred baht in the pot. Maybe a little more slides sideways for tea money or sin bon.

Many farangs have witnessed their good girlfriend suddenly becoming more devoted to cards than a Carmelite nun to Jesus and the first signs of this are vanishing possessions. Money from your wallet. The TV and the traditional, “Someone stole my motorcycle.”

Despite this rampant madness the present Thai government is considering the legalization of casinos in Chiang Mai, Phuket, and Pattaya to compete with the Cambodian gaming halls along the border crossings most notably in Poipet. Politicians figure if anyone deserves to bilk the Thai people, then it’s the Thais.

Thai Rak Thai indeed.

My uncle had casinos in the south of France and said no one ever won in the long run.

I discovered that on a disastrous trip to Perlata outside of Barcelona. Lost everything.

All you have to do is see the shoes of the gamblers tramping from Cambodia to know that the house always wins.

For a related article click on this URL

http://www.mangozeen.com/thailand-scores-2-in-corruption.htm

Most people lie about their weight and height. Even fewer men will admit to surfing the internet for porno, despite 99% of the sites on the Web are geared for that purpose. XXX is certainly more entertaining than youtubes.com, but all pleasures have their limit, except for a Japanese government worker with so many visits to porno sites that he should have gotten a medal.

Instead his 780,000 visits in 9 months earned the 57 year-old a monthly salary reduction of $190 from his employer, the local council, who discovered the worker’s furious foray into the cyberworld of sex after the system was infected with a virus. The Kinokawa government should have been using Macs instead of PCs, since most viruses target Windows programs.

Obviously his productivity must have suffered during this binge, then again he was a bureaucrat and how hard can it be pushing around paper in a paperless world?

At his peak the man was accessing 20 sites a minute.

Probably for a personal research project.

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http://www.mangozeen.com/dick-cheneys-sex-vision-googles.htm

The DC Madam took a small step for mankind by hanging herself rather than facing 3-4 years in hard time. Conspiracy fanatics are blaming the usual suspects; CIA, FBI, Eliot Spitzer, but unfortunately the poor woman probably took matters into her own hands for as Graham Greene wrote in THE COMEDIANS, “Suicide is the act of a true mathematician who has calculated that the odds to continue are worst than the odds to end it all.”

Sadly this woman died for a crime where they are no victims other than those persecuted to the full extent of the law.

We all pay for it.

The guy on a date. The teenage at the movies. Eliot Spitzer’s $4500.

Guilty as charged.

Me too.

But to hang yourself in her mother’s backyard shed.

Something ain’t right about that.

For a related article click on this URL

http://www.mangozeen.com/famous-for-never-short-by-peter-nolan-smith.htm

The first time I had sex with a Thai woman, she writhed in passion with her bones crackling like popcorn. She said, “I finish many times. You #1.”

I was very proud of myself, until hearing the same line during several subsequent encounters.

Either it was the truth or a lie and I was man enough to admit that perhaps these women might have been faking their ardor, especially in light of a recent survey stating that 70% of Thai women don’t experience an orgasm during sex. Nothing. No feeling. Lousy sex while 79% of Thai men say they have good sex without caring about their partner’s needs. I believe that because western females also complain about the lack of vigor from their companions, then again one has to realize that for the early part of a man’s life we are forbidden by women to touch their breasts or any other erogenous zones, so that by the time women actually want foreplay we’ve been preconditioned to think it’s taboo.

This theory comes from Nick Hornsby’s HIGH FIDELITY, but I have heard many Thai women swear that they never had an orgasm with their Thai boyfriend.

“He too quick. Only care for him.”

Also Thai women have a problem with feeling free, since good girls wouldn’t enjoy sex.

Only dok thongs or sluts.

Not so, because while you can eat love, it sure fills the heart when two come together as one.

For a related article click on this URL

http://www.mangozeen.com/ever-so-lonely.htm

Few people traveling along Route 331 from Satthahip to the Isaan Plateau realize this highway was built by the US Military in the 1960s. The Friendship Highway connected the Thai Navy base with several large airfields operated by the US Air Force throughout the Viet-Nam War. Those airfields are now quiet, however Satthahip remains one of the most important naval installations in Southeast Asia and every May the Thai military host Cobra Gold, a large military exercise involving the troops of the USA, Singapore, Malaysia, and various other nations of the Pacific Rim.

While most troops practice amphibious tactics at the main base, smaller groups of high-trained troops congregate on the idyllic archipelago stretching south into the Gulf of Siam for the intensive training regime of the Thai Navy Seals, whose home base of Koh SamaeSan is located across the channel from the isolated fishing port of Ban Samaesarn.

Continue reading » Thai Navy Seals