Tag Archives: bannok

THE END OF RICE by Peter Nolan Smith

September 1, 2022 – 4:55 pm

Thailand has many superstitions. One concerns rice. Never joke while eating or else a ghost will steal your rice. The ghosts will have to wait, for this is the beginning of the rainy season and throughout the Kingdom aging farmers are planting rice. The current price for jasmine rice per tonne from the wholesalers is […]

By Peter | Posted in farangs, Nature, semi-fiction, Thailand | Also tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Thai White Elephant

September 14, 2019 – 9:12 am

Many Asian cultures regarded fatness as a sign of wealth, however with the advent of 7/11 consumerism in the Orient obesity is fast becoming a health issue for the region. The Thais like to joke about fat people, whom they call ‘chang-nois’ or little elephants. “Why are farangs so fat?” An old rice farmer asked […]

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3 Ma – CO2 = 400+

April 24, 2017 – 1:40 pm

Three million years ago Paranthropus Boisei roamed the East African woods, existing on C4 plants according to scientists. Turtles, elephants, giraffes, zebras, lions, rhinoceros and gazelles appear in the fossil record of that long-lost era. The CO2 level 3 ma was 400 ppm and this week the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii recorded that number […]

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Luk Thung Garage Funk

April 2, 2014 – 12:57 pm

Modern Thai music is dominated by Pop bands churning out hits, however a purer form of music is Pleng Luk Thong or ‘music from the children of the fields’. The folk songs telling the stories of the poor became popular in the first half of the 20th Century and blossomed in the 1960s with the […]

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CAVE ANATIS by Peter Nolan Smith

July 6, 2013 – 9:01 pm

I spent the summer of 2008 on Palm Beach care-taking a haunted mansion and a crackhead Airedale for Johnny Zombie. The months of June, July, and August were very off-season, as the ultra-rich fled the fabled island for less muggy climes in France, Italy, and Maine. The house off Ocean Avenue was a big change […]

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