Friday

Rest in peace Princess Galyani Vadhana. Since Wednesday morning, Thailand has been stricken by the death of the king's older sister.¹ Newscasters are wearing black. Thai industry is bereaved (for example, check out the Thai Airways website here). Political bickering after the December twenty-third elections have suddenly cooled. The king has decreed a hundred day period of mourning for the royal family, during which regal functions will be suspended. Almost more shockingly, the prime minister has announced a fifteen day period of civil and municipal observance, nearly a bank holiday, where concerts and other unnecessary entertainment are asked to be canceled outright and flags will be flown at half-mast, among other legal observances. This directly influences the traveling band we picked up at the airport Wednesday night, whose whirlwind tour of Thailand next week has been all but completely turned into a university lecture circuit. In other news: remember back on December eleventh, when a Vietnam Air flight from Đà Nẵng was delayed due to scorpions?² Well, eight days later, on the nineteenth, Thai Airways mysteriously and illegally delivered a seven hundred kilo box of snakes to Nội Bài International Airport in Hà Nội. No animals are allowed on Vietnamese flights. After waiting the appropriate interval for someone to pick up the shipment, labeled "fresh fish", the warehouse decided to open it up. Snakes. Now everyone is confused: did the box come from Indonesia or Malaysia? Were the snakes alive when the crate was opened,³ or dead on arrival?⁴ No one is more confused than the surprised addressee, once he was finally tracked down. Lastly, I was very amused by this lamentably short online comic by Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon (pages one, two, and three) which was discovered for me, among other interesting things, by this blogger. [Cavin]