Recent Books

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Well, we didn't get flooded this year, although I sweated it for a while.  The Rainy Season is over, and we look forward to some relief from the humidity as the monsoon winds shift from the wet SW to more dry Northerly ones out of north Asia.
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I recently read Ender's Game (1985) by Orson Scott Card.  He is a popular science fiction (S-F) writer, but seemingly only marginally libertarian, yet a feature film adaptation is coming, so I read it.  It was a good read and I look forward to the movie.
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I just read Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying (1953) and really enjoyed it.  I had been looking in bookstores for Levin's This Perfect Day (1970), which won a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award from the Libertarian Futurist Society, but I mistakenly bought this book.  So I had put it on the shelf and didn't think twice about it until getting a good recommendation from Rand's literary criticism by re-reading her The Romantic Manifesto (1971).  Rand and I agree on most of literature and film, and her recommendations have usually been excellent sources of enjoyment for me, e.g., Hugo, Schiller, Fleming, Spillane, Zorro, etc.  Buying the book was not a mistake after all.
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I've been reading Halloween horror on my Kindle, and I'll post reviews either here or on Zenwind soon.
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Boo!
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-Zenwind.
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Cate Blanchett

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Wow!  I just saw Cate in Blue Jasmine (2013), seeing it solely because of rave reviews of her.  She blew me away with her incredible acting range.

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To be honest, I don’t care much for Woody Allen films (he wrote and directed this), and I rarely finish watching them.  In this one, I almost walked out in the opening third, as I was bored and I would only be out three bucks for the ticket.  But Cate acted yet another great unexpected scene, and so I had to see where this was going.  Reviewers have said that Allen’s script follows Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire, which is another (in its film adaptation) that I couldn’t finish watching, even with Marlon Brando in it. 

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This film has some great supporting actors, although it’s Cate’s show.  Alec Baldwin plays a creep, and he doesn’t even have to act. 

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It is one of Cate’s best roles, a kind of Galadriel Goes Raving Insane. 

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-Zenwind.

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No Flood Yet

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The river is high, but it has stopped raining.  The bulk of the run-off from up-stream floods will be reaching us in the next few days while the tide is high, so if we get through this week we should be okay.
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-Zenwind.
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Flood Watch 2013

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The Chao Phraya River is extraordinarily high, and dozens of provinces up-stream of us are flood disaster areas.  This means that there is a hell of a lot of water slowly but surely headed our way -- expected to reach us around October 15-17.
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Piled upon that horror is the fact that a period of High Tide will start around the 16th.  Our elevation above sea level is so low that a high tide retards the emptying of a high river that is trying to rush huge volumes of water out, therefore the river water seeks other outlets -- such as low-lying riverside communities like ours.
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Most of our valuables were moved up above ground level during the Great Flood of 2011, when water came up over our knees in our ground floor living quarters.  We had help moving the bed and treadmill (after knocking a hole in the ceiling to reach the unused second floor), but the treadmill was more damaged than we had thought from its brief wetting as we tried to move it up.
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The treadmill soon died, so I bought a new one later, a huge, heavy, quality one.  It sits on our ground floor and is the only valuable thing that is threatened now by this year's floods.  Our options are: 1. to hire a knowledgeable guy (the one from the store who set it up for us) to take it apart so we can move it upstairs (since it is too wide to move through doorways when assembled and too heavy), although we question whether the upstairs floors are robust enough for it; or, 2. wait until flooding actually comes to our ground floor and set it up a few feet on bricks.  Either option sucks, and my back aches just thinking about it.
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So, we are watching the river and the news, waiting for the apocalypse to come.  Stay tuned.
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-Zenwind.
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Recent Kindle Readings

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The Kindle is wonderful – easy to hold, carry, read, and store many digitalized books.  It is especially good for storing free eBooks of hard to find classics in the public domain, via Project Gutenberg and other sites. 

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Recent eBooks read on my Kindle are:  The Ego and His Own by Max Stirner (1844); Manfred by Lord Byron (1817); The Vampyre: A Tale by John Polidori (1819); The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo (1869); Wilhelm Tell by Friedrich Schiller (1804). 

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I have scores of other books downloaded and ready to read whenever I get the time. 

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-Zenwind.

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Some Recent Books Read

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I’ve been zipping through paperbacks like crazy, and here are some recent reads of note.  One very interesting one is Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape (2013) by Jenna Miscavige Hill.  Jenna is the niece of Scientology’s supreme leader, David Miscavige, and she defected from the cult as a young adult after growing up in it.  She doesn’t show the church in a good light, and her narrative squares well with other reports I’ve read about it.  (I’m a bit of a cult-watching junky, fascinated by quirky aspects of comparative religion, and I’ve been following Scientology’s meltdown for quite a while.) 

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A Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood is science fiction portraying a totalitarian theocracy in the USA.  It was a nominee for the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Prometheus Award.  Scary. 

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What It Is Like to Go to War (2011) by Karl Marlantes is an honest look at the human institution of warfare, by someone who has seen the hell of war.  He had written the novel Matterhorn: a novel of the Vietnam War (2011), and after reading both I see that his novel had drawn on many of his personal experiences.  Nasty shit, but his thoughts on war are important. 

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I am reading the textbook, Buddhist Religions:  a historical introduction (2005) by Robinson, Johnson, and Thanissaro, 5^th edition.  I had read the 4^th edition before I left the States, and this is heavily revised.  I am also reading, along with it, its companion volume of readings, The Experience of Buddhism: sources and interpretations (2002) by John S. Strong, 2^nd edition.  Both are part of the excellent series, “The Religious Life in History”.  But I get bogged down in the parts about the later mystical sects of Buddhism and their supernatural beliefs. 

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Charles Stross is one of my favorite science fiction writers.  His Halting State was great, and I just read the sequel, Rule 34.  His Glasshouse (2006) won a Prometheus award from the LFS.  He has an under-stated sense of humor somewhere between P.G. Wodehouse and H.P. Lovecraft.  (Was Lovecraft funny??) 

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Last Hours on Everest (2013) by Graham Hoyland dealt with the famous 1924 disappearance of Mallory and Irvine on Everest’s heights.  A good overview of the whole subject. 

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I just finished Ready Player One (2012) by Ernest Cline.  Also a Prometheus winner.  A great read. 

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-Zenwind.

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Rainy Season

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We had a horrendous thunderstorm rage through the neighborhood on Friday evening.  I had to lash the windows shut with rope and stand by with the mop as wind-driven rain sprayed through the gaps. 

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I hope to get my infirm computer into the repair shop in the coming week or two, although I must say that, with all the book and Kindle reading I’ve been doing, I hardly miss it anymore. 

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-Zenwind.

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Tech Failure

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My computer’s slow death rattles are worse than ever, and I cannot get it fixed right away.  So I’m not online much, and I expect at any time to have a tech crash.  I knew it was a good idea to squirrel away piles of old-fashioned paper books!  I also have many classic books stored on my Kindle, which is lower tech and thus more reliable than my computer. 

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We are doing well here.  I want to check in to this site at least once a month.  The biggest news for me is that last night I finished reading The System of Liberty:  Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism (2013) by George H. Smith, and it is a fantastic tour through the history of libertarian ideas.  Amazing, as George’s work always is.  I hope to review it someday, maybe on my main blog, Zenwind, but my computer will have to cooperate. 

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-Zenwind.

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Coolness at Last

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The Hot Season seems to be over – although it is always hot and humid in Thailand’s central plains.  We have been getting some rains, although not heavy downpours, and the cloud overcast is blocking the sun and cooling us off a bit.  I can tell that the worst of it is over because I am no longer applying Snake Brand Prickly Heat Cooling Powder, whereas I had been covering my sweat-soaked body with it four times a day for the almost eight-week period of grueling heat.  

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I always have an electric fan blowing on me, even at night, to keep mosquitoes away and to keep from being drenched in sweat.  But last night, for the first time in quite a while, I wore long pajama bottoms and a top with a hood.  It was so cold that I had to cover my bare feet before morning. 

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Blessed coolness.  Zen delight. 

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-Zenwind.

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Decline of the Soi Dogs

I am not talking here about the excellent band by the name of The Soi Dogs Blues Band.  (They are thriving and are back playing the Blues again, on Sukhumvit Soi 11 on Thursday nights at Apoteka.)  I’m talking about the canine “soi dogs.”  A “soi” means a back/side street, and soi dogs are homeless and always looking for a handout.  They have all but disappeared. 

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Our neighborhood used to be filled with soi dogs.  They would be around our place in the early mornings to beg food – often at the same time as the Buddhist monks on their alms rounds, soi dogs being no fools – and also in the evenings they would show up for handouts.  When I would straggle home from a late outing long, long after midnight, local soi dogs that knew me would get up off the street, stretch, and merrily follow me home where they knew I’d give them some scraps.  Waggly-tailed neighbors with big smiles.  Cosmic hobos with the wisdom of the streets. 

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But they are gone.  The Great Flood of late-2011 disrupted all street life and the communities in the region.  Soi dogs started to disappear at that time (although cats did not, perhaps because their climbing abilities put them high and dry).  But even since the end of the flooding, soi dogs that survived started to vanish one-by-one. 

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News reports started to tell of organized dog-napping operations, where stray dogs -- and even pets -- were rounded up and illegally exported to neighboring countries (the main one being that in which I once spent an unpleasant year over four decades ago).  Why were they kidnapped and exported?  Cuisine.  Dog meat.  Huge cargoes of closely-packed caged dogs were found by police – skinny, mangy and dying.  Apparently this black market demand for dog meat and the related supplier operations have continued to be quite successful, as the streets now have a conspicuous lack of soi dogs. 

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Here is an investigative account of black market dog trading, Dog-Meat Mafia. Read the full article transcript.  But only view the video if you are strong of stomach, because it is not pretty.  Here in Thailand, the blame goes not only to the villainous traffickers and corrupt officials who expedite this trade, but also to blame are the assholes who are too cheap to neuter their dogs (and cats) and thus allow so many homeless and unloved animals to come into the world. 

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May the karma of these ill-used soi dogs ever improve in their future lives.  If I actually believed in rebirth that would be a more comforting thought. 

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-Zenwind.

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