Ok, it’s really not that hard to grock.

sometimes i feel like it takes all the energy that i can muster just to drag myself out of my apt when i don’t have to go to work or school. i love being in a city, but there are days when it all seems like way too much stimulation. when i first moved here, the bars still permitted smoking which meant that about the only time i would ever go out was when i had someone visiting from out of town.

when the smoking ban when into effect at the start of this year, i think i probably went out about three weeks in a row and then got bored of it and took another big break. these days it takes a really special mood or some very good reason to get me out, and when frankie knuckles was set to perform at club culture i figured that was good enough of an excuse.

the music was really good, but for some reason the 11 billion thai gossip and fashion magazines were out in full force. the was probably one photographer for every 10 people, each one trying to get interesting shots for their publication. these two shots of me ran in cheeze magazine (for people not familiar with the thai press, this one has about 80% fewer words than intellectual paragon from usa called InTouch). you can probably tell by the second shot that i look pretty annoyed at the paparatzi. i scanned the full pages in case you want to see what else they were shooting that night, click the images to view full size.

this ran in the weekly newspaper for my university, interviewed me about being the only white person studying in the general program and a few other things about my life. the university has over 600,000 students and i think most of them get this in the mail every week.

click the image to download the full article.

thai newspapers will print just about anything to get people’s attention. they particularly love photos of dead bodies, or when the police force a shoplifter to reenact his crime for the camera (causes the criminal and his family to loose face and let’s the store clerk who caught him gain face).

this particulartly strange photo ran a week or so ago … the caption reads “Mr. Sskri Anunnrawad, a well-known professor, had this show repair needle shoved into his head by the cobbler Mr. Jerun. Ohh what good luck that it didn’t enter his brain! The cobbler apparently wasn’t happy with some situation caused.”

there are often similarities between numbers, due in part to the fact that thousands of years ago numbers were the main thing that different populations needed to communicate for trade purposes. i would love to read more on the similarities between numbers across the world, but have been thinking about the following one lately.

in sanskrit, the word for 100 is शतीम् (śatim) in thai we have สตางค์ (sa dtaang) (listen) which is 1/100th of a baht (kinda like a penny, or cent) and ศตวรรษ (soht wat) (listen) which means century. the words for century in spanish and french are siècle and siglo. interesting how they all maintain a s (or c) sound to start and are generally phonetically similar. there is a list of sanskrit numbers here at http://veda.wikidot.com/sanskrit-numbers i’d be interested to hear what other people might know on this topic.

(click image for full version)

so it’s normal in thailand for tissue to be sold outside of bathrooms, either by an attendant or in vending machines. sometimes it is distributed for free in each of the stalls, but generally you have to think in advance. marketing companies have seized on this opportunity and often distribute tissue for free with reading material from various companies stuck in the package …. anyway i bought this package after having a bit too much coffee and had a good laugh at the irony of putting a very yonic flower on the box. maybe they will start using georgia o’keefe paintings eventually.

i’m back to studying sanskrit again, this time taking a class at ramkhamheng which is finally forcing me to memorize things that i used to just look up in charts. the thing about the course is that it uses a pronunciation system based on the thai alphabet instead of the commonly used devanagari. i’m not totally sure i think this is a good system, the devanagari alphabet is only 33 letters and can be easily memorized in a day or two. additionally, since many of the thai letters change their pronunciation (ป is pronounced as a hard p and not the thai mix of b and p) it actually can be somewhat confusing.

while somewhat annoying, this system is incredibly helpful in understanding word origin. the thai language borrows no grammar from sanskrit (they are classified in different families), but it borrows tons of vocabulary. the thing is, that in borrowing words their form is maintained but they are pronounced according to thai rules. one particularly interesting change that had me wondering for quite some time is the reason that word “बुद्ध (buddha)” becomes “พุทธ (phoot) (listen)” in thai. the words seem totally different, but when you notice that the way that these sanskrit letters correspond to thai letters, and the fact that when there is a consonant cluster at the end of a thai word, only one of those consonants are generally pronounced then it makes much more sense.

ब	พ
द	ท
ध	ธ

i put together the above chart using images stolen from http://www.sanskrit.org/www/Sanskrit/SanskritPronunc.htm and then adding in the corresponding thai letter. the full version of my chart can be downloaded by clicking on the image above or right here.