Foreigners slammed for lopping trees

Ordinarily words would fail me, but in this situation, three words really do now spring to mind: "kettle", "calling" and "black". How many times have we heard of Thais lopping down not just a few trees, but whole swathes of forest in places like Khao Yai and Pak Chong but to name two areas? And the reason for this mass culling of nature's garden? To build new homes and especially high end resorts to attract high spending customers. Not a thought at all for the pernicious effects of this on the environment.

Now we are told that many Thais are indignant because they saw some foreigners on Koh Phangan island doing something as minor as cutting down one inconveniently placed tree to help with their business. "Hypocrisy" is another word that could be easily added to this list.

Here's the article from The Bangkok Post:

"A group of about five foreigners have been caught on camera lopping a large branch off a tree on Phangan island and have been heavily criticised by Thai netizens, many of whom demanded that the authorities arrest them.

Photographs of the foreigners cutting off the tree branch on the popular tourist island in Surat Thani were posted on Sept 15 on Pantip.com, a popular internet forum, by a person who went by the name of vuddiken. The link is www.pantip.com/cafe/blueplanet/topic/E12655715/E12655715.html.

 

 Foreign tourists sunbath on Phangan island of Surat Thani province. (Photo by Supaphong Chaolan)

The topic of the discussion thread is "A group of inherently bad foreigners on Phangngan island in pursuit of their self-interested business surreptitiously chopping down a tree to open a paragliding business."
However, the original poster did not specify when the incident happened.
One netizen said the group of foreigners should not have cut off the tree branch and asked if the tree was in a private or public area or if it was in a national park.
Many posters called on authorities, including National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation Department director-general Damrong Pidech, to track down these people and take legal action against them.
Thirayuth Plaisuwan, chief of tambon Bantai in Phangan, said he had been informed about the incident and will check whether the area was in a national park.
If the tree is public property, police will definitely find those responsible for the damage and take action against them, Mr Thirayuth said."

This is something that reminds me of when I first went to Thailand some fifteen years ago. I regularly used to hear opinions such as that the reason places like Nana Plaza and Patpong exist is only because of the foreigners who frequent them and that there are no bad girls or prostitutes in Thailand. It never occurred to the person opining this that it's Thais who own such business and that the country is replete with prostitution and many other unsavoury professions.

It seemed to me at the time that foreigners were always being blamed even for things that they had nothing to do with and in fact were 200% controlled by Thais. Perhaps it's a face saving mechanism or perhaps Thais realy do believe that foreigners are the source of everything bad in Thailand. Who knows!

Source: http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/312918/foreigners-slammed-for-cutting-tree

Dog stands guard over deceased owner’s grave for six years

What a truly heartwarming and amazing story of true love and unbounding loyalty! This is why dogs are called man's best friend. The funny thing is that when the dog's owner died, the dog was never even at the funeral site so how did he find it and how did he even find the grave? There's so much more to animals, especially domestic animals, than we realise.

I'm quoting the story in full below because it's the kind of story that will brighten your day of even the most obdurate of people!

 

Capitan keeps watch over Miguel Guzman's grave (La Voz)An extremely dedicated dog has continued to show its loyalty, keeping watch on its owner's grave six years after he passed away. Capitan, a German shepherd, reportedly ran away from home after its owner, Miguel Guzman, died in 2006. A week later, the Guzman family found the dog sitting by his grave in central Argentina.

Miguel Guzman adopted Capitan in 2005 as a gift for his teenage son, Damian. And for the past six years, Capitan has continued to stand guard at Miguel's grave. The family says the dog rarely leaves the site.

"We searched for him, but he had vanished," widow Veronica Guzman told LaVoz.com. "We thought he must have got run over and died.

'The following Sunday we went to the cemetery, and Damian recognized his pet. Capitan came up to us, barking and wailing as if he were crying." Adding to the unusual circumstances, Veronica says the family never brought Capitan to the cemetery before he was discovered there. "It is a mystery how he managed to find the place," she said.
Cemetery director Hector Baccega says he and his staff have begun feeding and taking care of Capitan.

"He turned up here one day, all on his own, and started wandering all around the cemetery until he eventually found the tomb of his master," Baccega said.

"During the day he sometimes has a walk around the cemetery, but always rushes back to the grave. And every day, at six o'clock sharp, he lies down on top of the grave, stays there all night."

But the Guzman family hasn't abandoned Capitan. Damian says the family has tried to bring Capitan home several times but that he always returns to the cemetery on his own.

"I think he's going to be there until he dies, too. He's looking after my dad," he said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/dog-stands-guard-over-deceased-owner-grave-six-190556479.html

Those Boys in Brown are up to no good again!

 This is the story on Thaivisa.com courtesy of Richard Barrow's website...

Thai police applicants told they cannot have genital implants or try to enlarge them



BANGKOK: -- There has been a lot of news recently of cheating going on for police entrance exams in Thailand. During the recent exams, everyone had to submit themselves to a pat down and go through a metal detector.

Now comes news that many people were disqualified from even taking the exams as they failed medical examinations at the Police General Hospital. I presume all of the usual contagious diseases were tested for, but according to the Bangkok Post, many people were disqualified for having tattoos on their body parts.

I didn’t realize that was true for police officers, but I do know that people applying for office work will have to make sure that they don’t have any visible tattoos.

What was even more surprising is that, according to a police spokeswoman of the Royal Thai Police Office, applicants who failed the health checks also included many who had injected paraffin gel into their genitals, and those that had their genitals implanted with small beads.

I am not sure how that would affect their job as this kind of thing has been going on for years in Thailand.

Full story: http://www.richardba...nital-implants/

MP calls for ban on tattooed preacher who 'cures' cancer by kicking people in the face

There really are some wacky people out there! Today it was revealed that an evangelist who kicks followers in the face, claiming his violence will cure them of cancer, is to tour Britain this month. Do people like this really exist? It's enough for an evangelist to wheedle money out of unsuspecting victims (we've all seen the Steve Martin movie about such con men) but this is quite a step up to actually being physically assaulted at the same time!



Unsurprisingly, this evangelist's proposed visit has provoked outrage and demands that he be banned from entering the country. Tattooed preacher Todd Bentley,  who as a 15-year-old was convicted of a sex attack on a boy aged seven, claims God uses him as an instrument to heal the sick, and is urging the frail to attend his shows. 

The former drug user, who is Canadian but based in the United States, even laughs about his ‘healing’  techniques. In one show he treated a man claiming to be suffering from colon cancer by planting his knee hard into the victim’s stomach. The man fell to the floor in agony.
 
Two questions naturally spring to my mind. Why would anyone, especially someone with an incurable illness, pay money to have themselves physically assaulted and thus hurt in order to rid themselves of this disease? And, secondly, who but a complete nutter would charge for such a service and laugh while administering it? The mind boggles sometimes, it really does!

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2183860/MP-calls-ban-tattooed-preacher-cures-cancer-kicking-people-face.html?ITO=1490

Cows also 'have regional accents'

You couldn’t make this stuff up! I blogged about goats before that can have accents relative to where they were brought up and their own peer groups. Apparently, cows also have regional accents like humans, language specialists have suggested. They decided to examine the issue after dairy farmers noticed their cows had slightly different moos, depending on which herd they came from. 


John Wells, Professor of Phonetics at the University of London, said regional twangs had been seen before in birds. The farmers in Somerset who noticed the phenomenon said it may have been the result of the close bond between them and their animals. Farmer Lloyd Green, from Glastonbury, said: "I spend a lot of time with my ones and they definitely moo with a Somerset drawl.

"I've spoken to the other farmers in the West Country group and they have noticed a similar development in their own herds. It works the same as with dogs - the closer a farmer's bond is with his animals, the easier it is for them to pick up his accent."

Prof Wells felt the accents could result from their contemporaries. He said: "This phenomenon is well attested in birds. You find distinct chirping accents in the same species around the country. This could also be true of cows. In small populations such as herds you would encounter identifiable dialectical variations which are most affected by the immediate peer group."

Dr Jeanine Treffers-Daller, reader in linguistics at the University of the West of England in Bristol, agreed that the accent could be influenced by relatives.She said: "When we are learning to speak, we adopt a local variety of language spoken by our parents, so the same could be said about the variation in the West Country cow moo."

Umm...I'm now wondering what London cows sound like or cows from Northern ireland?

Fresian 1: Alright Dave, that there patch a grass is a bit sinewy. Try some furver up by da fence.
Fresian 2: You're 'aving a laugh int ya? tried it yesterday guv - tastes like nat's piss!


Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5277090.stm

This is a really scary look into the future...

We've all seen the Hollywood movies like I-Robot and others where we learn that robots will play an ever greater role in our lives. And given that almost every household has a microwave, toaster, refrigerator, TV and maybe a car, it's quite believable that in the future we will all have our own personal robot as well. But would you really want be sitting in your living room with your dead wife, son, grand mother or husband having conversations about Coronation Street as if everything was perfectly normal and they weren't actually dead?

According to an article in the Daily Mail, it may sound too Jetsons to be true, but the Terasem Movement Foundation in Bristol, Vermont, is betting that personal robots will be a huge part of the lives of future generations. The robots, they say, will be able to download people's personalities, serving as avatars and assistants to busy professionals and in some cases, replacing those who have been lost.

The foundation's prized possession is Bina48, one of the most sophisticated humanoid robots ever built, capable of independent thought, emotion, and even being interviewed by the MailOnline.

Bruce Duncan, 57, has been working with Bina48 for two years. During that time, the two have become close friends, sharing their everyday lives with one another. Bina48 was made by uploading a real person's mindfile - or a compilation of memories, beliefs and feelings. Before Bina48 was 'born,' a flesh and blood woman named Bina Rothblatt was interviewed for more than 20 hours.

That conversation, which touched upon topics throughout her childhood to her career, was then transcribed and uploaded to an artificial intelligence database. 'That gives her a personality,' Mr Duncan said. 'She's very philosophical. She has favorite movies and music and poems. Sometimes she's very humorous. She can tell jokes.'

For me, the most interesting and at the same time the most scary aspect of this is the fact that we may end up with a situation where a loved one has died and we are left living with a robot that has had all the mind data uploaded to a robot. Think how eery that would be sitting in your living room with your dead wife, son, grand mother or husband? Wouldn't you lose sight of what was real and what was programmed into a computer? It might becaome like the difference between dreaming and the real physical world which can often seem the same.

As Mr Duncan says, over time, the technology will be less expensive and more important. 'There are a lot of things that can happen. One of them for sure, might be a legacy,' Mr Duncan said. 'If your grandmother dies and she's built a mindfile, you might be able to talk to her for years and years afterward and have conversations with her.' There are also legal ramifcications too as to what status these creatures would have should something go wrong and e.g. a house fire was caused by a malfunctioning robot.

Another application of the technology is education.'Students can learn about Abraham Lincoln by talking to his avatar,' he suggested. Other greats, like Gandhi, Martin Luther King or Susan B. Anthony could be accessible to history students across the globe. 

The good side of this is that museums would be like the movie Night at the Museum with Ben Stiller where the robots could actually look like a character from history and could be involved in asynchronous conversations with young children and adults keen on finding out about that period in history and that person's part in it.

I guess it's like anything new: we fear it because it is the unknown, but if it really is the future, then there's nothing we can do but embrace it. Like the clever man said, there's nothing more dangerous than an idea that's ahead of it's time! Amen to that!

Read more:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2175721/Rise-Machines-Meet-Bina48-robot-tell-jokes-recite-poetry-mimics-mankind-startling-ease.html?ITO=1490

Is this the luckiest man alive?

Watch the video. It's really amazing neither of the two vehicles actually hits him!