Elephant versus humans - World Cup Soccer 2006

In 2006 the Thai authorities have carted out the tired image of elephants playing football against humans in order to make some irrelevant point against gambling on the World Cup.

This game was organized in Ayuthayya by some craven eggheads from a nearby institute of higher learning how to be like everyone else in the world. The proctor said, "We want to show the world that you can have fun without gambling."

Hasn't anyone told him that people don't gamble for fun.

The human players weren't having fun, since the elephants took the game seriously and nearly trampled several players. No fouls were called on the leviathans, because the referees were scared of the khang noi's long memory.

The game ended in a draw and the crowd for the event numbered 23 people.

Across the street over a hundred people sat before a radio listening to the play by play of Iran versus some other country no one had ever heard of. They were enthralled and wagering 10 baht each. The police and had the elephants threaten them with their trunks. Not one football enthusiast bothered to turn their head.

OLD 60s JOKE

What's stuck between the toes of elephants?

Slow-running natives.

4Q Heart-warming Bullshit Stories

In 1986, Peter Davies was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Louisiana State University .

On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Peter approached it very carefully. He got down on one knee, inspected the elephants foot, and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Peter worked the wood out with his knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot.

The elephant turned to face the man and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments. Peter stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned and walked away. Peter never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.

Twenty years later, Peter was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teenaged son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Peter and his son Cameron were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Peter, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man.

Remembering the encounter in 1986, Peter could not help wondering if this was the same elephant. Peter summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Peter legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly.

Probably wasn't the same fucking elephant.

This is for everyone who sends me those heart-warming bullshit stories.

This story came from my friend Dougall.

He is much nicer than a charging elephant most of the days.

Yai Chang In Pattaya

Back in the day elephants nightly wandered the streets of Pattaya to cool off and cadge sugar cane donations to enrich their under-paid mahouts from Isaan. Yai walked down Moo 9 a few nights a week. The scrawny mahout said Yai's age was about 40.

A little younger than me.

I always had something for Yai, sometimes a quart of Chang beer, but he only had eyes for my two mango trees, especially as they flowered and bore fruit. When the mangoes reached harvest, I pointed to the top of the tree. "Those are yours."

The top of the trees were covered with red ants supping on the running sap and red ants are no one's friends.

Yai regarded Nok the mahout holding the ear hook and then me. We nodded 'go for it'.

Yai and I became closer friends year after year.

At the Buffalo Bar I bought Yai Chang.

Once a drunken Brit gave him a whiskey coke. Yai spit it out along with a snout of snort, covering the lager lout in pachyderm phlegm. Yai, the mahout and I laughed along with the girls of the Buffalo Bar.

In 2008 I moved away from Pattaya to the rice fields of Bannok, but occasionally visited the city of the Gulf of Siam to see old friends and speak my native tongues.

One night in 2011 I strolled down 2nd Road and everyone coming in the opposite direction looked over my head and I turned around to face Yai and Nok.

Elephants walk with a quiet unbeknownst to humans.

They both smiled at me and Yai slipped his trunk around my chest. I got scared, but Yai hugged me with the gentleness of a friend. We drank three beers at a near-by beer bar and he trumpeted his good-bye with an echoing bleat.

I'm 67 now. Yai is probably still around the Last Babylon. One day I'll go back and find out. It's what old friends do. See each other.

Castro's Cigars

The CIA were fairly stupid.

Not that they were smart. Most of them were Ivy League graduates. White collegiate philosophy sought the truth of deception like Jesuits chasing the Mysteries of the Holy Eucharist and the beauty of the Nailed God. The Agency overthrew the governments of Persia, Guatemala, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

They failed many times, but someone once told me that their success were veiled by clouds.

NEW ROSE - The Damned 1979

The Damned played Hurrah in September 1979. New York's Misfits opened the show. The 62nd Street club was packed with punks. I was working security and my job was to lead the band up to the stage. Several minutes before the show I asked them if they needed anything and one of them said, "4 Bottles of Vodka."

I went to the bar and returned with the requested 4 bottles. They twisted off the caps and poured the vodka straight into their mouths like hungry baby birds feeding on their mother's spew. Most of it ended up on the floor.

The show was classic. Fast and Loud.

Punk rock at its best and I love NEW ROSE

Go to this URL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaOraUh1AyM&feature=PlayList&p=81EF7096C0EE514C&index=1

Palm Beach Neighbors

In the summer of 2009 I was house-sitting the old stable of the Woolworth estate in Palm Beach. The main house has been divided in two. The remaining property apportioned to smaller luxurious houses providing safe haven for the mega-rich.

A few blocks away was Donald Trump's estate, Mar-De-Lago. The baroque vision of opulence overlooked the roundabout spinning traffic north, south or west along the barrier island. His mansion was undergoing renovation for the 2009 High Season. A rightwing radio commentator lived to the north, but Russ Limbaugh never left his tin-foiled basement. No one who was anyone was here this time of year, but the man next door to my squat had been living in Palm Beach all his life and said, as we drank gin-tonics by his pool, "I wouldn't live anywhere else."

"What about low season?" I asked, since most of the residents had fled to homes according to their inheritances; Newport, Maine, the South of France, Switzerland at al.

"Low season is the best time of year. I wish it lasted all year long." Mp> He had a point. Ocean Boulevard was unsullied by frantic billionaires in their Bentleys. The parking spots on Worth Avenue were open all day long and you could enter Amice without a reservation.

I've seen none of the other neighbors on the street. The houses are battened down until after the hurricane season. No storms were stirring in the Atlantic and there was no sign of Donald Trump at his tennis courts, then again the billionaire was a golfer and I walked through the bushes to the beach. Donald will never know I was there. Neither will the police.

Batten Down The Hatches, Here Come Dorian

Hurricane Dorian is predicted to hit the Bahamas as a category 5 storm on Sunday. Houses on those low islands are required with be built to withstand 120mph winds. Dorian might top the record with 200 MPH cyclonic gusts. Donald Trump has tweeter that the hurricane with will catastrophic and headed to his Virginia Golf Course to whack the ball around the green for the Labor Day holiday.

"What me worry."

The tidal surge is the next danger, as the hurricane drags the ocean onto the coastal front.

Convicts have been sandbagging the houses of the wealthy in Florida.

They will not be evacuated during the storm.

They are criminals jailed to be punished by the State.

Throughout the week meteorologists had fathom to path of the storm; first Florida, then the Carolinas and the open ocean, but hurricanes are fickle creatures and now Dorian seems to have altered its course to strike the Florida on Monday.

Palm Beach is empty.

Houses ready to be looted.

Dorian do your worse.

There is no global warming.

Donald Trump knows best, plus America's guns will protect its southern citizens from the storm and anything that follows the wind.