As published by Britain’s Daily Express newspaper, photos taken over the years by American storm chasers Mike Hollingshead and Eric Nguyen.

The Other Man: A Love Story — John F Kennedy Jr, Carolyn Bessette and Me
By Michael Bergin
Published by Regan Books, 2004

Beefcake in undies for Calvin Klein, Michael Bergin dries his tears to tell us where Carolyn Bessette went before she went down in a plane with JFK Jr. Mt review for The Nation, published on August 1, 2004.

In 240 pages of claptrap that might appeal to people who think it’s okay to read gossip in hardcover and those who call themselves fashionistas, Michael Bergin tells about being a top model, a “Baywatch” lifeguard and the guy Carolyn Bessette loved before she married JFK Jr (and after — whoops!)

Yes, the late Bessette carried on bedding Bergin even after she’d landed America’s most eligible bachelor.

To his credit, Bergin doesn’t spill these particular beans until almost the end of his little autobiography, and by then it’s clear that his reason for writing is to reassure the world that Carolyn was wonderful — no matter what the tabloids tell us.

In case you missed it in the tabs the other day, Bergin was just busted for drunk driving — five years to the day after Carolyn died in that weird plane crash with her sister and John Jr (sort of) at the controls. There’s more!

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
By Simon Sebag Montefiore
Published by Phoenix, 2003

A thorough, lively and likely unmatchable biography of Stalin with plenty of shock value. My review for The Nation, published on October 31, 2004.

A joke by Joseph Stalin: A young man is arrested and accused of being the actual author of Pushkin’s iconoclastic “Eugene Onegin”. The youth tries to deny it. A few days later, the interrogator bumps into the boy’s parents. “Congratulations!” he tells them. “Your son wrote ‘Eugene Onegin’!”

Gallows humour is just one of many fascinating facets of the sadistic dictator in this terrific biography, which by truth’s necessity is so relentlessly grim that any colourful flourish is welcome.

The journalist and novelist’s 700 thickly printed, footnoted pages, replete with Russian tongue-twisters, are a fluid thriller nonetheless. By focusing on the man and his “court” — the “potentates” who surrounded him in the Bolshevik hierarchy — rather than the ideology that drove them, there’s a wealth of personal anecdotes allowing him to juxtapose the grin with the grim.

“Far from being the colourless bureaucratic mediocrity disdained by Trotsky, Stalin
was an energetic and vainglorious melodramatist who was exceptional in every way,”
Montefiore assures readers early on in a wonderfully evocative set-piece from the night his wife committed suicide in 1932.

“Garrulous, sociable and a fine singer, this lonely and unhappy man ruined every love relationship and friendship in his life by sacrificing happiness to political necessity and cannibalistic paranoia.”

The language is captivating throughout, a marvel of sustained interest — but then the subject was almost unearthly in the sheer breadth and depth of his power and his passion. There’s more!

Learning to speak Thai is something that’s eluded me for 16 years now, despite being married to a Thai and having a pair of fairly talkative luk khrueng kids. I’m not a complete write-off because I know when my kids are dissing me, but I really ought to know more for when they start acting more like teenagers.

A new learn-to-speak-Thai program is being offered by Jo and Jay, who met in London, no doubt both struggling to get by in English. Jo is Thai and Jay is German, and he’s learning the language and passing on the lessons to others in the form of free online audio clips at the website Learn Thai Podcast. Jo does the talking, so there’s no danger of learning Thai with a German accent.

At the moment they’re getting out the sort of phrases you need in emergency situations, everything from “I feel sick” to “It hurts here” to “I’ve been robbed!” Thailand’s still a very safe place but, you know, you never know.

“Our main goal with this upcoming course,” says Jo, “is to make it not boring and don’t stuff too much info in a short amount of time in our audio lessons. This is what Jay complained about all the time when he tried other audio courses. The course will also have material about learning to read Thai, because it is one of the keys to successfully learn Thai.”

They also have a translation service, but they charge for that. Not much, mind you.

This may the “round tuit” I’ve always said I needed to get.

I’ve worked at eight newspapers in 33 years*, though two of them suggest that the total is actually 10. The Hong Kong Standard was revamped and rebranded as the Hong Kong iMail while I was there, and currently The Nation in Bangkok is burping a squawking baby named Daily Xpress (not THE Daily Xpress, just Daily Xpress).

Kids have funny names these days, don’t they? But what’s funnier — at times, less so at others — is the state in which newspaper owners come back from media conferences where they’ve been breathing the hyper-charged oxygen piped in from cyberspace.

Nation founder and group editor-in-chief Suthichai Yoon, who’s old enough to know better, and Nation president Pana Janviroj, who’s not, are high as Himalayan yaks at the moment. They think the Internet is God and insist that their employees join them in worshipping at the altar of the World Wide Web.

I have plenty of reverence for the Net, but in terms of faith I’m very much an agnostic. I expect the Web will still be 90% trivia the day I die and long afterward too. But now the printed news media, convinced by advertisers that the only market is youth, are frantically replicating its format and giving more weight to page views than facts checked, more heft to hit counts than a decent story well told.

Two millennia ago, the original Americans in what is now southern Utah used to catch up on the news at the place pictured above (with the alien mascot of Daily Xpress peeking over its summit).

People from different clans — the Anasazi, Basketmaker, Fremont, Pueblo, Navajo, Fremont, Ute, Anglo … a real gathering of the tribes — would stop off at the big red sandstone cliff that the Navajo eventually called Tse’ Hane, which means “rock that tells a story”, and they’d tell a story in art. Today we call this art petroglyphs and the place Newspaper Rock. There’s more!