The sheer vanity of having one’s own weblog is astounding, but with apologies to Uncle Jimmy, I shall carry on shamelessly. Ahem …

Greetings visitors!

I’m Paul Dorsey, and I’m the president of Dorseyland, a defaultocracy established in September 2005 in a small corner of Bangkok, Thailand, without the permission or the slightest interest of the authorities.

My wife Ae and I try to grow children, love, plants and knowledge in a two-bedroom flat overlooking the pool at a condominium just off the mighty Bangna-Trat highway that leads some people to the Cambodian border, but not us. We like to stay at home. We’ve had enough adventures outside. And anyway, outside is getting a little too dangerous.

So we have new adventures at home.

I’m Canadian, Ae is Thai, and we live in Bangkok, so expect to see a lot of stuff here about Thailand … and a little bit about Canada. And Mars. Mars is nice.

Dorseyland was originally launched in September 2005 at another webhost whose name we won’t get into right now, apart from the fact that it was MyBlogSite.com and after two months they decided they didn’t want to be in the free webhosting business anymore cause it was no fun and they were going broke and they couldn’t figure out how to fix some basic page components that had gone badly awry and everyone was complaining.
So they gave my 15 days to get out of cybertown UNLESS I wanted to have my whole weblog moved easy-peasy lock, stock and barrels of fun over to their new service, BlogHarbor.com, where I could have a look around and kick the tires for a whole 30 days for FREE, and then start coughing up $8.95 a month if I wanted to move in.
Well, that’s more than I earn in a month at my fabulous senior-level newspaper job, so I went around knocking on other people’s doors looking for a handout and Blogsome, the one with the loathsome name but apparently an eager servicibility, said come on in, we’re just making some martinis. I should have come here first.
So here we are frantically rebuilding our weblog and trying to figure out which screws went where and how to adjust the volume and where did we leave the remote anyway.

Dorseyland is basically, as George Carlin would put it, “a place for my stuff”. I have a place for my stuff in my Yahoo account (click “Get in touch” at the top of the menu), but it got too small – and, yes, I got more vain – so I decided I needed a bigger place for my stuff that was also PUBLIC.
Plus, there’s been a surge in correspondence across the extended Dorsey family lately – from Canada to Britain to the United States to Thailand, and among a lot of my former high-school classmates, all now on the funky side of 50 – so this will become a place for their stuff too.
For the rest of you seekers, the blog ought to afford you a few hours of amusement, because we Dorseys have discerning, if quirky, tastes, which means the jokes here will be cracking and the weird and wonderful items we’ve come across and decided to share will be very weird and very wonderful.

Now, if you do an Internet search for Dorseyland, you’re sure to find .. well, actually, you’ll find the Dorseyland Drive-In, which is in Caribou, Maine. Or at least it used to be. It’s closed now. It used to accommodate 300 cars. Anyone who scoffs at Web scans can look it up directly here.
But your Internet search will quickly steer you away from the sad, lonely ex-drive-in to more inspiring territory in the form of Jimmy Dorsey and his Original Dorseyland Jazz Band.
As a child I’d heard of the formerly very famous jazz clarinetist, saxophonist and big-band leader James “Jimmy” Dorsey (February 29, 1904 - June 12, 1957) and his similarly swinging brother Tommy, who was a year younger, but I had to live with my parents’ sad assurances that they were no relation. All that talent and all that money and, even with the same surname, we could get no closer to them than the hi-fi speaker.

Anyway, Jimmy had an outfit called the Original Dorseyland Jazz Band that included trumpeter Charlie Teagarden, trombonist Cutty Cutshall and tenor saxophonist Frank Maynes. They recorded some great tracks in their day, like “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue”, “Muskrat Ramble”, “When You Wore A Tulip (And I Wore A Big Red Rose)”, “Clap Hands (Here Comes Charley)” and, interestingly because of what was happening in New Orleans when I originally inserted this weblog into the ether, “Levee Blues”.
I’d never heard of Dorseyland the band until I Googled Dorseyland to see if I was there, but all I found was “Uncle” Jimmy and a lonely old drive-in theatre in a place called Caribou.

Now you’re here with us. Enjoy.