Phuket Gazette photo

On the eve of the fifth anniversary of the tsunami, Nation reporter Pongphon Sarnsamak shared a tale of two women who remain afraid to go anywhere near the shore.

Yupa Srisiri, 60, who lives in the most unfortunate of villages, Ban Nam Khem in Phang Nga, can’t forget her struggle to keep hold of her six-year-old nephew as the waves thrashed them, tearing the youngster from her grasp as their pickup truck rolled and rolled.

She found his body a month later, one of 800 dead from the same community. Yupa had lost one of her own three sons not long before before the tsunami struck, though the reason wasn’t given.

The sound of the wind frightens 46-year-old Saisunee Tongsakul, who lives in Ban Had Kamala on Phuket, and she told Pongphon, “There’s no way I can walk on the beach.”

The waves wrecked her house. She heard cries for help but could do no more than shout back, urging them in vain to swim.

“Every December 26 she has to seal all the family documents in plastic,” Pongphon wrote.

These cases are classified as post-traumatic stress disorder for reasons of medical and financial assistance. The boisterously named Thailand Centre of Excellence for Life Sciences has run genome scans on 3,000 blood specimens from tsunami survivors to try and find a causal link, and a treatment for the disorder. The results are being analysed at Japan’s Riken Centre for Genomic Medicine.

All the psychology aside, the victims’ fear is very real.

In August this year, one of the purported buttresses against fear of a recurrence was hauled dead from the water.

The Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) buoy had bobbed in the Andaman Sea 600 nautical miles northwest of Phuket since December 2006. This past August the Phuket Gazette reported that it was no longer functioning “because the Thai agency responsible for maintenance has not been able to replace its battery”. There’s more!

Paul Bunyan, King Arthur and the Loch Ness Monster, from left, participated in a Fox News Round Table Discussion last week to complain about misuse of the word “legendary”.

Among the shifts in the English language that drive me nuts is the migration of the word “legendary”. It’s gone from meaning “mythical” to “very famous” to “something people talk about”.

My newspaper in Bangkok, a city that doesn’t get that many truly famous visitors, has taken to calling every foreign DJ who’s playing in town “legendary”. This can only fleetingly be blamed on the absence of any genuine music stars, like “the legendary Bob Dylan” for example.

We did have a brief public appearance by Jimmy Page this year (see this post), whose quick set onstage with the local guitarists while on holiday in Thailand was reported in The Nation, sure enough, as an evening with “the legendary Led Zeppelin axeman”.

I got to edit that, and changed the word — as I always do with the DJs and would certainly do in the case of Bob Dylan as well — to something else. “Celebrated” is the usual fall-back choice in these circumstances, even it’s not always satisfactory either. In Page’s case I settled on “guitar hero” and allowed him a “rock god” too. There’s not much confusion in the public mind between divine gods and those on earth.

“Legendary” obviously infuses the subject with a lot of weight, which is ideal for promoting their shows or, in the case of Czech photographer Josef Koudelka, their images. Art Daily, which is a valuable website despite offering nothing but verbatim press releases, this week carried the headline “Koudelka’s Legendary Photographs of the Prague Invasion to be Shown in Miami”.

No doubt Miami Dade College supplied the headline as well as the report on the exhibition documenting the 1968 Soviet invasion but, as remarkable as the photos are, given their graphic drama and historical value, how can a snapshot become “legendary”?

Over the years we’ve become accustomed to hearing journalists (and the publicists whose bums they caress) referring to “the legendary Marilyn Monroe” and “the legendary James Dean”, which might suggest that dying young is a criterion for the honorific. Kerouac just slips in there, but more people regard Neal Cassady, the supercharged real-life hero of his best book, who also died in his early 40s, as legendary.

Frank Sinatra was accepted without question as “a legend in his own time”, as was Hemingway in some circles. Today, is Edward Murrow legendary? What about Ed Sullivan? Why don’t you hear about the Beatles being legendary? Yes, two of them are still alive, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the phrase “the legendary John Lennon”. There’s more!

The Rolling Stones — from left, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood, with Keith and Charlie’s wives and Ron’s girlfriend — at a press conference in London on Tuesday announcing plans for their 2010 world tour.

Jagger, 83, insisted he was fit and ready for another gruelling tour, which is expected to hit more than 300 cities in Europe, North and South America and Asia between April and December next year. Richards, 82, admitted he wasn’t sure he’d survive but was willing to give it a go, “for the fans”.

The outing, already being dubbed the “Sympathy for the Elderly Tour” by some cynics, will have no new album to promote. The Stones have declined to return to the studio because, as Jagger put it, “We couldn’t be arsed. People only come to the shows to hear bloody ‘Satisfaction’ anyway.”

The warm-up act for most dates on the tour will be the re-formed New Kids on the Block, whose members’ ages average 57.

Endgame 1945: Victory, Retribution, Liberation
By David Stafford
Published by Abacus, 2008

Londoners and New Yorkers swigged beer and smooched on VE Day, but the horror of World War II would persist for months. My review for The Nation, published on November 7.

War’s end, beyond the jubilant newsreels, is certainly not all banners and bunting. Europe remained a boiling nightmare for months after Hitler’s Third Reich was vanquished, but the weary citizens of Britain and the Americas had had enough after six horrifying years of the tyranny of tanks and shrapnel. All they wanted to know was that World War II was over, at least in Europe.

And so today, their memories are of flags flying and GIs grinning and Marshall getting on with his rebuilding plan.

In “Endgame 1945″, David Stafford lays out the grim reality of what kept right on happening. Atrocities continued even as the veil was torn from the concentration camps. In peacetime, inflamed partisans imposed terrible vengeance on their wartime masters. Displaced persons were everywhere — it must have seemed like all of Europe was on the move.

And, in a foreshadowing of the terror that Stalin was about to generously share with all of Eastern Europe, Russian PoWs refused to go home, and whole communities scattered rather than see more of the brutality already meted out by the victorious Soviet army.

Then there were the German troops, legions of whom kept on fighting even after it was abundantly clear that their cause was hopeless. Such was the depth of their indoctrination that Allied troops routinely encountered German officers, even death-camp commanders, who expected honour and obsequity from their captors.

In some bizarrely ill-considered cases they received that honour. The Canadians, having liberated a huge Dutch population that had initially been bypassed in the rush to conquer the German homeland, and ended up as cadaverous in malnutrition as the inmates of Dachau, actually agreed to a dual command with the tens of thousands of German troops remaining in western Holland.

The Germans, deemed “surrendered army personnel” rather than PoWs, were even given rifles on several occasions so they could assemble firing squads to execute their own deserters. It was weeks before common sense and morality prevailed.

These are the sort of amazing revelations that Stafford places before the unnerved reader. There’s more!

McMafia: Seriously Organized Crime
By Misha Glenny
Published by Vintage, 2009

Crime not only pays, it pays most honest people’s salaries. My review for The Nation, published in September.

“Anyone who has used a cellphone or computer notebook in the last decade has unwittingly depended on organised crime for his or her convenience,” Misha Glenny writes in “McMafia”. It’s one of many grounds for the blame he metes out to just about everyone — but mostly greedy bureaucrats — in the course of a 436-page survey of criminal gangsterism like you’ve never quite imagined it.

One of the world’s most tenacious (and thus successful) reporters, Glenny roams that world flipping over rocks to expose the handful of fungal roots that link just about every mob there is. The roots extend into your home, obviously if you smoke ganja or buy pirate DVDs, but less obviously if you’ve been the innocent victim of an online phishing scam.

The situation, it would seem, is hopeless, but then why fight crime? It’s got it’s own suite of offices at City Hall, and you can’t fight City Hall. More importantly — and this is where the politicians climb aboard — it keeps the global economy humming. At least it did until Wall Street screwed up its end of the operation, but eliminate organised crime and we’ll all really be weeping into our wallets.

The book is amazing throughout, but there are two outstanding bits. One extrapolates on what exactly happened after Mr Gorbachev obeyed President Reagan’s command to “tear down that wall”. Much of the bankrupt Soviet Union opened laundries for foreign cash and found many interesting ways to help foreigners get it dirty in the first place.

The other great part is the revelation that organised crime doesn’t always involve triads, yakuza, Russians or that guy from Sicily with the scar on his cheek. On your way to meeting the scummiest of the Nigerian scammers, you run into pot farmers in western Canada who act like they’re in “Mission: Impossible” and some very shady (but funny!) characters in Tel Aviv and Mumbai.

And here, there and in Dubai, bless his soul, our very own VIP guest at Bang Khwan Prison, Mr Viktor Bout. Read an excellent New York Times article about him here