Quarterfinalist Gael “Tumbleweed” Monfils

Got back to the Thailand Open last month for the second time courtesy of my friends and co-workers Luci and Ramona.

Ae and I were there for the Round 2 evening session and just missed Novak Djokovich and his kid brother Marko playing doubles against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Fabrice Santoro. Hardly seems fair having separate admission for afternoon and evening sessions when there aren’t that many top players involved, but there you go.

Nevertheless we thoroughly enjoyed watching Gael Monfils of France rattle past American Robert Kendricks 6-4 7-6 (4) at the same time as Marat Safin and his German partner Mischa Zverev were playing Simon Aspelin, a Swede, and Austrian Julian Knowle. Safin and Zverev won easily.

All of the seats above the deck had a fine view of both “Centre Court” and the adjacent “Court 1″. Tennis fans will know it’s daft designating the courts like that (there are only the two), but evidently most of the staff checking tickets outside had no idea that you could watch two matches at the same time from almost anywhere in the stadium.

They should have had a peek in before telling us to walk all the way around the outside if we wanted to “see Safin first” before Monfils. On the other hand, maybe they were confused by the fact that there was a smallish, four-tier gallery of seats at the side of Court 1, though that’s not exactly where they were directing us either.

That’s where Marat’s fans made sure they had seats, and he’s got legions of fans in Thailand, including my wife. From up in the high seats, she could only wish we’d brought the binoculars.

Tsonga, who’d been a finalist at the Australian Open in January, knocked off Monfils in Bangkok in the semis before getting his revenge against Djokovic for the Aussie loss. He took the Thailand Open title 7-6 (4) 6-4 — the first of his career, amazingly enough for the World No 16.

I went to see the pandas in Chiang Mai, expecting at most a cursory glimpse. To my delight, they put on a heck of a show.

Nephew David’s arrival in Thailand from Canada finally pried me loose from the apartment long enough to go see the country again, almost exactly 16 years after my last proper tour, which happened to be in the company of his visiting kid brother.

This time, with Dave and his pal Ben, we headed south for some sun and saltwater — and more on that to be posted here — but once we got them back on their homebound plane, there was business to attend to up north, and Ae and I took the opportunity to check out the Chinese sex maniacs incarcerated at the Chiang Mai Zoo.

I kid the Chinese about their promiscuity, of course, but there was a lot of kidding on a global scale back in late 2006 when the zookeepers tried to coerce Chuang Chuang and Lin Hui into having sex. It was purely for research purposes, you understand. Their caretakers just wanted to watch and, naturally, they were hoping for panda cubs.

They didn’t actually let my wife and her father and sister inside the pen, of course — I just made this up.

@

Chuang Chuang and Lin Hui are the giant pandas that Thailand is renting from China. The fee for one decade, which is being clocked from October 12, 2003, is $250,000, an amount that the furry guests have already earned the zoo many times over in admission charges. They’re still tallying the revenues, however, against the Bt40-million cost of the air-conditioned enclosure they had to build, called the Panda Palace.

It’s a not-altogether-impressive home, but then expats are easily amused. The signs warning human visitors to keep quiet seemed a bit daft given that there was a front-end loader clawing noisily away at the foundation outside. Probably something to do with the plumbing.

The official website, PandaInThailand.net (mostly in Thai), and other sources give credit for the pandas’ presence to Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister who doesn’t live in Thailand anymore because, you know, he’s a crook.

But ThaiWays magazine says it was another former premier, Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, who cooked up the deal with Beijing back in 2001 when he was Thaksin’s deputy PM. Chavalit’s a crook too, so it doesn’t really make any difference. The dual-government spin on the rental is that the pandas are “friendship ambassadors” whose temporary expatriation was a tribute to Her Majesty the Queen on her auspicious sixth-cycle birthday in 2004.

Anyway, the pandas received a welcome in Thailand of the sort usually reserved for this week’s hottest Korean popstar. They were given new names, dreamed up in a national competition, although Taywan and Taywee appear on no signs in the 520-square-metre Panda Palace.

And then, just to keep everything above board in this family-owned country, they were formally married in a ceremony on November 9, 2005. Let the fun begin!

Or not.

There’s more!

Pretty exciting stuff, this: My wife and I have bought some dirt in northern Thailand on which to build a home, which automatically makes this turf, by default, “Dorseyland”!

That’s right, it’s no longer just a figment of my imagination.

We purchased two vacant adjoining lots totalling 254 square wah. A wah is a Thai measure about equal to four square metres, so we’ve got about 1,016 square metres. That’s big enough for a decent-sized house. So I’m told — it looks awfully small to me.

Coincidentally, wah is also what I said to my wife when she announced that we were buying some land.

It’s not much to look at yet because it’s covered in longan trees, but Ae is already signing up a guy with a bulldozer to destroy them. (I’m not going to grieve for them because I’ve learned from the trees around our condo in Bangkok that Thai flora cannot be killed — it always comes back and takes over its rightful property again.) There’s more!

JUST ARRIVED IN DORSEYLAND!

I am so very, very sorry to Matt Drudge, the blogger who somehow became a kingmaker in American presidential politics, for unabashedly stealing his webpage’s design, I truly am. The Dorse Report is just a bit of fun, really, a mock-up of the bizarrely mega-popular Drudge Report, in this case pulling together links to recent posts here and at Dali House.

Unlike the originator, though, I really don’t think I can update my report daily or even regularly, so for now, it’s just out there.

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!