Many of the good people of Thailand are agog at the prospect of coming up with the winning name for the panda cub born last month at the Chiang Mai Zoo.

The fact that the winner gets Bt1 million helps, of course, but the nation’s hearts have gone out to the little baby regardless. Will the child be named Kwan Thai (meaning Thai darling), Thai Jeen (Sino-Thai), Yingying (complete and fertile) or Lin Ping (the mother’s name combined with the name of Chiang Mai’s river)?

What people are forgetting, though, is that giant pandas are vicious monsters, which is why China is so eager to loan out its entire panda population to unsuspecting zoos around the world.

Chinese experts are loaned out too, ostensibly to make sure the animals are well cared for, but in fact they’re there to make sure the enclosures are completely secure, because if one of their rented beasts ever clears the moat or fence or glass wall, all hell will break loose.

Just look at the fear in the eyes of mother Lin Hui in the photo below. She knows all too well what she’s brought into this world and can only hope that she survives when her offspring reaches wrestling weight.

See my pictures of the Chiang Mai Zoo panda containment area here and see if you think it’s anywhere close to being secure enough.

Ian Hunter turned 70 this week. Happy birthday and don’t ever stop writing. This is “When the World was Round” from his last album, “Shrunken Heads”. He’s got the follow-up coming out this month. Wonderful animation here by Andy Doran of Menagerie.

Remember the kids in the playground, avoiding the bullies each day
Timing your life to the monsters, the monsters that won’t go away
And you win some, you lose some, you ain’t got much choice
so you choose one (what have you done)

Everybody lies ‘n’ we’re stuck in the middle
I think I liked it better when the world was round
There’s too much information but not enough to go on
I think I liked it better when the world was round

Now that we’re older and wiser
Now we got kids of our own
Timing their lives to the monsters
But the monsters won’t leave them alone
You win some, you lose some, you ain’t got much choice
But it’s gotta be done, yeah it’s gotta be done

‘Cause everybody lies ‘n’ we’re stuck in the middle
I think I liked it better when the world was round
There’s too much information but not enough to go on
I think I liked it better when the world was round
I don’t wanna put you off it
I don’t wanna put you off it
But I think I liked it better when the world was round
And I wish that I could change it
Yes I wish that I could change it
I think I liked it better when the world was round

Is it my imagination
When I look back thru the ages
Is it my imagination

You win some, you lose some
You only got two shots, so you take one
(what have you done)

‘Cause everybody lies ‘n’ we’re stuck in the middle
I think I liked it better when the world was round
There’s too much information but not enough to go on
I think I liked it better when the world was round
And I don’t think we deserve this
No I don’t think we deserve this
I think I liked it better when the world was round
Give me a reason to believe in
Give me a reason to believe in
I think I liked it better when the world was round
Maybe we can make it better
Maybe we can make it better
I think I liked it better when the world was round.

When last we left our hero Cassini, in February 2008, he was already four years into his new career as a pinball, bouncing to and fro among Saturn’s rings.

Two months later NASA gave him permission to keep right on bouncing, at least until mid-2010, wearing a fresh T-shirt bearing the words “Cassini Equinox”.

This is all by way of justifying the use of yet another photo of Iapetus, that nut of a Saturn moon that did a fashion spread for Cassini in September 2007. This picture is among the astounding collection featured this month on the Boston Globe’s Big Picture website.

Iapetus was too walnutty to believe, as explained with great anticipation in a spring 2007 Dorseyland post, though it’s still not very forthcoming about its funny ridge.

Oddly enough, Cassini was in the process of transmitting its Iapetus snapshots back to Earth when it was hit by a blast of protons from deep space’s slingshot that shut it down like an armadillo being pecked by turkey vultures. The scare was temporary, though, and Cassini’s camera has had no rest since.

ARTICLE: New Scientist, March 23 — “Space storm alert: 90 seconds to catastrophe”

SUBJECT: “An extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January [says] plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.”

QUOTE: “We’re moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster,” says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.

ANALYSIS: “Moving … closer … closer … edge … possible”

OTHER HEADLINES ON SAME PAGE: “Zooming in on Mars in glorious 3D”, “Speculation mounts over North Korean missiles”, “Meteorite hunters ’strike gold’ in Sudan”

CONCLUSION: Nothing to see here, folks. Go back home.

There have been some mighty fishy pictures on the Net lately, but given the sources I think it’s safe to say charges will not be laid against Photoshop.

These lumpfish were photographed at a Japanese aquarium. Eumicrotremus pacificus evidently have suckers on their fins so they can cling to rocks underwater, and the aquarium reckoned they could hold on to colourful balloons just as easily.

The National Geographic, no less, came up with this and other shots of the six-inch-long Pacific barreleye — Macropinna microstoma – which it insists has a transparent head!

What you see is its barrel-like eyes topped by green, orb-like, sunlight-filtering lenses. It lives 600 metres deep in submarine darkness off central California.

The eyes are looking upward in this picture by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. The pair of dark orifices out front that look like eyes are actually organs to smell with.

And then there was Briton Ian Welch, who was in Thailand last month helping with a stingray-tagging programme. He went fishing in the Maeklong River, presumably in Samut Songkhram, and landed the biggest freshwater fish ever caught with a rod.

In the river. With a rod. I’m still looking for further details on this story, which appeared in the British press but, as far as I know, in neither of Thailand’s English-language dailies.

Once you move away from fishes and into snakes, though, Photoshop rears its head and reality becomes ambiguous.

This image enjoyed a brief but wide-ranging life online because it’s supposed to show a gigantic snake shimmying down Borneo’s Baleh River. A second “photo” didn’t even come close to being realistic, but there were plenty of sceptics about this one too.

This shot was supposedly taken from a helicopter by a member of a flood-relief team.

The picture’s shelf-life was certainly goosed along by the accompanying allusions to the legend of the Nabau, a 100-foot-long snake with “a dragon’s head”. The story was not aided by comparisons to the prehistoric, 45-foot-long, crocodile-swallowing Titanoboa, whose fossilised skeleton was recently discovered in Colombia.