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.

The captioned photos in this post come from Pundit Kitchen.

A child born anywhere in the world on January 20, 2001, the day George Walker Bush was sworn in as president its most powerful country, will have gone through all of life’s most crucial learning processes by now, adopting attitudes and traits he will carry to his grave.

He’ll have learned all the basics of social interaction — how to play, how to connive, when to run and when to fight, whether he should move up the pecking order and, if so, how, what responsibilities belong to him and which ones can be put aside until later.

By now that child will have figured out who’s in charge — at home, at school, in his town and in his country and in the world.

For all of his life, the biggest guy in charge was George W Bush.

With some emerging cyber-technology you just don’t know where you’re heading. I think I came across “Ground Zero” while browsing 2Bangkok.com. It’s not really a game: It lets you choose a location on Google Maps and detonate various types of bombs over it to see the extent of the impact.

Naturally I laid a thud on Bangkok, trying to see if I was safe in the outlying suburbs, but I couldn’t get the program to stay put in one spot on the map long enough to calculate how far the nuclear winter would extend.

Anyway, if they start popping nukes, NO ONE IS SAFE. I thought we were all clear on that point.

I suppose “Ground Zero” is a history lesson, in the sense that the bombs are all famous characters from the tale of man’s inhumanity to man, from the 15-kilotonne Little Boy that smoked Hiroshima to the Soviet Union’s 50-megatonne Tsar Bomba, which in 1961 created “the largest explosion ever”.

If your ears can stand the imagined noise, you can also select Fat Man (21kt for Nagasaki), the Mk28 (1.4mt, 1958) on which Slim Pickens rode to Earth (and Heaven) in “Dr Strangelove”, the B61 (340kt, 1991) now riding on US fighter jets and China’s DF-31 (140kt for intercontinental missiles).

For comparison’s sake, you can also re-create the Chicxulub meteor impact that rid the world of the dinosaur nuisance.

Get trigger-happy here.

“Ground Zero” comes courtesy of Carlos Labs, “a Data Architecture, Integration and Consulting firm registered in Sydney, Australia”. They have nothing to do with nuclear weapons; they deal in computer doodads, or as the website puts it, “the evolution of the data universe”.

I wonder if they’ve seen “On the Beach”, in which Gregory Peck flees as far as he can get from a nuclear war — to Australia. (Spoiler: In vain, as it turned out.)

I could’t find much amusement in Carlos Labs’ “Cycloid” either.

Robert Longo: “Study for Serpent’s Tongue (Tall) Elvis”, 2004

Even the earth seems to shudder at the recollection, with a 6.2-magnitude quake groaning through Mindanao in the southern Philippines on the eve of the fourth anniversary.

But the memory is starting to slip a little now, isn’t it? Bad memories don’t like to hang around, and if they have to, they’re apt to don a disguise.

A photo by Janice Carr of the US Centers for Disease Control: Magnified 598 times, the exoskeletal surface of a male louse

The front page of my Bangkok paper three days after the catastrophe, with the biggest shock still to come: just 10,000 dead so far.

The International Herald Tribune has a decent story about a survivor in Sri Lanka, still rebuilding, “still scared of the sea”, but getting there.

IRIN, the media wing of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, reports from Lanka as well, about reconstruction winding down with not everyone quite satisfied.

And from AFP in Indonesia, “Hope and disappointment four years on”.

There are more tales.

The mosques of Aceh will ring with “massive prayer” on Friday; an Indian police sergeant keeps searching for his two lost children in Chennai; the Firmage family of Mill Valley, California, returns once more to Koh Phi Phi to help fellow survivors, as they do each year.

Also in Thailand, The Nation reports that 388 bodies of tsunami victims are still unidentified at the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification and Repatriation Centre in Phang Nga. Another 445 people remain missing, mostly Thais but also 95 Burmese who were working here and 60 holidaying Scandinavians.

When he composed “You’re Missing”, Bruce Springsteen was writing about the people who didn’t come home from the World Trade Center like they were supposed to on the evening of September 11, 2001. The lyrics enmesh the missing from December 26, 2004, as well.

Coffee cup’s on the counter, jacket’s on the chair,
Paper’s on the doorstep, but you’re not there,
Everything is everything,
Everything is everything,
But you’re missing.

René Magritte: “The Castle in the Pyrnees” (detail), 1962

Earlier in Dorseyland:

The first anniversary
The second anniversary
The third anniversary

Ai Weiwei: “The Wave”, 2005, glazed ceramic

Today is the 40th anniversary of the day a famous Christian monk told a Thai audience that Eastern religion might be better. He was dead within hours.

Forty years ago today, a visiting monk from America who has since been described as the most famous Christian monastic since St Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th century, died by a quirk of fate in Samut Prakhan.

Thomas Merton, who had formulated theology and theories of peace and justice in discussion and correspondence with the Dalai Lama, DT Suzuki, Erich Fromm, Boris Pasternak, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Joan Baez and many others, had just given a morning talk about melding Eastern and Western religions.

The setting was Sawankaniwas in Tambon Tai Baan, a shady retreat with flower gardens and an aquarium, five kilometres south of downtown Samut Prakhan. It’s owned by the Thai Red Cross Society.

Merton, known as Father Louis, had emerged from 27 years of solitude at a Trappist monastery in Kentucky for two reasons. The first was to meet the Dalai Lama, which he did over the course of three days in Dharamsala, before flying on to Thailand. In earlier correspondence, the Tibetan leader had advised Merton to read about the Vajrayana school of metaphysics, which the American embraced enthusiastically.

In turn, His Holiness would later credit Merton with showing him that Tibetan Buddhism did not have a monopoly on spiritual truth. “As a result of meeting with him,” the Dalai Lama wrote, “my attitude toward Christianity was much changed.” He described Merton as a highly advanced lama.

Merton spent two months in India, also visiting New Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai, in the last city seeing Little Mount and St Thomas Mount, where Indian Christians believe the apostle Thomas brought the gospel in 52 AD, and where he was martyred 20 years later.

Then he had a stopover in Sri Lanka, where he viewed the three reclining Buddhas in Polonnaruwa. “This was,” he wrote in his journal, “the greatest aesthetic experience I’ve ever had in my life. All things become clear.”

Preparing for his journey to the Orient, Merton “was like a kid getting ready to go to the circus”, his secretary at the monastery, Brother Patrick Hart, told Knight Ridder Newspapers in 1998.

“It was a dream come true. He never thought he would get to Asia. He was going with the idea of learning from the wisdom of the East.”

Sawankaniwas, I’m reasonably sure, as seen on Google Earth.

In response to Vatican II, the Catholic Church’s sweeping policy realignment initiated by Pope Paul VI, the Confederation of Benedictine Abbots organised an inaugural Asian East-West Intermonastic Conference in Samut Prakhan. Merton’s second mission was to attend this gathering and, in his talk, compare Marxism to monasticism.

Simply put, the linkage is that Marxists believe change is impossible, and dangerous to attempt, without a thorough understanding of economic sub-structures, while monastics, both Buddhist and Christian, require the same level of understanding of the consciousness. Our inbred prejudices skew our comprehension, always placing our own ego at the centre of things.

It was a year of revolution, 1968, and Merton held forth on Marcuse (”a kind of monastic thinker”), the Sorbonne students (who told him, “We are monks also,” challenging the world’s claims) and Marx’s desire for a progression from individual greed to the good of the community.

Buddhist and Christian monasticism alike, he said, teach that social, political and economic structures cannot be counted on for support because of their inherent vulnerability. Only in detachment and purity of heart can be found freedom and transcendence.

Merton concluded his talk by saying that Buddhism and Hinduism could show Westerners how to achieve that freedom in spite of perceived external limitations.

Any questions for him would await the evening session, so he said simply, “I will disappear from view, and maybe we can all have a coke or something.” It was December 10, 1968, the the 27th anniversary of his entry into the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky.

Merton returned to the bungalow assigned to him and, around 3pm, had a shower in preparation for a nap. He crossed the floor, still wet, and reached up to switch on a tall floor fan. He was flattened by the current, and the fan fell on top of him, with the power still live. When his body was found soon after, there was a severe electrical burn across his chest. Merton was not quite 54.

It was an accident bizarre enough to generate multiple mystical notions, beginning with the fact that his 1948 autobiography had concluded with the words “to know the Christ of the burnt men”. There’s more!