Apologies to George Bellows as well as Dempsey and Firpo.

Other nations can find their own ways to cope with earthquakes, floods, cyclones and the plague of Big Oil. Thailand deals directly with God.

“God”, that is, in the sense of the spirits of the land, the Hindu pantheon and whoever’s in charge of the stars and planets.

Thaksin “Ousted” Shinawatra, who should be done with his pilgrimage around 99 temples and become fairly enlightened by now, said on June 16 that Thailand’s once-again-lethal political mess will be well and truly sorted out by July 2, and here we’ll extrapolate to include all the world’s current problems.

You see, he said, Mars — the planet but also the god of war and all things military (like coups d’etat) — would be “moving away” on June 21, and then there’d be no more danger. “After July 2, confusion in the country will ease. Let’s be patient. We will have headaches until July 2,” he said.

Apparently, by “moving away”, he meant that Mars will have caught up to and passed beyond Saturn as they run the million-kilometre dash across the constellation of Leo. Saturn, far bigger, a whole lot farther away and thus a much slower orbiter, is the tortoise in this celestial footrace. There could be trouble when the two planets meet en route.

The local star-gazers were quick to point out, though, that it’s not as simple as that, Mr Know-It-All-Who-Can’t-Even-Hold-a-Job. International Astrology Association president Pinyo Pongcharoen said the anti-corruption People’s Alliance for Democracy now massed around Government House is likely to clash violently with the defenders of Thaksin and current Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej between June 21 and August 29, with the Interior Ministry “targeted” in particular.

Another astrologer, Lak Rekhanithet, was much more dire: July 2, he said, will be “a day of hell”, Thailand’s worst day in 30 years, with death, explosions, fires and combat. He couldn’t have been more specific: “The situation will reach a climax at 11.07pm.”

Earlier Siamese spook stories

Another shrine destroyed
Thaksin consults the spirits
Post-coup shivers
Tsunami magic
My superstitious medium

Actually, Dorseyland has received a press release announcing that the world will end on July 5.

Apparently the Church of the SubGenius issues the same press release every year, which may be why Wikipedia seems to think it’s a “parody”. But, as with everything in Wikipedia, I’m not so sure.

The church predicted in 1980 that the world’s end would come on “X-Day” — July 5, 1998 — in the form of an alien invasion and global destruction, from which only church members would be rescued (by alien “Sex Goddesses”). When nothing happened in 1998, church theorists suggested they’d got the year upside down (it should be 8661), or that the calendar was wrong and July 5, 1998 hasn’t yet arrived, or that Earth and Mars were switched in 1998, and we missed “the Rupture” because we’re now actually living on Mars.

At any rate, the “SubGenials” will again be gathering this July 5 at the Brushwood Folklore Center in Sherman, New York, to await the outcome amid rock concerts, bonfires and random mayhem. Their sins will be ritually washed away in a baptism and they’ll “receive new ones in return”.

“Random mayhem” might be a good description for what’s been happening in Thailand lately, but what follows is a synopsis of certain events, all of which lead me to one inescapable conclusion: Thaksin Shinawatra is attempting to regain power through magic. And there’s very little about it that’s random. There’s more!

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!

With a fresh old government back in charge, Thailand is once again investing heavily in Burma, and for my part I’m eyeing the real estate. Just look at these great properties, none of which probably costs more than a few broken monks’ skulls!

This post is a political sandwich, heavy on spicy Google Earth condiments from the Land That Time Tried to Forget, and specifically from Naypyidaw, the still-spanking-new federal capital, which is going to be one giant construction site for a long time to come. More on that in a bit.

The Olympic jackbooting event in Tibet — at which the Chinese so admirably excel — has thankfully diverted the world’s attention away from Burma, giving the Thai government ample time to go in and sign some lucrative business deals.

Not that it needed a smokescreen. Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej was anxious to get started on his official visit to Burma earlier this month to sign a pact protecting Thai investment there when someone must have asked him about the rest of the world’s sanctions against the junta for, you know, killing Buddhist monks.

Suddenly even the newly revamped Best Business Newspaper in Thailand, The Nation, realised it had forgotten that there was another aspect to Samak’s trip besides buying natural gas from Burma’s Yadana field and hydropower from the long-delayed Tasang Dam on the Salween River (which will flood a good chunk of Shan State, but those rebels need cooling down anyway) and giving the generals Bt800 million to build a 40-kilometre road into Thailand.

Many bricks in the wall: Official HQ of the thieving government of Myanmar

Ah, right, said Foreign Minister Noppadon Pattama. Now that you mention it, Samak is going to attempt some “neighbourly engagement” to “help the junta to achieve national reconciliation and democracy”.

“The international community expects Thailand to play a significant role in breaking the political deadlock in Burma,” Noppadon said, quite correctly, before sticking his head in the muddy banks of the Salween. “But, like other Asean members, we will not interfere with the internal affairs of Burma” and no way Thailand is going to insist on opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi being allowed to play politics.

However, Noppadon assured the peaceniks, Thailand would give Burma some advice on fostering democracy ahead of its constitutional referendum in May.

But seriously, Noppadon, what’s on your mind?

“Thailand disagrees with sanctions,” he said. Instead, just talking to the junta “could lead to positive developments”. As the United Nations darn well knows. There’s more!

Topping the Dorseyland poll of best-ever Jules Verne books, comic or otherwise.

One hundred and forty-five years ago last week, a book by an unknown author went on sale in France. “Five Weeks in a Balloon” was about three travellers who’d become the first outsiders to glimpse the uncharted interior of Darkest Africa. They’d done so in a hot-air balloon, and been through a horrendous ordeal.

The book seemed to be a genuine journal, filled with detailed descriptions of places visited and events witnessed, but what an exciting story! A reviewer in Le Figaro demanded confirmation as to whether the account was truth or fiction. Jules Verne was suddenly the centre of attention.

He grew up with stars in his eyes and a stout breeze in his sails. His teacher at the school on Place du Bouffay had lost husband at sea; perhaps he would one day return. Jules made sure that he did, years later: The protagonist of his story “Mistress Branican” went out herself after 14 years’ wait and found her long-lost spouse.

In a later grade at school Verne had a professor who would design the US Navy’s first submarine. As a kid Jules rented little skiffs for cruises along the Loire River that flowed past his house in Nantes. One time the boat sank and Jules was stranded on a tiny islet until the tide went out. What a marvellous adventure. He was keen to have more.

His father was a lawyer, though, and that’s what he wanted Jules to be, so he sent him to Paris to study. Big mistake. Paris! The theatre alone in Paris was a fantasy come true! He met Victor Hugo, and Jacques Arago, who’d written the bestseiller “Journey Around the World”, and Alexandre Dumas, the author of “The Three Musketeers”, and became best pals with Dumas’ son. Jules was prodded to try writing plays. He kept at it for a decade, finishing his law studies but leaving it at that, and yet foundering in his literary efforts. “Blind Man’s Bluff” did fairly well, and there were 25 others, but he was far from rolling in francs. His father had cut him off, so he got a job as a stockbroker, and only then did he have enough money to get married.

Honorine Hebe du Fraysse de Viane Verne had buried one husband, the father of her two daughters, and she knew enough to encourage Jules in his writing. He’d had a story in mind since reading Poe’s “The Balloon Hoax”, about an accidental crossing of the Atlantic, and “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall”, about a trip all the way to the moon in a balloon! And he’d met the greatest living balloonist as well — the photographer Felix Nadar. One day Verne would join his Society for Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by Means of Heavier-Than-Air Craft (but decline at the last minute to ride aloft in the club’s monstrous balloon Geante).

Jules had been reading the geographical magazines, too, full of compelling yarns about faraway places. He’d found out quite a bit about Africa, or at least as much as Europeans thought they knew. Between his newfound writer and scientist friends and the imagination nurtured in his childhood, he had his own tale to tell now. There’s more!

What really happened to poor old Edgar Allan Poe in the end? I dug out an old biography and nosed around the Net and developed a tour for Google Earth attempting to track his meanderings in his final four months. And, hoping to infuse a little humour into a morbid tale, I incorporated pictures of him and the places where he lived and visited into original graphics with a comic-book look to them. I hope that’s okay with Edgar’s kin.

“Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” Poe wondered. “Everything about him is controversial,” concedes the Poe Society of Baltimore, “literally from the place and date of his birth to the exact location and date of his burial.”

Poe himself toyed with the dates and places in his story and laid false claims to bolster his reputation and sell more of his writings, such as having joined the Greek fight for liberation in 1828. If Poe’s biography is a delicate house of cards, every card is ornately imprinted with intriguing clues left by him and others. The puzzle is as compelling as anything in his tales.

The bicentennial of his birth will be commemorated in 2009. There will be more research and perhaps more revelations about his life and, hopefully, his strange death, which has, to date, been blamed on too much booze alone, the resulting delirium tremens, opium, some sort of lesions on the brain, tuberculosis, epilepsy, diabetes, rabies, heart disease, a rare enzyme disorder, dipsomania, hypoglycaemia, epilepsy, carbon monoxide poisoning, a savage revenge beating and the brutal practice of fixing elections through “cooping”. By one of these means or something else, to use John Pendleton Kennedy’s words, “A bright but unsteady light has been awfully quenched.”

In need of some cash

In June 1849 Edgar Allan Poe was living with his aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Poe Clemm, in what is now the “Poe Cottage” but is referred to by scholars as the Fordham Cottage. He’d moved there in about May 1846 following the financial collapse of his newspaper, the Broadway Journal, where he’d been hired as an editor in February 1845, then became sole editor and then the owner.

The cottage, now maintained by the Bronx Historical Society, is where Poe wrote “The Cask of Amontillado”, and there too his wife Virginia died on January 30, 1847, no doubt fuelling the intense morbidity of his writing. Poe had married his cousin in 1836, when she was 13. The bed in which she died is preserved here.

Virginia’s death may also have caused Poe to drink more, though his supposed “weakness” for alcohol is in permanent dispute among biographers. It’s been claimed that since his youth he could never drink much without becoming either obnoxious or unconscious, and that alcohol greatly hindered his newspaper career.

Poe’s ambition in the summer of 1849 was to finally launch his long-planned magazine, the Stylus, and to raise money for it he embarked on a lecture tour on June 29, travelling to Philadelphia, Richmond and Norfolk. There’s more!