Synchronise watches
for 11.07pm on July 2

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!

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.
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.

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
















