A Mayan mask in jade mosaic from around 500 AD

As most people predicted — quite uncannily, I think — the prediction last month by astrologer Lak Rekhanithet that July 2 would be “a day of hell”, Thailand’s worst day in 30 years, with death, explosions, fires and combat” reaching a climax at 11.07pm, turned out to be, uh, wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Nothing much of anything happened in Thailand on July 2, even in the Deep South, where mayhem is an almost everyday experience.

This was excellent news, of course, for all the people who would have died and been injured had Lak’s prophecy proven correct, but it’s a major disappointment for the rest of us who were counting on something dramatic to happen.

I’d taken heart in an Associated Press story on June 21 headlined “Everything is spinning out of control”. It began, “Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Airfares, college tuition and healthcare border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.”

An American angle to be sure, although the saga did point out the far direr news from China (more than 69,000 dead in the earthquake) and Burma (78,000 killed and 56,000 missing thanks to Cyclone Nargis and the junta).

But July 2? Nothing, even with Thaksin Shinawatra’s endorsement.

I’ve written before about the body blow that Comet Kohoutek delivered to my gullibility by remaining invisible in 1973 when it was supposed to illuminate the night sky as if it were day. And yet somehow I still wish to believe in a greater force. There’s more!

Thaksin Shinawatra is going to need a new lawyer now that his whole legal team has been thrown in jail for trying to bribe the Supreme Court, but he should have his old lawyer back soon, once Noppadon Pattama loses his job as Foreign Minister over the Preah Vihear fiasco.

Meanwhile, naturally, nothing’s actually changed, so back to more speculation about the supernatural.

The picture above shows an equilateral triangle superimposed on a Google Earth image of Central Thailand and western Cambodia. Preah Vihear is at one corner, and Koh Kong — the Cambodian island in which Thaksin is allegedly investing — at another. I added a triangle thinking the other point would rest on Bangkok, but it doesn’t. It sits almost exactly on Nakhon Nayok.

Five years ago, when Thaksin was at the height of his power as prime minister, he designated Ban Na, a largely agricultural district in Nakhon Nayok, about 100 kilometres northeast of Bangkok, as the future site of Thailand’s new administrative capital, along with adjacent areas of Saraburi province’s Wihan Daeng and Kaeng Khoi districts.

He called it Muang Mai, meaning “New City”, although the name Muang Sawan — Celestial City — was also kicked around.

The idea was to ease Bangkok’s population burden and, starting in 2005, to move the halls of government to 250,000 rai in the adjoining provinces to the northeast, to be shared with residential and commercial development, a new royal palace, schools, hospitals, first-class hotels, its own mass-transit system linked to Bangkok and Suvarnabhumi Airport, facilities devoted to “environmental tourism” and hi-tech industry — but no polluters.

More than a third of the area was to remain green, with parks or retained farmland. Ban Na means “home of the paddy fields”.

Civic planning began in earnest, and public forums got the citizens of Nakhon Nayok excited about the prosperity that development would bring. Land prices immediately jumped tenfold as speculators swarmed in, and at least one newspaper openly accused two of the country’s biggest corporations of hoarding thousands of rai while owners of small parcels were being duped.

Then, in August 2006, there was a larger-than-usual gathering of military officers for the annual anniversary celebrations of the Royal Military Academy in Nakhon Nayok. Privy Council president Prem Tinsulanonda attended for the first time in years, the Bangkok Post reported, quoting sources close to him as saying his presence “was aimed at fostering unity, amid reports of attempted political interference”. There’s more!

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!

It’s always wincingly amusing when scientists show up in the media saying, “We’ve got good news and bad news.” That’s in effect what happened the other day when, simultaneously, Arizona State University’s International Institute for Species Exploration unveiled its top-10 list of newly discovered species and ScienceDaily.com announced that the Caribbean monk seal is no longer with us.

One species extinct and 10 new ones found doesn’t seem like a bad deal, but of course that’s just the way the news bubbled up. In fact far more species are being lost every year than are discovered.

And a lot of people will wonder if the 10 “new” species are really that much of a boon to life on earth when they include a duck-billed dinosaur that’s been dead for 75 million years, a frog that doesn’t look too healthy either, other weird creatures like a bat, a ray and a rhinoceros beetle and the jazzy specimen pictured above, Thailand’s very own “shocking pink dragon millipede”.

Desmoxytes purpurosea, to give the millipede its Sunday-go-to-meeting moniker, “sits openly on the ground and vegetation during the day”, probably indicating that it’s toxic if eaten. That, its colour and its “common name” were enough to get it on the top-10 list.

The list is designed to thrill, with animals selected from among thousands of nominees based on unique or surprising attributes, the intent being to promote biodiversity awareness.

The Bangkok Post on June 11 quoted Somsak Panha as saying his “animal systematics research unit” from Chulalongkorn University determined that Shocking Pink — up to seven centimetres long and with 88 legs (one for every key on the piano, in case anyone wants to try training them) — lives primarily among the limestone mountains of northern and central Thailand. Despite its surmised toxicity, the beast regularly appears on rat and squirrel menus. There’s more!

“Opium Dream: An Asian Adventure”
By Jason Schoonover
Published by Asia Books, 2002

A Bangkok-based author makes a bold claim about his latest novel. My review for The Nation, published on October 15, 2004.

Author Jason Schoonover says the “debauched ways” of his character Lee Rivers “are a reflection of considerable research — and readers want to read about that too”. The readers of Schoonover’s books, “Opium Dream” and “Thai Gold”, are a curious demographic. “I can’t tell you how many men have written to say my books are the only things that kept them sane while forced to be stateside or in Oz,” the author says.

These guys enjoy Rivers’ sense of humour as he carries on a running conversation with his penis, Ol’ Thunder, which, Schoonover says, “Only plays a, uh, small role, but he’s a big crowd favourite, constantly brought up by my readers.” Heh heh.

Schoonover, who has bases in Thailand and Canada, travels about the world collecting primitive art and antiquities for museums, which puts him in a good position to write about “Khun Indiana” Rivers, who travels about the world collecting primitive art and antiquities for museums.

Among Bangkok’s boozy, billowing, expatriate novel-writing community, he claims to have been the first to “have a book go international”, his 1988 “Thai Gold” selling “a respectable 125,000″ copies.

“I wrote the kind of book I wanted to read about Thailand,” he says, “fast-paced, a real roller-coaster ride, with lots of twists and turns, and rich, fascinating characters. For those, I mined the local spook and Air America community.” There’s more!