Former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra showed up on Facebook on Friday, the eve of the eve of his 60th birthday — apparently the real one, not one of the fakes who’ve borrowed his name previously to chat up FB babes.

Of course I beseeched his comradeship and was soon enough accepted as an official Facebook Friend. Good thing I didn’t wait, too: When I applied for chumdom he already had about 400 friends, and by the time I was accepted, just a short while later, he had twice that number.

So I poked him.

Ladyboys: The Secret World of Thailand’s Third Gender
By Susan Aldous and Pornchai Sereemongkonpol
Published by Maverick, 2008

The lives, heartaches and breakthroughs of Thai gender benders, shared in a weave of miserable lament and giddy fluff. My review, at the request of the publisher.

I suppose Susan Aldous and Pornchai Sereemongkonpol’s book makes a decent guide for young people pondering gender — and the possibility of changing it — and a warm companion for kathoey who can identify with its many familiar episodes.

Other than that, I don’t see the point.

The argument that not enough is written about transgenders in Thailand is patently false. Who doesn’t already know how surgeons turn a penis inside out to form a vagina? Or that effeminate boys go through hell en route to realising they’re really girls?

The justification that straights reading this book will come to understand and empathise more with kathoey might stand up if it were better written, with answers to more probing questions, rather than being a lazy transcript of nine women’s not-altogether-edifying life stories. Besides, the bigots are never going to read this book.

The authors seem to think they’ve got a closet full of secrets to share with the world about ladyboys following their interviews with the nine disparate individuals.

Unless I’m badly mistaken, these “secrets” are that the ones who still have penises tape them tightly into their crotches to appear more like women, and that breast implants have to be massaged daily following the operation to keep them from assuming unsightly shapes.

This stuff is common knowledge to anyone who’s ever read a magazine feature about the women-trapped-in-men’s-bodies who seek new identities under fresh but misguided labels like sao praphet song (second kind of woman) and phet thi sam (the third sex). Why the authors are so caught up with taep — the Thai word for penis-taping — is beyond me. It’s just “tape”, just as com is the “Thai word” for computer. (NOTE: Please see the comments below.)

And are the authors really “authors”? Each of the kathoey featured tells her own story with no interjections from an interviewer, first person all the way through. Presumably Aldous and Pornchai have stitched together the segments and fixed up the syntax, but in doing so, their approach is exposed for its affectation, because all nine women misspeak the same, and surely that’s not their fault.

Everyone refers to their place of origin, for example, as “the Ubon Ratchathani province” or “the Nakhan Sawan province”. Why “the”?

Finally, while Aldous and Pornchai gush in their introduction about the “willingness, warmth and openness” their subjects displayed, only two of the ladyboys come across as likeable. One of them is Parinya “Nong Toom” Charoenphol, the celebrated former kick-boxer, who KO’s any desire to embrace kathoey wholeheartedly.

“It is very disheartening to find a group of people who you think understand you, only to discover that not one among them is genuine,” she says of the ladyboys she’d sought out as companions.

“I have plenty of friends who want to eat with me in nice restaurants and have fun, but none of them are willing to be there for me when I’m down. I don’t intend to stop socialising with them, though. I think it’s important to be able to acknowledge their flaws and keep them at bay. I just won’t be giving them any further handouts.”

TEXT BITE: From airline hostess Nicky, one of the “success stories” in the book: “The only real difficulty we now face is that some of his friends and family don’t know about my true identity, and he insists that he doesn’t want them to ever find out. His parents are very fond of me and often ask when we plan to marry and how many grandchildren I expect to give them. I feel so flattered by their expectations that I hate the thought of dashing their hopes.”

TIME TO GO: A Bang Kwan inmate is prepared for execution, in this case by lethal injection.
Nation photos

The Last Executioner: Memoirs of Thailand’s Last Prison Executioner
By Chavoret Jaruboon with Nicola Pierce
Published by Maverick House, 2006

Chavoret Jaruboon’s memoir about being licensed to kill has remained a solid seller for three years. Here’s why. My review for The Nation, published in abbreviated form in June.

Chavoret Jaruboon has a big heart, and that shouldn’t be a surprise just because he’s pumped bullets into 55 other people’s hearts.

He won’t like that line. He’s meek about the job he did at Bang Kwan Prison and always abhorred the spotlight that invariably fell on it, whether in admiration or condemnation, it didn’t matter.

It’s been three years since “The Last Executioner” hit the shelves, but the publisher noticed we hadn’t touched it and pointed out the oversight. It’s a serious oversight to miss a book like this in Thailand. The central story is gripping, and it’s also got history, sociology, psychology, good crime-case stuff, insider information on how the government works, and plenty of cautionary advice.

It’s also got a lot of flaws, most of which could presumably have been fixed by Chavoret’s co-author (or is it ghostwriter?), Nicola Pierce.

What exactly her role here was is not at all clear, but the flaws are of the sort that her command of English surely ought to have overcome.

Chavoret says he learned English by listening to his dad’s “Frank Sinatra and Eddie Williams” records. It’s doubtful he meant either of the jazz musicians by the latter name, so who’s he talking about, the very obscure Eddie Williams and the Crusaders? If you Google “Sinatra Eddie Williams”, the search turns up Google’s online version of this very book! Surely a ghostwriter-editor-assistant writer should have sorted this out.

A good editor-helper could have also goosed up the drab passages, although, arguably, they might feel they have to let the author speak in his “own voice” and tell the story in his own words. Chavoret is certainly capable of spinning a good yarn, but the book, overall, sags against amateurish template. Letting it rest there just seems lazy.

Not to worry — what a story he’s got to share, once you get past the humdrum chapters on his youth, enlivened in part only by his stints as a teen doorman in Patpong and as a rock guitarist in the cheesy cafes around US military bases. These episodes merely serve as an excuse to natter on rather pointlessly about prostitution, the Vietnam War and the music business, but finally, about 100 pages in, we get to attend an execution.

There’s more!

David Carradine, who died this week, was, of course, a close personal friend of mine. We worked together on that television series about kung fu — what was its name?

But that was a long time ago, and David never even bothered telling me he was coming to Bangkok to shoot a picture. He was probably still ticked off about the time I told him Peter Fonda was a better actor. I was kidding!

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.