The other day one of my adult students, Yuki (not her real name), was learning words for feelings and emotions. One of the exercises in the book asked the student to describe what she did when she was happy, sad, tired, cold, scared, etc.

When we got to “What do you do when you’re scared?” she began a story. Eight months ago, she woke up one night to see a woman in her room. She was a white woman, blonde; and her face was on fire. The woman was pressing her hands on the wardrobe. Then she came towards Yuki, who was in bed with her sound-asleep husband. The woman touched Yuki’s neck. Then she disappeared. The next morning there were handprints on the wardrobe that only Yuki could see.

She said she’d been petrified, but she tried to communicate with the ghost and ask her what she wanted. She didn’t get an answer. Guessing that the woman had been murdered, she asked a neighbour if a white woman had been killed in the building. Yes, said the neighbour. A woman had been killed in the basement by a man who threw oil or petrol on her and set her on fire.

Yuki told me that she saw the ghost a second time, after which she left the bedroom door open at night so that her cats could come in. Cats, she said, have the ability to keep ghosts away. One of her other teachers, who speaks much better Japanese than me and had also heard the story, told me that Yuki came from a family of Shinto priests and that she’d also done an exorcism ritual in the room. He said that a few of his students had told him they’d seen ghosts. We don’t know whether the Japanese area of town is particularly densely haunted, or whether all of Bangkok is ghost-infested and we just hear about the ones our students encounter.

My mother on one occasion saw ghosts in our old house - white wraithlike things - and I once woke up one morning there with two inexplicable stains, one red and one white, on top of my blankets. I was always slightly nervous in that house at night and had no wish to encounter its ghosts. Nor do I want to meet any residues of the dead here. I don’t have a cat, but I’m thinking of buying a toy one. No kidding. I just wonder who has greater powers, Doraemon or Hello Kitty.

Inspired by the mesmerising melty blue cow Laurie found by doing an image search for “steak”, I searched for “pork”, and found, well, this. The inventor of the pork martini, Josh Karpf, is an editor at Random House, my publisher in the US. Now I begin to understand how I got published. Editors are as crazy as writers, or possibly crazier.

In a note that strikes a pleasing symmetry with yesterday’s jarred baby discussion, he describes the Spam-in-vodka as pickled-fetal-tissue imitation. I so want to make fetus martinis now. It would be art, like Damien Hirst’s pickled shark. A row of them on a stainless steel counter. Or arranged on a windowsill with some plastic unicorns and a photo of Orlando Bloom.

Continuing in the erratic tradition of the first six pages:

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Concerning Pom Jo, Castle Laputa and pirates, from my surrogate elder brother Geoff Maloney. Oddities, created and found, by Geoff and fellow writers Lee and Lyn Battersby and Paul Haines can be found at Jerry Jarvis’ Wig.

“Monday — bought Alchemy & Mysticism for Diana a wonderful Taschen book of illustrations from hermetical texts. There was one picture that I particularly liked — Laputa the Castle in the Air from Gulliver’s Travels.

Tuesday - Zoran sends me the cover for Fantasical Journeys — its central image is Laputa the Castle in the air — identical to the one in the book

Today — reading your blog came across Pom Jo from your dream — I’m kind of fasinated by found names, so I did an internet search

And found that “Pom Jo” exists in a Spanish online play called: Laputa Castle in the Air (Spanish translation of Miyazaki’s Laputa - ed.). Spanish site: http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/laputa/script_laputa_spanish.txt

After translating the site I found the play featured: DORA, Mrs. Capitana of the pirate airship, the Polilla of the Tiger. Trying to obtain the Levistone de Sheeta at the outset, She decides then to help Pazu and Sheeta. Which conincides with your blog entry about female pirates and the Vandermeers’ anthology.

Also in the search on Pom Jo there’s another site about POM updates maintained by Jo Vandermeeren

And the link directly above that one is about Bristish perfumer Jo Malone’s Pom Noir fragrance.”

And lastly - “Diana took Alex shopping for some material yesterday. She needed to make something for a school project, and she bought home a soft pink flannelette material with black Jolly Rogers all over it — just the sort of thing for the lady pirate!”

Thanks to Geoff for letting me post this. I love coincidences and am inclined to look for messages in them. The obvious one here is that I should get around to seeing Laputa. I checked out a review of the Pom (actually Pomegranate) Noir fragrance, in which the reviewer likens it to one of my favourite scents, Passage D’Enfer. Here’s the online shop. I probably won’t be buying a bottle as the exchange rate from pounds to other currency makes it rather expensive, but it does sound nice.

Addendum: last night I ordered a coconut shake in a bar. The owner made it an alcoholic version. On the bill it was listed as a “pirate’s lady”.

To Tim, who is sick of pirates, sorry…

One night recently, Stu received a well-deserved three of these cards from the girls at Rawhide, a bar on Soi Cowboy. This is the best English I have ever seen in Thailand. I must say, I would like to meet the mass-market Cyrano de Bergerac who wrote it, as such eloquent diction is rare these days even among native speakers of English. But there are some very old farang men here in Bangkok; as Stu says, they come here to die; and if I were an old man I would probably want to die in Soi Cowboy too.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a Buddhist discussion class in which it was repeatedly stated that this world is an illusion, and a crappy illusion at that, with little to recommend it to the enlightened being. To the unenlightened being, however, it offers such grim, satanic, frostbitten, very very very blasphemous joys as Impaled Northern Moonforest. Thanks to the LinkKing for this.

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From Russia (?) with magic, thanks to Michael Cisco for the link.

I found this page by accident. It shows pictures of creatures made out of Sculpy by kids with behavioural problems or alleged behavioural problems. I love the Hornflyer and its description. My gut instinct is to argue with the therapist about some of the conclusions she draws, e.g. the creature is legless, so it can’t move (but it can fly); the one below has no mouth to communicate with (but it may communicate by other means - kids think of stuff like that). But it isn’t my field, so I probably don’t have a right to an opinion. If I were to make a sculpy creature representing myself it’d be something with two heads (possibly that two-headed fetus). Because there just aren’t enough two-headed monsters out there.

My teaching license is up for renewal, so I had to give my boss a photo. It was rejected, though, because it showed too much of my collarbone - not cleavage - I don’t have one - just collarbone. While I knew that Thai custom considers it modest to cover the area, and many Thais do cover it, wearing high-necked clothing is uncomfortable in the heat and Thais don’t seem to mind that most farang, if they aren’t required to wear a shirt and tie, tend to leave the area uncovered. But it was no good for a license photo. So I had to get another set taken, in a less revealing shirt. I was rather pleased with the squinting, stoned expression I achieved. I got to work yesterday to find my Thai boss giggling - that photo was no good either, because the proportion of my face to the background was too great. So, as he was running out of time, his friend at the ministry of education told him to go to a photo shop nearby and get the image, well, photoshopped. They took my head and stuck it on the body of a wide-shouldered woman wearing a black suit and white shirt, and altered my hair to make the images fit better. “You look like a bank lady,” he said. Yep. A stoned bank lady.

Edit: ok, here are the pictures (oh, and this is my crappy haircut, too). I don’t have a scanner, so I had to take them with my camera. The first is the immodest one. The middle is stoned and the last is bank lady. My hair just looks like it’s pushed back, I guess. But I think it should go with a sign “do not feed the loans manager”.

Something I discovered today while I was looking through vintage porn sites for a reference picture.
(Dave, if you’re reading this - porn yo!)

Warning - the following links lead to images that may be racist or sexist. (And vulgar - but since this is the internet, that’s like saying a road may have cars on it, no?)

http://www.tijuanabibles.org/
http://www.millionaireplayboy.com/entertainment/tjbible.php

A summary from Wikipedia - “Tijuana bibles (also known as “eight-pagers”) were pornographic comic books produced in the United States from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Their popularity peaked during the Great Depression era. The typical “bible” is 4 by 6 inches (approx. 10 x 15 cm), with black printing on cheap white paper, and eight pages long. In most cases the artists, writers and publishers of these tracts are unknown. The art is usually crude and sometimes included racist caricatures […]. Their subject is explicit sexual escapades usually featuring well known cartoon characters, political figures or movie stars (used without permission).”