Chuckler’s Musings

So I was watching Battlestar Galactica and got thinking what would really happen if someone was thrown out of an airlock.

Luckily, the internet knows.

I also checked out the incredibly diverting tvtropes.org, especially the “Reality is Unrealistic” page. The one that made me laugh the loudest:

Parodied in The Simpsons, where a Hollywoodesque special effects team paints a horse’s skin in a cow pattern, because “real cows don’t look like cows on-screen.” When asked how they would make something look like a horse on-screen, they suggest stringing a bunch of cats together.

Sorry to anyone who’s productivity I just ruined.

As the lawyers like to say, yesterday Mint and I were married de jure. This was not a super-easy process.

On Wednesday we caught a songtaew to the government office that deals with registrations. This was the wrong place. So we then caught a songtaew to the Amphur office, the equivalent I guess of a council office. This was the right place. It also turned out to be a short walk from our house, so we could’ve just walked if we new where it was already, but we didn’t, so there you go.

When we got there, we were given a number downstairs, and told to go upstairs. So we went upstairs, and there were a billion people there, so we took a seat. And waited. And waited. And waited.

It was the type of system where a computerized voice reads out “Customer 326, please go to customer service agent 5″. There were different sets of numbers for what the person wanted to do, ie. we were 328, but 440 was called before us because they were there for a different purpose … we had to wait for 326 and 327 to finish before we’d be called.

Anyway, after 2 hours I saw that 326 was still being served at counter 2. A counter which had no people behind it, no anyone standing in front of it. My first thought was that the staff member working behind counter 2 had gone home. This is Thailand, after all.

I got Mint to check, and it turned out we were supposed to re-register our number given to us downstairs with a desk upstairs. So two hours wasted, we started the paperwork. At 4:30pm, it was almost finished, except they wanted to see Jack’s birth certificate. We didn’t bring that, and they would close in 2 minutes. Defeated, we walked home.

Thursday was the charm. This time we brought Jack’s birth certificate, and were duly married. We needed to pay a witness to witness it, and Mint was later very cross at herself for giving the woman 1000 baht for it. She later realized the woman, who was ecstatic, would’ve been happy with 500, or even 200 for the two signatures. Still, we were married.

We had our own dodgy reception, at the food court at Kad Suan Kaew. I had this monstrosity for 229 baht that included 2 chicken breasts, a pork steak, roast potato and deep-fried fish. Oh, and 2 slices of thick toast with garlic butter. And coleslaw. It was waay too much food, but it’s my tradition that when I let myself get retarded hungry I always overorder. Oh well, it was a celebration I suppose.

You have to admit, there aren’t many countries in the world in which terrorists can take over one airport, let alone two, with impunity. People outside of Thailand know that the Army were ordered in and refused right?It’s been going on for days now, and is pretty serious: some pundits think Bangkok’s airports will be closed for weeks.

If that happens, I suspect I’ll not be home for Christmas - my flights go through Bangkok and if they need to be cancelled, flights from CM will not be available for love nor money. I already tried to change my CNX - BKK leg to a day earlier to do some embassy stuff, but all flights are full.

The real issue is my visa, which has expired and I am only on a “permission to stay” stamp until the 11th. I depart CNX on Thursday the 11th at 9:45am, so if the flight status is unknown up until, say 6am on the 11th, that means I’ll have to hightail it pretty quick to a border to get stamped out before midnight. Actually I just checked that, and apparently they’re giving discretionary powers to the border police on enforcing overstays that can be proved to be at the expense of closed airports. Still, this is Thailand, so I’d much prefer to have no doubt.

Also, weather here is quite cool. This morning I resorted to wearing my suit jacket for warmth. Looks like Mum and Dad only just missed the cool season!

Yesterday’s post inspired me to also post this:

http://schickfreeyourskin.com.au/go3d/player.html?id=00ec4f6a998e50f2b7936d35a7027907&

You’re welcome.

Hey everyone, sorry for the dearth of posts - I have been busy.

Tuesday I flew to Bangkok to visit the Australian embassy to register Jack as an Australian citizen. When I got there, there were a couple of groups of people ahead of me, and they took AGES. They were doing the same sorta thing, but usually it was old confused type men with their Thai GF on ridiculously high heels making heaps of mistakes on the form, which then needed to be filled out with heaps of eye rolling from the Australian old guy. When it was my turn, I’d read the instructions back to front and everything was completed 100% correct in advance, so I took 5 minutes. The guy serving me must’ve been SHOCKED.

From there I went to MBK and bought some new shorts. They didn’t have the shorts in the fabric I wanted, but they had long pants, and they said “no problem, I can make shorts for you” and whizzed up the legs to turn the long pants into shorts. Voila!

Then I went to The EuroGourmet Bistro for goulash with gnocchi, and a reuben sandwich. They were fantastic. The cheesecake desert was not fantastic, just average, but maybe that’s because I was really too full to be eating cheesecake anyway.

I headed to the cheap Ever Rich Inn on Sukhumvit between soi 5 and 7. I recall Brek stayed there once, pre-Mint, and the room was the cheapest and therefore didn’t have a window. This sounded perfect as I needed to get to bed early for an early start the next day. It was perfect. I was in bed by 7pm.

Yesterday I was up at 4am for a visa run to Cambodia. The bus left at 5am on the nose and got to Poipet n about 3 and a half hours. We then walked over the border and had breakfast at the Grand Diamond casino. Dawdled around for another 40 minutes, then walked back across the border and headed home. Once back in Bangkok, around 2pm, I headed to The EuroGourmet Bistro again for more goulash, this time with the pork knuckle. No cheesecake though - I had learned my lesson! I caught a cab from there to the airport and flew home.