We moved

Hedda's Hopper can now be found at:


http://www.baht-stop.com



.

Moving the Hopper

As some of you may know by now, I have accepted, in between redecorating a new livingroom here, an invitation from the new posting board called The Baht Stop to move Hedda's Hopper there - as a separate forum under my editorial control.

As regular readers know, I have never been satisfied with the limited software format for discussion that this Blog format provides, given the totally uncontrolled nature of posting here and the limited format for comments.

I feel comfortable with the posting attitudes expressed by the new board and its administator. I am eager to accept the chance to move the Hopper to this new and better platform.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I hope to see you at the new Hopper when I'm back and ready to go.


PS: The new site can be found at : http://www.baht-stop.com

Gone fishing

Just a brief note to let you all know that I'm leaving for a brief holiday today and will be back next week. Perhaps by then, the authorites will have told us more about the alleged plot to bomb the prime minister.

To date, the only person charged in the matter is the army guy who was arrested at the wheel of the car. He claims he was paid to pick the car up and was arrested before he even had a chance to start the engine.He denies knowing that there were any explosives in the vehicle.

There have been so many press versions of what happened that morning that it's impossible to put together any kind of coherent theory of what really went down. The biggest mystery is how and when the police decided to stop and arrest this driver and this car when they did.

The army man arrested with the car has been charged with possessing explosives without a license, but he is not the car's owner and the police still have not identified who actually owned the car.

For a plot allegedly involving the attempted assassination of a prime minister, this investigation appears to be proceeding at a very slow pace indeed. That can only feed the popular gossip and rumors that this was really a big sham manufactured for political purposes. But by whom ?

I wonder if we'll ever really know.

See you all next week when the Blog will resume normal operations again.

Dumping trash

The continuing saga of Whatever-happened-to-Sawatdee-Forum rages on, in what now appears to have been a simple matter of its owner, the man who calls himself Elephantspike, having had the plug pulled for the non-payment of rent.

Now that's the sort of thing that can happen to anyone, even if it's just a little more than embarrassing when it happens to you. Even worse, however, is when you allow your friends and associates to look very foolish when they start to publicly imagine all sorts of terrible scenarios, only to find out that you were just a little short on arranging a payment on time.

Even if the rent is current now, one wonders what kind of absentee landlord or slumlord is pushing the buttons, or simply ignoring, the goings on at SF. There are some real head cases lurking there and the reputed owner doesn't seem to care enough to comment on recent events.

But what I found equally amazing about the blackout at Sawatdee was not only the utterly adolescent way in which some posters reacted to the sudden closure. What was truly appalling was the manner in which all sorts of Sawatdee veterans, starting with dear old Smirks, and all the usual trolls, who immediately highjacked the GayThailand posting board as their emergency communications center, without the slightest apololgy or thank you for the obvious imposition.

Mind you, it wasn't like a good neighbor coming next door to ask politely if he can use your phone because his is out of order. No, the Sawatdee gang arrived without invitation like some long-lost brother-in-law, out of time on his own mobile phone, who saw the lights on and dropped in to use your home and phone for free.

It got so bad that some of the veteran trolls like Farang Boss were actually giving progress reports on GayThailand as to what might have happened to Sawatdee's missing owner. Another tearful SF troll actually posted a "Thanks for the Memories" tribute to Elephanstpike, not on the old Sawatdee, which was still being run by Jinx because the rent was paid in advance, but on GayThailand, where many of these jokers had never even visited, much less posted before.

Smiles & Company should be ashamed for moving in on Gaythailand as if it was their private satellite link with the real world. Elephantspike may be too indifferent a captain to care how he runs his ship, but that doesn't excuse his crew from acting like the pirates of the caribbean, jumping from their sinking ghost ship onto the nearest thing that floats.

To their credit, the men running GayThailand were too polite to wonder or ask when the visitors with the eye patches and muddy boots might be leaving. Indeed, they might well turn out to be refugees who came to stay. Now that's a chilling thought, isn't it ? Sort of like the Marielle boat crowd that Castro used as cover to dump his trash in Florida.

As most of you regular Blog readers know by now, I am not a great admirer of the sloppy and sleazy way in which Sawatdee Forum has been operated at times in the past. What I guess I never really appreciated until now is that some of these folks just don't seem to have the class to know how to act decently. Pity.

I forgot that Shitsville can be just as much a state of mind on the internet, as it is a place on the Gulf of Siam. That won't change just because the rent is now current.

Israel Democracy at work

The gentleman at the right is the Speaker of the Palestinian parliament, Professor Abdel Aziz Dweik, a former college professor, recently elected speaker of parliament, who remains imprisoned for weeks now under Israeli army control, under charges of being a "member of an outlawed organization."

That organization is Hamas, the political party which won the parliamentary elections earler this year, and which George Bush and the United Nations had urged the Palestinians to hold "in order to reform and elect a democratic government for Palestine." When the people voted overwhelmingly for Hamas, Israel refused to accept the outcome and George Bush went into hiding.

Speaker Aziz is shown here, as he appeared before a secret Israeli military tribunal at an army base located somewhere in Israeli-occupied Palestine. On wonders if any of the Israeli army officers on that tribunal had fathers or grandfathers who found themselves in the same position, accused by some Gestapo tribunal in occupied Europe, of being "members of an outlawed organization."

Dweik is among an estimated 35 members of the Palestinian Parliament, all duly elected in the UN sponsored elections, or cabinet members, who have been rounded up by Israel's brown shirts and imprisoned without trial. It's another example of "Israeli democracy" in action, one that George Bush or the American Israeli lobbyists never talk about.

Then again, it's not much different from what Bush has been doing in Guantanimo, is it. But isn't this the kind of tyranny that we are supposed to be fighting against, not for ?