Published on June 27, 2005

Pudgy police face dietary action; two frowns and an up yours; Chuwit parks his name; credit cards aplenty; who left the gate to the asylum open?

Police have filed defamation charges against forensic expert Khunying Pornthip Rojanasunand for questioning whether a fugitive murder suspect shot five times really committed suicide or was the victim of an extrajudicial killing by police.

Excuse me . . .

Police have filed defamation charges against forensic expert Khunying Pornthip Rojanasunan for questioning whether a fugitive murder suspect shot five times really committed suicide or was the victim of an extrajudicial killing by police.

Yep, that’s what I thought it said.

Sunthorn Wongdao was found dead in his house last month with four bullets in his lung and one to his head.

The police called it suicide.

And we all laughed, thinking the boys in tight brown were employing their keen sense of humour to elicit a few chuckles among the populace and reinforce their image as a whacky, fun-loving bunch of law enforcement officers.

But this seems not to be the case.

They are serious.

Talk about trying anything to bring Pornthip down.

The cops would love to have forensics under their control.

If this happened, it would likely lead to a sharp increase in the number of suicides among fugitives.

The charges against Pornthip, deputy director of the Central Institute for Forensic Science, and Manit Suthaporn, the Justice deputy permanent secretary, were made by five police who had been pursuing Sunthorn.

Colonel Thirasak Surawong said his men did not kill Sunthorn and the comments cast a bad light on them.

Well, he’s convinced me.

Welcome to the Theatre of the Absurd. Don’t forget to close the door behind you.

Lose weight or else lose weight, cops told

Bangkok’s traffic congestion has been blamed on a number of causes, but according to the capital’s traffic police, part of the problem lies in the fact that traffic police officers are too fat, reads a story we plucked from somewhere.

Hang on. Senior cops were rabbiting on about corpulent coppers about three months ago; telling them they all had to lose weight within three months or else . . .

Or else, they would give them another six moths to lose weight, it seems.

Metropolitan Police chief Pansiri Prapawat said that weight problems were affecting the ability of traffic police to carry out their duties efficiently.

According to the chief, 30 per cent of police were too beefy to boogie. This puts them at a disadvantage when trying to stop agile motorcyclists at check points, thereby denying them a valuable stream of income.

A reason to frown

The Public Relations Department website has a page called Media Monitoring, where it publishes stories about Thailand that have run in overseas publications.

It then rates this stories according to the negative, positive or neutral light these articles cast on Thailand.

The system used to indicate these ratings is a series of smiley faces (also known as emicons on Planet Microsoft). A big toothy grinning smiley face means the story is positive about Thailand. A frowning smiley means the story carries negative news about the Kingdom. A smiley with straight-mouthed indifference means the story was neither postive or negative. As much as we wish we were making this up, we are not. It is, like the frowning smiley, sad but true.

Here’s proof.

Normally you would think that a simple yet effective smiley rating system would be hard to stuff up, which makes us wonder what the “In the world of carbuilders, Thailand relies heavily on a pickup” story contains to get both a grinning smiley and a frowning smiley.

Perhaps the story ran the gamut of emicons.

While the smiley rating system has a lot of adherents, many media critics prefer the Hello Kitty rating system, which tends to be more accurate. The old school of media analysts, however, refuse to abandon the Snoppy rating system. But we like the Pokemon system best of all!

Burmese knicked

A Burmese labourer crept into the room of an 18-year-old female university student while she slept and made off with her panties and a cell phone.

On finding her phone missing, the student dialled its number and the Burmese answered, proving you don’t need a brain to answer a mobile phone – as the rest of this story will indicate.

The student asked for her phone back and agreed to the Burmese man’s demands for what the Chiang Mai Mail quaintly called “rumpy-pumpy” .

Anyway, the Burmese man arrives back at the student’s room, loins girded, only to find his dreams shattered by a clutch of burly police officers.

The student said that her underwear had gone missing on several prior occasions, but always returned when it got lonely, according to the Chiang Mai Mail.

Yeah, right

The winner of the Flying Pig Quote of the Week is Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who uttered:

“No one, no matter how influential, is above the law.”

This quote desperately needs an asterisk pointing to a proviso at the bottom of page: “except”, then a very long list of names.

Ice-creaming it

The boys in tight brown set up a checkpoint on Rama IV Road, about 200 metres from the Sukhumvit Road junction, and proceeded to pull over passing motorcyclists at random. At one stage they hauled in two ice-cream vendors within a minute of each other – one from Paul’s, the other from Nestle.

The two ice-cream bikers parked beside each other and faced a simultaneous grilling from the cops.

Both paid a fine of Bt200 and six Coronetts before being allowed to turn their music back on and leave.

Credit not due

A story from AFP about Thailand’s consumer credit boom on the Public Relations Department website was tagged with an indifferent smiley face. We would have given it the Hello Kitty index finger for sure, as it gave the impression that Thai banks are run by halfwits. Well, who else would set up a system whereby staff charged with dispensing credit cards to bank clients worked on a commission. That is, the more cards they give to people, the more money they make.

The AFP story quoted one lady who had nine credit cards. She said she accepted them as a favour from her friend who worked at a bank because her friend received commission for each card.

The lady said she only used three of the cards (is that all?), but admitted the annual fees for nine cards stung.

Would we be wrong in guessing this practice is widespread?

What a recipe for disaster.

Madness . . . mayhem

Will this parade of lunacy ever end? Five-bullet suicides; cops on diets; a prime minister telling us everyone is equal before the law; clutches of credit cards dispensed with abandon; a government department that awards smileys for happy stories from the foreign press; a safari park without animals; everybody gets a cow each, soon; dried longans for Chinese amoured vehicles; exploding chickens; insurgents who raid police posts carrying accordians; a distinguished elder statesman saying that the Muslim South can’t have autonomy because there is no Thai word for it (although the Thais in the Muslim South seem to know what it means) . . . For God’s sake, there must be something normal to write about.

Hmmm, What’s this?

Muller books journey

White Lotus Press has just released the second book by Chiang Mai-based scholar and writer Carool Kersten. The book is entitled “Dr Muller’s Asian Journey: Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Yunnan (1907-1909)”, and comes with a biographical sketch of Dr Hendrik Muller written by the editor. The publication contains many rarely-seen illustrations from the early 20th century.

“Dr Muller’s Asian Journey” is based on one of the travel books written by the Dutch scholar and diplomat Hendrik Muller after a lengthy sojourn in various parts of Asia.

Apart from the main cities: Bangkok, Saigon, Phnom Penh and Hanoi, Muller also ventured into the interior. There is an extensive account of his excursion to the ruins of Angkor. As a former businessman, he was also a keen observer of the region’s contemporaneous economical situation.

This century-old book is also interesting for what it reveals about the author’s conceptions regarding other cultures and religions, and the role of imperialism.

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