Deep, dark secret lives

We really are all getting wired together. I let this one out into the wild a week ago, just to a couple of friends, and copies keep coming back to me by e-mail from increasingly unlikely sources. It’s a little scary. I guess it’s too late to decide my mining background should be a deep, dark secret (as mining-day secrets should be).

The photo was taken quite some time ago, if I may be coy about it (as hardrock miners … Read more

Linus Pauling and the Energy Vortex rool, OK!

The flu season is here.

I was coming down with a massive cold yesterday. The signs arrived the night before—a fluey muzziness, a cough, soreness in the chest. Past experience suggested I’d have a ripping head cold and sinusitis by morning, fever and a sore throat the next day, and a fine honking case of bronchitis to follow.

My old friend Bibi Bulambowitz is a vastly intelligent, worldly, emotionally volatile individual who has been living too close for too long … Read more

Samui: So what’s new?

I saw a letter to the editor in yesterday’s *Bangkok Post* that raised the question of whether exploration oil drilling could do any more harm to Samui’s natural environment than mass tourism has already accomplished. Same old story, wherever you go–the same scenes that are being “spoiled” for the old hand, are  often “just wonderful, so natural!” to the first-time visitor.

Here’s a take I did on this notion years ago (first photo from www.phuket-trips.com):

The silence boomed. At … Read more

Bright side to Gulf oil spill?

Okay, so it’s a stretch. But one has to think, given current sensibilities with respect to offshore oil drilling, Rak Aao Thai Network Group  couldn’t have found a better time to protest oil exploration in the vicinity of Thailand’s third-largest tourist island.

Come July 31st, we can look forward to aerial coverage—with possible surprises for aerial viewers—of a 35,000-strong human chain standing hand-in-hand on the 52-kilometre road that encircles Koh Samui. Better still, we can hike on down … Read more