Most of the films I watch these days are at home, on planes and in foreign countries. At home we get “Spidey Man” and “Mighty Pirates”. Anything with more CGI than script. The five movies shown in theaters are at the local Blackboster by the end of the month and heavily edited on HBO a week later. The selections on planes are not much better. But at least they rotate the stock. Some of the current Classic Movies include “27 Dresses” and “Night At The Museum 2”.
What always surprises me, and this is probably because I come from a heavily repressed puritanical country, is how the entertainment on planes is less censored than what we get on HBO. I watched an episode of “The Sopranos” at home wherein a big fat tub of sweaty cow meat was walking down a street without a care in the world one minute and bloodied and beaten the next. Clearly something had happened but there was not a hint of what that might be. I then coincidentally saw the same episode in South Africa and watched the scene in between where said fat guy has hot sweaty homo fun with some other dude and then gets into savage fisticuffs. I guess that is how big fat mafia homos like it. But at home we never see any violent homo sex, regular normal sex, drug use, references to drug use or naked lady parts. The scene in “Annie Hall” when Woody Allen sneezes on the pile of cocaine would be cut out around here. Except that they would never show “Annie Hall” here. Too much talking and not enough explosions.
On the plane to Thailand I saw nipples. I told my very own Personal Entertainment System to play “The Sopranos” and right there in the opening scene I saw a bunch of big fat sweaty (presumably non-homo) mafia dudes and a young, not at all fat woman as naked as the day she was born (from the waist up). Assuming she was born with 36D implants. For a brief dull moment I was a true American and thought that any child could turn this on and watch this. There are no parental controls on these devices as far as I can tell. Then I remembered that breasts are good and have yet to cause blindness or methadone addiction in children. At least not directly.
On the flight home I watched nothing as my Personal Entertainment System crapped out on me. Perhaps there are parental controls after all.
Whilst waiting in the hotel for the Wife to make herself presentable, I turned on the television set and saw a bunch of old dudes on stage singing Eagles songs. Time has not treated their faces well, but Don Henley sounded the same as always. Even more suprising was Joe Walsh. He looks like a man who has enjoyed a recreational drug or two in his life. But he sounds just as good or as bad as ever, depending on your point of view. I knew that Don Felder had been kicked out several years ago (I was at what turned out to be his last live performance with the band) but I had no idea who his replacement was. You would think a band like the Eagles could get Andy Fairweather Low or David Rhodes or someone less British but well known to play a guitar solo here and there. But the Wife wanted to go about the town and we were not there to watch television, so I only saw a few songs.
We went to Bangkok because the Wife wanted to go somewhere on her birthday and she still had money left on her voucher from Minnesota. When she went to Minnesota, the airline asked her to stay an extra day and gave her a flight voucher for her trouble. But the voucher was only good for her, and that airline only flies to two cities from here; Tokyo and Bangkok. We went to Tokyo in March so the Wife wanted to go to Bangkok. I have been to Thailand several times. Every trip to Thailand requires at least two days in Bangkok since the flights in arrive late and the flights out leave early. I have even stayed in Bangkok exclusively. I like to think I know the city well. I know how to get where I want to go and which taxis to avoid. I know where to eat all the food I like and where to find things I cannot get at home. I also know that if I am going to spend money and energy on a trip abroad I would rather go somewhere else. Thailand has its good and bad qualities and it is certainly a good place to visit for anyone who has never been, but I have seen it. There are many better places I will never experience. But the Wife and I have never gone to Thailand together and we had just been to Tokyo. Given the choice between the two, I would rather go to Tokyo, but it is a much more expensive city. Thailand is always cheap.
More often than not whenever we go somewhere we see the famous tourist sites in between straying off the tour book path. Vacations generally mean waking up early to go somewhere by a certain time and seeing something specific. The Wife wanted this trip to be less hectic than last year’s European honeymoon. Bangkok is not generally regarded as a relaxing city. There is serious traffic, constant construction and millions of people running around like rabbits in waistcoats. But I have seen all the requisite sites in Bangkok and the Wife is not too terribly interested. This made it much easier to take our time and not worry about missing anything.
The Wife liked the fact that I knew where everything was. All she had to do was follow me. She gets far more frustrated when we have no idea where we are going. I like not knowing where I am going but she always wants me to study maps since she has no idea how they work. We used no maps in Bangkok.
One of the Wife’s favorite things to do on vacation, and really anywhere, is to go to overpriced shopping malls and look at every single item on sale. I like to avoid shopping because it takes precious time away from seeing whatever there is to be seen, and because it sucks the life out of me. But this was her birthday trip and I had no plans to do anything else. Fortunately for me and less fortunately for her, the CentralWorld mall, supposedly the third largest shopping mall in the world, was burned down by the Red Shirts in May. Some of it reopened at the end of 2010 but it is not nearly as large.
Right around the corner is the Siam Paragon, a not entirely new mall that I had never noticed except during its construction. It is just outside of the Siam BTS station and hard to miss when it was a large frame of construction girders and giant cranes. As a finished product it looks just like all the other malls surrounding it. But the Wife loves Japanese mall basement food, which is very different from American mall food court food, and wanted to see how Thai mall basement food compares. Once inside, we both fell madly in love with the Paragon. The Wife loved all the overpriced shops and the vaguely Chinese/Thai food. I loved the brand new Krispy Kreme right at the front door.
At the Siam BTS station I noticed someone carrying a Krispy Kreme bag. I can spot that logo in the middle of a bustling commuter crowd the way a lion spots the weakest gazelle in the herd. I do not normally approach strangers at train stations but this was not a normal occasion. The only Krispy Kremes in Asia I had seen up to this point were in Tokyo and Seoul. They are supposedly in Hong Kong but I have never seen any.
The person with the Krispy Kreme bag spoke no English and I speak no Thai, so I tried asking him in Chinese where he got those donuts. That was as useless as English. I got him to point in the general direction and the Wife and I began our quest. I was very disappointed when we found two people selling donuts from a folding table on Thanon Rama I. The Wife thought it was better than nothing. I thought it was counterfeiting of the worst kind. I asked the people selling the donuts if there was an actual store anywhere, fully expecting a negative response. People who sell bootlegs on the street do not usually let you know where you can get the real thing. But this bootlegger casually mentioned that there was a store in the Paragon. That proved convenient as we were going to go there for the Wife’s basement food anyway. The Paragon also had an overpriced grocery store where all the foreigners shop and from where I bought the first Reese’s peanut butter cups and Jiff peanut butter I had seen in years.
Home of creamy Krispy Kreme and crispy octopus balls.
I have been through a security checkpoint or two in my time. I have yet to do the American porn scanners, and we never take off our shoes in Asia, but my luggage and I have been x-rayed and scrutinized by undertrained low wage earners on several continents. I almost never set off any alarms and my suitcase almost never attracts anyone’s attention. So when the uniformed slackers at Suvarnabhumi Airport asked me to open my bag it was a little unexpected.
The woman making the sky safe for democracy asked me if I had any books in my bag. I did not, but I wondered to myself how that could be a problem. Are books no longer permissible on commercial flights? Do the airlines want people to use those electronic book readers instead? That would be unusual since we all know that any electronic device is capable of taking down a 747 during takeoff and landing. A few years ago I was having a bad day and considered turning on my MP3 player during the plane’s final approach just to end it all. Fortunately for the crew and all passengers on board, I came to my senses and no one had to die that day.
Since there were no books in my bag, Security Lady looked around for an alternative. That is when she saw my jar of Jiff peanut butter.
I recently found fresh celery at a specialty grocery store in our quaint little metropolis. Celery is not common around here so I have been buying some every time we visit. And with celery one needs peanut butter. We may be heathens but we are not savages. But our peanut butter choices are lacking at best. Chinese peanut butter is no better than Chinese butter and the Vietnamese peanut butter at Jialafu is probably safe for people with peanut allergies to eat. The inferior Skippy peanut butter is widely available, but I am not an animal. Beggars and choosy moms choose Jiff. As did I when I saw some at a grocery store in Bangkok.
Whenever I get out of the bush I like to go to grocery stores and see what marvels of the Western World they carry. I can always find something that makes me wonder why I can only find it in that particular city or country. If I want almond M&Ms I have to go to Macao. For Amy’s frozen pizza rolls, Hong Kong. If I want Dr Pepper I go to Seoul. Dr Pepper is actually available almost anywhere, but the price is usually three or four times higher than Coke or Pepsi. In Seoul you can find Dr Pepper at any 7-11 for the same price as everything else.
From Bangkok I tried to bring back Reese’s peanut butter cups, those tiny boxes of Corn Flakes and Jiff peanut butter.
When Security Lady saw my peanut butter, she told me that “liquid is not allow”. I told her that it was not liquid. I showed her the Thai writing on the jar. I assume it said something about what was in the jar. Despite all of my trips to Thailand I cannot read a single word of Thai. But she was unconvinced and kept repeating “not allow” while I argued with her.
Before arguing with security personnel in Bangkok, one should be aware that several factions of whatever they call the Thai mafia hold sway over more than a few security agencies in Thailand, including Suvarnabhumi. While the Chinese mafia is pretty pathetic compared to the good old fashioned American mafia (they kidnap your pigeon rather than put the severed head of your prize horse in your bed), we can assume that the Thai mafia is better equipped for violence. Chinese people are frail and weigh less than I do. Kicking and beating people is Thailand’s national sport.
I have no special love of peanut butter, regardless of what the peanut butter cups and jar of peanut butter might suggest, but I prefer Jiff over the crap we have at home and I wanted to keep what I bought. I was even thinking about opening the seal and turning the bottle over. Surely the lack of spill would convince Security Lady that it was not liquid.
She was replaced by Security Dude. This regularly happens when there are language issues, but his English was no better than hers and my Thai had not improved in those two minutes. I told him that peanut butter is not a liquid and he tensed up as if I had said “bomb” or “citrus fruit”. He wanted to know why I said that it was not liquid. I cleverly pointed out that I said it was not liquid because it is not liquid. That did not seem to satisfy his concern and I told him that Security Lady said that my peanut butter was liquid. He assured me that it was indeed not a liquid but that it was “not allow”. I asked him why. The look on his face cannot be described by mortals. Ask a five year old about the difference between dark matter and the calcium carbonate levels in monotreme eggshells and you will get the same facial expression.
Security Dude’s point of view was that a jar of peanut butter is not allow on commercial airlines. My point of view was that this was simply an arbitrary restriction to provide travelers with the illusion of security. What could I possibly do with this peanut butter to harm the plane or its crew? The pilot could be allergic to peanuts, but how would I get it to him? I never fly first class and the flight crew never schmoozes with the people in the cheap seats. My little jar of peanut butter would have to find a way to infect both the captain and first officer and somehow disable the automatic controls that can land a 747-400 even if every single person on board is in anaphylactic shock. I would be more than a little impressed if any brand of peanut butter could do this and more than a little surpised if any of this was crossing the mind of the lackey telling me that my peanut butter was a threat to civilization as we know it.
I was also wondering at the time what any of this had to do with whether I had books in my bag or not. It occurred to me moments after my peanut butter found its way into a trash can with other hazardous materials that maybe they were simply looking for anything that they could claim was not allow. My peanut butter was more scapegoat than culprit. Nothing untoward showed up on the x-ray, but if you pull the occasional passenger aside and take away some of his possessions, other travelers may think that you are doing your job and that their irrational fear and paranoia is justified. Will taking off your shoes at American airports make you safer? Not in the least. Is 110ml of water or toothpaste more dangerous than 100ml? Of course not. Anyone who can blow up a plane with a bottle of water, a bag of stale peanuts and a tube of toothpaste can probably take out an entire city with some of that duty free crap they let you take on planes. There is probably plenty of peanut butter for sale at the shopping mall that is Suvarnabhumi Airport. I can get behind restricting guns, knives and explosives. But what is the point in taking away water, food and creams that people can replace with a little shopping inside the terminal. Or is that the point.
Remember when they wanted people to put their passports into plastic bags? What was that about? If I can make a bomb out of the Wife’s hand lotion, I probably have the technical skills and manual dexterity required to open a plastic bag. But when the powers that be impose stupid restrictions that make absolutely nothing safe it keeps people from thinking about the fact that lighters and matches are allowed and all commercial flights have oxygen tanks. I have absolutely no idea how to turn a bottle of Evian into a bomb but I know what I can do with fire and compressed gas. A better alternative would be to smash open the slide bustle in the emergency exit door with one of the cabin’s fire extinguishers and use the high pressure nitrogen aspirator with the CO2 in the fire extinguisher to blow the plane out of the sky. You can even do it with your shoes off.
But anyone who really wants to use a plane as a missile would simply take a cargo or private plane. There is practically no security at all at those terminals and some of them carry just as much fuel. Some cargo planes even carry explosives or material better suited to making bombs than lotion and toothpaste. But the next major attack on American soil will not be from a plane. Americans always assume that the next big thing will be just like the last big thing even when it is always different.
Not to beat a dead horse and spread delicious creamy Jiff peanut butter on it, but Israel’s El Al never has hijackings. And that is an airline and country that people who hijack planes really do want to harm. Yet they keep their planes and airport safe without porn scanners, shoe checks, liquid quotas or peanut butter theft. What Israel does is employ genuine security techniques like paying attention to passenger behavior and looking at people while talking to them. Israeli security would look me in the eye while I argue with them and know that I am not a terrorist but simply someone who wants to keep my peanut butter. In any other country their security will blink first.
