(Shiver-me-timbers….a friggin Alien Blob!)
Just last week I enjoyed giving you the lowdown on Thailand’s scandalous superstars who get their faces plastered all over the show. So, what other kinda news hits the headlines of the Thai newspapers?
Go to any magazine stall and you’ll be astonished at the amount of weeklies with saucy pics of bikini-clad girls painted on the front. As for the newspapers, well nothing the readers love more is a good-old close up picture of the remains of some sizzled-up corpse. So apart from just gruesome murders, rapes, scandals and boring politics, what else there?
Well, story of the week, is another classic which had the nation’s people glued to their TV sets in anticipation of a ‘War of the World’s-style Alien attack!’ The Thai Rath newspaper started the story about ‘Alien Blobs’ falling from the skies and landing in laundry-tubs around the country. Amazingly, these Alien Blobs would start wriggling and changing size within the hour of being found. The country, in panic of an alien attack, saw the government set up a special ‘hotline’ number for any latest report on more Alien Blobs. On top of this, one highly respected doctor from a top university even sent a ‘Blob’ to NASA as proof of alien life.
As for the country’s lottery players, they once again took the splendid opportunity to use the Alien Blobs to predict the lucky Government Lottery number of the month. Wriggling away, the Alien blobs were set before altars, sprinkled with holy water and asked to wriggle in the sand naming the lucky 3-digit number of the fortnight! Sadly however, the Alien Blobs, after laboratory tests, were found to be nothing more than a huge national hoax. The Blob was in fact, just cooling gel used on patients in hospitals.
The national newspapers here in Thailand, just love any sordid bad story about the likes of murdered Farangs, randy monks and absolutely anything concerning ‘fortune telling’ and the Government lottery. I was rather surprised at the anti-steve comments by a couple of angry Indians after my not-so-serious blog on money-lending/Roti vending Indians a few weeks back. Why? Well, the Thai media is just full of sordid stories about our Hindu friends too – perhaps such Thai-Indian commenteers never read the Thai press! Then, there is the Thai Ladyboy! I once wrote up a blog on ladyboys and I know how sensitive some readers are about such a subject, as for the Thai media however – they show no remorse on sensationalizing any story about them!
Just after the ‘Alien Blob Hoax’ story began to die down, the TV news and the papers picked up on the sordid story of a ladyboy and a policeman. If it had been a girl, I guess the story would only have made mediocre news, but because it concerned a ladyboy there was national outcry. Here it is:
(No more discos for this certain ladyboy!)
A Bangkok based Police Lt Colonel went to a disco with some buddies of his over on the Thonburi side of the river. The high ranking officer got into conversation with a ladyboy sat on her own – he invited her to sit at his table. When the disco closed, the policeman’s friends went home and the cop invited the ladyboy for some ‘rice soup’ at a nearby restaurant. At the restaurant, a waiter asked the policeman if he realized that his partner for the night was a ladyboy, to which he honestly replied “I wanna try something different!”
Next, the high ranking policeman took the ladyboy to a short-time hotel. After a couple of hours, the ladyboy was seen driving away – alone, in the cop’s car. After bashing down the door, the policeman was found suffocated-dead, along with a couple of Valium wrappers on the dressing table. Huge story, and the ladyboy was amazingly arrested the very same afternoon at a hotel in Lopburi province.
Of course, she admitted to unintentionally killing the officer, but just wanted to rob him of all his possessions instead (Pretty daring wouldn’t you say!) The media quickly latched on to the story and after the ladyboy was forced to put on a re-enactment of the scene for the courts, literally 200 people were forced back by riot police after they admitted wanting to kill the ladyboy in avengance.
Stirring up the story, just cause she was a ladyboy is nothing new, but what surprised me – not once did I read in Thai, anything about this high-ranking policeman breaking the law in the first place! The waiter in the restaurant and the ‘boy’ at the short-time hotel told the media “He takes ladies of the night to the hotel every week, but we were shocked when he took a ladyboy”. Perhaps this knowledgeable police officer forgot that such night-time activity in Thailand is……against the law!
After writing about Rock Star ‘Mr Dag’ of the band Big Ass in my last blog, it has been guaranteed fair and square after two DNA tests that he did not father a child to a 16 year-old girl. Who started this story off? It was in fact, respected MP Paweena Hongsakul of the capital’s most famous organization for ‘Women’s and Children’s Rights’. This organization, though it may have helped a few underprivileged folks in the past, has caused a lotta controversy in that they supposedly pick on stories – which are just potentially scandalous! Thus, bringing Mrs Paweena into the media limelight. If the case of ‘Mr Dag’ isn’t a prime example of this, check this huge one out from two years back:
Two years ago, a Hong Kong woman, after been told to “Get that quack-wack story outta here” by the local police, went crying to Mrs Paweena. According to the Hong Kong woman, she was gang-raped by 4 men including her Tuk-Tuk driver at the side of a Bangkok main road at 2 am, not too far from parliament in fact.
Mmmmmmm…..already sounding rather fishy, when one realizes that Bangkok’s main roads are full of traffic 24 hours a day! Anyway, Mrs Paweena had the police intervene on her request and the Tuk-Tuk hotel taxi driver was imprisoned. Anyway the Hong Kong woman, who reckoned she was a well-known news reporter, went into great details about the attack and the newspapers just lapped up the story. While the poor-old Tuk-Tuk driver is left behind bars, the girl’s hotel’s security guard starts babbling to the press about some naughty activities he had recently been enjoying with the Hong Kong victim! “She’s a complete quack-wack, takes drugs and slaps herself silly”
After one week, the Tuk-Tuk driver was released from jail after the cops dropped charges – the evidence just led to one thing and that was – the Hong Kong girl had completely fabricated the whole story……..and Mrs Paweena had just sucked it up! After the Thai police flew over to Hong Kong for a background check on the girl, it was discovered that she had a serious history of drug abuse, theft and mental disorder. She was sentenced to three years in jail for making up the story but freed after one and a half – courtesy of HM The Queen, and deported home.
Now, I am sure if the girl had just been a nobody Thai girl, the story wouldn’t have got anywhere. Sensationalizing is one thing, but falsely imprisoning somebody because of it, is pretty….out of order, don’t you think?
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yummm!
Pad thai…
