Hello, and welcome to the HoltBlog. I am very happy to welcome Korski, an old friend and an excellent writer. Korski is a well known writer, published author, monger extaordinaire, denizen of the highways and loways of life, and a good drinking buddy. Welcome aboard Korski!

Right here on HoltBlog, you will find many original stories about Thailand, politics, and just good fun, as well as some news stories I feel are interesting or important.

Rep. Ron Paul has ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, breaking the news in a seven-minute video posted on his campaign Web site Thursday. The Texan, who ran on a libertarian platform and saw an outpouring of financial support via the Internet, tried to soothe anxious supporters by letting them know that his “campaign for freedom will continue in this new phase.” While his campaign will not formally organize events, he encouraged supporters to continue to work on behalf of a broader movement.

“I don’t mind playing a key role in this revolution, but it has to be more than a Ron Paul revolution,” he said. “Our job now is to plan for the next phase.”

Thank you Ron. Even though you have pulled out of the race you have already inspired many Americans to reassess their political options. But from now on the Republican Party has nothing new to offer. What a shame.

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When we are young, we collect stamps, baseball and football cards, toy cars and trucks. When we are older, and if we have enough money, we collect antique cars and motorcycles, mountains climbed above 20,000 feet, classic 78 records. A great many academics–although they would deny this is what they are doing–collect publications, the more, obviously, the better. And indeed, collecting in this sense is even highly institutionalized, to the point where promotions and raises are based not on the quality of what one does, but on the number of publications. The collecting mentality of the eight year old boy never dies.

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Deux coups de téléphone de deux vieux amis. Deux questions brûlantes. Du mariage avec une Thaïlandaise.

Voici résumé en quelques mots ce qui tracasse non seulement mes amis, mais aussi beaucoup d’entre vous. Est-ce que j’ai des réponses ? Probablement pas, mais prenez en compte les récits qui suivent et faites vous une opinion.

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She was an angel. Long straight black hair hanging down to her ass, small but beautiful breasts, and legs up to her armpits.

She looked to be only sixteen, but the thin man said she was twenty-two. I wanted to believe him. Who wouldn’t? There was no way I was going to pass up this chance.

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When I was a young man back in the mid nineteen sixties I first heard the siren call of Women’s Liberation. Germaine Greer, Angela Davis, and Alice Walker, to name a few, shouted out for women’s rights. They told us how our forefathers had always kept women unequal. It was time to change all that and give women their rightful place in the world.

That was the start of the misunderstandings between men and women up to today. Oh, I know you are going to point out that women had been campaigning for women’s rights long before that, but the 1960’s was when women actually started to achieve a whole range of ‘rights’.

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Elle est de retour à la maison ! Je savais qu’elle reviendrait. Nous avons vécu tellement de choses ensemble. Vous ne pouvez quand même pas faire une croix dessus comme ça, n’est-ce pas ?

Nous nous sommes rencontrés l’année dernière dans un night club, par une nuit torride. C’était une vraie fournaise dehors. Le milieu de la saison sèche est toujours difficile à supporter à Bangkok. Alors je suis allé chercher refuge dans ce night-club glacial au sous-sol d’un hôtel, à proximité de l’endroit où je me promenais. Il faisait trop chaud et je me sentais trop seul pour rester à la maison par une nuit pareille.

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She’s home again! I knew she would come back. We’ve been through so much together. You don’t just throw that away, do you?

We met at a night club one boiling hot night last year. It was like a furnace outside. The middle of the hot season in Bangkok is always hard to take. So I ducked into the ice cold night club in the basement of some hotel that happened to be near where I was strolling. It was too hot and lonely to stay home on a night like that.

The interior was chilled to almost freezing point, goading the patrons into dancing feverishly out on the dance floor.

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Although Christianity spread throughout Europe and many parts of the Americas, the rest of the world has had its own beliefs from the earliest times. These beliefs had nothing to do with Christianity. Yet Christian missionaries believe they have a god-given right to go out and try to convert these ‘heathens’ to their beliefs.

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The jar is a good ten to twelve inches on a side and well more than a foot high, and it has a black screw-on lid. It reminds me of a huge cookie jar that my mother got from her mother and that I would regularly raid at the slightest opportunity, and sometimes shamelessly when it was filled with freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. If my mother did not stop me, I could eat all of them, and then suffer for the next couple of hours. This happened once or twice, with my mother’s knowledge, to remind me of the price one pays for overindulgence.
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The seed for the scheme was planted as he was passing time in an airport bookstore. He saw a cover for a New York magazine showing the ex-governor, Eliot Spitzer, dressed in a suit and set against a stark white background. To the right of the photo was the word “Brains,” with an arrow pointing to the ex-governor’s groin. He did not think again of the magazine cover, which had made him laugh, until he was on a bus near Mt. Pinatubo on his way to Subic Bay. As he stared at the landscape of white ash, the residue from the volcano’s eruption in the early 1990s, his mind turned dark. It was not a darkness born of what brought to mind a vast crematorium and his own mortality, but rather one brought on by the growing pain from seeing the last of his three daughters leave home, the very considerable losses in his real estate holdings, and then, not two months after his daughter nonchalantly waved goodbye in her new BMW, he and his wife had to put his mother in an assisted living residence.

And then the idea began to unfold, slowly at first, but by the time he had reached the famous terraced rice fields of northern Luzon, his principal destination on this brief ten-day vacation, his first to Asia, he knew exactly what he would do upon his return to his home in Escondido.

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