Could we use a man like Herbert Hoover again?

Normally, I write about books over on the ol' Literary Supplement, but what I have to say after finishing An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover is far less about Richard Norton Smith's book, which had some pretty serious flaws, and more about Hoover, the man.

Strengths: Efficiency. Thrift. Churned out a lot of words. Anti-militaristic. Fed people (entire starving nations, in fact). Supported equal pay for women, the end of child labor, etc.  Worked hard. Worked tirelessly, into his ninth decade. Self-made man, as they say. Traveled the world. Known to offer up a pithy comment or two. They loved him in Belgium. And Poland. Random acts of generosity. Enthusiastically supported young people, from Scouts organizations to Boys' Clubs to answering thousands of letters people wrote to him, well into his old age.

Example: He agreed with a young woman that "the chances of a female president were improving; after all, 'the men have not done too good a job of government...in the last forty-seven years' and wishing her well 'if you are a candidate for President about thirty years hence."

Another girl, Kathleen, told him she wasn't yet born when he was president and she wanted to be not president, but a doctor. He wrote, "My dear Kathleen, You were saved a lot of trouble by not being born earlier. I am glad you want to be a doctor and not President. We do not have enough doctors, and there seems to be a sufficient number of candidates for President." --from p. 383 of An Uncommon Man 


Weaknesses: Probably wasn't meant to be a president, namely because he didn't excel at the compromising political schmoozing of it all. (On second thought, maybe this is a strength.) Listened a little too carefully to some of Joseph McCarthy's fears, although not the rabid paranoia.

Fascination factor: High. He was born in 1874 and died in 1964. The year he was born, Thomas Edison was inventing the duplex telegraph, Jesse James was robbing trains, and Hoover's eventual alma mater, Stanford University, did not yet exist. By the time he died, he had gone from meeting with Charles Lindbergh through advising against dropping the atomic bomb to congratulating John Glenn on orbiting the Earth. He also outlived, among others, his wife Lou, his pal General MacArthur, and Eleanor Roosevelt, not to mention his successor FDR and John F. Kennedy, whose father the ambassador to England had known Hoover for a while.

The man got around. He met everyone from Hitler to Eva Peron, and he was friends with other presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Harry Truman, with FDR being basically the exception (he spent time with and was consulted by Eisenhower AND Kennedy). Bottom line is that Hoover had a fascinating decades-long pre-presidency career and an accomplished decades-long retirement, but all most people know about him is "the Depression!" And really, he was unfairly blamed for the so-called Great Depression, as if any one person caused it or could solve it single-handedly, and it's interesting to note the complicating factors of his administration, such as: Congress. The economic policies of his predecessor, Calvin Coolidge. The fact that FDR was his own brand of crazy, when he swooped in to "save" the day -- and the fact that FDR used some of Hoover's ideas and already-started-before-FDR-got-there tactics.

Other  fun facts gleaned from this bio, in a more-things-change-the-more-they... way:

*In the aftermath of World War I, "Washington sports fans cheered a uniformed sailor for shooting to death a fellow spectator who refused to stand for the national anthem."

*In a 1935 speech, Hoover noted the way some politicians stifled dissent: "They set up a glorious ideal to which we all agree unanimously. Then they drive somewhere else or into a ditch. When we protest they blackguard us for opposing the glorious ideal. And they announce that all protesters are the tools of Satan or Wall Street. When we summon common sense and facts they weep aloud over their martyrdom for the ideal."

*"If America joined the [World] war [II], he said,  and was rewarded with victory, 'then we will have won for Stalin the grip of communism in Russia and a greater opportunity for it to extend in the world. We should at least cease to tell our sons that they will be giving their lives to restore democracy and freedom.'" -p.298

*In a 1954 critique of foreign policy, he noted: "We should cease to jabber about leading the world. Sometime the world will turn on us with remarks as to where we have led to."

Furthermore, I hereby declare that we should bring back the name Herbert. Come on, hipsters, get with me on this! I previously mentioned, during my reading of the William H. Taft bio, that I really like President Taft's brother Horace--he was a fun guy!--and that I kind of wanted to bring back the long-forgotten name Horace. Well, now I'm adding Herbert to my list. If I have twin sons, perhaps they'll be named Horace and Herbert. Or maybe I should just get two puppies or kittens for this purpose.

While I learned a lot about Hoover, I should probably check every fact in this book, because author Richard Norton Smith and his editors apparently couldn't be bothered to do so themselves. I've ranted elsewhere about the incorrect statement that the Hoover Dam is on "the California/Nevada border" (hello, can you read a map?) but that isn't the only fact Smith gets wrong herein. So, I do advise you to learn a thing or two about Hoover, but maybe check out some other sources while you're doing it.

And may we all hope to be as accomplished and prolific in ninety allotted years on this Earth!

Seller Beware!

What would that be in grammatically correct Latin? Caveat vendit? Caveat vendor?

So, I'm just sitting there innocently working on my things and listening to some tunes when a JCPenney ad comes on advertising the store's "biggest sale of the season," taking place now through Saturday. I wasn't really listening, in an active listening kind of way, rather just allowing the save-big-discount-save-money-discount-blah-blah to wash over me, subconsciously knowing the music would come back on soon. Then, that telltale advertising voice shift happened, and the bright and chipper "Come save money!" gave way to the "NowI'mgoingtotalkreallyfastforthefineprintdisclaimertalk" lower voice. And this latter voice informed me that "biggest sale of the season" refers to the duration, the most days of sale, but that there might be another sale later that lasts for fewer days but has more items on sale.

To which the only possible logical response, of course, would be: Oh, you selfish stupid lazy entitled consumers of the US and wherever else your sorry selves are located, what the !@#$&* is wrong with you and why don't you go back to whatever !@$&* glacier you stepped out of?!  (As Julia Sugarbaker would say.) This is what we need disclaimers about now??! Because otherwise some jerkwad (I'm tempering my language right now to try to keep this blog reasonably family friendly) is going to come screaming into JCPenney and say whine-whine-whine you owe me money give me a refund i want my money back i am stupid i suck i have no life whatsoever but you said the BIGGEST sale and then later you had a BIGGER sale and I'm a total f****** loseramus but give my money whine whine pout I am terrible and horrible and give me my money. Ye gods, do I ever feel for JCPeneny, having to deal with and anticipate shite like that. It makes we want to go shop their "Biggest Sale of the Season" just to support them in the face of the abject loserdom that is US consumer society. Because I know from my Borders days that these kinds of things are what consumers waltz in demanding all the time.

You may be thinking that it was just a joke. That in this particular advertisement, JCPenney is making fun of the "NowI'mgoingtotalkreallyfastforthefineprintdisclaimertalk" voice that we hear all the time in ads. But that doesn't account for what happened yesterday.

Yesterday, the news went viralish that Cheerios or General Mills or some cereal corporate entity or other was including mandatory arbitration in their terms and conditions if you "Like" them etc. on social media. Meaning you can't sue them later when they say their cereal is "a healthy morning treat" and you find some jackass lawyer to support your jackass loserdom and you try to take them to court so you can get thousands or more dollars from their deep pockets when you say that "healthy" is a term reserved for the medical establishment-approved Ritalin and Prozac that big pharmaceuticals are pumping through your stupid, loser, jackass body and they totally wronged you by daring to claim that their cereal was "healthy" and oh by the way your 300-pound meat-eating dairy-drinking Walmart-shopping preservative-purchasing park-in-the-closest-spot-and-never-walk-on-any-errand-in-your-life self had better be compensated for such an egregious affront to your health.

Guess what, asswads? (trying, trying, trying to use gentle language, and failing) You have agreed to SO MANY mandatory arbitration clauses. Probably for Facebook itself -- and your car insurance -- and your credit cards -- and god knows how many other things. AND IT'S NOT ANYONE'S FAULT BUT YOUR OWN if you aren't reading the terms and conditions you agree to. You are NOT entitled to any of this shite! Any of it! You are not entitled to Facebook, or Cheerios, or Baby Einstein, or whatever.

Get the mighty !@#$&* over yourselves.

This really, truly makes me feel sorry for corporations. No, they are not people. They are corporations. You know who "people" are? "People" are the consumers who actually walk into a courtroom trying to get money from corporations who said their cereal was "healthy" or their Baby Einstein DVD was "educational" instead of those people focusing on real, actual, malevolent corporate wrongs such as those perpetrated daily by our military-industrial complex, for example.  Jeez, I hate people so much. The people that would find it anywhere within the realm of their possibility to sue Cheerios for claiming to be healthy. I hate those people. I hate them. This is the basis of my hatred. For today anyway.

Mom, what's a chaperone?

So, the other day or week or whatever, a piece in The Atlantic started doing its viral thing, thus popping up in my Facebook news feed. It's called "The Overprotected Kid," and it details a lot of incredibly obvious stuff, like how kids need to play outside and discover things on their own and not always have parents breathing down their necks. It talks about how it's actually good for kids to not know how they're going to get out of a predicament, and then to get out of that predicament, because that's called growth. But we have reached the point, chronologically, where we now have college kids who have never had to get themselves out of predicaments, and I really wish that the college professors would stop capitulating to their whining. (I should rephrase: I wish they had never started. I wish not a single solitary grade had EVER been changed. Ever. Because: consequences, people!)

One of the interesting lines in the article was that kids are growing up now with the assumption that they are always being watched, and therein lies the problem. Now, of course the parents today offer up lots of good reasons to always be watching their and other kids, chief among them because otherwise the kids are going to be kidnapped. As the Atlantic author points out, child abduction by strangers is as uncommon as it ever was, and it seems to me that basing your entire life around those odds is kind of like doing your monthly budget with the assumption that you are you going to win the lottery. Yeah, you might (especially if you play), but it really has no practical purpose in your plans. Most missing children are either abducted by someone they know, which is often a parent, or they are runaways. And let's not forget that independent teenagers and adults can also be stranger abducted, as horrible cases like the recent one in Ohio remind us (and as Criminal Minds likes to remind us also--why doesn't that create some abduction-of-adults paranoia to accompany the abduction-of-kids paranoia?)

Obviously, I think children should be prepared, as I was, for what to do in "stranger danger" situations. Sometimes you should  talk to strangers, politely, especially in places of business. If it's not one of those times, you should not be afraid to scream, make noise, run away, etc. And no, I'm not advocating for kids to be alone outside all the time --by all means, walk to school with friends, have curfews, keep in touch, come in before the streetlights go on, let your parents know where you are, and all the rest -- but my god, my nephew is ten-and-a-half years old and he is still not allowed to do anything by himself, or even, say, walk through the neighborhood with his eight-year-old sister but no parents to my dad's (their grandpa) house, which is less than half a mile away. I think I was babysitting other people's toddlers when I was ten-and-a-half. I walked to/from school without adults (with friends) from age seven or so. I've seen the car pick-up line at my nephieces' school. It hurts my brain. (This is also due in part to the reconfiguring of gifted education in that school district, making it a magnet program at only one school that necessitates driving longer, non-walk/non-bicycle distances for all the families who live in the zone of other elementary schools but have to schlepp their kids to the one gifted magnet school, and that's annoying and horrible for lots of other reasons too, but also my nephew could not walk the less than half a mile through the residential streets home from elementary school in second grade when he still attended in their very own neighborhood. Is second grade too young? Not with a friend, I'd say, and I daresay that's a good grade to start the whole Mom-walks-to-the-end-of-our-street-then-watches-you-go-down-the-street-toward-school thing even if the kid is alone, but I don't daresay that to my sister, because then we just have a big fight, because I'm not allowed to talk about parenting until I have my own kids or maybe not even then, although my sister herself admits she is "highly paranoid" -- her words, not mine)

OK, that parenthetical bit was so long you probably even forgot we were in parentheses, eh?

The point is: watching. A day or two after seeing some parental friend types post and ruminate about that piece ("Why can't I just send my kids outside to play?" mused the attachment parents, with the obvious implications just hanging there in cyberspace), I was typing something in a Facebook post or comment and it red-squiggly-underlined the word "chaperone" and I was struck. Aghast, I thought, 'My god, is this what it's come to??? We don't even use the word chaperone anymore in this modern/attachment/helicopter parent 21st-century?? Because kids are always being watched so they wouldn't even know what a chaperone is, because there's just always an adult there?!??!! There is no distinction!' Then I realized that the Facebook/Google/Blogger/internet spell-checking overlords apparently prefer the alternative spelling "chaperon" that I think looks incomplete and that I have never before this sentence used in my life.

But I was a little worried for a minute there.

Impact on my Mind

Whenever I hear someone talking-head-like say that something impacts something else, as I just this moment did on The Diane Rehm Show (it happens on public radio a lot), I recall a Designing Women moment when Julia is frustrated by a woman and says that woman is "such a--yuppie!" and Charlene says "Julia, you hate that word!" and Julia says she knows but how else could you describe someone who "uses impact as a verb"?!

I have continued to laugh/marvel/shake a fist at various yuppified verbings of words that make their way into our world in an irritating way (unlike fun verbings that have whimsy or poetry to them), with "partner" being a particularly irksome one. That was one Borders consistently tried to use to save its dying self; as a merchandising supervisor and corporate trainer I was always being asked to "partner" with this or that other department, and it was pretty terrible. (I don't think I even need to remind you all here that Google is not a verb. You can, however, perform a search using Google. While the registered trademark may sadly become accepted rather than just wrongly used as a generic one day, like aspirin or Kleenex, that's no reason for you to verb it. I will also slap you if you slip up when photocopying and use Xerox as a verb.)

Beyond impact-ing and partner-ing, there's also the need to think outside the box while focusing on outcomes during our teamwork and other best practices. Corporate jargon, as someone (Noam Chomsky?) has pointed out, has really become the Orwellian double-speak of our day, rather than military or government overlord speak (except for the massive extent to which corporate jargon permeates said military, because military-industrial complex), and we have all accepted it and happily brought it into our daily self-helping conversations.

But the point is: impact. WWJD (what would Julia [Sugarbaker] do?) in the face of the internet barrage of selfies and tweets and Upworthy and  everything else? I miss her. If you aren't intimately acquainted with the antics of the ladies (+ Anthony) of the Sugarbaker design firm, you have missed out. Think about the discussion they could have about the way people constantly post pictures of what they ate for dinner. I suspect Charlene would be the one to snap a pic of her meal, or maybe Suzanne would do it, going crazy with some bewildering app on her phone, and Mary Jo would fret about Claudia and her friends judging the adults' cooking by posting it on Facebook, and Julia would find it all so tacky... I long for a TV sitcom with the cheerful-yet-substantial, scathing-but-not-petulant, intelligent, political, personal, ferocious, beautiful brilliance of Designing Women to address these 21st-century issues. Any suggestions?

Far Away So Close

I just got back from China. I lived there for a year. It was not scary, dystopian, Orwellian, expensive, or "evil" (whatever that means, although there are quite a few internet searches for "China is evil"). It was, however, at times the following things: bureaucratic (especially in banks), crowded (in big cities, especially in subways), dirty (we'll talk about bathrooms and children and hygiene and toilets another day), and irritating (for the aforementioned reasons).

I would say that the main thing I think about China after having lived there is similar to the main thing I thought about China before having lived there: it's misunderstood by the West, or at least people in the U.S., to a startling degree, but that's true about most foreign countries. People in the U.S. who haven't traveled extensively abroad seem to retain these vague ideas of "otherness" about basically everywhere else in the world. China gets a lot of special thought right now, because we have the likes of Donald Trump who freak out at the thought of the international economic warfare supposedly being waged between the two countries (nothing a little revenue tariff couldn't solve, I say...) and because people do stupid things like shop at Walmart while lamenting that no products are "made in America" anymore. (Hello, McFly?!)

So we got back to Phoenix at the very end of February and shortly thereafter I came across a flyer advertising Shen Yun 2014, a show with live orchestra to be held at ASU's Gammage Theater in March. Just checking out what's going on in my hometown, and at the lovely Gammage where I have of course seen shows in the past, I read about Shen Yun - the extraordinary journey of ethnic and folk dances, thunderous drums, soaring voices, animated backdrops, and so on. Underneath all the reviews with their cries of "Mesmerizing!" and "Dazzling!" there was a paragraph headlined in bold:

"NOT MADE IN CHINA: Shen Yun cannot be seen in today's China, where traditional Chinese culture has been mostly destroyed under communist rule. Based in New York, Shen Yun is a nonprofit organization dedicated to reviving authentic Chinese culture."

Why is this distressing to me? Who am I to tell these Chinese artists in New York what "communist rule" has or hasn't done to their culture? Well, those are interesting questions. But it's not just about China; I spent eight years pondering what the occupation of the White House by Dubya and his murderous cronies said about me as a United Statesian, and I suspect the people who flood my Facebook news feed with dire warnings about "Obamacare" and the government taking away all their guns might not think I speak for them, politically.

But people -- maybe not all people, but a whole lot of people -- who are not in China seem to find it really easy to believe that this Great Oppressive Chinese Whatever in the Sky is squelching and destroying (or, I guess, has theoretically already squelched, under Mao) all that is right and good in life. And when a line like that appears on the brochure, it feeds the frenzy so well, which is what the Shen Yun artists seem to want. Their web site is filled with comments about the Chinese government being unable to stop the worldwide popularity of Shen Yun -- and about the government's "oppression" of Falun Dafa (aka Falun Gong), which is the spiritual discipline at the root of this Shen Yun show. And so it comes back to religion, but that's not mentioned anywhere in my advertisement brochure. Just the phrase "culture has been mostly destroyed," which is as vague as it is manipulative.

Ooooooh, Big Bad China.

Meanwhile, the big thing that happened (besides the Oscars, which are obviously the biggest news story in the world to me every year) since our return from Asia was the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines flight. It has been strange to watch news stories, especially the initial ones, with their maps of the area, which undoubtedly a lot of people needed to know just exactly where in the world this great and exciting mystery was happening. Those countries have basically been our "backyard" for the past year as we lived in Guangzhou. We flew in and out of China multiple times, and we flew on Malaysia Airlines a couple times. We loved Malaysia itself, in fact; Kuala Lumpur easily skyrocketed to the top of our favorite-cities-of-the-world lists. It is interesting to be so recently removed from all that, in my hometown of Phoenix, watching the news and wondering about the flight but not thinking of it as "remote" in the slightest. I was just there, geographically and aeronautically, let alone mentally.

The world is not a big sphere of Us/Them that we inhabit only a tiny part of, despite how we so often present it to one another and to ourselves.

Trouble in Paradise

Well, I don't want to fall off the blogging wagon (or is that get on the blogging wagon, if being on the wagon means you're not doing something? because then I'd be trying to avoid falling off the not-blogging wagon, right? OK, that's what I meant. ANYway...) but I've been a little busy and uninspired the past few days. Let's see what happened....

Our good friends Ann and Kyle, whom we first met in Korea and have since hung out with in two different cities in China, are on vacation in Phuket, so we all got to hang out in our third country together. Naturally, when you gather four expat teachers around a table, it's pretty easy to guess what sorts of beverages will be on that table. I spent more money and read fewer pages in the four days after their arrival than I really care to think about. But, a good time was had by all as we took second place at the weekly trivia night at Roxy Bar, spent an afternoon at Patong (including: barefoot lunch in the sand, sunset, and a game of pool at a shady bar once darkness fell), spent a day at Laem Singh (more barefoot lunch, they paddle boarded, and I flew! my first para-sailing adventure!), wandered the Phuket Old Town Festival that so nicely coincides with these Jan-Feb stints we like to have in this place (last time, in 2012, it fell on our first weekend here and we've since referred to it as our "welcome party"), and then, as if that weren't enough, set sail to Ko Phi Phi!

Yes, I'm still talking about the same four-day period. Naturally, Kyle and Ann planned to head to Phi Phi Don because they'd not seen it before on their first (lackluster, monsoon season) quick trip to Phuket. Brian and I had done a day trip to Phi Phi in 2012, but this time we decided to stay over in a bungalow and see what all the beach fuss was about. Oh, my god. The fuss, apparently, is about madness! Kyle said the beach smelled like "gasoline and bad decisions" and I'm inclined to agree.

First of all, though, I would like to confess that I am ever so slightly underwhelmed by the KPP. I can't tell you how much I heard about it being one of the best beaches in the world. At the risk of sounding spoiled, I've seen other beaches that pleased me just as much. Now, the rising limestone rock faces surrounding the cove are apparently what gets Phi Phi its accolades, as well as the by-all-accounts superb diving below the surface (of which I didn't partake -- we just kayaked and snorkeled a bit), but I just don't see the point of dragging all of those boats, people, food, drinks, infrastructure, construction, shops, etc. to this tiny spit of land. It seems better suited to be a day trip or camp-on-the-beach place. I've been hearing so much about how Thailand/Phuket are basically doing nothing wise with regard to the rampant development as tourists flock to this paradisiacal place that is going to be an environmental disaster in a few minutes here if someone doesn't start paying attention, and this hit me harder than ever at Ko Phi Phi.

It's like Obama all over again: while I appreciate Ko Phi Phi to a certain extent, it didn't captivate me. It's like I'm missing something that others see, which is generally how I felt whenever Barack opened his mouth in 2008. "But have you heard him speeeeeeeeeeeeak?" the people would swoon. Yes, yes I had. There was no there there, you might say. Funny enough, on the boat on the way to Phi Phi we got in just such a politically themed discussion, which ended with Kyle and I placing a bet on Hillary 2016.  He thinks she's going to win; I think she's not going to run. (Why? Because fuck all y'all, that's why. She should have been prez in 2008 and everyone knows it, including B & Michelle O.) She's fated to be like that other great HC in U.S. politics, Henry Clay, the great compromiser, the perhaps smartest and shrewdest of all the peeps of his time (up there with my boy JQA, at any rate), the hardest worker, the one who was destined to be president, like, four times in a row but was continually thwarted by upsarts (Van Buren, Polk) and assholes (Jackson) and other bizarre political circumstances.

Back to Phi Phi. As for the nighttime debauchery, there was certainly a lot of fire involved. Juggling fire, shooting flames on a lick of gasoline, spinning fire, flaming jump ropes, you name it. Where there's fire, there's bound to be smoke, and I'm sure that the lungs of many were indulging that night. Interestingly, while we were enjoying some beers at the Chillout Bar (I think that's what it was called), I looked around at the spectacle unfolding up and down the beach and stated that I felt reasonably certain someone somewhere was going all Walter White on this scene and that there was probably meth in the crowd. Upon returning to the mainland and picking up the latest Phuket News, I read two stories of recently busted meth dealers. So there's that.

It's not that I don't recommend going to Phi Phi, but I do recommend lowering your expectations bungalow wise, if you don't spring for a fancy resort, and I do hope you can handle the smell of more than a few bad decisions, most relating to sewage and other basic infrastructure delights that take on new meaning when you have thousands of revelers showing up on a sandbar. Meanwhile, Brian got food poisoning, and it seems most likely timing-wise that it was from something he ate there, which is perhaps adding to my negative take on these last few days. (And no, I'm not one of those people who calls every twinge of the gut food poisoning.)

And so we come to the one-week point:  one week left in Phuket (this time!). I have accomplished a bunch of things, and by a long shot I have not accomplished all of the things I had hoped to accomplish at the end of week three, let alone a full day into week four, but isn't that the nature of life and creativity and work and passion and also beer?

Furthermore, we had to face a tough decision here. On a whim, I applied for a newspaper editor position here and much to my delight/anguish, was offered the job. The unfortunate reality, beyond the low salary (not Mexico-teaching low, but lower-than-China-teaching low), is that I couldn't accept it because we have things to do at the moment, plans that can't be easily altered, a few engagements in the U.S., some life details to attend to, financial commitments, and so on, and one can't really ask an employer to hold a job for two months, now can one?  I had a majorly traumatic 48 hours trying to figure out how to make it work, and when I realized I couldn't make it work, I accepted that but still felt a little sad.

The moral of the story is: can we have a few more filtered water coolers and a whole lot less plastic tossed into the bins/street/ocean? Can we work on the public transit on this island and ditch the vast numbers of motos, private cars, and many accidents? (The having-to-get-a-car-if-we-live-here thing was part of the anguish, I might add, financially speaking. Why can't this place get some nice, clean shuttle buses going and discourage so much individual motorized transport? Also: bicycles, people! Bicycles! Alas, I know there's a rainy season...)  Can we please try to keep everything magic and beautiful?

I would, however, recommend that all the assholes in China who have the evil nerve to tie up their cats take a trip to Phuket and see how beautiful and glorious it is to let cats have their freedom to walk around to which they are entitled. There are plenty of Chinese tourists here; I hope they get inspired when they see cats living how they should live to tell friends back home to knock it off with the cruel restraints.

Thai it up!

It was said as she cleared our table, collecting the now-empty plates and flatware:
"You guys eat like Thai people!"

Brian and I smiled. What a fun (and funny) comment. We both think eating in Phuket is basically the best thing about being here, or at least in the top two. (Do we have to order them?  How do you rank paradise?) We definitely make use of the Thai condiments, and we can often be seen using the fork to push the food onto the spoon, and we absolutely like the things that pass our lips to be spicy. All I want out of my day is a Thai curry. (And to think I used to be so blase about Thai food, back in the L.A./Boston/New York day when I just seemed to prefer all my many other options so much more...but when it's fresh, delicious, on-the-spot, and a mere $2, it's hard to argue...)

We go to this particular restaurant in old town Phuket, called Wilai, at least once a week; it was one of the places we discovered two years ago on our first trip here and it was a no-brainer we'd go back now that we're Phuketting again. It's very popular with foreigners, but it's Thai food (which I do have to point out, because lots of cuisines are available here: burgers, Italian, Japanese, even a bit of Mexican at the popular beach areas...)   Earlier, when a different staff member had taken our order, she had clarified that we really wanted the food spicy (no, really) and I saw her cross out something in Thai she'd written at the top of the pad on which she was writing our order, which caused a good minute or two of speculation: I imagined a system in which they write "foreigner" at the top to warn the cooks, and I fantasized that she had crossed it out upon learning we really wanted spicy food...

So, to have at the end of that particular meal on that particular day another restaurant staffer just bust out the amused-and-pleased "you eat like Thai people!" and go on to explain that she saw us dipping our food in the spicy sauces just as the Thais apparently would was hilarious, indeed.

Less than two weeks remain this time around in Phuket. Is there anything else I absolutely must try/eat/see here before I go?

Rock the vote, but no votes on the rocks

This is an interesting time to be in Thailand. If you have been reading any news stories about things other than Justin Bieber and the polar vortex, you might have heard something about the protests in Bangkok. They have been going on for a while; I started reading about them well before we left China. But, they are basically confined to Bangkok, and here in Phuket, an especially oblivious foreigner might not know that they were even going on. Especially if one flew directly into Phuket and didn't even have to think about Bangkok along the way.

I've kept up with the news a bit, but of late it seems to have been mostly a low-level agitation. A few people, tragically, have died during the unrest. My understanding is that for the most part, you can avoid the protests. Friends in Bangkok report that they are going about their lives. Now, however, there will be something for us to notice here in Phuket town. Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra has called for elections, trying to end the protests. Unfortunately, the protesters, who think the PM's government is hopelessly corrupt, aren't jumping on board the election idea, and are encouraging others to boycott. The elections are going to happen, despite the threat of more disturbances as the elections are protested.

Will there be increased unrest and violence? I can't say. What I can say is that here in Thailand, just like in Mexico when we were there, the bars will be closed on election day. And these elections are going to last for TWO days!  Can you believe it?  This Saturday and Sunday, no happy hour for us! I haven't heard if alcohol sales in stores are also suspended. Good times, reminiscing about our last minute dash into the convenience store Oxxo in Queretaro to buy a 12-pack before the 6 p.m. cut-off; they had already draped coverings over the beer coolers and everything!  But we convinced them that it was only 5:58p.m.  It was a close call, though.

Definitely have to plan ahead for our beer drinking for this weekend here in Thailand!