Five-thirty in the morning and we are about to embark on a 12-hour train ride to Chiang Mai. What fun. I won’t be able to blog at all for a day or two. It’s been a good trip, but I strongly recommend not visiting Thailand in May. On top of the heat, SARS has decimated tourism here, and as in China, the tourist spots are pretty much empty. In the upscale shopping malls, nervous clerks file their nails and read the newspaper and look miserable. In order to make enough to pay their staffs, the big hotels are offering dirt-cheap rates and bargains abound.
I can’t believe how much I’ve missed since I basically stopped blogging in late April, when my stuff was carted away to Singapore and I fled China as fast as I could. Only now, as I try to catch up with my favorite blogs and news sites, am I seeing just how out of touch I’ve become. I’d never even heard about the Katrina Leung scandal or the Bill Bennet gambling scandal until minutes ago, when I went through Josh Marshall’s most recent posts. Marshall is a brilliant sleuth journalist and his points on how Bennet’s past self-anointed role of nation’s moralist justifies the intense examination of his own morality/hypocrisy. This and his recent posts on how the “liberal media” glossed over Leung’s ties to the GOP make for great reading.
More to come in a day or two, hopefully.
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