The woman in the green-cloth militar shirt was busy playing pool on her computer. I approached her small both on the Laos/Thai border and coughed slightly. She looked up briefly to inspect my visa, pushed it back into my hand, and went back to a tricky shot on her eight ball. Welcome to Laos.
Etter litt folkeopplysing fra nærbutikker og roseselgere har jeg fått med meg at det er Valentine i dag. Uten at jeg vet dette med sikkerhet er det vel en dag funnet opp av kjøpmenn i USA, når så kjøpmenn i Europa så hvor innbringende den er prøver de å innføre den også der og nå er den kommet til Asia. Jeg misliker egentlig den type dager som setter dollartegn i øynene på kjøpmenn, så lar meg ikke rive med. Så dagen vil bli “feiret” på den normale Thai restauranten vår, men jeg kan vel alltids la meg rive med nok til å komme med et lite dikt til Alisa (et som står hele året, og ikke bare denne dagen):
In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States, concerned about the worldwide trades in narcotics, lobbied the leaders of a number of European and Asian countries to create an International Opium Commission. This forum met in Shanghai, China between 5 and 26 February 1909 and was charged with task of establishing methods to control narcootics. Delegates came from the United States, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Persia, China and Thailand.
This is a Book Review!
Bangkok Inside Out was co-authored by Daniel Ziv (a seasoned peripathic) and Guy Sharett who has managed to sit still long enough to put down some roots in Bangkok. It was released in 2005 (Equinox Publishing, ISBN 979-97964-6-6) and is printed in Thailand.
Pattaya has been in the throes of a building boom not seen anywhere on the planet since Harry Truman decided to level Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a matching pair of atomic bombs to make way for a series of American fast-food franchises and car dealerships.
Jim Carrey has become one of the most recognized faces in the world. It is precisely because of his face that he has achieved fame. His rubbery visage and penchant for wild and extreme behavior has given him a notoriety he delights in. He has developed a repertoire of oddball characters to the pleasure of audiences everywhere. Not everyone is impressed and you’ll find people who are thoroughly anti-Carrey and his style of comedy but the majority has voted him into our lives. His humour is far from high brow, tasteless in many cases, but he aims to amuse and, for most people, he does just that.
I am gradually developing a suspicion, or perhaps it is a fear, that Jim Carrey is growing on me. Am I becoming a fan? In “Liar Liar” he works tirelessly, inundating us with manic comic energy. Like the class clown who’ll do anything for a laugh, Carrey at one point actually pounds himself with a toilet seat. And gets a laugh.
The movie is a high-energy comeback from 1996’s dismal “The Cable Guy”, which made the mistake of giving Carrey an unpleasant and obnoxious character to play. Here Carrey is likable and sympathetic, in a movie that will play for the whole family, entertaining each member on a different level (he’s a master at combining slapstick for the kids with innuendo for the grownups).
As the title character of THE CABLE GUY (Columbia, PG-13), Jim Carrey thrusts out his jaw and speaks in a sulky, nagging lisp, as if he were Jay Leno’s infantile brother. Has any other performer derived this much joy from acting this undignified? Carrey plays a pathological leech, a cable-TV serviceman, the cable guy, who latches onto a yuppie customer (Matthew Broderick) and convinces himself that the poor sap is his new best buddy. Calling himself Chip Douglas (from My Three Sons, one of the shows that haunt his TV-addled brain), he invades Broderick’s home and office, leaving endless messages on his answering machine, crashing - and I mean crashing - his amateur basketball game, bombarding him with pop-psych homilies on how to win back his girlfriend, and, in general, turning his pursuit of “friendship” into a thinly disguised act of sadistic terrorism.
From Jerry Lewis to Eddie Murphy, the bottom-line rule of thumb in contemporary American film comedy has been that the more control a performer has over his movies, the less funny - less daring, more self-indulgent - they become. Not so Jim Carrey, whose fourth starring role, in ACE VENTURA: WHEN NATURE CALLS (Warner Bros., PG-13), is his best yet. Unlike so many superstar comics before him, Carrey has retained a raw hunger for The Joke - the killer punchline, the ultimate sight gag - that seems insatiable, and this gives his work a furious, omnivorous energy. Even when the jokes are as corny as this movie’s subtitle is, Carrey regularly squeezes a laugh out of you through sheer force of will.
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