Black Naped Oriole

This one was really clear and easy to identify using the binoculars, but you couldn't tell in the photos. I wouldn't have known he was there if I hadn't seen him fly to the perch. In the upper photo, he's on the far left on the highest branch coming out of the side of the frame. He was there for all of maybe 15 seconds. I realize I've set up unrealistic standards, wanting to not only see the birds, but to photograph them too. Anon, I'm going to look into a camera like yours when I get back . My serious birder friend Dianne doesn't even have a camera. What you can't see in the picture are his bandit black stripes over his eyes, his other black markings on his tail and underparts, and his reddish beak.

And, coming soon, are pictures of the racket-tailed drongo in flight. These guys show themselves for five or ten seconds at a time. I finally figured out their flight path from our balcony - just a short opening - and knowing they were in the area, just kept the video camera on until they flew by. I'll try to edit the video tonight.

1950's Mike Wallace Interviews

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas Austin has about 65 Mike Wallace interviews from 1957 and 1958 on their website. The people he interviewed were all very well known names at the time, some still are. I haven't had a chance to listen to them yet, but this seems like an incredibly interesting way to connect to American history and to get some perspective on how some things have changed, how other things haven't changed at all.

There's a tendency to think that the time you live in is when people really know what's going on. But I've always been amazed reading books from the past at how aware and 'modern' people from previous centuries and millennia were.

I've picked a few of the interviews to give you an idea of what's there. Great for those with ipods to listen to in the car or at the gym. Find out how we got to where we are today. I've included the brief bios since many of the names will not be familiar to a lot of people today. (And Monica, no I didn't know who they all were either. The first one's for you though.)


Thanks to reader JM for this great tip, which he found when Salon.com discussed the interview with Pearl Buck.

Mortimer Adler
9/7/1958

Mortimer Adler, president of the Institute for Philosophical Research, former professor of the philosophy of law at the University of Chicago, and author of The Idea of Freedom, talks to Wallace about conceptions of freedom, capitalism, socialism, and the American worker.



Charles Percy
7/6/1958

Charles Percy, president of Bell & Howell, talks to Wallace about the role of government in the economic system, about private enterprise's involvement in public services, tax reform, and the soviet economic system.



Henry Kissinger
7/13/1958

Adlai Stevenson
6/1/1958

Adlai Stevenson, former governor of Illinois and twice the Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States, talks to Wallace about American politics, the difficulty in persuading good people to become involved in politics, diversity, elections, and the need for the average citizen to be involved in government.

William O. Douglas
5/11/1958

William Douglas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, talks with Wallace about freedom of expression and the freedom to exchange ideas. In Douglas's book, The Right of the People, he wrote, "In recent years, as we have denounced the loss of liberties abroad we have witnessed its decline here in America."


Salvadore Dali
4/19/1958

Salvador Dali, the surrealist painter, talks to Wallace about genius, the subconscious, weakness, old age and luxury, death, religion, and dreams.


Reinhold Niebuhr
4/27/1958

Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, vice president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, on leave to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and one of the most important and challenging religious thinkers in the world, talks to Wallace about the separation between church and state, Catholicism, Protestantism, anti-Semitism, communism, and nuclear war.

Oscar Hammerstein II
3/15/1958

One of the most successful and controversial figures in show business and Broadway lyricist for such classics as Oklahoma!, The King and I, and South Pacific, Oscar Hammerstein II talks to Wallace about sentimentality, racism, religion, and politics.

[He was like a father to Sweeney Todd composer Stephen Sondheim]

Pearl Buck
2/8/1958

Pearl Buck, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning novelist, talks to Wallace about American women, marriage, career versus family, and the difference between men and women.

Walter Reuther
1/25/1958

Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, talks to Wallace about his plan for profit sharing for auto workers, which was being attacked as a "giant step toward socialism."

Drew Pearson
12/7/1957

Drew Pearson, syndicated columnist, talks to Wallace about Sputnik, a third world war, Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, and about being called a vicious liar by prominent politicians.

Eleanor Roosevelt
11/23/1957

Eleanor Roosevelt, former first lady, talks to Wallace about Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Republicans, Democrats, the Soviet Union, Westbrook Pegler, her son's relationship with Dominican leader Rafael Trujillo, race, and garlic pills.


Kirk Douglas
11/2/1957

Kirk Douglas, a film star who had recently completed two films, Paths of Glory and The Vikings, talks to Wallace about acting, fame, the charge that Hollywood films misrepresent America abroad, Nazis, Communists, and European versus American women.
[Michael Douglas' father]

Malcolm Muggeridge
10/19/1957

Malcolm Muggeridge, former editor of Punch Magazine and one of England's leading intellectuals, talks to Wallace about his article in The Saturday Evening Post in which he created an international furor by criticizing Queen Elizabeth.


Orval Faubus
9/15/1957

Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas, talks to Wallace from the Governor's mansion in Little Rock during his standoff with the Federal Government over the integration of Little Rock Central High School. Faubus had called in the National Guard to bar the African-American students from the school and had met the day before this interview with President Eisenhower in an effort to resolve the conflict.


Margaret Sanger
9/21/1957

Margaret Sanger, the leader of the birth control movement in America, talks to Wallace about why she became an advocate for birth control, over-population, the Catholic Church, and morality.


Frank Lloyd Wright
9/1/1957 and 9/28/1957

This interview was recorded in two parts. Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the greatest architects of the 20th century, talks to Wallace about religion, war, mercy killing, art, critics, his mile-high skyscraper, America's youth, sex, morality, politics, nature, and death.
Thanks to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation for their cooperation in presenting this interview here. This interview is available on home video through the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.



Eddie Arcaro
9/8/1957

Eddie Arcaro, the most celebrated jockey in America, winner of 5 Kentucky Derbys and 22 million dollars in purses over a 25-year career, talks with Wallace about horse racing, gambling, drugging of horses, and the pressure to win.

[Sports scandals with drugs are nothing new]

Senator James Eastland
7/28/1957

Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, who has been called "The Voice of the White South," talks to Wallace about segregation, slavery, the Soviet Union, voting rights laws, and the Ku Klux Klan.
NOTE: This interview contains language that may be offensive to some people.
[Listen to a Mississippi Senator when segregation was still the law in the South]

Bob Feller
8/4/1957

Bob Feller, one of the great baseball pitchers of all time, talks to Wallace about ballplayers' salaries, the reserve clause, rich ball clubs, Pay TV, beer companies as sponsors, bean balls, gambling, and Joe DiMaggio versus Ted Williams.


Charles "Commando" Kelly
6/30/1957

Chuck "Commando" Kelly, recipient of the Medal of Honor in World War II, talks to Wallace about his financial troubles, unemployment, the Korean War, and nuclear weapons.


Steve Allen
7/7/1957

Steve Allen, comedian, musician, and television personality, talks to Wallace about his rivalry with Ed Sullivan, his television show, and awards.


Gloria Swanson
4/28/1957

Gloria Swanson, one of Hollywood's most spectacular stars, talks to Wallace about why she is not making films, sex appeal, Hollywood in the 1920s, marriage, plastic surgery, and cancer cures.


Eldon Edwards
5/5/1957

Eldon Edwards, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, talks to Wallace about the South's attitude toward the KKK, the Klan's membership, segregation, the NAACP, communism, and J. Edgar Hoover.

Things Just Happen - Fixing Flats, Meeting a Monk and a Gaur Part 2

[Double click on any picture to enlarge it]


In addition to passing Wat Umong everyday on the way to work, I also pass a sign about Wildlife Conservation, but the road goes uphill. And it's hot. But one morning about a ten days ago, I rode up and discovered . . .well I'm not quite sure what. There's an office.



There's a huge bird cage full of bulbuls, and even when they're in a cage I can't get a good picture. I'd been thinking about cages and how awful it is to put birds in cages. This all arose from watching the birds off our balcony and how much space they use.









There were also some caged deer. I got to them from the backside so there were lots of fences between us.











And there was a free family of white crested laughing thrushes. I'm guessing this was the pair we'd seen at the garden restaurant behind Wat Ramphoeng a while back - it's less than a quarter mile away as the thrush flies. (It's on the tree trunk, lower left. Like always you can double click to enlarge the pictures.)




So as we walked around the lake after the monk chat and I saw a paved road that looked like it went out, I began to wonder if it went to the wildlife conservation area. It did. And now it was around five pm, cloudy, cool, and we saw the thrushes again. J moved very quickly when she saw a snake go by (I never saw it) and so we went past the picnic area to the nature trail.

It's the end of the dry season, so most things are very dry. But there was a small damned up lake and a kingfisher flew across. There were lots of birds, I got some on camera in just brief glimpses, not very good. And these red flowers.



Then we ran into this monk with a wheel barrow of old leaves and cow dung. He asked us what we were doing here - in curiosity, not challenging us - and we had a long discussion about birds, living things, where I work, Buddhism (this was where my Thai vocabulary began to fail me, but he did say that all living things love life more than anything else and there was a sign near by that said the same thing.) Which made it all the more curious when he spoke about an Alaskan friend - in the Air Force - who comes to Thailand frequently and is an avid fisher and hunter who likes antique guns. Then he told us there was a wild woowa. (I think cow must be the only animal we have in English for which there is no generic name for both the male and female - well I guess there's peacock too, and if I think about it I might think of more.) He said the monks can walk up to it and feed it and it licks their arms. Did we want to see it?





Well of course. So he walked us over to see if it was there. It was. It was this huge wild bull. Later I thought of the word gaur, googled it, and sure enough, that's what it was. It was staring straight at me in the distance as I tried to keep up with the monk. Joan stopped earlier. And it clearly wasn't comfortable with me either, so I stopped as the monk went on.


There were some small deer that appeared to be caged down there, but the bull was free and later ran off through the wildlife area. I have to say I was amazed to see a huge animal like that loose right here on the edge of Thailand's second biggest city. But from this area, it really looks like it's forest all the way up the mountain side of Doi (Mt) Suthep. And clearly this gaur has found friends among the monks who do feed it. I know we wouldn't have seen it had the monk not taken us over there (though we weren't far away) and that the gaur would have run off if we'd gotten close. As I think about it, it looked at us the way a moose does - trying to figure out who we were and whether we were a problem. We weren't wearing orange monk's robes.

The ultimateungulate has this description:

Body Length: 250-330 cm / 8.3-11 ft.
Shoulder Height: 170-220 cm / 5.6-7.2 ft.
Tail Length: 70-100 cm / 28-40 in.
Weight: 700-1000 kg / 1540-2200 lb.

The dark brown coat is short and dense, while the lower legs are white to tan in colour. There is a dewlap under the chin which extends between the front legs. There is a shoulder hump which is especially pronounced in adult males. The horns are found in both sexes, and grow from the sides of the head, curving upwards. Yellow at the base and turning black at the tips, they grow to a length of 80 cm / 32 inches. A bulging grey-tan ridge connects the horns on the forehead.

Ecology and Behavior

Where gaurs have not been disturbed, they are basically diurnal, being most active in the morning and late afternoon and resting during the hottest time of the day. However, where populations have been molested by human populations, the gaur has become largely nocturnal, rarely seen in the open after 8:00 in the morning. During the dry season, herds congregate and remain in small areas, dispersing into the hills with the arrival of the monsoon. While gaurs are dependent on water for drinking, they do not seem to bathe or wallow. When alarmed, gaurs crash into the jungle at a surprising speed. Gaurs live in herds led by a single adult male. During the peak of the breeding season, unattached males wander widely in search of receptive females. No serious fighting has been recorded between males, with size being the major factor in determining dominance. Males make a mating call of clear, resonant tones which may carry for more than 1.6 kilometers. Gaurs have also been known to make a whistling snort as an alarm call, and a low, cow-like moo. The average population density is about 0.6 animals per square kilometer, with herds having home ranges of around 80 square kilometers.

Family group: Small mixed herds of 2-40 individuals. Adult males may be solitary.
Diet: Grasses, shoots and fruit.
Main Predators: Tiger, leopard.

Distribution

Tropical woodlands in India, Indochina, and the Malay Peninsula.

Countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia (Peninsular Malaysia), Myanmar, Nepal, Thailand, Viet Nam (IUCN, 2002).

I'm used to eucalyptus trees from growing up in Southern California, but I've never seen bark like this. It's a piece of art. The monk showed us a birds nest just on the other side of trunk.
He also said the cicadas sounded different before and after the rain, better before. Now I know where they got the sound they put in table saws. It's from the cicadas, but amplified a bit.

(click on the black arrow in the yellow square) Chiang Mai Forest Cicadas uploaded by AKRaven



As I said it is the dry season. Though the Thai New Year is coming up next week and the rains should be coming before long. The Songkran festival is when people soak each other with water and Chiang Mai is supposed to have the wildest Songkran festival. The moat around the old town has been filled with water and there were even people swimming in it Saturday when we came back from Mae Sai.





He said that a hummingbird like bird feeds on these tiny pink flowers. We see a bird like that from our balcony.







We walked back through the Wat grounds which has words of wisdom posted here and there on trees. Then we walked back to pick up my tire from the bike shop and headed home.


We've seen the signs for the Heinrich Böll Foundation when we first got here, but never actually found the place. Since the sign is right near the tire repair place, we decided to try to find it. We ended up at this compound at the end of a small back street. (Sorry it was getting dark, but I still think a little blur is better than the artificial light of a flash. This is what it really looked like.) And as I looked to see if the tiny street went further, I realized that it ended in part of the Wat Padaeng temple grounds just a short ways from our building. The dogs didn't like us cutting through their property, but they stayed up on the hill and did their barking from there.

When we got home and put the tire back on the bike, I discovered that the rear tire was now flat, so we took the bike back to the bike shop where he pulled out two thorns and put on two patches. At 20 Baht a patch, I was now almost $2 down because of thorns. It would be another 20 Baht when I discovered the rear tire flat again Monday (yesterday) morning and he found another thorn he'd missed in the bad evening light. But he had a good sense of humor and when I told him I hoped we wouldn't meet again soon, he said I could come by just to chat.

Things Just Happen - Fixing Flats, Meeting a Monk and a Gaur

Last Wednesday I rode my bike to the bike shop to get the rear brake tightened. He fixed this and that too and then I rode into the old town to meet J for dinner. Since she doesn't have a bike here or show an interest in one, she walks a lot. (If you ride anywhere besides the back sois I take to work, you really have to ride in the traffic.




No bike lanes, no sidewalks you could ride on - you can barely walk on them. So it can be pretty intimidating.) So we walked home - it took about two hours. Just before we got home I realized we needed bananas and I was ready to ride up Thanon (road) Suthep. But my bike was weird. I had a flat in front. So I just pushed it the rest of the way home. And the next day we left for Mae Sai.

So yesterday (Sunday) I borrowed a monkey wrench and took the front wheel off and we walked to a little shop that fixes flats.

We left the wheel there and walked up the road to Wat Umong. This temple is known as the forest temple. I ride past it every day on the way to and from work, but I'd never been in it. J had gone in once to look around. This is a major wat that tourists go to, but it isn't in the middle of town. For most people, you have to work to get to it. So it seemed like, since it's in our neighborhood, we ought to check it out.

After looking at a few books on Buddhism, environmental issues in Thailand, meditation, we moved on.







Looking at the map, we decided to just follow the trail. This is not your average Wat. It's in a forest and the buildings are scattered here and there amongst the trees.
First we went to the library. I haven't been in one for a while, so it was nice to browse the books - they had English as well as Thai and other languages.


The middle sign is in English and says there will be Monk talks in English on Sundays from 3-5 at the fish pond. It was four. The blue arrow signs points to the fish pond.
So we wandered down and found about 15 foreigners sitting in a little round pavilion next to what was more a small man made lake than a pond, listening to a British (I think) monk talking about Buddhism.

A young man asked for a definition of Enlightenment. The monk explained why simple explanations were problematic. Then he described enlightenment, using his hands, as two sheaves of grass leaning against each other. One is a person, the other is reality. Then his hands collapsed. When man no longer sees the world from his subjective view, when this separation between a man and the world collapses - that's enlightenment. (I've fudged a bit because I can't remember exactly the words he used.)

I was struck by how this parallels one of the points of post-modernists who talk about how we objectify the world instead seeing ourselves as being part of the world. (That's not quite right either, but there is a connection here that I can't explain well.) The monk had to attend to things at 4:30 and so we wandered further along the trail around the lake.

[The internet connection ended last night at this point. I was going to write more on this post, but it's long enough and I'll do a part 2 later to finish Sunday. I'm in the office again, working on my presentation that will be sometime this week. No one else is here again - they were supposed to get back yesterday (Monday) night - so I have a quiet place to get this powerpoint so it makes the points I need to make in a fun way. They really have a lot of their planning in place - thanks in part to the requirements of the original grant application to Oxfam. Now it's just a question of being able to break down the major expected outcomes (it's taken me a long time to learn that in Thai well enough to roll easily off my tongue. In Thai it translates as "results that we expect to receive" or ผลที่คาดว่าจะได้รับ)
into steps that need to get there. Maybe I'll do a post on that too. So this is it for now. I'll do the monk and gaur in part 2.)

McCain Has an Interesting Past, Obama Has an Interesting Future

I don't make predictions often or lightly because there are just too many unpredictables, especially in politics, but I'm getting a strong sense of where things are going in the US presidential election.

CNN has become a gossip station, focusing on the day-to-day scraps of information

• today's poll data,

• snippets of candidates talking about each other, ignoring what they say on the issues,

• goading partisans to make nasty comments about the other candidate, etc.

This, of course, makes the campaign into a reality show - who will end up as the next American Idol President? "Who says the campaign can't be entertaining?" is one of their campaign ad lines.

• Can Hillary get enough votes to stop Obama?
  
• with story after story on how she might get them through primaries, super delegates, and even enticing those 'pledged' to Obama

• Will dragging out the Democratic primary cost them the election in November?

• Why is McCain competitive when so many people think the US is going in the wrong direction?

Very little about their policy proposals, no serious analysis of their past records and accomplishments, nothing with any meat.

Well, here's my take on things.

I was there for the excitement of the Democratic caucus in Anchorage. It was palpable. People were excited about politics like they haven't been for decades.

And there is no mistake that the people of Thailand here are excited about the possibility of Obama as president. My sense is the Thai perception is echoed around the world. Just Obama's election would totally change the rest of the world's image of the USA.

Obama's response about his pastor was statesmanlike.

• The content was intellectually solid - putting into words a new understanding of race relations that the American public was ready to hear,
  
• The language and images spoked directly to everyone
  
• The delivery sounded honest and authentic
  

Compare this to Clinton's shrill and ineffective response to her Bosnia Airport-under-fire story.


What about McCain?
The Republican primary was packed with candidates who fell by the wayside quickly. McCain was the front runner only at the very end so was never really the target. At the end Huckabee gracefully dropped out compared to Clinton's clinging. (And she has every right, and I don't necessarily buy the media's story that this will hurt the Democrats in the end.) McCain hasn't been under any serious pressure or probing spotlights the way the Democratic candidates have been.

When that happens, his numbers will drop quickly. Reading between the lines, it sounds like

• he's testy,
  
• he talks off the cuff without thinking,
  
• his ideas don't seem to be based on any comprehensive world view. Instead they seem to be idiosyncratically based on his emotional reactions to his experiences and so they are inconsistent and unpredictable.
  
• his party's establishment has no enthusiasm for him.

Once he and Obama are the two candidates, McCain will be creamed.

In summary, McCain has an interesting past. Obama has an interesting future.

Burma Border Run 9 - Almost Home

We had a little time before the bus left and we found this organic shop. Since my organization is working on these issues, I naturally take an interest in all these shops - how are they doing, how they advertise, who their customers are. I talked with one of the people working in the shop. They are making a slight profit. They have sponsorship of the Queen of Thailand which certainly doesn't hurt. They have customers from across the board. And organic wild honey they have to process themselves because it tends to come in with things floating in it.






Some of the farmers my organizations works with grow organic strawberries and I've been saying that jam has to be an option if they don't sell them all fresh. So, here is some strawberry jam.



When we got off the bus, and got into a song thaew for the ride home. Then it suddenly filled up with foreigners. Here's a Thai traveler who talked loudly the whole way, whose lived in Ireland for several years. Next to her is a Dutch woman.



This first man was a Scot who'd just spent 28 days traveling through Burma. He said he saw no signs of trouble anywhere, though there were places that were restricted to foreigners.

Burma Border Run 8 - R&R Laluna, Chiang Rai

J has put up with a lot from me over the years, so now and then it's time to just kick back and relax in something resembling luxury. So before we left I scanned the internet and found the Laluna Resort in Chiang Rai. On Sawadee.com it has about half the price it was on its own website. So we enjoyed the last part of the trip by the pool.

Here's the view from our room.

I really like open showers, like this one on the other side of the plant.

J relaxing by the pool.

And a nice leisurely breakfast.

Burma Border Run 7 - Mae Sai Swimmers

We went back into Thailand, then went to check out the riverside guest houses for lunch. Our Lonely Planet book says about the guest house in the picture,

Unfortunately, the great river views are overshadowed by a general lack of upkeep. If you stay here, pay close attention to how to find your way in and out, and pray that your hut hangs on just one more night.

We ended up almost under the border crossing bridge at a table on the water's edge, watching these kids enjoy themselves all through our lunch. This river separates Thailand and Burma. Campbell Creek is deeper and just as wide. Who says you need money to have fun?



They dove in here on this side, then floated down the river and came quickly back to dive in again.

Burma Border Run 6e - Tachileik Back Streets

Now, here's the real reason Tachileik is a destination for Thai tourists - shopping for Chinese goods. I finally found a pair of sandals - I can feel the ground through my old ones - a case for my camera, and a longyi for a friend who asked for a pakama. Will a Burmese man's sarong do instead Lewis Since he doesn't read this blog to my knowledge, I don't have to worry. Des, don't tell him.
Ron ZZ, I really have no idea about these fishing reels, but this will give you another reason to put Northern Thailand on your travel list.


And this is one of the shops that carries animal parts - many if not most prohibited in most countries. But they no longer have tiger skins, just small pieces of tiger skin.

Burma Border Run 6d - Tachileik Back Streets

Coming out of the Thai-Yai village we passed a Chinese Buddhist temple that had a small forest of beautiful trees still on the back of the grounds.

And there's garbage piles here and there.

I have no idea what the sign says. But it's to the left.

This guy knows how to pack his bike with vegies. It was ok to take a picture of the bike, but not to take his picture. Compare these vegies on the back street with the fruit stand on the main street.

Two monks walking onto a backstreet from the main street. You can see J in the background in the new shorts she got at the Textile Fair while we were waiting for the bus back in Chiang Mai.

The back streets are a real contrast to the main street that you see as you come across from Thailand. When we were in Burma at Mae Sot our guide said that rich people own the shops in town and the land prices have been going up very fast as they expect lots of traffic when the road from Thailand opens and you can drive from Hanoi to Yangoon.

But Mae Sot was a backwater town 40 years ago. Gems and other goods got smuggled over the border, but I suspect the Burmese border village was just as much of a backwater as Maesod. I'm guessing that Tachileik has been a much more important town for centuries. While it's not on the Mekong and its river was certainly not navigable while we were there, nevertheless it is very close to Yunan province in China and it certainly looked much more prosperous than Myawaddi, the town across from Mae Sot. But I'm just conjecturing, I need to look this up. But our guide then did say that a few Burmese get rich and the rest of the people are poor. The contrast between all the Chinese goods for sale - next post will have a little of that - and the unpaved back streets and tiny shops would be consistent with that.

While I was trying to find more on Tachileik, I came across this discussion of opium in the region. The post is a year old, but the comments are clearly by people who know about Burma.