The economy and other stuff

I have a list of topics I plan on writing about that is literally several pages long. The topics include various aspects of Lao culture, comparisons of Thailand and Laos, thoughts on learning the Lao language, humorous observations, lists of things I love, lists of things I hate, and any number of other things that have popped into my head in the past six months. At the beginning of the year I promised myself I would put up an entry of at least a few paragraphs every Friday. I even put this in my day planner. For the past few days I’ve been reading through my list and nothing has jumped out at me. One thing I’ve learned about writing is that anything you write will suck if you aren’t enthusiastic about it. So instead of forcing myself to write on one of these topics, I’m just going to jump around stream-of-consciousness style.

Let’s start with the Economic Crisis (this seems to be the agreed-upon term). I have to admit, I’m finding the whole thing rather amusing. Part of me wants the Dow to drop 2,000 points in a single day so I can watch people on the other side of the world frantically running around while I sit giggling in a Beerlao and valium-induced stupor. The New York Stock Exchange opens at 9:30 PM, making a bad trading day endlessly more entertaining than anything on HBO Asia.

And how can they call it HBO when there’s no cussing and no boobs? I thought the whole point of HBO was that there were no commercials and no edits. I’m pretty sure the guy in charge of editing is an Islamic cleric of some kind. Take Entourage. The show’s full of boobs, f-bombs, drug use, casual sex, etc. The logical thing would be to schedule a movie or tamer show. Instead, we have a program edited to the point where it no longer makes sense. In a recent episode, we saw Drama getting a prescription and later smoking it. The scene where he buys it has been cut. I mean, what kind of Keystone Kops censorship operation are these guys running? Smoking bongs is perfectly fine but OMG THEY’RE BUYING MARIJUANA!

And here’s the thing that really cracks me up: the guy editing Entourage doesn’t want anyone to know Lloyd is gay. I know what the guy is thinking: “if all these asians watching asian HBO see an asian guy who has sex with other men, they might become gay.” I’m sure if he had the budget, he would have had a CGI team insert women into every scene where Lloyd is doing something remotely gay (which is most of them).

Even if Entourage did make people gay, would that be a bad thing? China has 1.3 billion people. Luckily the government wants to avoid a Malthusian nightmare (I love that phrase) and has instituted its one-child policy to get the population under control. Why not actively encourage homosexuality? They missed a great opportunity to tie this in with the Olympics. If they had just come up with some catchy slogans (“Sodomy: think outside the box”), Beijing would be looking like the Castro district right now. And let’s face it, most Chinese girls aren’t much to look at.

But anyway, back to the Economic Crisis. It doesn’t seem to be affecting Laos much. Tourism is down from a year ago but still seems to be doing fine. I don’t know how much is the economy and how much is people not wanting to fly into BKK. Buildings are still going up. The Vientiane times says everything is OK, but what else would you expect? The population is 80% subsistence farmers, a profession that is recession-proof by definition. Most of the locals don’t understand what’s going on in the rest of the world, but if they did, they would probably just shrug their shoulders and say bo pen nyang. If things get bad they can always work on uncle Phoungsavanhathanakhamathan’s farm for a year or two.