Back Home in Bangkok, Part IV
Following Part III
August 17-25, 2003
Asking for divine intervention.
Playing ... feeling better, I guess.
PS: ZZZZZZZZZZZOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmm.
Everything (and everyone) is finally virus free: Watcharee and our seven PCs are now fully 'patched' and ready for play.
Tomorrow we can return to business.
"It all boils down to one thing: fresh pussy ... and lots of it. Without it Allah would be shit with these guys." - Anon.
(CNN) -- When Bali bomber Amrozi was sentenced to death by firing squad this month, he turned around, smiled broadly and turned his two thumbs up in the air.
"It's a martyr's death I am looking for," Amrozi said during his trial in Denpasar, following the October Bali nightclub blasts.
The 40-year-old mechanic from a village in East Java was happy because he had a chance of joining a growing horde of Muslims from Gaza, Iraq, and Afghanistan willing to die as heroes in the name of Islam.
While there are many reasons young Muslims sacrifice their lives -- including the honor and money bestowed onto their families after their death -- it is the martyr's afterlife that captures the imagination.
In the late 1990s, Pakistani journalist Nasra Hassan interviewed nearly 250 prospective bombers, their families, as well as their trainers, from within militant Palestinian camps.
In remarkable accounts, members of the Palestinian fundamentalist group Hamas described how potential bombers came to believe that paradise was on the "other side of the detonator."
Candidates for martyrdom were told the first drop of blood shed by a martyr washes away their sins. They could select 70 of their nearest and dearest to enter Heaven; and they would have at their disposal 72 houris, the beautiful virgins of paradise, Hassan recounted in the New Yorker.
Indeed many of the statements written by suicide bombers before they died spoke of a painless death that offered the shortest path to such a Heaven.
NB: Shortly after 9/11 THOCBDC pointed out that recent scholarly interpretive translations of the traditional 'rewards page' for 'martyr's indicated a 'bait-and-switch' scheme was probably at work. That it was six-dozen albino raisins and not a dorm full of virgin twittering teens that awaited these cobbled-together 'explodees' when they were finally wheeled in for their heavenly desserts.
Yes, I am still fiddling with my Nikon zoom.
Yikes! 'White Shirts' has become 'Blue Shirts'!
The girl with the smile is named Noi.
As it was David's next to last night in Bangkok we invited him to dinner at our apartment ... Pom did most of the cooking. Golf ironed part of her elephant polo uniform while Pom tended to the rice cooker. Watcharee helped with the vegetables. David drank beer. I talked. We all ate.
A rainy day in Bangkok ... the usual suspects.
The comics:
En route from Bangkok to Hong Kong ...
Next: Hong Kong
