From The Nation yesterday: “Bangkok Rock Festival 2007 – which was initially scheduled for February 10 and 11 – will be cancelled mainly due to the government's ban on alcohol advertising.”

This is only the beginning.

Addendum: In case you aren't aware, the proposed acts for the Bangkok Rock Festival 2007 included, wait for it, The Prodigy, Damien Rice, and Kasabian. That alone causes me to weep out of desperation. However, the passing of the bill to ban alcohol advertising was put back 30 days, which may mean it never comes into effect. We can but hope, because I want to see The Prodigy. I've been a fan since my cousin played me 'No Good, Start the Dance'. I must have been around 12-years-old I think. It's a long time coming.

I spent two hours in Asia Books today looking for something to read. The Wisdom of Confucius simply screamed at me and I bought it on a whim. As of yet, I’m too scared to pick it up. While I was in Paragon, I saw something utterly dumbfounding.

I decided to go to Burger King. I hadn’t been for a while and felt that the ingestion of fat, salt and sugar would go some way towards elevating my mood. I was halfway through my meal when I noticed a congregation of two Farang men, three Thai women and one baby eating at the table in front of mine.

Imagine my surprise when the dimwitted, bespectacled father of the baby picked it up and lay it down on its back on top of the rubbish bin where there would usually be a stack of trays. This born fool actually changed his baby’s diaper on the bin, and then threw the evidence inside to join the burger-wrappers and uneaten French fries. I was almost sick.

It wasn’t a casual change either; it was the real thing, wet wipes and all. This man was quite clearly an idiot, and his baby had a face that left me convinced that it too would grow up to be an imbecile of epic proportions. The father was so stupid that he paraded his baby around in front of my table as if to mock me. It’s bad enough to do something like that in a place where people eat, but to do it as if it were completely normal seemed completely insane.

Unless…

Have I missed something? Are there baby-changing spots in fast food restaurants where parents can clean up their functioning offspring? Have I judged this man without really knowing the full extent of the situation? I’m really not sure, because it seemed so ridiculous that it just couldn’t have been possible unless there was a rational explanation.

December 3 will go down in the books as the day one of the maddest ideas in Thai political history came into effect: the complete ban on alcohol advertising in all media.

“Spokesman of the Public Health Ministry Md Suphan Srithamma, revealed that the Public Health Minister Md Mongkol Na Songkla announced at the November meeting between executive officials that the ministry will continue with the 24 hrs alcohol ban in all forms of media. It will inform provincial public health doctors across the country attending a meeting on November 27 of the ban. Once the ban takes effect, all provinces are obliged to follow the order,” quoted from Thai National News Bureau Public Relations Department today.

“It will cut our advertising revenue by a quarter,” said the editor of one Bangkok-based magazine.

The bigger fish will be able to keep swimming whilst the smaller ones die an untimely death and slowly float to the surface – twisted, deformed and wretched – along with all the other little fish that tried to make something of themselves in the big pond.

The impact on the media goes without saying, but another editor said today that “There will have to be ways around it.”

People are not going to stop drinking because of a ban on advertising. People already know alcohol exists, and the sudden elimination of it form their direct line of vision will not mean it is instantly forgotten.

If anything, now people will become more curious because of the enormous amount of publicity the passing of this bill has achieved over the past several weeks. If ever there was a time to see some irony in the government’s actions it would be now: when all the alcohol companies are getting vast amounts of exposure for free and seeing themselves thrust into the victim’s role in the public eye.

There will be no more Tiger Beer girls. Jobs will be lost. Advertisers, who are devilishly clever at the best of times, will have to come up with all new, inventive ways to sell their products. There are still products to be sold, and the larger companies will find a way to reach the consumer. There is always a way; especially in Thailand.

The smaller alcohol companies, however, may face a similar fate to that of smaller magazines and newspapers. Hopefully, the government will realize that they are going to be destroying great chunks of revenue that benefit a great many lives.

Nightlife will suffer also. Thailand has recently been graced with an influx of international bands and DJs, partly thanks to major sponsorship from the likes of Singha Beer, 100 Pipers and so on. This sponsorship has not been eliminated altogether, but the goalposts have been shifted somewhat. Again, there will have to be a way to work around this, but it will surely mean, no matter what, that funding is drastically cut.

It could be the end of Bangkok’s revitalized nightlife status, which will anger foreigners and locals alike, and Thailand will lose out to Singapore and KL once more.

These are strange times. Yesterday I watched a man with a persistent itch he was too lazy to scratch, take a knife and cut a piece of flesh from his shoulder roughly one inch squared. He was a foolish man.

Techno’ tags: Asia, Coup, Government, Bangkok, Thailand, Thai Politics, Thai Ban Alcohol Advertising

They could be Thailand’s answer to the Spice Girls. They have attitude, style and grace; everything needed to be bastions of ‘girl power’ in the Land of Smiles. They go by the name of Venus Flytrap and have been taken under the watchful wing of Sony BMG. The girls are known by the monikers of Hot, Posh, Cool, Naughty and Sweet Venus, and they really really really wanna be women; because unlike the Spice Girls, they were all born men.

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I ran 'chkdsk' as a 'run' command and my external hard drive is now fixed and readable. It looks as if I have all the data in-tact. I'm still not exactly sure what caused the problem, though. This is the first good news I have had all day and I am going to celebrate by having lunch now.