Wow. Yesterday was quite a day here in Bangkok, with Police arresting suspected JonBenet Ramsey killer John Mark Karr. Initial reports suggested that he was proclaiming his innocence, but then he ultimately confessed to the crime. But wait — could he be lying?
2Bangkok.com has a good round-up of news stories, many of which paint Bangkok (understandably) in a negative light. And here’s an interesting look at Karr’s life in Thailand.
UPDATE 2: Is Karr falsely claiming to to be the killer?
UPDATE: Thai police say he’s confessed.
CNN:
A suspect was arrested in Bangkok, Thailand, Wednesday “for the December 26, 1996, murder of JonBenet Ramsey,” the district attorney in Boulder, Colorado, said Wednesday.
A law enforcement source identified the suspect as 41-year-old John Mark Karr, a one-time schoolteacher and American citizen who has lived in Conyers, Georgia.
It is the first arrest in the decade-long investigation of the 6-year-old beauty pageant contestant’s slaying. The case was the subject of suspicion and speculation and provided years of fodder for the news networks and the tabloids.
Karr had been communicating with someone in Boulder and that online communications played a key role in leading authorities to him, law enforcement sources said.
Karr has confessed to some elements of the crime and is under investigation for an unrelated sex crime, the sources told CNN.
Reuters provides more info on the suspect:
BANGKOK – Thai police said on Thursday they had arrested an American in connection with the 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey, a child beauty queen whose grisly death triggered a U.S. media frenzy.
They did not name the man, identified in U.S. media as primary school teacher John Mark Karr, 41, but said he was arrested in conjunction with FBI officers after being followed for three weeks as he sought a job teaching English in Bangkok.
“We arrested him yesterday at an apartment not far from my office after having followed him for 21 days,” immigration police chief Lieutenant General Suwat Tumroungsiskul told Reuters.
“During the arrest, we were accompanied by American officers. He has been in and out of Thailand a couple of times and the arrest warrant was issued just a couple of days ago.”
First Sly Stallone sets his sights on Bangkok, and now Nicholas Cage — the man who famously named his son Kal-el, after Superman’s birth name — is up in Krungthep.
Seems Nick is here filming a re-make of the 1999 flick “Bangkok Dangerous.” Apparently the film will be called “Time to Kill” (not to be confused with the 1996 crapfest “A Time to Kill”).
According to the Wikipedia page for the new movie:
The original film’s main character is a deaf-mute whose disability makes him a fearless, unflinching gunman. That character will be changed in the remake.
“We’d like to keep him the same, but we understand that from a marketing point of view Nic needs to have some lines,” Oxide was quoted as saying in the International Herald Tribune. “So what we’re going to do is transform his girlfriend instead into a deaf-mute. This switch will maintain the drama of communication between the two main characters.”
Cage’s character’s girlfriend will be portrayed by Hong Kong actress Charlie Yeung, who is preparing for her role by learning Thai dance and sign language.
In addition, Cage’s character will have a local “errand boy” with whom he develops a bond. That role will be portrayed by Thai film and television actor Chakrit Yamnam.
Indeed, I can confirm that filming occurred Sunday evening on Soi Cowboy, one of the Big Mango’s most popular red light districts. I wasn’t there, but a pal was picked to be an extra, a gig which required him to sit in a girl bar from 4 p.m. until 4 a.m.
I love the street dogs in Bangkok. (Everyone here calls them “soi dogs,” as “soi” is the Thai word for “alley.”)
The canines here and scrappy and they’ve got tons of attitude. They’re usually friendly, and since Thai people are Buddhists and they generally don’t believe in hurting living things, the stray pooches are often in pretty decent shape. Stray dogs often stick to regular territories — their beats, if you will — and the folks who live nearby seem to pitch in and feed them. The other day I saw one of my neighbors, a middle-aged lady, scamper across four busy lanes of traffic to give a local soi dog a nice big bag of food. He was delighted.
(This is not to say, of course, that all stray dogs in Bangkok are looked after properly — lots aren’t, but my experience is that compared to canines I’ve seen in developing countries like Ecuador or Cambodia, the dogs in Thailand have got it pretty good.)
Anyway, given that I love Thai soi dogs, you can imagine my surprise upon discovering that they’ve got their own blog — authored by a real, live Thai soi dog, Cassanova. Seriously.
There’s a noodle stand outside my front door. I mean, really outside my front door.
As you can see in this image, when I come bounding downstairs, I’m practically on top of these poor folks. Not only am I 6’3″, but the door’s elevated well above the alley, so much so that there’s a cinder block I use as a step before landing on the street. I wish I could capture the looks on some of these patrons’ faces when they glance up from their bowls of noodles and see an enormous farang looming about ten feet above them. It seems that when I’m not amusing Thais, I’m frightening them.
(By the way, the owner of the stand, Muay, is delightful. And she turns out some seriously good food.)
Hide the women and children.
Bangkok bad guys: run for the hills.
Rambo is coming to the Land of Smiles.
Filming for “Rambo IV” starts October 1st in Bangkok, baby. Who will (a now nearly geriatric) Sly Stallone be hunting down and killing like the vile pigs they are? None other than the Burmese military junta! This EW story is full of gems. Stallone, in making this new film, had to figure out who to slaughter (apparently an idea hatched in 2002, in which Sly would head to Afghanistan to take out Osama Bin Laden was scuttled):
‘You know, it’s hard,” says the 60-year-old star. ”Politics have changed so much. Who do we fight? The Finns? You can’t do that. The Dutch? That’s not gonna work. Wooden shoes are not gonna look cool.’
Sly Stallone: stand up comedian! He’ll be here all week, folks. Be sure to tip your waitresses.
Stallone may be joking, but finding Rambo a fresh foe was actually a serious problem for the Nu Image/ Millennium Films production. After ruling out the Mideast, Africa, and Korea, the actor finally hit on a solution. ”I called Soldier of Fortune magazine and said, ‘What is the most critical man-doing-inhumanity-to-man situation right now in the world? Where is it?”’ The answer was Burma.
Now, I don’t know about you, but when I’m jonesing for information on international human rights crises, my resource of choice is Soldier of Fotune magazine. Those pantywaists at Amesty International? Lilly-livered pinko eggheads, the whole lot!
So, the script that emerged — a ”first draft” Stallone has written with Art Monterastelli (The Hunted) — finds Rambo living a monastic lifestyle in Bangkok and salvaging old PT boats and tanks for scrap metal. (”It’s like he’s stripping himself down,” says the actor, pensively. ”That old piece of military equipment.”) When a group of volunteers bringing supplies into Burma disappears, a relative of one of the missing missionaries begs Rambo to find them. He heads off with a team of young guns, a plot point required by the financiers, who wanted to hedge against Rambo’s possible mono-generational appeal.
When I walk through the streets of Bangkok, I am struck by two things: 1) the countless retired Green Berets I see living monastic lifestyles, and 2) the preponderance of old PT boats and tanks lying around — you can’t swing a dead cat on Sukhumvit road without hitting discarded military hardware!
I cannot wait to see this movie.
(Via.)
I am very conspicuous in Thailand. I’m very tall. I’m white. And I constantly do silly farang (foreigner) things — like sit on the ground and eat my lunch.
A captured this excellent 30-second video of me today at an outdoor market about 500 meters from my apartment. (Click on the image above or go here to watch it.) I’d bought some chicken with roti and decided to sit on the ground to consume my snack. Unfortunately for me, a gaggle of Thai ladies saw me do this and were consumed with laughter — why would I sit on the dirty street when there were tables nearby? They found this to be hilarious. They guffawed and pointed at me, which I quite enjoyed. Then, with characteristic courtesy, they directed me to a table to sit down.
Indeed, making a fool of myself in Thailand is something of an inadvertent past time. Longtime newley.com readers will recall that I did this for the first time way back in 2001. And I wrote about it in an essay called “Soup to Nuts.”
A new photography exhibit documenting life in Bangkok’s biggest slum. That’s the subject of my most recent Gridskipper post.
The image above — like all of the pics on display — was taken by street photographer Yoonki Kim, a Korean who lives here in Bangkok. In addition to his images from the Klongtoey slum community, his Web site contains many more exceptional photos, such as this (taken at a Tesco-Lotus store in Bangkok, I think), and this (a BTS Skytrain platform) and, best of all, this atmospheric portrait of folks on a Bangkok street.
Before: a mere squid.
After: squid salad.
A few nights ago, A and I made squid salad. Or actually, A made the squid salad and I cleaned the squid (the Thai word for squid is plaa meuk).
I volunteered to do so, as it sounded like an adventure. Cleaning squid can be a very messy process. It’s actually pretty cool. Squid have a totally weird clear plastic-looking/feeling spine (or “quill”) that you have to remove; see the first photo here for an example. And don’t even get me started on giant squid. Giant squid rule. (A later described the cleaning process to a friend as “very Jules Verne.” It was.)
Anyhoo, a question: how much squid did we have at our disposal?
Answer: over four pounds.
Why, you may ask, would two people need four pounds of squid for a simple salad? They wouldn’t, of course. But four pounds is what you end up with when you — and by you I mean me — go the grocery store with the intention of buying one pound and then get your metric system rules messed up and purchase about 2 kilos of squid, which is in fact over four pounds.
(I knew that 1 kg = 2.2 lbs but got confused. I was mistakenly thinking about how 1 km = .6 miles, and so assumed I needed roughly twice as many kilos as we need pounds. Dumb mistake. I really only needed about a half a kilo, not two kilos. Live and learn.)
The squid salad was delicious. We froze the three leftover squid.
My latest Gridskipper post is about khanom buang, an interesting Thai street food made by filling pancakes with coconut cream and topping them with either egg yolks or onions. Mmmm.
