Month: April 2011

Video – What to Do when the Commuter Train Passes through a Thai Market…

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The market shown in the video is one located at Maeklong (Maekrong) a town near Bangkok. A news photo of the market from 2001 has the following caption:

Thai vegetable market vendors pull back temporary shades and their produce off a railway track to allow a cross-country train to pass through the middle of the town of Maekrong, 60 kilometers west of Bangkok, April 5, 2001. The bustling market, in the middle of the town, has to scramble from the tracks eight times a day as trains pass, a scene repeated in other rural centers and some city slums across Thailand every day.

In a blog entry on the Thailand Travel Blogs website, the blog writer, Richard Barrow, notes:

The journey was over very quickly and we soon entered a built up area. The outskirts of Maeklong. I knew that during the last 100 metres or so the train would pass through a market. Literally. I know it sounds strange but this was my planned highlight of the trip. I wanted to get pictures of the market stallholders pulling back their produce as we passed through the market. It had always intrigued me and I wanted to come and see for myself. For this event, I made sure I was at the front of the train. The door to the driver’s cabin was open and I asked him if it was OK if I took some pictures. He said “no problem”. As we approached a corner he sounded his whistle a number of times. Then, as we rounded the corner we were presented with the image in the above pictures. I thought I would see people rushing to grab their vegetables before it was run over by the train. But, they knew the train was coming and everything had been cleared!

And an article about the markets published on the Rex Features website notes that, in spite of regular interruptions by passing trains, the market works very well and only two people have died during the last twenty years.

posted with vodpod thanks to Bobb Bopp

“federal government is now an insurance company with an army”

The Government Accountability Office concludes that America faces a “fiscal gap” of $99.4 trillion over the next 75 years, which would mean we would have to increase taxes by 50% or reduce spending by 35% simply to stop accumulating more debt. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will together make up 50% of the federal budget by 2021.

For liberals, the long-term fiscal crisis should seem devastating. If entitlement programs continue to grow, they will soon crowd out almost all other government spending. Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein has pointed out that the federal government is now an insurance company with an army. This means that there will be little money left for programs to address income inequality, poverty, education, infrastructure, science and technology, research and all the other purposes of active, energetic government.

via The Ryan Budget: A Test of Character for Obama – TIME.

Gay Caveman Outed

The male body – said to date back to between 2900-2500BC – was discovered buried in a way normally reserved only for women of the Corded Ware culture in the Copper Age.

The skeleton was found in a Prague suburb in the Czech Republic with its head pointing eastwards and surrounded by domestic jugs, rituals only previously seen in female graves.

“What we see here doesn’t add up to traditional Corded Ware cultural norms. The grave in Terronska Street in Prague 6 is interred on its left side with the head facing the West. An oval, egg-shaped container usually associated with female burials was also found at the feet of the skeleton. None of the objects that usually accompany male burials  such as weapons, stone battle axes and flint knives  were found in the grave.

“We believe this is one of the earliest cases of what could be described as a ‘transsexual’ or ‘third gender grave’ in the Czech Republic,” archaeologist Katerina Semradova told a press conference on Tuesday.

She said that archeologists had uncovered an earlier case dating from the Mesolithic period where a female warrior was buried as a man

via First homosexual caveman found – Telegraph.

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