International Vagrant In Burma, Japan, Thailand & Hong Kong

Hurrah!! I just received my portable hard drive back from over a year in storage and I've been looking through all the stuff again. I'm really pleased because I've got a bunch of files including my first digital photography back from when I travelled around Burma with an Olympus C-2000 that I wrote about over here. I'm really chuffed to rescue those amazing fishermen shots just down the road from Ngapali beach that you can see above and which I wrote about here and here. Then there's also the Nokia 8250 launch party in Bangkok on Feb 23, 2001. I can only remember the phone model because of the sign to the rear of this chap Johnny Doran from Saville Productions below, with 'Walk on the blue side'. Remember when a blue Screen was the latest thang? Before mobile cameras and colour displays.

There are the trips to Bagan, the ancient capital of Burma. You might need to click on it to see this stitched together panorama shot. The journey took me over 24 hours on a nightmare bus journey that I wrote about here. Bagan took a hit during an earthquake in '74 I think but its still breathtaking to imagine the monks, merchants, families, kids and officials running around this place, breathing life into it around the time that the Normans gave us a good hiding at the battle of Hastings isn't it?


I've now also got the shots from many trips to Cambodia (but not the one where I went missing in the heart of darkness for a few days) including Angkor Wat, which is just plain spesh because of all that South Indian influenced Jayavarman architecture. Khmer culture is so important to S.E. Asia.

Then there is me during my camp yachting period around the Andaman Sea. Never was a hangover washed away so quickly than by jumping off the Piraya (our boat) in the morning.



Not to mention my gay cowboy look long before Brokeback mountain was a hit. That was quite a smash hit with the ladies, if I recall correctly. Cowboy boots 'n all.

The Tokyo period which was all too short because Tokyo ROCKS as far as I'm concerned.

But the wack stuff I've saved is from Hong Kong.


And no photo story can be complete without those Bangkok nights. As a friend of mine once said. More can happen in a Bangkok night than most might expect to happen in a year. This was taken on Soi Cowboy.


And of course those Hua Hin days, weeks and months. It never occurred to me before but I guess this blog is as good a place as any to explain why this bug very memorably fell in LOVE with me and then scared the very life out of me.

Any requests? ;)

I Love Benjamin Fulford. He Doesn't Fuck About

By Benjamin Fulford

The world knows that the US corporate government headquartered in the mini-state of Washington D.C. is doomed. The leaders of the world know this corporation posing as a government murdered close to 3,000 of its own citizens in order to create a fake pretext for a massive oil grab in central Asia. The countries of the world have also decided not to finance this monstrous regime any longer. The result has been a steady and accelerating decline in the power of the military industrial complex. Their criminal corporate leadership is now carrying out a battle of the bulge style offensive that is mathematically doomed to failure no matter what they do.

Behind the scenes various leaders of the cabal that has controlled the US and many Western governments are scrambling to preserve their own interests. There is also increased infighting at many different levels.

First of all the US regime continues to act like an unemployed junkie running out of friends to borrow from and possessions to hawk. The latest sign of this is the announcement of social service disabilities payments are on the verge of insolvency. This is another way of saying the corporate government has been raiding people’s money they were never entitled to have and that even that money is running out. Power and drug shortages are other signs all is not as they pretend.

More important has been the fact that more and more small investors are finally waking up to the fact the stock market is a rigged casino and are taking their money out ASAP. That means all the Federal Reserve Board fake money being pumped into the market is no longer going to con those with real money. Hence the record gold price and the flight from the US dollar.

The US criminal regime, however, is not going to dissolve right away. It continues to use the threat of World War 3 to buy time and kick the can down the road a bit further by getting temporary credit extensions from its foreign lenders. It is interesting to note how US Vice President Biden was quoted in English corporate propaganda media as saying “do not count out the US yet,” but that his comments got no publicity in China.

Behind the scenes, a major pentagon/CIA/NSA agency faction is still preparing for the mass arrest of US criminal oligarchs. Nazi leader George Bush Senior and his cabal have finally contacted a White Dragon representative seeking some way to preserve their assets after the US corporate bankruptcy.

Henry (Heinz) Kissinger, the other top Nazi, tried to convince CIA power broker Dick Cheney to kill several key White Dragon members. However, Cheney knows the cabal was planning to throw him under the bus and is not going to be manipulated into doing something that is not in his interest.

David Rockefeller is claiming to be old and senile and to be not involved in what is going on. J. Rockefeller remains in deep hiding.

The German and Dutch factions headed by the likes of Queen Beatrix and Deutschebank’s Ackerman have withdrawn to the sidelines, aiming to keep their own interests intact until the dust settles. The British royal family are circling the wagons around the British Commonwealth.

The French have decided to try to settle their internal spat. French President Nicholas Sarkozy has rushed off the China to try to cut a deal. Meanwhile, the latest evidence links Sarkozy to the maid who accused IMF leader Dominique Strauss-Khan of rape. DSK of course, threatened to reveal all sorts of cabal secrets if he went to trial so the cabal is now trying to bring him back into their ranks.

In Japan, meanwhile, various bits of new information have emerged about recent events. A professional killer who was involved in over 70 political assassinations in Japan and South Korea told the White Dragon society the foreign cabal controlling these countries through murder no longer had anybody willing to do their work these countries. That is why they resorted to using an atomic-bomb triggered tsunami attack and nuclear crisis to try to force their will on Japan.

This move has backfired as a growing number of members of the Japanese self-defense forces, the yakuza, national Broadcaster NHK and politicians now discuss the atomic attack on Japan as a given fact. It is still not being admitted publicly simply because it would push public opinion towards war against the US despite the fact that most of the Pentagon was unaware of this attack and is opposed to the perpetrators.

The scuttlebutt in Japan is that the next Prime Minister will be Seiji Maehara. Maehara is known to be friendly to the Pentagon and US interests. However, he is expected to be another short-termed Prime Minister whose main purpose will be to maintain public ambiguity until the over-arching world power struggle ends.

The sudden offensive by so-called Libyan rebels working for the British, French and Italian colonial interests in Africa is a Rothschild gold grab, according to an alienated Rothschild family member. Some sort of compromise over mineral and other interests in Africa is still expected and this sudden offensive is merely high powered bargaining.

There is still a crack 7,000 man unit standing by to try to seize Saudi oilfields if necessary but trying to do that would be foolish.

The Saudis, for their part, are making new friends in Asia by helping sell Thai Royal gold to China by laundering the proceeds into dollars, according to a high level Asian gang source. 

As usual, there is plenty of other information being passed to this writer from sources within the Yakuza, the Italian P2 Freemason lodge, the Rothschilds etc. about bonds worth hundreds of billions or trillions that are about to be cashed. This talk has gone on so long this writer can only say, I will believe it when I see it.

The White Dragon Foundation, for its part, will be concentrating its initial funding on setting up a committee of experts to scientifically assess “free” energy technology and begin planning the establishment of the new International Economic Planning Agency.

There is much that this writer is being asked not to report at the present time. However, the overall assessment remains that there will be more turbulence before the old world order finally cedes power. 

It's the Amygdala Stupid

This Evian ad is doing the rounds on the blogs and I thought it was a good time to revisit the neurological influences that drive some advertising through the our response or compulsion oriented reptilian brain or the R Complex or basal ganglia if you wish.

While I think it's a sweet execution, isn't it just crypto neuro marketing? Or is it coincidental that this was one of the biggest spreadable media (viral) content successes of the internet? Here's an updated version.

I was having a brilliant lunch with Rob last week and I realised that just shooting the breeze with him is solid gold planning lessons that ordinairly he invoices interesting brands for. So if ever there is a good reason to get blogging and get involved in the conversation instead of just reading or lurking on blogs, here it is because I've gotten to know Rob and   pester him for lunch through blogging. Though  of course it's OK if you just like to observe.

Anyway I got talking about my experience on the success of a Coca-cola drink brand called Qoo across Asia some years back because I met the Japanese creatives at Hakuhodo in Tokyo who came up with the creative concept and discovered a secret. Qoo is an expression that the Japanese make when taking a cold drink on a hot day. The beverage was named Qoo and a brand cartoon character was developed to appeal to children.

I learned that, much like the dancing babies above, the Qoo character is largely  a neurological hook; particularly for children. The cartoon character was designed sketched and refined 'on-the-fly' in focus groups with bits of paper going back and forth between the illustrator and the kids and it was seen that using traits such as a big head, baby eyes and a small body appealed to children most and there was no doubt at all which character made the kids most excited. The winning design formula had an unmistakably positive response to say the least.

This is why the product used to fly off the shelves in Asian markets. Strategically it's an RTD (ready to drink) low juice, sugared soda with a few vitamins added for marketing to mothers at a rational level, and the Qoo character for children at an emotionally responsive level. It was quite a learning experience discovering the design gestation process and seeing how well it performed with commercials as short as 15 seconds in the China market. I wrote about one execution I worked on in Hong Kong and Shanghai over here.