Somebody Blew Up America... Who Who Who Who Who?

A very powerful piece of Jazz poetry by Amiri Baraka. Somebody blew up America.

Pan American Airline Archive Film for Thailand

The voice over at 10 minutes says 'Kites such as this represent Siamese men. Nowhere else in the world are kite flyers such skilled manipulators. Competing with the male kites are frivolous and wriggling female kites'

If we take into account that kite flying in Thai is a metaphor for having a tug I think this promotional video has a lot more subtext than would otherwise be evident.

The film relies on the Asian clichés that I've talked about in The Wonderful World of Suzie Wong and The Ugly American that was filmed in Thailand.

Strangely enough a Zbigniew Brzezinski character steps off the Pan American plane in the beginning. I don't recognise many of the roads apart from Ratchadamnoen and a distant Victory Monument in the beginning, but some look like Chinatown as they're one-way a lot of the time. There's plenty of Wat Arun and Wat Phra Kaew.

There's lots of guff in this propaganda film, such as a claim that Thais eat one pound of rice a day. That's not the case even if they are referring to cooked rice and completely impossible if referring to dry rice.

I just checked. It's 285 grams a day 

However there are some nice clips of old Bangkok, and it's worth a watch for the enthusiast. There's a nice opening scene of the view from Pratumnak Hill overlooking the crescent bay of Pattaya. 

To the south is Jomtien Beach but that isn't shown.

Bangkok Photograph by Ian Taylor

Did Twitter Just Throttle My Account? - Let's Ask @SumAll

Looks like Twitter are throttling activist accounts.

— Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) January 8, 2014

I'll know for sure in three or four days because I use SumAll to measure and automatically publish my data statistics publicly, but my gut feel is my Twitter account retweets have suddenly fallen off a cliff since yesterday. 

Let's see. I'll continue to talk about the issues I feel need greater awareness and I'll post the next SumAll automatic update below, when it comes, along with any other supporting evidence. 

I'll let the data do the talking.

My week on twitter: 13.5K New Followers, 1.11K Mentions, 2.41M Mention Reach, 743 Replies, 1.67K Retweets. via https://t.co/2xXjv6PrhT
— Charles Edward Frith (@charlesfrith) January 19, 2014

As you can see the figures are down but not drastically. All I can assume is that Twitter is throttling my retweets so that I don't get feedback as to what is working but that doesn't mean it is not getting retweeted. Oddly enough it says I have 13.5K New followers but that's not accurate. I have that number of followers not new people.