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[ 19th Jun 2003 ] Mr. Pumpsie Hobergoffer | leave a comment

Does someone know how many dudes are surfing the net each day? And at this very moment? Well, I'm sure there are some statistics, and it must be quite a number. No, I'm not going to tell you about all of them tonight neither to try to do any analysis. Instead, I'll write about an interesting dude I met, and also publish parts of some of his e-mails. With his permission, of course.

Just like many site visitors, after taking a look at it he wrote me a short message. This one was a bit unusual: the guy was referring to my photo gallery asking for more info about a lady from a picture.

Hi, Konst. Nice site. In the picture referred to above, there's a woman to your left. Who is she? I'm planning to move to Romania in a few months and would love to meet her if she's romantically available.

I'd rather not specify exactly which photo he meant, so that others are desperate to find out which one was lucky ;) But as you can see, the konst.org.ua web site is not only a comprehensive source of information on Eastern Europe and UNIX programming, but it's also can be good for dating. That's why you, ladies, should be interested to get your photos into my gallery. It's your real chance for you to meet interesting dudes! End of advertisment :)

U.S. Expat and Romanian Immigration

During the further discussion the guy turned out to be a US citizen, who had been seeking self-improvement travelling through various locations. By the time he wrote me he lived in Thailand and was planning a move to Romania. Quite unusual, huh? But the world is all about unusual things. He also wrote articles on various topics, which I found interesting too. This is how he explained his reasons:

My reasons for being an expat are many. I'm from the US, but I don't like it there and have many objections to the things my government does in the world. Also I find myself in the position, in my forties, where I'm very out of touch with mainstream culture in the US (or what passes for it), and, since I'm a writer, that puts me at a disadvantage. I managed to salvage some money after losing most of it in a divorce, and I decided that I could live on it for a number of years, if I lived in places where expenses are much lower than in the US. In Thailand everything's very cheap (less so in Bangkok than where I am, in the north). I think I could duplicate that cost of living in Romania, as long as people don't insist I pay four times the rate they charge locals, which I understand is the standard procedure.

So...if I could live there, with a nice girl who doesn't want to have children, and have a nice country place to grow organic fruit and vegetables...I think I could maybe be happy...or as happy as I could be in a world that is so fucked up.

From this paragraph I understood I was dealing with a unusual and interesting person. Not that I totally 100% agree with everything the guy ever said in the e-mails I'm going to publish, but he definitely makes the point. Also the Thailand word rang the bells (Beavis, he said Thailand! hehehe). Actually, it's the country which interests me particulary. Once I tried to find a temporary IT job for me there, but no luck. There appeared to be a law which put restrictions on working foreigners. Like if you hire a foreigner you should have 3 or 4 Thais working in the company per a foreign head. Also there was something about taxes, so Western companies having business there were not enthusiastic about hiring me. Nevertheless, I'd still like to stay there for some time, because it must be a really interesting place and culture. So, having heard "Thailand" I decided to ask the guy what living there looked like. During our e-mail discussion we talked about appartments, fun places, food and girls. Here are fragments of some e-mails.

Living

Well, the apartments come with showers, just no tubs usually (mine is an exception). And everywhere in Thailand you have people serving food on the streets, from little mobile cooking units. So that's how most people eat. They don't cook at home.

> Aren't there any sasons at all in Thailand? Forever
> summer? :)

No, there are seasons, but they're different. We have the rainy season, winter, and the hot season. Now it's the hot season, and I sweat so much my pillow is drenched in the morning. I hate sweating so much as I do here in all seasons. And I like four seasons, like the kind I knew when I was a kid...ya know, with leaves turning color and all that...and looking out the window at a blizzard...

Bangkok

During preparations to his move to Romania, the guy went to Bangkok and shared his impressions of the Thai capital with me. The lines starting with ">" are my questions.

It's incredible that with tourism way down in Thailand due to fear of the bogus Sars epidemic, still Khao San Road is full and guesthouses are booked! These people come to Khao San Road because it's cool, and nothing will keep them away. Many of them don't even venture out to see the real Thailand, they just stay on Khao San Road. Personally, I've always been contemptuous of the very idea of "cool." I stay here because it's cheap (though prices are up 33% from when I stayed here two years ago, due to the unending stream of cool-seekers).

> What is that famous Khao San Road? Is it a district where foreign
> tourists live in Bangkok?

No, this is a street and neighborhood that has become famous for having very cheap guest houses, and was featured in a famous movie called "The Beach," which I didn't see. Since it appeared in that movie, cool westerners just flock here. It's amazing, for while other tourist venues in Bangkok are suffering from declining tourism due to the Sars hysteria, and people report half-empty planes, Kao San Road seems fully booked up.

Kao San has lots of cafes, pubs, restaurants and it's always full of young and not so young people, Western and Thais, prostitutes, gays, all just sitting around getting drunk and eating Thai noodles and spring rolls. I guess I could enjoy it more but for the fact that I have so much work I have to do here in preparation for leaving (getting parts and things for computer, etc, deciding how I'm going to get there, etc., dealing with lots of other issues).

The cab drivers in Bangkok would certainly take the prize for world's most annoying people. You know that in Thailand, you don't hail cabs, they hail you. They can be very persistent and to someone like me, who likes to walk, it's really annoying.

The prostitutes on Kao San Road are also very annoying, and won't leave you alone. If they were cute I could smile about it, but most of them are what are called in Thailand "katoeys," i.e., transsexuals. THailand has more transsexuals than any country in the world, and an immense percentage of the male population is gay or bi. I'm quite certain that most of the "heterosexual" Aids cases in Thailand are really gay cases who lie about it to the authorities.

> But judging from what you say it must be really cool. But what
> exactly is good about the Road? Are there any clubs or places like
> that?

Yes, all that stuff, everywhere. It's just a scene. Street musicians, beggars, food carts everywhere. Pickup possibilites everywhere. I don't see what people would go to Bangkok for a scene when there are much pleasanter scenes elsewhere where it isn't so humid.

Girls

Yes, I've had relationships with some of them. The major problem is the language barrier. I just find getting beyond the basics of Thai very difficult, because of the tones of the words and the fact that so many words sound similar. Thai women are nice, they're not the great beauties people say they are. I mean, one out of maybe 20 or 30 is a beauty and the rest are average or worse. But then, I've never really been attracted to Asians that much, as some are. I do think that the Chinese are much prettier, because they have lighter skin and more refined features. In fact, many of the most beautiful Thais are part Chinese.

And they are short, too. (I'm tall). And a very large percentage of them have bad breath, because of a variety of factors, one of which is probably the fact that they eat antibiotics like they were candy and these fuck up their intestines.

No. The Thais are enamored of pills, especially brightly colored ones. They believe pills will make them well when they get sick, so they take antibiotics every time they have a cold. But antibiotics cannot cure a cold, all they can do is kill bacteria, and colds are caused by viruses. So what the Thais are really doing is destroying the beneficial bacteria in their intestines, the bacteria that protect them from disease. And it creates a cycle: with each set of antibiotics, they are destroying their immunity and making it easier to catch the next cold.

The pharmaceutical industry, of course, does nothing to discourage this, nor do doctors, who in Thailand are often taking bribes from the pharmaceutical companies.

We live in a very corrupt world.

Thai Massage

There is something new I found out about the Thai massage thing. In Russian when you say "Thai massage" a sexual form is meant. Like, naked ladies who touch your body with theirs, etc. But in English it meant something different, and the guy explained me what it was exactly. I'd hardly believe he didn't try it anyways :)

I've had a Thai massage. There's no sex involved, just massage. I find Thai women are sexually very conservative, and many of them don't like to kiss and stuff like that. And don't like oral. Though many others do. I think part of it is they have the mistaken idea that they are going to get Aids by kissing or oral. But that's another big subject that I'll tell you much more about later. I will give you a hint, though. The whole thing is a huge scientific/medical fraud. Visit www.virusmyth.net for starters.

Whoa, you are confusing Thai massage with what they call a "soapy" massage. Thai massage is a non-sexual technique of making your body feel renewed. There are massage parlors that do this all over the place. There's nothing erotic about it. A soapy, on the other hand, consists of a girl rubbing her tits all over your back while you're all wet and her tits are covered with soapy lather. These are available in more specialized "massage parlors" that are sexual in nature. I will confess to having had one once. It was okay. :o)

Also, regarding the "soapy" thai massage: I neglected to mention that after the lady massages you with her mammaries, usually she turns you over and you have more of a face to face kind of encounter (after she washes the soap off, of course).

Well, there is something I definitely should try :)

Alice? Who the f..k is Alice?

Hope you liked the quoted things just like I did. As to the guy's name, he preferred not to expose his identity and asked me to call him Pumpsie Hobergoffer on my web site. Well, that's how I'll do. At the end of this quoting I'll give a feedback I received from Pumpsie on my Internet terrorism article. Probably you'll like it too. Again, I'm not much into politics and I still prefer simple observations and travel notes to analysing global issues, but the part about Ikle and reptiles from outer space is great :)

Interesting. But don't make the mistake of believing that just because one guy who is anti-Israel is a paranoid nutcase, that all people who criticize Israel are nutcases.

One of the techniques of deception is to discredit legitimate ideas by associating them with crazy ideas or crazy people. This is widely practiced in the ivory towers of the CIA and the public relations agencies who are so instrumental in shaping the public mind. So you have people like David Icke, whose very popular website exposes many of the things I've told you about--that AIDS is a fraud--and other things I haven't told you about, such as that vaccination and fluoride are unquestionably harmful to people, not helpful. He writes very good, convincing articles about stuff like this. But then he writes other articles that claim that reptiles from outer space are really behind all these evil politicians and corrupt scientists. When they read that, most people will automatically think the guy is a flake, and that all that other stuff that he wrote so convincingly about medical issues must also be flaky. I strongly suspect Icke is being run by the PR agencies or the Intelligence agencies. His purpose is to discredit the very ideas he seems to espouse.

There's a lot of this stuff that goes on in the very elaborate operation to shape and control human perceptions. Another technique of deception is what I call the Illusion of Comprehensiveness. In this, a massive amount of information is presented as evidence to support some assertion. It's so much information that nobody could possibly read it all. Often the type is deliberately made very small to make it harder to read. But because there is so much information, presented by people of apparent credibility, the average person will simply assume that it must be true. A good example of this is the Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of President Kennedy (a bit before your time, I realize, but you've probably heard about it). It encompassed something like 20 thick volumes with small type, and nobody could read it. When somebody finally did (District Attorney Jim Garrison--see the film "JFK")--he found that none of the so-called evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK was persuasive, and that it was full of contradictions and other problems.

This same illusion of comprehensiveness is used today in other deceptions--I have heard, though not read, that the US Health Instituions have a website with the evidence that Hiv causes Aids, and that it is massive--too massive for anyone to ever get through. The dissidents who have looked at it all see through it, they see that what purports to be evidence is nothing of the sort, it's just a reprinting of many highly dubious and unreadable research papers that don't prove anything. Some of them are working on rebutting it, but they are at a great disadvantage--the people who write the propaganda are being highly paid by the US govt and drug company establishment to do so--the dissidents work on their own in whatever free time is available to them. Nobody funds them and nobody promotes their findings. THey work out of a sense that somebody has to expose this and the task has fallen to them.

Didn't mean to write so much, there are other techniques of deception, this is just part of it. The world is full of it, and it can dupe even highly intelligent people because they are not aware of it.

Coming soon

Finally, there is an e-mail that Pumpsie wrote me a week ago.

Greetings, Konst. Sorry for the delay. I went to Cambodia for six days on a visa run. Boy, talk about third world! They don't even have ice cream there! (at least, not in Koh Kong)

This means that if you liked the Thai impressions, you can some here later, maybe in several days and you'll find Pumpsie's Cambodia travel notes. I really liked to hear more about Asia, especially from the point of view of a guy who just came there without any previous knowledge and described what he saw. Stay tuned.

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