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Very Happy Birthday to the bunny-fearing dfordoom. Killer bunny video here.

Someone else who has a birthday today is the saxophone-playing Bhumibol 'Lek' Adulyadej, aka. the King of Thailand. At the end of October I found myself visiting Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok where he was being treated (Benji's mother was also being treated there, and by chance we also ran into the former Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai, photo here). I've never been a royalist and never will, but the level of adulation Bhumibol receives fascinates me. It's become a verified and state-enforced cult of personality, though there's nothing actually sinister or dictatorial about it, like, say, with North Korea's Kim Jong-il; reverence for the King has been managed into a highly successful meme used to unite Thailand. The wearing of yellow t-shirts there is as trendy as Levis largely because of Bhumibol, then last month when he left hospital wearing pink he's now unwittingly sparked a new craze for pink t-shirts. Thais are mostly a happy people and 99.9% royalist, so like most farangs I look at this circus with the bafflement of an outsider though sometimes I can't help but smile about it. It's certainly something I can – and will have to anyway – learn to live with.

Lives of Photographs 2.1, 10 & 11

   

Three of my Zimbabwe photos are now online at Matador Travel, illustrating today's featured article 'Robert Mugabe and the Death of Zimbabwe' by the Canadian freelance travel writer Eva Holland. It's a good article too, given that she's never been to Zimbabwe and has had to piece it together from background research, though it is the kind of article in which I would like to see some citational references.