Time for a Toothpick

-one of the most common vectors of computer virus transmission is through USB flash memory sticks. They can sneak in through the autorun protocols, so you barely have to click on anything. And at the same time, there's really no getting around it. Given the unevenly distributed and usually poor bandwidth here, physical storage is the only way to go. Actually, if you think of it that way, the piles of software, gaming, and film DVDs for sale in the markets really just represent a form of arbitrage between areas of high bandwidth to areas of low bandwidth (and low regulation).

-interest among the Cambodians I know has slightly risen for the first of the KR trials, but overall it's still fairly low.

-I keep reading in the paper about westerners being found in their guesthouses dead of heart attacks. The thing is, they're all under 50. Speculation suggests that it's got to do with heroin, either spiked or being sold as cocaine.

-Given the myriad Mennonite, Mormon, Maryknoll and other non-M religious charities operating here, it seems like it'd be much easier to get a steady gig teaching and working on educational capacity development here if I got churched-up a bit. But seeing as they don't have any churches like the one from the Blues Brothers (the late Rev. Cleophus James presiding), I'll pass for now.

-it's MANGO SEASON, and it is indeed as wondrous as it sounds. Mangoes! Mangoes! Mangos for the taking! They're also accompanied in April by the "Mango Rains," cloudbursts that break the heat and often loosen mangoes from the trees. My Khmer tutor told me a funny story about when he was a kid. A ferocious storm hit his hometown when he was at school, knocking mangoes off trees for miles around. He ran around gathering them up, elated at the prospect of bringing so many mangoes home, when he found out that the storm had knocked over his house. You win some, you lose some.

-I went to "Culture Day" at RUPP, a big pre-Khmer New Year celebration organized by the tourism department. There were other parties sponsored by other departments, and my students were very happy and surprised to see me (I accentuated the surprise by arriving several hours after the 8am beginning of festivities) I saw lots of my students in various forms of traditional or semi-formal dress(the guys mostly wore the same things they wore for school, but the girls were practically wedding'd up in makeup and stiff, uncomfortable shiny attire), playing those silly games and dancing. (Here, slapping and hair-pulling as a form of flirtation seems to go on into your early 20s.) One of the games was similar to a piñata, but involved a clay pot and no candy. I was amused because it emphasized the humiliating aspects of swinging a stick whilst blindfolded, with none of the rewards we normally associate with such activity. I also learned some of the khmer standard party dances, which I was able to pick up on fairly quickly, The biology party was for some reason more raucous than the others, and I was asked by some possibly-drunk students if during the hip hop tracks I could "show us your stylez." Needless to say, that is the kind of offer Adam Flynn never refuses.