Evian Snowball Election

Brilliant corporate politician snowballing game fom posh water bottlers Evian….huge amounts of fun to be had here…bravo to the designers of this.

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BBC - Derby - Features - All change at American Adventure

This stou almost made me cry. When I was 19 and in need of money after the Amsterdam fiasco, I decided that i’d always fancied working at local theme park The American Adventure, so I got myself a job on the rides department. Ok it was no Alton Towers, but it had decent rides like the Missile and a BIG Log Flume and Rapids…and various other rides which while not as excellent as the aforementioned ranged from fun to utter poo.

I have paticularly fond memories of speeding the octopus upto dangerous speeds whilst playing hard acid techno over the PA, until I nearly got rumbled and stuck on the ultimate shame for a week, the junior pirate ship ride (8 hours of this screaming child hell contraption was pure torture), that and the Vintage Car Ride…aaarrgghh.

Eventually I was granted the trust of drip-nose moustachioed supervisor Dave, and got the big pirate ship ride everyday, and soon learned how to give perpetual 15 minute rides by pressing the stop and start buttons quickly at the highest point of the ride.

The place was filled with nymphomaniac 16 year olds, and baseball hatted chavs, and they were just the staff. The scutters that would fill the queueing systems every day made you wonder at the gene pool sometimes.

Such nostalgic ramblings lead me to the article I discovered today.

Visitors to the American Adventure theme park, near Ilkeston, are likely to notice some changes this year - three of the park’s biggest rides are being closed: the log flume, the missile and the rapids.

It’s part of a re-branding exercise by the park which is aimed at encouraging younger families to visit the site.

OH MY GOD!! They are losing the only three really good rides they had. Now I don’t know about anyone else, but if I were to make a choice about what theme Park I’d be taking my (not oo distant) future family to, it would be a choice based upon the fact that there would be some banging hardcore rides I could go metal on while my kids were on the kiddy rides.

Mr Lloyd refuted the suggestion that closing some of the popular rides would actually make the park less attractive and said aiming at families was very much the park’s new strategy: “We’re trying to keep the family unit together. We’ve found that 15-to-18-year-olds don’t want to be on a day out with their parents, they want to be out with their mates and there are plenty of attractions suitable for that. We’ve decided that we are not in the white-knuckle market.”

Fine well, don’t expect mew to bring MY young family when i get back to the UK.
Though given that I knew just how many of the ride attendants were off their faces on whizz and e’s all day when I was working there, I’m not sure I’d fancy taking them anyway.

Alton Towers it is then.
American Adventure RIP

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| Prank fools US science conference

Nice story from the Beeb, about some hoaxers getting their own back on a conference organiser who spammed a lot.

They sent a fake document randomly compiled on a computer which was accepted by the conference.

The paper has the nonsense headline “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy”.

The full text of the paper can be downloaded here.

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Three bombs hit southern Thailand

Three bombs have gone off tonight in Hatyai and Songkhla. The Hatyai blasts were the worst, one outside the Carrefour shopping centre injuring 15 people and the other outside the domestic arrivals at Hatyai Airport.

Closer to home there was a third bomb outside the Greenworld Palace hotel in Songkhla (about 5 minutes drive from here) where three people were injured and the hotel sustained major structural damage to it’s entranceway.

So far 2 people have died and 43 people have been injured from all the blasts.

My sister-in-law was just leaving Carrefour in her car via the side exit when the blast went off and witnessed several people lying on the ground. Another friend lives a minutes walk from the Greenworld Hotel and says that the whole house shook from the blast.

To read how it unfolded check this thread I started from a few minutes after the Carrefour blast on Ajarn Forum.

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One of the first incarnations of the Ajarn.com Forum

I posted this a little while back on Ajarn Forum, but knowing how easily info gets buried on there I thought I’d post it here too. The above link is the topic list from, I believe the second incarnation of the Ajarn.com forum. There did indeed exist a first but all it seems is left of it is this terse message from Ian.

The Discussion Board

July 2000 - Several months ago I added a message board to the site. The board was unmoderated and I trusted people to use it for it’s intended intention - sharing useful information about living and teaching in Bangkok.

That didn’t seem like too much to ask but apparently it was. Due to a handful of idiots who regularly posted crap on it I have had to remove it and replace it with a new board that requires users to register to use it. ( It’s a relatively painless process that only takes 2 minutes - please try to make the effort )

I know this is a bit of a hassle but don’t blame me - blame those who seemed intent on dragging the image of teachers here in Bangkok into the gutter with their inane posts. Don’t get me wrong - I don’t want a ’serious’ board but I’d like posts to be either genuinely amusing, informative and/ or thought provoking.

Damn that sure sounds familiar. Sadly these archives seem to have found the old Ajarn.com several months after the establishment of this second incarnation and so exactly what irked Ian so much seems to have been lost forever along with much of the content in all of these archives, though bits remain of the beige board for example this topic that was posted September 11th 2001, here’s another demonstrating the time-honoured ajarn tradition of flaming newbies, and what forum review would be complete without a heated “Which TEFL course is the best?” thread.

This second incarnation (or the beige board as it’s become known) lasted until September 2002, and was moderated at this point by Ian, Philip, Khunkru, and Jonathan. Two of them are still moderating today.

The board subsequently move to the third incarnation (just a snapshot of the index) - Ikonboard, the first time that Ajarn Forum became multi-room.

By this time it was called the TIT (This Is Thailand) Forum, and combined Phil’s Bangkok Mouth Forums which dealt with life in Bangkok,and the Ajarn.com forums which were teacher centred. It was on this board that the Virtual Pub and Practicalities first appeared and also contained other teaching forums the seeds of what would eventually become the Staffrrom and Classroom.

This incarnation also introduced the ill-fated TEFL course room which later was the battleground for the infamous Thailand TEFL Provider wars between staff at two of the best known schools.

We can also see how the Travel and Out on the Town forums were seperate entities.

Also this era was the one where blogging had first appeared and two valient efforts started out, but as often happens (and I know this well), fizzled out fairly soon after their inception.

A year later in May 2003, around about the time I first joined up the Powder Room (for the ladies) was added, and several new moderators were around such as Grasshopper, Crvenazvezda, Hodd, and of course Markoinbangkok, who had started to help Admin the forum.

At this time there was also a forum called the schools database, which was supposedly a place to

get together and compile a list of schools/universities, and what they pay.

It all ended in farce as information was incomplete or badly organised and mainly featured half a dozen “grey lists” which merely listed schools which people had not got on with for varous reasons.

Membership at this time was reasonably high, but by August 2003 everything had changed, when all the information was lost, and what emerged was a much slimmed down forum from 11 rooms to just 7, with the Bangkok Mouth affiliation dropped. Incarnation 4.

By October 2003, the forum had become blue and I had become a Moderator, the Sports forum had been created, the Jobs Wanted page was started (which got taken down after posters started making sarcastic comments about the resumes posted.) The Visa News room was started following the panic about new visa regulations that started to emerge from doom and gloom-meisters on the Thai Visa. This would lay the foundations for what became Paperwork.

By June 2004 the forum was dogged by controversy. Members had been leaving and creating their own forum following high profile arguments with Marko over his moderating style and other mods for what were perceived as abuses of status.

New forums at this time included “You Can Keep Bangkok” a room for discussion of Upcountry - a nod finally to us boonies dwellers and recognition that the forum was now not just about Bangkok life.
Unfortunately it was set-up with too ridgid a posting format and soon fell into decline.

Shortly after this the board had to be moved to another server after the hosts complained about the bandwidth the board was using, and sadly nearly 130,000 posts and a membership of 3,000 members was gone.

It returned a few days later as ajarnforum.net, the 5th incarnation of the forum, (which for some reason is not in the archives at all). This was the short-lived reign of Adrian Tristom, a cuddly bearded bloke with meek, mild, and considerate ways (which is fact was Marko on an image change mission), the pretence lasted all of 1 month, before everyone finally clicked it was him and that Adrian Tristom was merely an anagram of “Administrator”. It was around this time that the ill-fated Plat Club was introduced, if nothing else a good reason not to establish elitist non-moderators rooms which run on cod-democracy. The fallout from the Plat club, Adrian’s unmasking and subsequent hacking challenge, meant that within one month the 5th incarnation suffered a hacking.

It was at this point I offered to set up a phpBB board, Marko disappeared and left me to be admin, and the 6th Incarnation began. Since the majority of posts from that era are still available despite 3 subsequent hackings I think we are still in that era.

I’ve done far more than I meant to here so there we go one potted history with archived links to Ajarn Forum.

Your comments and stories please.

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BB III: Political Debate - a Flash cartoon

Nah not really, it’s Terrence and Phillip form South Park with Blair , Howard and Kennedy’s heads pasted on top singing Uncle Fucker…very amusing.

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| 10 stories that could be pranks - but aren’t
Here’s another “should be but aren’t” entry for today.

This time it’s April Fools day stories which against all odds are actually true. Come to think of it I haven’t yet encountered any decent wind ups online so far..and I HAVE been looking.

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Words and phrases that sound gross but aren’t

Cockwater
Dick test
Windfucker

None of these are offensive words. Check this link for more useful additions to your vocabulary.

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Second Sight

Is Yahoo finally starting to win the search engine war over Google?

Ben Hammersley writing in the Guardian thinks so.

Yahoo is the new Google. Google is the new Yahoo. Up is down, and black is white. This spring has been very strange. Google, it seems, has jumped the shark. It has been overtaken, left standing, and not by some new startup of ultra smart MIT alumni or by the gazillions in the Microsoft development budget, but by the deeply unhip and previously discounted Yahoo.

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Boring Boring: A Directory of Dull Things

Kicking off today’s April Fools Special is a superb parody of mega-famous blog Boing Boing

Lots of hillarious working links and close attention to detail…not a classic April Fool by any means but clever nonetheless.

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