Of course there are things happening in Malaysia at the moment, but I can’t write about the news while ignoring Bangkok.

I think the pictures in Asian newspapers are more graphic than those in Western papers, and here’s what I opened to yesterday morning (click to enlarge).

I don’t know enough about Thai politics to speak definitively on this issue, although I do wonder where the Thai king is in all of this? He’s protected by a frighteningly devout population, as well as a number of punitive laws should you even breathe the wrong way while in the same city as him, and yet he remains ostensibly silent while his own subjects are being killed under the authority of an elected official. This is all too much for my feeble mind to take in.

Much more personally, I have friends in Thailand so am naturally worried about them. I’m not about to ask anybody to pray for them, because prayer achieves absolutely zilch in the getting-better-in-any-situation stakes. I’m just monitoring and hoping they are all okay.

In other news, after reading a post on minimalism at Smashing Magazine, I decided to apply that principle to my website and you’ll now find that the front page is bare of all those little updatey things that used to go at the bottom. I’m still thinking of how best to organise the other releases so it doesn’t resemble a hodge-podge of stories from all over the place, but haven’t come to any firm conclusions yet.

Tomorrow, I have a guest author. It’s Ann Wilkes, fellow Broad and fellow sf writer, so please make sure you visit. She has some interesting things to say about writing and recycling. You wouldn’t want to miss it.

And you still have time to enter the Cougar Growls competition by leaving a comment at any of the Cougar posts. I’ll be drawing a winner tomorrow evening, Malaysian time.