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A New Work by Emerging Thai Poetess Sutita Gai

From being a hermit, now I am awakening,

ready to rise, shine and to follow my dreams,

I can not tell how much I do love sharing,

the energy of caring, courage, comfort and hope,

to all men and women arond the world.

I'm Giving Away Five Dollars this Morning

HEY!  I'm giving away five dollars this morning on a live video broadcast on my Facebook page. All you have to do is call in and answer the riddle "What did Jack say to the Beanstalk?" 

The first person to give the correct answer will have five dollars mailed to them, no strings attached. 

I have posted the answer to this riddle on my Twitter account. What's my twitter account? Sorry, you'll have to look that up yourself.

What's my cell phone number? Sorry, I won't reveal that except on my live video on my Facebook page in two hours (9 a.m. Mountain Time.) So you'll have to find me on Facebook if you want a chance at that five bucks.

Hope to hear from you in 2 hours!  

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Well, this is humiliating. I stayed on for 13 minutes and nobody, not one single solitary soul, called me for the five dollars.  My social media sucks . . . 

Postcards

Hi -- thank you for your message. Please note I am out of the office until Dec. 3 and will respond to your email upon return.

I wish all 'out of office' notes

were eaten by a herd of goats,

and those that put 'em up were fried

in Crisco and then quick tie-dyed.

If you're not in and won't reply

please do not my slim patience try

with idiotic automation

that sends me such cold notation.

I gonna go back to postcards

when sending someone my regards;

at least they'll get it, wait and see,

sometime in this here century.

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Reporter Jennifer Maloney Likes Trains

Jennifer Maloney, of the Wall Street Journal

Jennifer Maloney likes trains. No, that's not strong enough. Jennifer Maloney loves trains -- she dotes on them. And why not? It was a train that saved her life and set her on the journalist's exciting and remunerative path.

On a hike across Lake Winnemucca during the dry season in Nevada as a teenager, Maloney was set upon by a herd of feral merino sheep. Just as they closed in on her, their fangs dripping with lanolin, she spotted train tracks, with a locomotive pulling train cars headed her way. As the rabid sheep made for her jugular vein, she leaped into an empty boxcar and was thus saved from a sheepish death. Exhausted with terror, she immediately fell into a deep slumber.

When the train pulled into Primm, a kindly conductor found her still asleep in the boxcar. Rather than turn her in as a vagrant, he took her to his home and fed her beetroot souffle to build up her strength before sending her back home. His parting words to her as he put her on the train back East were:  "Never trust anything you don't read in the local newspaper." 

Ms. Maloney never forgot that sage piece of advice. In a few years she was a star reporter for Newsday, and then came to the Wall Street Journal to report on book publishing, cultural institutions, and trains. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages, including Xhosa and Michif. 

Today she limits her writing to stories about the liquor and tobacco industries (she lost a bar bet.)

She enjoys touring gypsum mines and eating at restaurants that still use flypaper. She is working on a history of cow catchers, which is already out of print.  

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Laura Stevens and German Banking

Laura Stevens, of the Wall Street Journal

Ms. Stevens is fond of telling her coworkers at the Wall Street Journal that: "The only difference between a German banker and an armadillo is armadillos have better manners." 

When the Wall Street Journal sent her to Germany to cover the banking industry there, she initially thought it would be a tedious and unfulfilling assignment. After all, how exciting or controversial can a German bank be? They're full of money and have honest burghers guarding it carefully and prudently. It'll be about as exciting as a Buddenbrooks sequel. Nothing more.

She soon learned how wrong her initial reaction was! Her very first week in Dortmund found her chasing down the details of an old banking family that had siphoned off funds to start a cuckoo clock factory in Zhangdao, China, using recycled water bottles and cheap willow bark to produce knockoffs of Hermle and Junghans models for the Russian black market. Her investigation ruffled Teutonic feathers far and wide; she became the target of an online smear campaign that charged her, falsely, with putting ketchup on her sauerbraten. When that didn't deflect her reporting rampage, a contract was put out on her by the Schwarze Gauner -- and her life became worth less than a plugged pfennig. 

Ms. Stevens had no intention of backing down -- she loves a good challenge, whether it be with German mobsters or on a Norwegian slalom -- but her editors back in America had no use for her as a corpse riddled with bullets and feeding the fish in the Baltic, so they recalled her to report on the fracking industry.

Unfortunately the trans-Atlantic communication to her was garbled, and she thought she was being reassigned to report on the Swiss comedy team of Frick and Frack. She canvassed dozens of skating rinks in Chur and Zug for background on the skating duo, and returned to New York with a fascinating article on their exploits during the Second World War, when they smuggled hundreds of chinchillas out of Romania into Liechtenstein. 

Today Ms. Stevens makes her home in San Francisco, where she entertains guests at her condo under the Golden Gate Bridge by exhibiting her collection of Victorian beanbags. She also likes to cruise the Bay in her ketch, christened "Mambo Sauce to Go", which she built by hand entirely out of s'mores. 

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