Happy Thanksgiving from the Electric Company

Hello! I've been busy, busy, busy this month with work and preparing for a recent excursion to Siem Reap, Cambodia, home of the Angkor Wat temple complex, the area of which proved too immense and spectacular for a one-day visit. While I'm sorting and collating the some 300 pictures and videos I took, I give you this picture of people either working on or worsening the state of city electricity.

They are strapped to the poles with those industrial cloth tie-downs I have used in vans designed to accommodate wheelchairs; their shoes are outfitted with something similar to bicycle clamps. These guys are actually practicing a greater degree of safety than the average public works employee--I once saw about five more guys about twenty feet higher in the air, with just their shoe-clamps. It's either amazing or incredibly irresponsible, I haven't decided which one yet. Either way, it says a lot about how things are done in a society whose citizens don't really have the liberty to be litigious.

As for Thanksgiving, I'm afraid it came and went without much thought on my part. Typically, I love Thanksgiving. It's a holiday that features tons of great food, and the chance to connect again with family and friends. Who wouldn't love it? But over here everything is pretty much the same--the weather stays hot, it's the "dry" season (though I'm learning that that means "less rain, but same humidity," contrary to my prior hope that things would actually be drier), the restaurants in the tourist neighborhoods start playing horrendous Christmas music, but really life goes on without much thought about parades, football, turkey-comas, and people trampling each other to death at some unlucky Wal-Mart in the early hours of the morning.

In that vein, can someone explain "Cyber-Monday" to me? What is it, please? When I first started using the internet, "Cyber-ing" had some pretty, ahem, adult connotations. I can only assume that "Cyber Monday" carries different ones.

And also also--while I don't like to use this blog as a platform for my political opinions, I gotta say I'm a little shocked at what's coming out of the US these days vis-a-vis the Occupy Wallstreet movement. I am of course removed from a firsthand account of what's going on exactly, so doubtless my perception of the movement is a bit skewed. However, I struggle to understand how, in a country that protects people's rights to protest military funerals with signs insisting that our fallen soldiers are going to hell, or a parade/public demonstration of hate groups like the KKK, this movement is getting beaten down just to (seemingly) make a point.  A picture floating around Facebook provides a timely assessment of what is/isn't (seemingly) allowed in the US:

Granted, we can start an argument about private/public property rights and different legal definitions of what constitutes "trespassing" or "unlawful loitering" or whatever. The point is in the perception.

At the end of the day, a movement is a movement is a movement. You don't have to agree with Occupy Wallstreet, but you have to let 'em have their voice, however Smartphone-coordinated it may be. That's what America is all about. I mean, you know who suppresses freedom of speech and the press, and responds inappropriately to nonviolent demonstrations that seek to expose and correct corruption in high-level government corridors?

Communists.

And with that, I wish you all Happy Holiday Season! :-)