Transient Demons

Last Sunday, the day before our visa run, a pickup truck with two. very old, white-robed monks pulled up in front of the house across the street. (Our street, by the way, might be called an 'alley' in the US.) They took sturdy baskets filled with who knows what out of the back of the truck and entered our neighbor's house. A lot of loud chanting followed and the odors of an unusual incense floated through the area. Then came one sharp explosion and then a few strings of firecrackers crackled. Oddly enough - none of the many neighborhood dogs barked. An exorcism was in progress.

It is not unusual to hear firecrackers sputtering around here, but they are not set off by kids having a blast. They are helping to rid someone of evil spirits. Firecrackers are serious business in Thailand. I don't know how successful these ablutions are, but there is no question that our neighbor's ritual worked, because we have had a week filled with very bad luck and it's my guess that whatever evil inhabited our neighbor's house got the hell out of there in a hurry in face of the barrage of chanting and explosions and ran across the street to live in our house.

It's the only explanation I can think of for the horrendous activation of the CIH virus (commonly called Chernobyl) on my computer and a couple of other equally devastating events of the past week.

That's the long way around the barn of saying that it may be a few more days before I put up the promised Visa Run II post. We snapped another batch of interesting pictures and the journey was as bizarre as ever. I'll work on it as soon as I'm through exorcizing the virus.

I have three variants of the CIH and two of them arrived in emails from friends a while back. They are programmed to activate on future dates, or when visiting demons think it would be fun to wake them up and raise a little hell. Because I have an NTFS system, they can't destroy it, but they are lurking in my registry and have corrupted the boot sector. One variant has even blocked my access to DOS - the only place where they can be snuffed out.

I'm persistent though and hope to get the Visa Run post up over the weekend. If all else fails, I will definitely call in the monks, although it might be a dirty trick on my neighbor should the demons decide to vacate and hightail it back across the street.