Someone forwarded me a YouTube video that someone made of a commencement speech that the late novelist, David Foster Wallace, gave in 2005 at Kenyon College. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z5TIFr5XMo The speech is…
I came across a series of seven “Army Behavior Posters” in the US National Archives that were created in the 1950s by the United States Information Service (but it was…
The previous post brought out some good comments by readers/friends on Facebook. We have been having a little discussion about why it is that Filipino musicians were (and to some…
In 1964, Filipino musician and songwriter Vic O. Cristobal (葛士培) and (I’m assuming Hong Kong) lyricist Ye Lü (葉綠) wrote a song called “Enjoy Yourself Tonight” (歡樂今宵) that was recorded…
I had never heard of the Batu Puteh Caves until I read about them in the July 16, 1903 issue of The British North Borneo Herald. These caves high up…
I got a dose of 70s nostalgia today, so I decided to take a look at what was happening in Singapore in the 1970s. And one of the first things…
I was looking at an issue from 1959 of a Chinese-language newspaper that was published in Bangkok, the Sing Sian Yit Pao (Xin Xian ribao 新暹日報), and I started to…
There is a museum that opened in Bangkok around a decade ago called the Museum Siam (some people call it the Discovery Museum). It was designed by Thai academics (and…
A long time ago I wrote about some advertisements for Worcestershire sauce that I found in a newspaper from Siam in the 1930s. At that time I looked on the…
Having talked in the previous post about how bronze drums were not important to the Việt in the past, there is one case in which they were, and that is in regards to a shrine known as the Shrine of the Spirit of the Bronze Drum (Đồng Cổ Thần Tự 銅鼓神祠) which was in the area of Thanh Hóa Province on a mountain called Mount Đan Nê, but which was also known as Mount Khả Lao (可牢山).
There is a passage about this shrine in the nineteenth-century geographical text, the Đại Nam nhất thống chí 大南一統志. That passage is a bit confusing because in addition to the shrine on Mount Đan Nê, an altar dedicated to this spirit was also later set up in the capital. So this information is about one spirit who was honored in two locations.