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Posted on 08/19/2005 7:07:43 AM PDT by Mike Bates
With Asian tourists still shunning its southern beaches, Thailand is calling in a revered Chinese sea goddess to ward off the restive spirits of the thousands who died in last December's tsunami.
A statue of Godmother Ruby, known as Mazu in Chinese, will be brought to the Thai island of Phuket from the Chinese coastal province of Fujian next month for ghost-clearing rites, said Suwalai Pinpradab of the Tourism Authority of Thailand.
"After the tsunami, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Chinese and other East Asians dare not come because they don't want to visit places where mass deaths took place," Suwalai told Reuters on Friday. "It is inauspicious."
Mazu, a Taoist goddess of the sea, has a huge following among fishermen and shipworkers in coastal provinces of southern China and Taiwan.
Thailand's official death toll from the December 26 disaster stands at 5,395, of which 2,436 are believed to be foreigners. Of these, fewer than 50 were East Asians.
This all comes from reading Hairy Potter.
Then there's the Richard Gere influence. . .
Paging Catherine Zeta-Jones
or
Yes Patti Ann Browne is a cutie. Say, where has Heather Nauert been lately?
Dang! You know I forgot about her. I'm still ticked off that they relegated Donna Fiducia to the midnight shift permanently.
;-)
http://jennifer-eccleston.com/jennifer_eccleston/jennifer_eccleston_pictures.htm
I used to know an elderly Dutch man who had been in a Japanese prison camp in WWII. He was always complaining about how many Indonesians worshipped a goddess of the Indian Ocean. He took this as a sign of a lack of civilisation. The name of the goddess was something like Nai Lara Kidu. It would be interesting to know if these people have all been converted to Islam.
I was in Phuket in March, and they were doing the same thing there for the Japanese.
Why?
The typical Brit, or Aussie or Yank like myself goes to Phuket and gets a pretty nice room for under $20 a night, eats great food off the street, goes diving for about $60 a day. The typical Japanese goes to Phuket, gets a room for about $250 a night, hires a driver for about $50 a day, plays golf for a couple hundred a day, and eats at the high end resorts for another hundred a day.
So, you patronize them, kiss their ass, give in to their silly superstitions and hope like hell they come back, so you can squeeze them for copious amounts of dough.
She flipped over to NBC, I think. Haven't seen her since. Definitely easy on the eyes.
Yeh ..... bummer. Jennifer had such an easy, tender manner about her, I mean soft and gentle like a summer's evening light rain.
Yes, it will.
The intent was to recapture lost revenues from certain supernaturalists.
Thai Capitalists have no problem with supernaturalist symbols/idols being used to their financial advantage.
Better be careful. This thread could turn into one on news babes, followed by posts on the Weather Channel girls. . .
Entrepreneurs 'R Us.
lol
;-)
As 'The Sundance Kid' said when he was auditioning for the job as a guard at the silver mine in Bolivia, "I'm better when I move." Similarly, Jennifer is even better when she's on "live film".
I've decided to not even try.
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