Regular features from November 2005 119th Issue

Slow boat to China

Three years ago I wrote here about “Financial Predators” and from what I heard this week, I am driven to repeat it. The rumour mill says a Bangkok based broker recruited 10 consultants, gave them 3 days training and shipped them off to Beijing to sell their product. For the financial health of expatriates working there let's hope they catch a slow boat to China !

The following is the protection article I am talking about.

“As long as expatriate managers exist they will continue to look for the safest and most advantageous products and jurisdictions for their savings. Likewise foreigners who sell up and retire in Thailand .

Remember the heady days of 12 and 13% return on deposit accounts in Thai banks. Many retired foreigners thought the good times would never end and when they did, regretted they had not taken or not listened to a professional financial advisor. Even back in those bonanza times, most expat managers continued to save offshore. Of course they were clever. That's why they were managers in the first place. Here are some common sense rules.

Never repeat NEVER ever give money to a broker. It doesn't matter if he is a member of your church, your family or your golf club and you have known him for twenty years. Just don't do it. Would you let your 20 year younger beautiful wife go on vacation for a month with your thrice divorced best friend?

If someone offers you a guaranteed product with returns above 6% per annum, read the small print before you thrash it. You can of course earn a lot more than 5% each year in equity markets or hedge funds but think about it- with bond yields and deposit rates so low, how can any institution offer a guarantee at this rate?

Only place your savings or capital with a company with a pedigree of at least 150 years and with assets under management of at least US$50 billion dollars. Don't be discouraged; there are many reputable companies that will meet these criteria. However for the ultra cautious and for those who want to sleep well please accept one other bit of advice.

Before you transfer money to them from your offshore bank or your bank in your home country, look them up in an international directory and ring them directly. Ask them for their bank details and the bank account number for the currency you are transferring. Get them to fax or post to you these details. If this matches the bank transfer instructions your broker has given you then do it.

If you see “Honest Andy's International Investments” Est. 2002 with assets under management of 100,000 Dollars offering guaranteed returns of 12% but to avail of the special offer you need to give them a cheque today of at least US$10,000, then you know what? If you give them the cheque, change your name from Mr. Greedy to Mr. Stupid.

The most important consideration in any investment or savings plan is the level of consumer protection in the jurisdiction of your choice. After all if the company which has accepted your monthly pension contributions for 23 years collapses and goes bankrupt what happens? Probably your 20 year younger wife will take off but if you choose carefully your pension will not. Most offshore jurisdictions offer up to 90% protection under policyholder protection schemes.

One final consideration for the cautious. We will not all live until retirement age. Even if we do it is our responsibility to ensure that when we die our beneficiaries inherit our estate in full. Don't let the financial predators follow you into the grave. I know I could not rest in peace while greedy lawyers feasted on the money I had worked hard for a lifetime to earn. Also Tax inspectors from a country I had abandoned years ago trying to collect Capital Gains Tax and Inheritance Tax.

However it is your moral and legal duty to advise the tax authorities in your country of the origin of this estate. How could you rest comfortably in your grave if you did not?

In conclusion let me go back. Why do Expatriate managers continue to save large monthly premiums into retirement accounts?

Answer. They know that when they retire it will not matter how much they've earned during their working life. All that will matter is how much they've saved.”

Mag's Page

There are 9 million bicycles in Beijing .

Exciting news that isn't it? Especially for motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok , who must be feeling very left out of things.

Before you think that Mags has finally flipped - the 9 million bicycles thing is the title of a rather bland and romantic ditty by Katie Melua, which has become a surprisingly big hit. (No, I hadn't heard of her either.) The title was apparently inspired by a gem of info gleaned by Ms Melua while on a trip to Beijing , and with respect is hardly likely to knock spots off ‘One Night in Bangkok '

Those of us who grew up to the lyrics of Joan Baez and the protests of Jane Fonda can only wonder what on Earth is going on these days. Maybe it has something to do with this year's gipsy skirts and bling, but honestly young women are becoming so - well - Girly.

By contrast older women, and especially pensioners, are becoming more outspoken and prepared to stand up for their rights. In September a retired Social Worker refused on principal to pay yet another increase in her Council Tax. Financially she was quite capable of paying, but that wasn't the point. The time had come to make a stance, and she willingly accepted a seven-day prison sentence.

Imagine how she felt when some anonymous Do Gooder paid her debt and she was released from prison after only 2 days.

Then there was the elderly lady who planted a new shrub in her garden every year, in memory of a loved one lost in a war. Her local Council clearly did not approve and served her with an eviction notice. (No doubt a garden full of flowering shrubs stood out like a sore thumb against the rubbish tips of its' neighbours.)

Fortunately someone offered to give her garden a slight trim, which was all it needed, and the Council backed down, but not in time to prevent three other pensioners in the same town from camping out on a local Common in protest against yet another Council Housing problem. Eventually these three were given shelter in a tent in the Beer Garden of a Pub, which by many people's standards must be a quite satisfactory outcome.

Of course Pensioner Protesters are not always women. An 80-year-old man got in on the act at the Labour Party Conference in September, where he was physically manhandled and thrown out for daring to disagree with Jack Straw, and proving that some people at least can manage to stay awake during Conferences these days.

Demographically much of Western Europe is entering an era of post-war baby boom pensioners, so hopefully we can look forward to even more of this outrageous wrinkly behaviour. I certainly hope so. It's much more entertaining than the Top Twenty these days.

Movie Review

A bold and brilliant superhero movie, Batman Begins is the best outing ever for the Caped Crusader. Officially Batman 5, it reboots the franchise, going back to the birth of the Bat. Christian Bale stars as millionaire orphan Bruce Wayne, recruited by the mysterious Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson) to join vigilante ring The League Of Shadows. But while their ninja training comes in handy, Wayne has his own ideas about combating crime. And they involve a bit of fancy dress...

Styling himself as “something elemental, something terrifying” Wayne uses his company's cutting edge technology to fashion a fearsome masked vigilante. Fear is the film's theme: confronting it, conquering it and using it. It is Batman's greatest weapon, but also that of Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy), one of Gotham 's many enemies.

Murphy is superb as the chilling villain, but then Memento director Christopher Nolan has smartly stocked his picture with excellent, established actors: Michael Caine as Wayne 's wise butler Alfred, Morgan Freeman as his business ally Lucius Fox and Gary Oldman as Batman's weary friend Detective Gordon.

While the film is far from po-faced, Nolan takes the material seriously, nailing the emotion in the story of a damaged child who grows up to work out his demons through violent retribution. Bale plays Wayne as a wounded, determined human and Batman as a raging, relentless beast. Influenced by Frank Miller's seminal comic Batman: Year One, this is easily the most engrossing and faithful screen adaptation of his adventures. It is also the most intelligent and entertaining. The franchise is reborn. Embrace the Dark Knight's return.

DVD EXTRAS

Nolan set out to “renew and reinvent” the Batman franchise as he explains in The Journey Begins - an in-depth look at development. Of course co-writer David S Goyer contributes to the discussion, explaining his vision of Batman's origin story while production designer Nathan Crowley took up residence in the back of Nolan's garage building models of Gotham City . Amusingly, even Warner Bros execs were required to attend meetings in the garage to maintain secrecy. Unfortunately it was a tight fit for Christian Bale who put on pounds after filming The Machinist and sent the costume department into a tizzy. “Bloody hell, Chris,” they purportedly scoffed, “What are we doing here, Batman or Fatman?”

However Bale shows off an amazing ability to transform himself in Shaping Mind And Body, another surprisingly substantial featurette. We see him buffed up, training in the art of Keysi - a “dance like” combination of martial arts - and there's also video footage of rehearsals for the Bhutanese fight sequences. Although Bale performed many of his own stunts, he sadly wasn't allowed anywhere near the Batmobile. In The Tumbler, stunt driver George Cottle takes the custom-built mean machine through its paces on the Gotham set - footage that will leave gearheads salivating. Elsewhere there's a full behind-the-scenes breakdown of the climactic monorail chase sequence.

“ New York on steroids,” is how the director describes his vision of Gotham in a comprehensive look at production design. Beyond the back of Nolan's garage, Crowley built the entire city from scratch inside an airplane hangar. It's a “heightened reality” captured in loving detail down to the insidious steam rising from its manholes. We're also taken inside the real Wayne Manor in north London and the Bat Cave at Shepperton studios. Cape And Cowl is a detailed showcase for the costume (and prop) designers who punished Bale with a “hi-tech wetsuit” that would hug any poundage he failed to lose. The idea was to create something “organic” so he could “move like an animal”. As the star himself notes, you couldn't pull the part off properly “unless you became a beast in that suit”.

Path To Discovery goes on location to Iceland (doubling as the Himalayas ) for a gruelling schedule of swordplay, hiking through blizzards and slipping precariously across icy cliffs. Most alarming of all, Liam Neeson and Bale recall hearing the ice crack beneath their feet as they battled each other on a slowly thawing lake. Note: It's never a good sign when the cameraman decides to shoot the scene sprawled on his belly and cinched by a rope...

Rounding out the bonus disc is Genesis Of The Bat, chronicling the various incarnations of Batman from the 80s onwards, a section of character files and a marketing design gallery. Disappointingly, Nolan doesn't offer commentary for the film although he does speak eloquently about his creative choices across all the featurettes. Key crew and supporting cast like Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman also get a fair amount of talk time. These interviews teamed with reams of behind-the-scenes footage add up to a hefty package that's definitely worth getting in a flap about.

Game Review

First-person shooter specialist Monolith has a habit of popping up out of nowhere with esoteric and often outstanding shooters... before disappearing for years at a time. So is the case with its new release, F.E.A.R. Breaking new ground in presentation and AI, it's a sometimes-terrifying, always-gripping tour de force that easily ranks among the best single-player shooters of the year.

F.E.A.R.'s plot isn't the deepest, but it manages to keep the standard-fare first-person shooter action in context and be reasonably coherent. As coherent as a tale of psychic (and psycho) little girls and armies of clone soldiers can be, anyway. As now seems to be fashionable, it's mostly told through voicemails and computer files left by the previous occupants of the levels.

But is it really scary? The whole spooky little girl thing is getting a bit tired, but it would be a strong spine indeed that F.E.A.R. can't chill now and again. Far from being constant action, you're often walking eerily darkened corridors hunting for... something, and minutes often pass without seeing an enemy. With careful sound effects and a flashlight battery that never quite seems to last long enough, your nerves will be as taut as piano wires in no time.

Run into a gunfight, and that tension explodes into life. F.E.A.R.'s gunfights are alive in a way no other game has matched. Stray shots blast chunks of masonry loose from the walls or floors. Smoke quickly fills the air. Sparks fly as your shots ricochet off armor plates. One weapon even pins enemy soldiers to the wall with wrist-thick metal rods. F.E.A.R. also deserves kudos for not only including a range of melee attacks, but also for making them useful.

Another particularly strong point (and it's as much a nod to the AI as to the graphics) is the range of moves the enemy soldiers can perform. You'll see them vault barriers, kick down furniture to use as cover, and peer round corners to search for you. Catch them in a shotgun blast, and they'll crumple into the wall in a superbly satisfying way.

The game is quite a system hog -- similarly pretty games run smoother on the same hardware. You shouldn't have serious problems if you're on a new system, but you might have to turn down the graphical bells and whistles a notch lower than usual.

No such gripe applies to the audio. It's outstanding. Much of F.E.A.R.'s gripping effectiveness is down to seriously good sound design, whether it's ambient noise in the hallucinations, the well-acted voice-overs or the just-right weapon sounds. When you're in the slow-time mode, the sound slows down with you, and there's something incredibly satisfying about hearing the pitch go back to normal as you flip it off, leaving nothing but the tinkle of brass as your spent shell casings fall to the ground. Gunplay doesn't get much better than this.

Nothing's perfect, and F.E.A.R. does have a few niggling issues, mostly boiling down to lack of variety. The levels blur together quickly, without much to distinguish them in either objectives or surroundings. A few more enemy types wouldn't have gone amiss, either -- and at around 10 hours, it's not spectacularly lengthy.

Nevertheless, F.E.A.R. is the game that Doom 3 should have been. While it can't touch the haunting potency of survival-horror classics like Silent Hill or Resident Evil (thanks to the scare-dispelling power of a semi-automatic shotgun and a belt-full of grenades), it makes up with more adrenaline-pumping moments of sheer destructive glee than anything else on the market. Whether you're a serious first-person shooter aficionado or you just like to tear stuff up on the weekends, it's unmissable.

Book Review

Gambling on Magic, by Christopher G, Moore , Heaven Lake Press, 2005.

This is another great yarn set in Thailand by Christopher Moore, whose prolific output of quirky thrillers and wide-ranging contemporary observation of the Southeast Asian underworld scene puts him high on the list of the best Western authors based in Bangkok . This is his 18th novel, and follows on the heels of A Killing Smile (1991), Minor Wife (2002), and Pattaya 24/7 (2004), among others. His novels have previously been compared to the work of Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, Peter Weir and John le Carré, to name but a few, and it thus is difficult to place his fiction firmly in any single conventional genre.

Gambling on Magic is principally set in the exotic front and back rooms of a flower shop just off Sukumvit road and a short hop from Soi Cowboy. But this is just a central stage for the intricate web of motivations that brings a varied collection of characters to Bangkok . The intersecting lines of the plot converge from Las Vegas , Vancouver , Cuba , Washington D.C. , and Pitcairn Island . The time setting is very much the present day, in late 2004, when the tragedy of the Asian Tsunami in Phuket becomes intertwined with the twists of Mafia and F.B.I intrigue among the high rollers in the Big Mango.

Certainly original, contemporary and extremely inventive, this is not the average mundane type of thriller that many holidaymakers use to while away the time on the beach or the airplane. There is undoubtedly lots here for fans of crime and spy thrillers, but there is also appeal for those interested in the global perspectives of cross cultural behaviour in the heart of a big Asian city. This is a thoroughly believable modern story of what could easily be happening right now, and right here, exemplifying the tangled tentacles of historical, geographical and political events in our complex modern world that connect, affect and involve many disparate individuals and catch up with those running away from them.

The pace is not really relentless, though the novel regularly takes sudden unexpected twists and turns, which keep you guessing. It is also somewhat contemplative on occasion, but from a fascinating variety of character perspectives, which encapsulate the diversity of attitudes to the game of destiny in a big international city. Joey Balfour, the expat flower shop owner and former TV gambling show host, is given to considering his future prospects through both probability theory and Feng Shui. His two Thai bedmates, in contrast, validate their existence through plastic surgery reconstructions suggested by models on Chic Channel, or seek harmony by reading aloud Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

A Thai heart surgeon from Bumengrad Hospital regularly makes merit in the back streets, but his charity is seemingly derived from his deception in receiving expat pay-offs. A Westerner uses his on-line card skills for subsistence income whilst hiding out in the slums of Klong Toey. A cat-loving internet nerd poses as an unlikely Norwegian fisherman while on the lam from the powers that be- or are they the good ole' bible thumping rightist Christian Republican arm of the American security agencies? And, in passing, what did they have to do with the assassination of JFK? The adaptable morality of Thai police in their connections with Embassy staff and western friends also plays a part in the denouement of the convoluted mesh of vengeance at the climax, both at Don Muang and in the back streets after dark. Although violence is often not far away, and the threats of revenge and media humiliation are the major stimulus for the characters, the action largely avoids the multiple, gory shoot-em-ups that are often the bread and butter of more conventional populist thriller novels.

Threaded throughout the story is the important figure of Errol Flynn, the now deceased swashbuckling film hero of Robin Hood, and The Dawn Patrol. Now just what does he and his rumoured friendship with Fidel Castro have to do with the underworld shenanigans around Soi Cowboy?

I'm afraid you will have to read the novel yourself to find out about that, as otherwise I'd be giving the game away! Hopefully you may now look forward to the fun of untangling the maze surrounding Joey Balfour, and become absorbed in the inventive ramifications of this enjoyable and richly textured modern novel. Very readable

Useful Telephone Numbers for Hua Hin

Railway station
032-512 770, 032-511 073

Bus station of Hua Hin
032-511 654, 032-512 543

Bus station of Prachuabkirikhan
032-601 901

Bus station of Pranburi
032-621 443

Hua Hin Hospital
032-520 401

Dog Rescue Center
0-1981 4406

Wild life Rescue Center (Tayang)
032-458 135

Department of Land Cha-am office:
032- 430 846-7

Department of Land Hua Hin office:
032-536 164, 032-512 407

Department of Land Prachuabkirikhan:
032-611 211

Department of Land Pranburi
032-622 199

Local Government (Hua Hin)
032-521 340, 532 471

Local water supply
032-511 677

The Power Board of Hua Hin
032-512 215, 032 513 165

Observer office:
032-531 078

Red Cross.
032-512 567

San Paolo Hospital
032-532 576-85

Polyclinic International
032-516 424, 032-516 425

Shell Cooking Gas
032-511 144, 032- 515 620

The Communication Authority of Thailand
(Hua Hin)
032-511 351

Rotary Club of Hua Hin
0-1916 6637
Meeting every Thursday 8.pm
at Hua Hin Grand Hotel & Plaza

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