Last Week in Reality: Mar 27 - Apr 2

April 11th, 2008

26 WED

In Suphan Buri, a 53-year-old woman dies after being stung by a bee that is hiding in the honeycomb she is eating. Craving some sweets, Kularb Huaychana asks her grandson to fetch a beehive hanging from the roof of their home. Kularb fails to see a bee that has remained in the hive and bites straight into the honeycomb. The bee stings her tongue, which soon goes numb; the rest of her body soon follows. Kularb is rushed to the hospital but dies the morning after.

29 SAT

In Udon Thani, an elephant-like piglet is born. Boonpeng Buranasiri’s sow gives birth to a deformed piglet that she offers to Umka Chawana Punyo, the head of Wat Sraku. When the media arrive, the piglet is already dead. The male piglet is white, with one eye, an unusually long tail, Jumbo ears and a long trunk-like snout. The monk promises to expose the freak to the public but asks that it not be used to divine lottery numbers.

In Nakorn Pathom, a jobless engineer is caught plundering telephone booths. Bunpot Polkun, 31, worked for a short time at the TT&T. He copies the keys used to open public phones’ safes and keeps a TT&T uniform. After quitting, he plugs a score of telephones with sponges so the coins cannot drop through. Later, he collects the money accumulated in the phones, making thousands of baht each time. As he regularly targets the booths around Rajabhat Nakorn Pathom, police eventually catch him in the act.

30 SUN

In Samut Prakarn, a family is nearly entirely eradicated by a series of mysterious deaths. Yod fi nds a red-brown snake at his new house’s construction site. He kills the snake, fi nds fi ve eggs in its abdomen and cooks them for his family. Two days later, his wife falls ill and later dies at the hospital. On the second day of her funeral ceremony, his father has a stroke and dies. Soon after, Yod’s eldest son dies in a car accident. Convinced some kind of curse is responsible for the string of deaths, the family consults a sorcerer, who believes the snake was magical and instructs them to take fi ve lives to compensate for the fi ve eggs that were eaten. Yod, however, doesn’t believe in the prediction and challenges the snake’s spirit. Two weeks later, while Yod is riding his motorcycle with his other son, they crash and are seriously injured. Yod’s relatives plan to change their names, move out of the village and dedicate a shrine to the snake.

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