Mango Pudding Blues 3.0

THE FLOATING STARS OF CHIANG MAI

One of the greatest things I’ve ever seen was in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand. It was the unleashing of miniature paper hot air balloons anchored by burning pucks where the gondola would be, done as part of the Loi Kraton festival.

The festival of light.

The balloons are not really balloons; not balloon-shaped, that is; they’re cylinders of white rice paper, like those Ikea lampshades, but about two and a half feet around, four to five feet high, closed on top, wire ring holding the bottom end open in a circle. The puck? No idea. A tight roll of some fabric soaked in flammable liquids? Wax? Don’t know, but it burned yellow and long, but not so big as to burn the paper balloon. It was affixed on wire crossbars in the middle of the wire ring at the base of the balloon. Okay. And so what would happen is that a couple of guys would hold the paper cylinder while another couple of guys would light the puck and then they’d all wait a moment while the air in the cylinder would heat up, and the thing would begin, slowly, majestically, to rise. And they’d let it go, and the fire would illuminate the paper cylinder in the night, and the thing (and many others) would float languidly into the hot moist Thai night. So sweet. And then a surprise: when they got high enough, you couldn’t see the cylinder any more, but the flames were like bright stars, but warmer and faster. And some had extra explosives deep in the puck, so that suddenly supernovas would bloom deliciously in the black velvet sky.

And I thought at the time that one really ought to import the idea to Canada here. I certainly had enough evilly creative pyromaniac friends back in Calgary to pull it off, but I was always concerned about the possibility of starting big fires where the damn things land. I was mulling it over once again with a friend here the other day and he suggested we release them from a boat on a lake. Not bad.

Suggestions?

I also recall another friend in Calgary telling me that she and her gang of witches had a method of twisting in the four corners of a full sheet of a broadsheet newspaper that would form a sort of bowl that, if inverted and ignited in a certain way on a summer night, would cause the thing to rise brightly in the sky during its immolation. Do any of you know this one?

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SKEPTICISM

We at Mango Pudding Blues have always suffered from extreme skepticism. We are not cynical, no; but we are skeptical. Ask our loved ones, who long to punch the frequently recurring look of suspicious incredulity off of our smug little face.

Anyway, one thing we’ve always been extremely skeptical about is the claim, oft repeated in popular health-and-fitness journalism of the past 15 years, that people are generally dehydrated. That people must chug down at least eight glasses of water a day.

So they’re saying that our natural mechanism of thirst and its satisfaction is out of whack? For everybody? We never bought the idea. Surely the human body is a fine-tuned marvel, especially when compared to the body of work of lifestyle journalists, which is often shaky. And we’re not even here digging in to the notion that prescribing eight “glasses” of water (how big is a glass? Eight ounces? Twelve?) to everybody regardless of size and activity level is clearly preposterous. Or the lack of attribution; we’ve seen literally dozens of these stories in newspapers and magazines, and not one has attributed this advice to real data. It’s pure folklore from the 80s gym-freak culture.

So we were delighted to read in the Globe and Mail the other day that a new study indicates that people who are drinking too much water are damaging their kidneys.

Well, we’re not delighted that anyone has damaged a kidney, but we are delighted to see the notion at last debunked.

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