I live about half a block from the main Thai area in Hollywood, so I can get delicious Thai food at 2am in the morning. Which is awesome for someone like me who keeps vampire hours most of the time. This also means I was able to walk to the Curry Festival a couple of weeks ago. Today marks the beginning of Thai New Year, known as Songkran.

I wish I had realized earlier that Songkran was coming up as the Thai holiday is celebrated with socializing, spring cleaning, and throwing water at other people. Originally, the water was apparently intended to be spiritually cleansing as it was what was used for spring cleaning the Buddha statues. The young could observe the holiday by sprinkling water which was thus blessed and perhaps lightly scented on the hands of respected elders. Today, the fun aspect of dowsing others with water is emphasized and people of all ages head outdoors to fire water guns at one another. This means one should be conscious, while dripping wet, of a sense of personal renewal.

Songkran actually runs through April 15, so there might still be time to get or make the perfect water gun. A gentleman named John Young has designed The Ultimate Water Gun (pictured) using a fire extinguisher and a motorcycle helmet.

When I was in college, I was Treasurer of the Strategic Games Club which used to play a sort of free-for-all Assassin in the tunnels underneath the school. Motorized water guns were popular, but the homemade monstrosities usually were most effective. The pesticide sprayer backpack was a particularly devastating model, although I personally lacked the upper body strength to run around with one on my back. I totally needed The Ultimate Water Gun made out of a fire extinguisher and a motorcycle helmet.

I am at least going to treat myself to a new water gun, even if I don’t start crafting or mad science work on one today. I think Thai New Year sounds way better than American New Year. I would far prefer strangers fire water cannons at me all day than expect to be entitled to tongue me at a specific time of night. It is really hot in Thailand this time of year too, so getting soaking wet is extra-refreshing. Really, I just love the idea of a traditional holiday reason to have a goofy water fight.

Although I spent actual NYE contemplating my goals for 2009 and feeling pretty good for a change about how well I did on my 2008 resolutions, I did go to champagne brunch this morning. I haven’t quite determined all my primary goals for the New Year, but Blue Blood just turned Sweet 16, so we’re all pretty celebratory about that, so that should tie in with those resolutions somehow I think.

Although this is Blue Blood’s first and only Sweet 16, my friend Sabrina has a fabulous Sweet 16 birthday party every year. She is a brilliant event planner, so her events tend to be varied and fun. When I say she is a brilliant event planner, I don’t mean in the Cartman tea party fantasy way some people claim they are good at stuff, but in a she just got a hundred million dollar budget to plan events for 2009 kind of way.

Today’s festivities involved getting a whole bunch of us our own colonnade sectioned off from the beautiful Chateau Marmont patio. (I could tell what a colonnade was in context, but, if you were wondering about the precise definition, according to the dictionary, a colonnade is “a series of regularly spaced columns supporting an entablature and usually one side of a roof”.) Apparently Sabrina had to bump some other party of twenty for us. She explained the details of how this was accomplished, but, really, she just cannot be denied. We were all much better behaved for champagne brunch than we were at her birthday. Certainly, I was.

There were a few people at brunch who I totally had zero recollection of having met before. Hopefully they didn’t think I was being stuck up saying “nice to meet you” and asking for names. In my defense, we all drank so much champagne at Sabrina’s most recent Sweet 16 that we actually ran the dinner restaurant entirely out of champagne. Our party literally drank every bit of champagne in the restaurant and a couple of people had to make a supermarket run to replenish.

Afterward, we went to this surreal karaoke bar which fortunately (or possibly unfortunately for remembering everyone clearly) was still well-stocked with champagne. We did start out with Rotari and then move to Moet, which is kind of backward, but we did play a drinking game to see who could drink a split with no hands. (Apparently not me.)

The karaoke place seemed like something out of a gangster movie. It didn’t appear to have signage and was just on this particular floor of this Korean office building. There were these semi-private rooms with black stone floors and it just seemed very much like there should be a high level mobster meeting going on. (We had thought the rooms were entirely private, until the staff informed us that there were certain things we could not be doing in there, and it turned out the walls were one way glass.) I’ll try any weird food once, so I did eat some of a chicken thing which left a very peculiar taste in my mouth, but it was worth it for the adventure points.

I still have my place setting name tag. Sabrina made them out of these sort of Barbie style dolls and customized each one to the person they were a place setting for. As Chateau Marmont scolded us for taking pictures, allow me to share a crazed Barbie art gallery with you all, photographed by the talented Forrest Black. My seating tag doll had a mohawk and come on her mouth. Very elegant . . . in a Barbie with a mohawk and come on her mouth sort of way.

I was going to make a post about the usual New Year’s resolutions, but I realized that my main goal for this year is improved communication.

Communicating on the internet is daunting because too often scope is difficult to define, words are stolen, honest journalism is undervalued, tone is misunderstood, and readers will be oversensitive to their own feelings and wholly insensitive to the feelings of others. I’m not one to shy away from a formidable task, though, so this year I aim to cut through the internet culture’s impediments to real communication.

If there is anything you have been wanting to know about Blue Blood or Blue Blood philosophy and how Blue Blood fits into the world around us, or even the world around Blue Blood, please feel free to respond to this post with your question. Feel free send your question via Personal Message to me or Forrest Black on the BlueBlood.net forums or any of the other sites Blue Blood or its reps are on. If you ask via a less public method, please mention how/if you would like to be credited for what you’d like to know. Each month, we will answer some of the most intriguing questions. If you ask a question which is chosen, we might even send you cool swag from the Blue Blood Boutique.

Over the coming weeks, I also plan to write about each of the issues which I think cause a lot of great thinkers to be silent online. I plan to report honestly on newsworthy topics, even if, heaven forfend, I step on a few toes. I’m going to look for the good in everything, but I’m going to tell it like it is and so are other Blue Blood writers. Expect more funny anecdotes, interesting insights, news coverage, and penetrating perspectives in 2008. Expect us to call out plagiarizing scum and other people who would cause me, and people like me, to communicate less.

I look forward to encouraging intelligent critical thinking and bursting the bubble on groupthink. I hope to skewer a lot of truthiness. Expect a high level of genuine truth.

PS I resolve to eat better and go to the gym more often in 2008. How about you?