A light rain finished a cool afternoon April 19 at Karon Stadium, but that didn't seem to dampen spirits for the fifth annual Phuket Cricket Sixes tournament. Players were scattered in clumps across the stands, chatting quietly among themselves. The low murmur was occasionally broken when someone decided a bowler or batsman on the field needed heckling. It was probably the beer talking--all in good fun, of course. "Our attraction is a bit like real estate," explains Chairman Michael "Cat" Maher, who founded the tournament in 2004. "They've got the three L's: location, location, location. We've got beaches and hotels and palms and a stadium right next to the sand, and where else in the world can you do that? Maybe a little in the Caribbean. People love it, and they come back year after year. We have teams now from as far as New Zealand."

Pornthip Raksapiksu has big ambitions. With business partner and boyfriend Rob Collins, Khun Pornthip opened D Gallery at the Royal Phuket Marina in December 2007 to add sophistication to the art scene in Phuket. The works that hang in the D Gallery on a stormy mid-April afternoon are surely sophisticated. Drawn from both established and up-and-coming Thai and Vietnamese artists, the paintings often wrestle with big ideas: the blending of traditional techniques and modern imagery, a clash of cultures, urban living, and the intersections between commercial and erotic culture. "It might take time for Phuket people to understand this art," she says. "It's not everyday colour or beauty. They're conceptual, and most of them are sophisticated."

The tsunami of late 2004 stopped Phuket's real-estate boom cold. A year later, local real-estate professionals say, the juggernaut rose again. Even a military coup and the military government's tinkering with foreign investment rules couldn't slow the pace of Phuket's prized high-end real-estate market. But a new tsunami has come from across the Pacific Ocean--only this time, instead of hitting beaches, it has struck banks and financial institutions across two continents. A seismic shift of fortunes in the US housing market triggered a financial crisis in 2007 that sent shock waves around the globe. The New York Times recently reported that many once-hot regions around the British Isles and Europe--even as far away as India and China--have cooled significantly and followed the US pattern of tumbling prices and sharply rising defaults and foreclosures. In Phuket, however, the real-estate market seems unfazed.

Efforts by the Phuket Provincial Livesotck Office (PPLO) to inoculate stray dogs against rabies have earned a new Japanese ally. The Animal Clinic of Japan visited the Phuket Shelter for Stray Dogs in Suanpha Bangkannoon, Talang on April 26 to bring food and medicine to animals there, joining the PPLO's campaign to make Phuket a rabies-free zone. They brought 10kg of food for dogs and cats and a gift of $5,000. PPLO Chief Sunart Wongchavalit explained that his office and the subdistrict administrative organizations on Phuket have rallied together around the rabies-free campaign to offer free vaccinations and sterilizations for dogs and cats. In addition, veterinarians from the Livestock Office have been going door-to-door on Phuket to register and vaccinate family pets. Phuket animal lovers may contact the Phuket Health Station Group (PHSG) or the PPLO for times and locations of vaccination clinics. The PHSG may be contacted at 0-7621-7330, the PPLO at 0-7621-6934.

Summer is approaching and everyone wants to look their best in bikinis and swim wear. In the past I have on occasion shared information about body treatments with you. Now, I have some more news about these treatments: Thermage and laser lipolysis or Smartlipo. Until now, Thermage has been used successfully for treating facial and neck laxity. Body Thermage has produced phenomenal results for many patients using the ThermaTip STC treatment. But the new body shape procedure by Thermage, ThermaTip DC, can help tighten, firm and shape the body in a single go without surgery, injections and with little to no downtime.

Having just returned to Phuket from jet-setting around the Southern Hemisphere, spending long periods of time cramped in economy class seats I began thinking about economy class syndrome, known by the medical name deep vein thrombosis (DVT). Anyone can get economy class syndrome--you do not need to be in economy class at all. People in business and first class have developed it since it's related to low cabin pressure, low humidity and dehydration. Relative humidity is 20-25% in the Arabian Desert, while optimum comfort is around 50% humidity. In-flight cabin humidities gradually fall on long-distance flights. In many cases they can be as low as 1%. That's pretty dry, and it is also the reason why people do not urinate much on a long flight unless they drink plenty of fluids

Phuket may not have a finer example of a friendly neighbourhood restaurant than Ban Saiyuan's the Breakfast Hut. Set among a cluster of small businesses along Kata-Sai Yuan Road, the restaurant sits in a building that's a little more than a hut--but not much more. As I pull my motorbike into the small dirt-patch of parking outside, I immediately feel at home. The surfer ghetto in my home region of Santa Cruz County, California is dotted with many such neighbourhood eateries all serving straightforward breakfast and lunch fare (often heavy on the carbohydrates) at modest prices. They're populated with locals on their way to work or to the surf break if a killer swell happens to be running that day. The scene at the Breakfast Hut is no different, and just as in Santa Cruz, the proprietor of the Breakfast Hut issues a warm "good morning" when we walk up to take a seat.

There is more life in the eyes of a squirrel nailed to a plaque by a taxidermist than in the eyes of someone who has just waded through 800 words on the subject of chemistry, but something happened at Sunday Brunch today that caused me decide to write about the subject anyway. The hotel manager handed me a bottle of wine from one of my competitors, with thousands of tiny floating crystals, and asked me what was wrong with it. I tried to explain that it was salt but she did not understand how there could be salt in an unopened bottle of wine. I further explained it was potassium bi-tartrate, the esterified form of tartaric acid, and that it indicates the wine was bottled without the winery chemist first ensuring the wine was chemically stable. By this point the familiar expression of the taxidermy squirrel was already in her eyes.

"They paved paradise and put up a parking lot," crooned Joni Mitchell in the '70s. Parking in cities of the Kingdom during the '80s and '90s was still child's play. Nasty devices like the yellow wheel clamps were still unknown, and parking was mostly free.