Let's play a game. What you'll need to succeed at this activity is an illogical mind, a cast-iron stomach, and a history of people describing you with terms like silly/eccentric/batsh*t insane. Got all that? Let's proceed.
So imagine that you're sitting down to dinner with your family. No, no, weird Uncle Somchai who gets drunk and touchy before the appetisers come out isn't at this hypothetical meal, so don't let him haunt the visualisation process.
OK, now the food is served, and you're super excited because today's dinner treat is sausages. "Every night should be a sausage-fest," you exclaim with glee! Wait, that didn't come out right.
Anyway so you start om nom noming the delicious wieners. All is great, until...
You see a pair of eyes staring back at you from inside one of the sausages! Then you notice there's also a nose and a chunk of hair resembling the corpse of a kitten! Holy hell, you've been eating a sausage with a dead kitty that somehow got stuck inside!
Do you:
A)Run to the bathroom and make yourself throw up while vowing never to eat meat again?
B)Guzzle boiling water to get the kitten corpse taste out of your mouth and sanitise your insides?
C)Scramble to the hospital and get tested for cat-sausage herpes and every other disease known to man?
Did you pick A, B, or C? Perhaps a combination of all three to make sure you're not going to die of some crazy cat poisoning? Well, it doesn't matter, because all those choices are wrong anyway!
The correct answer?
You're supposed to build a shrine to the freak sausage and use it for lottery-winning purposes, dummy!
This exact scenario played out in Buri Ram province recently when Krod Yotchomrang found the body of a kitten inside one of the foot-long sausages her family was eating for dinner. (Note to readers: The sausages were purchased from a local market in Satuk district if you want to add that to your list of "Places never to shop".)
After her horror subsided, Krod apparently "thought things through" and decided the best plan was to set up a small altar in her home for the dead kitty and pray to it, complete with burning incense. Neighbours and strangers came to see the bizarre shrine, and instead of freaking out, used the strange situation to help them pick lottery numbers.
They went with "52", which is Krod's age, and also happened to be the two-digit winning number for the March 16 lottery draw.
Now, if you think I'm just bitter that people are winning the lottery while I'm fishing for satangs in my purse, then you are right. However, that's not why every scientific synapse in my brain is misfiring at trying to comprehend this event.
It's not a new revelation that many Thais are very superstitious. Every ailment can be blamed on a spirit, and every bad thing that happens can be combated by making merit. Lottery numbers can be found in a tree, on a licence plate, on a bizarre animal, or whatever else suits the moment.
However there's no method to this madness, and people seem crazy because they just make up their own rules as they go. What if the lottery-seekers had decided to choose a number based on an arbitrary marking on the cat? What if they played a number based on how long the sausage was? Then they wouldn't have won on "52" and their superstitious beliefs would have been shaken, right?
(Yes, I'm aware I'm trying to make sense of a situation that makes no sense).
As long as people's beliefs don't harm anyone, then it doesn't really bother me. But when it surpasses innocent fun and ventures into "Holy sh*t, there's a cat in my sausage", then wouldn't the logical thing be to find out how the hell this happened? Wouldn't you want to track down the supplier and make sure there's no CatGate conspiracy going on, like the horsemeat scandal that's been taking place? How are we ever supposed to trust food in this country again?!
Whatever, I'll just starve myself while you all have fun glorifying your cats-in-sausages! I hope you all find tons of strange animals within strange animals that help you win lotteries for years.
In fact, I'm about to go buy a lottery ticket with the number "12". Because that's how crazy I think this all is on a scale of one to 10.G