Same soap, same cast

As we embrace the dawn of 2012, people are looking forward to changes, while many others have already come up with predictions what the new year may bring after we experienced a rough ride last year.

Will things change for the better? Honestly, I won't rush and put my money on a "we will have a smoother year" bet. Maybe instead of rash speculation, we should just learn from the past few years and see how we go from the point we take off at.

With the help of Google, our newspapers have gathered the top-10 most popular stories on this newspaper website, and in short the statistics on the stories viewed is pretty handy reaffirmation of what we went through. Online readers had floods, politics, crime, gadgets and a soft porn movie in common.

If we go by numbers, the top stories viewed were the floods, Muammar Gadhafi's death, a Lao girl cut in half by a speeding Porsche driver, PM Yingluck Shinawatra, the Thailand-Cambodia border conflict, Thaksin Shinawatra's possible return, Thailand's general election 2011, natural disasters around the world, the 3D movie "Sex and Zen" coming to Bangkok, and iPhone5.

The list should not surprise anyone, especially the flood story, with its severe impact on many facets of Thai life. Submerged industrial estates, flooded airport runways, cancelled school schedules, the slump in tourism and displaced people were all wounds and are still a freshly bitter memory of the past year.

And just as the country is licking its wounds from the recent floods that caused Bt1.4 trillion in damages, storms and floods have now hit the south of Thailand, right on the dawn of 2012, just as many had finished their countdown celebrations. Flooding certainly stands a chance of remaining the most popular news this year.

Politics, like disasters, continued its domination this year, with veteran player Thaksin Shinawatra playing "to return-or-not to-return" to the backdrop of his sister's government. Regardless of his presence in or absence from Thailand, the fugitive ex-premier still shares centre stage with his sister. His homecoming technicality alone is a rather difficult scenario, and would be an issue that everyone glued their eyes to. If he can really make his way back to Thailand in grand style without having to go to jail, that would trigger another round of confrontation. Here we go again…

That Thailand-Cambodia conflict is unlikely to remain a big issue for the Thai public, thanks largely to the arrival of the Yingluck administration last year. Never mind that Cambodian troops shot at a Thai helicopter last month; the Thai government seems to be more at ease with our neighbour. If Thailand had a Facebook page, the status with Cambodia should be changed from "It's complicated" to "In a relationship with Cambodia".

The rising star in regional news could be the new kid in town - Burma. Thaksin has been there and so have Yingluck and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. All eyes are now focused on Burma, which is undergoing a democracy facelift in order to rejoin the world. Apart from that, Burma remains attractive to Thailand, and many others, as a land of business opportunities. The term "energy diplomacy" will remain intact in 2012.

As for accidents and all kinds of crimes, aside from the shocking Porsche-cut-the-victim-in-half case to the hit-and-run incident of female doctor Hathaiporn "Mor Muk" Imwitthaya, 2011 saw many stories unsolved, with a number of recent cases towards the end of the year. Among them was the political aide of Democrat MP Tankhun Jittitsar shot in a market in broad daylight.

As we welcomed 2012, businessman Worsasith Issara was stabbed in a pub brawl in Phuket. Certainly, crime will continue in much uglier forms, and the real pain for many is not only the crime or the accident but the way the police are incompetent in following up the cases and bringing justice to victims.

Of course, top tales that will remain this year will be talk-of-the-town lifestyle stories. The public anticipated the premiere of soft-porn movie "Sex and Zen" last year, and the launch of the new iPhone, showing that there was still a lighter side to the news. Overall, this year will not be a whole new soap opera for Thailand. Like 2011, we will continue to see lots of tears, injustice, villains, heroes, heroines and bit of sex to keep audiences tuned. Welcome to the new episode of Thailand with the same cast members.