xylophone

Palestinians living side by side with Israelis would IMO be normal, even if they never managed it in the recent past!! You took my use of the word "normal" too literally.

Sadly, a good friend of mine who has lived here most of the time for years has now decided to call it quits and has moved back to the UK. I am in contact with him and he says although the weather is disgusting, he is glad to be free of the traffic, Russians, invading Chinese and poor roads here in Patong/Phuket – – he owned a Triumph Bonneville and loved riding it around, but not safe to do that now, so sold it and he has gone. Another friend is considering going back to Canada because he is fed up/bored with Patong and has been financially shafted by one Thai girlfriend, thereby losing his business, and his latest Thai girlfriend has decided to dump him! Not a happy chappy, so I expect him to leave very shortly. As I have posted previously, this is not the place I remember it to be, but I'm tied here by friends and a daughter, so I will have to put on a happy face and carry on!

I was Chief Manager Investments for a major New Zealand bank, and I and another guy had started the division, which I was now running, along with 25 Investment Advisers and a team of back office investment personnel. A far cry from my days working for oil companies in the Sahara desert (twice), Nigeria, offshore Norway and a couple of North Sea platforms. The stress of the bank job was starting to get to me, so I took a holiday in Phuket, and around two years later I was living here!

Surely a fairly simple solution would be for a ceasefire for a period of time to be agreed whilst Hamas released all of the hostages, and Israel to release the same number of prisoners which it has – – a release of hostages for the release of some prisoners. Nothing difficult about that. The problem, amongst many, seems to be that Hamas will agree to release a certain number of hostages whilst wanting the Israelis to release many hundreds of prisoners, many of whom are convicted of terrorist acts and that's not a fair trade in anyone's language. Also of course Hamas will not lay down their arms, simply because they are a terrorist organisation whose main aim is to destroy Israel and the Israelis, so you have a stalemate which is damn near impossible to navigate. When Hamas is wiped out, things could return to normal, apart from the fact that many Palestinians support Hamas and their activities, so that will go on, sadly.

As has been noted by another poster, the chief investigator was an out and out Republican and Trump supporter, so being able to portray Biden as he has done in this report, could be seen as a move to "balance the scales" if you like, with Biden being portrayed as senile and incompetent versus Trump being a liar and a crook?? Food for thought, but at least Biden has not tried to buy Greenland or suggest that ingesting/injecting bleach could cure Covid, and whilst Biden might be a little senile, Trump is pure dumbness, bigly so.

Listening to Biden speak on this, there is no way that one can ascertain that he is mentally deficient/incompetent, because he comes through this very well, despite an occasional gaffe and the cackling and shouts from the floor. Rest assured, he knows what he's doing.

How disgusting is that, but then again they support another terrorist group, Hamas, so this is not surprising and really shows their true colours.

I will try and help you out here, whilst people may not "love Joe Biden", the other option is an absolute disaster. What is there to like about Trump, who is a compulsive liar, a convicted thief, stealing from a charity, a "rapist", someone who has ripped off the average American working man with his bankruptcies, possibly endangering America safety and security by the stealing of classified documents and a man who pays for his hookers out of campaign funds – – and plenty more to add to this but I'm sure you get the picture. Oh, and one more thing, he is as dumb as a bag of rocks.

"Birds of a feather", perhaps!!

Thanks for recommending this, as I watched it and thought it was very good, and although slightly off topic, but still related, it added to my knowledge of the persecution and murder of the Jews. I say this because I have read many instances where people have suggested that it was only the German "Nazis" who were doing the killing, and I had no idea that Lithuanians and Latvians were also culpable in the murders. In addition, other people, mainly Germans, have stated in the past (and one German in my workplace said the same to me) that the everyday German knew nothing about the concentration camps and the persecution and slaughter going on, yet there are many archives of this period which show everyday German citizens dragging Jews from their homes and shops and attacking them. Hitler and Nazism were a akin to a cult......say no more!

For some reason, as I was out this afternoon picking up a few things for dinner, the words of a Joni Mitchell song came to mind, brought about by your comment above: – "Pave paradise and put up a parking lot"......not quite the same, but I'm sure you get my drift!

Read a few of his posts over the recent past and you will get your answer........now you can go back down the rabbit hole again.

So now you know how it drive it Mac.......😉

Thanks for offering up another perspective, always good to get another viewpoint, however it won't change my opinion of it, but everyone to their own. Agree with you about the main road, and I observed some of these idiots on the motorbikes as I was driving through it, luckily in my car! Also agree with your last paragraph regarding the "ruining of that part of Phuket" and for my part, Patong has already reached that stage – – i.e. been ruined one way and another, and particularly with the traffic which is gridlocked much of the time during the week.

Me neither LL, but it was better when I sang a few songs there!!

I would start chemotherapy if that was what was needed, and I'm 76, however as @LosLobo has said, there are many options for treating cancer, depending upon the type and location of it. My brother-in-law in Melbourne has just been through a course of chemo for a tumour in his stomach and seems to be handling it very well at the moment, and he is in his mid-80s. I wish him and King Charles III all the best.

IMO, Kamala is the pits and even though I am tired of Patong, nothing, nothing would encourage me to move to Kamala! It's a "one road, one horse town" and that road is considered a racetrack by many motorbike idiots. I'm not that desperate yet LL! And as I recall you come over to Patong on your motorbike and have a few beers, so it's not something I would want to do; drive back to Kamala from Patong after having a few glasses of wine and a couple of shorts, especially as I do not drink and drive these days, although I have to say that I did a little in my youth, but that was decades ago!

I have mentioned the atrocious driving in Patong, many times, and some of the worst culprits over the years have been the French Africans, so I was not surprised to hear the following from a friend who manages a shop here.......... Thai friend: – you know Big C, outside, have big crash yesterday (this was a couple of days ago). Me: what happened? Thai friend: – French chocolate man do wheelies on big motorbike and crash into other motorbikes, and have blood in many places! I could find out no more about this and I haven't seen it on any the news yet, so I would suppose that the guy is just injured and not dead, but it sounds like he got his just rewards through being an idiot on a motorbike – – mind you there are many of them here at the moment, sad to say.

I was here during that time and true enough corruption was rife, with even fake "Tsunami collections" being staged around the island of Phuket, for example. However the movie focused purely on the day of the event (and a few days after) and on the experience of one particular family and that was the scope of it........and in that regard, IMO it was excellent and very realistic

That version consisted of "fictional characters", whereas the movie had input from the actual persons involved, with the key people being on set in the making of the movie.......couldn't be more accurate than that.

Last night I watched a film that has been seemingly lost in the annals of time, yet is so pertinent to those on this forum – – namely: "The Impossible", which is about the 2004 tsunami, and is a true story about a family caught up in it. I had forgotten much of the content of it, so I was pleased that I did download it and watch it, and what surprised me in the credits was that although much of it was shot in Thailand, the tsunami waves aspect was shot in Spain and figures and other objects were added digitally, not only that, both Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts filmed their underwater sequences in a training tank in Spain! Well worth watching again and in it I saw a Thai guy I know here called Tao, who was drafted in as an extra for the movie, and I still see him around the place!

I've only bought two electric kettles since I've been here (17 years) and both of them were Sharp and both of them were plastic – – the reason being is that although the stainless steel kettles are "double insulated", I always steer clear of them since I got a bit of a "tickle" off one a few years ago! Never had a problem with anything made by Sharp.

I watched a movie called, "The Killer", starring Michael Fassbender, last night, and found it to be very average although it seems to have an IMDB rating of 6.7? I would probably give it something along the lines of 5.7, if that. Starts off very slowly, so slowly in fact that I almost switched it off, but I watched it through to the end, and whilst waiting for the grand finale, was presented with something which was just a little short of pathetic.

And this latest news should help Biden............. Stunning’ US jobs growth of 353,000 far outstrips estimates The US economy added 353,000 jobs in January, almost twice as many as forecast, in “stunning” figures that led investors to slash expectations for interest rate cut in March. Economists had expected a 180,000 jobs increase for last month, according to an LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group) survey. Tom Simons, US economist at Jefferies, described the figures as “stunning numbers” that left him “near speechless”. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/stunning-us-jobs-growth-of-353000-far-outstrips-estimates