xylophone

Whoosh>>>>>>>>>

I believe a "local state of emergency" was in place for the Auckland region, and I have never seen rain/floods like this in all my years in NZ. Not far from where I lived on the North Shore of Auckland, several houses and properties have been hit by landslips and in some cases the houses are perched precariously on the edge of what's left of a cliff. The cleanup operation is going to be costly and lengthy and I'm not sure that those people who have "house insurance" are adequately covered for events like this – – I only hope the insurance companies come to the party, but then again...........

I had the good fortune of being able to share a taxi ride from Bangkok Phuket hospital to Lotus's in Phuket town, with an attractive, and judging by her dress and jewellery, reasonably wealthy Russian woman, and we got talking about the invasion of Ukraine and what she said was enlightening for me! She said that this invasion/war was crazy because many families, like hers, had mixed Russian and Ukrainian relatives, whereby some of her lineage were Russian, whereas others were Ukrainian, so taking sides was damn near impossible, and she said it was dividing the country and families, ALTHOUGH she did say that any dissent was pounced upon immediately, so being able to come to Thailand for her was a good way out. She didn't say she was for or against Putin, but she did say she was against the invasion – – take from that what you will.

Had to chuckle at your response L L, and the description given was (I think) the one posted by the producer in California. Having said that, I tasted a second bottle a couple of days later and it was completely different to the first one, and I've heard of "bottle variation", but this took it to new levels!!! So I will have to try another one! Now back on to the thread.......having managed to stay alive on the back of a motorbike taxi heading down to the Blue Beach Café and Restaurant, I was pleased to reach the place in one piece, what with being "cut up" by morons driving PCX bikes and weaving in and out of traffic at speed, almost colliding with the motorbike taxi I was on, as well as nearly being wiped out by a farang who decided to do a U-turn on a very busy road without any indication whatsoever – – I don't think I have ever witnessed such atrocious and dangerous driving in my 16 years here. Bloody idiots all of them. Luckily enough I was able to meet some friends at Blue Beach and enjoy a nice meal in a tranquil setting, with guitar player "Moody" entertaining the diners, and there were many of them as the place was just about full. This place is what Patong has been waiting for, and there are some rooms available overlooking the beach. What more could one ask for..... The friends and I wandered up Bangla and it was very crowded, probably the most I've seen it for years, and there were more friends at the Black Horse bar, so we stopped for a chat and a drink, after which we visited a couple of other establishments at which we knew the owners, before one of the overseas guests wanted to go to a go-go bar (not a new event by any means). So the leader of the pack decided to lead us into Suzie Wong's 2, and I duly followed, only to leave about two minutes later because the place was nothing short of a disaster, populated by fugly women, all vying for a drink and wanting to hold your hand and converse in their own limited command of the English language. Not for me so I popped out to see another friend who owned a bar nearby. The group decided to go on to another go-go bar, but I was not up for that as, "once you've seen one, you've seen them all", although I will add a proviso to that, inasmuch as the original Suzie Wong bar does have some very good looking girls in there and I don't think there's anything to match it here? Anyway, as per the norm with me I decided to walk up Bangla towards Red Hot and in doing so passed the New York pub bar, which was absolutely packed, with people standing outside, but I've got to say the singing was very, very average, so perhaps people were enjoying the noise, because surely they couldn't have been enjoying the songs because some of them were being murdered! Whereas the band/group in Red Hot are several notches above any of the others I've heard here, so I was pleased to be able to get up and sing a couple of numbers with them. It was then that the very likeable captain from Jetstar, whom I'd met before, came over and as I was on my own, invited me to join his table of other Jetstar crew, all of whom were very amiable Aussie folk, and I have to say that I felt in good company because I have flown Jetstar dozens of times and have always had a great flight and great service, so I felt very comfortable in their presence. I eventually found my young and very good motorbike taxi driver who safely delivered me home, and I will always look out for this young guy because he is a good driver and very courteous. So, Patong continues its "resurrection" and Bangla certainly helps, as do the new/newish restaurants that are opening, and the only complaint from me is that the place is seemingly full of absolutely crazy/stupid/ignorant/first time motorists, many of whom haven't a clue about a road code or indeed road safety.

I do believe that the poster "dotcalm" is being deliberately antagonistic, not only in this post, but in several others, because no one in their right mind can really believe the things he writes, so he is just a "windup" merchant. And if he isn't, then he surely he has a twisted view of the world and in particular trump and his non-achievements.

There is a man who goes out drinking all the time and comes home very late every night. So one night his wife decides to teach him a lesson. She dresses up like Satan, and decides to hide in the dark, and scare him when he gets home. The man comes home, and his wife jumps out and screams in his face. He just looks at her and says, ”You don’t scare me I am married to your sister".

Hmmm..........maybe not the case, but then again one can't use a few examples as being endemic amongst Thai farmers, but I did have a friend who owned a pineapple "plantation" near Chiang Rai and I did visit him at one time, and he wanted to know if I was keen on going out with him in his truck, which was loaded up with small tanks of "whatever" in order to spray the pineapple plants. I was reasonably keen to go out and see what was going on until he explained that he was spraying the plants with hormones which would boost their growth, and I wasn't sure that I wanted to be in the midst of a hormone spray, so I refused his offer to accompany him!!

Just a few years ago there were some tests done on vegetables available in supermarkets and other markets, and even those labelled "organic" were found to have unacceptable levels of pesticides on them – – in fact it was suggested that because the pesticide levels on the "organic" vegetables were high, that farmers were using the term "organic" as an excuse to be able to use more pesticides, because more people would buy them thinking they were organic and because they were more expensive, the farmers made more money!!! I actually posted about that and have never fallen for the "organic" ruse since.

I haven't been able to find it..........any suggestions please!

There is a great documentary on BBC iPlayer called "How the Holocaust Began" and as I've always been interested in that subject I decided to watch it, and was so pleased that I did. One of the reasons was that when I was in my teens and working in a factory in the UK, we had a German guy who was responsible for running the boilers, and I saw some footage of the concentration camps on TV and asked him how on earth this happened/how could they do this? His response was that the German people never knew these things were happening and therefore were powerless to stop it/them, however there were some critics at the time who laid waste to this argument, suggesting that with such a huge scale of events going on, someone must have noticed. This documentary puts paid the original argument and it is both disturbing and disgusting, and is well worth a watch IMO.

As you said earlier, a huge amount of deforestation happened centuries ago and nowadays New Zealand grows trees for export, so there will be an ebb and flow of statistics in that area. Getting back to the belch/fart tax, whilst we are at it, why don't we kill the cattle in other countries, along with the goats, sheep, giraffes, deer, gazelle, antelopes and wildebeest because they produce methane and nitrous oxide which are labelled "greenhouse gases". Then of course there are elephants, with each one producing enough methane to power a car for 32 km! In the US, dogs and cats produce about 64 million tonnes of methane and nitrous oxide per year, so we could also include those.........and the list goes on, so why don't we just focus on the big and important issues which often begin with an M; man, machines, manufacturing, mining, moving and stationary vehicles, and I'm sure people could think of many more, with fossil fuels probably heading up that list. As you say, the tax proposed by the Labour government was a nonsense and it was just Ardern and her government trying to "curry favour" with the lefties and leaders of other countries. Just imagine the outcry if it was suggested that the government taxed cats and dogs. Hmmm.

Well we will have to agree to disagree on this, and I'm not a climate change denier, just trying to get some perspective on it. I was really talking about the burp/fart tax, rather than the coalmining, and the argument about "per capita" does pale into insignificance when one considers that a small country in the bottom of the world really doesn't have a lot of impact upon climate change per se, and NZ doesn't have a lot of deforestation because there are huge tracts of land which are suitable for ruminants, so cutting down forests is not a major for NZ. Anyway, my main point is that we/the world/other countries could do something about the major contributors to climate change, whereas a burp/fart tax on New Zealand will have just about no impact whatsoever.

Yes I appreciate that, however I still go back to the fact that taxing farmers like that when there are only 4 million cows in New Zealand is not going to make one iota of difference. And I thought about this just yesterday when I was driving into Phuket town and following several vans and trucks belching out black smoke, and it sort of put things into perspective for me. Then look at the burning which takes place here and sometimes makes even breathing difficult, then glance across to the pollution in India and Indonesia, and little old New Zealand didn't really figure for me......(I am a Kiwi though!).

There were many years when all sorts of fertilisers were put on the soil to make the grass grow and feed the cattle/dairy industry, however a few years ago the farmers started to clean up their act and many have made big strides to do this, however it's not that simple, but it is being done. And if you really think about the greenhouse gas/burp tax you will realise that it's just for show because the Labour Party wanted to jump on that bandwagon – – if you sincerely believe they were serious then consider the following: – There are 302 million cows in India, 94 million cows in the US and 4 million+ in NZ, so do you really think that taxing the NZ farmers for their cattle belches and farts is going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things – – not a chance.

"[the new PM] must be hard-headed enough to face up to Labour’s powerful Māori caucus and take all New Zealanders into his confidence by sharing what’s in store with what is, in fact, a constitutional revolution. Right now the Government has alienated too many people with its parliamentary stealth tactics over Three Waters in particular. This is not what New Zealanders expected when Jacinda Ardern promised at the 2017 election that she would run an open and transparent government." That hits the nail on the head for me. It is simply a matter of honesty and trust, and no amount of hugs or smiles could ever make up for the failings of Jacinda and her Government in this regard.

I would have to agree with you there LL, as I've noticed the same thing, whereby the days of the fat, potbellied old farangs sitting at bars trying to chat up bar girls, seems long gone, although there are a few old mongers milling around the place, but nowhere near the numbers of the past. Having said that, if one ventures just outside of, say, Bangla, some of the above-mentioned old mongers can still be found propping up other bars like those in OTOP and similar in Nanai, so perhaps it's the crowds driving them away, or perhaps the cost of drinks for the girls or indeed just the noise, which is louder and more intrusive than I've ever experienced here before. There's definitely a younger crowd, and also more families, and I do know for a fact that some of these are Russians, probably escaping the Putin push into Ukraine. On the subject of loud music, it is one of the things which annoys the proverbial out of me, because if I go out to eat/enjoy a meal, or have a drink, the last thing I want is music drowning out the conversation. It was bad enough in the past, but now it's almost unbearable and unfortunately many places seem to want to compete with one another for the loudest music! And I had to laugh a couple of weeks ago when I saw something on Facebook with regards to one of the bars having an evening of partying with free food available, and it advertised itself as, "a great bar, with good music and........... ". In actuality the music from that particular bar is absolute rubbish and it's not only me saying that, but friends who have stopped off there for a drink don't stay longer than one drink, because the noise is awful and deafening. Bangla itself was "shoulder to shoulder crowded" on Saturday when I visited it, and it seemed as if there were many people who walked up or down for a look, but didn't frequent the bars that often?? I and a few friends visited a bar in Soi Sea Dragon and whilst we were having a drink, there was an incident going on in a little go-go bar just up from where we were sitting, complete with BIB, and although I can't be 100% sure of these "facts" it would appear that the farang who was slumped in a chair outside of this little bar had tried out some of the local "weed", and it really did have a "knockout" effect on him, and despite several Thai guys trying to revive him, in the end they ended up carrying him to the end of the Soi, and I am not sure what happened to him from thereon in! Although I enjoyed my evening out, it had been about two weeks since I last ventured out, and for quite some time now I have thought that, "I am over Bangla" because it holds nothing for me any more and I'm not a bar Monger, but would rather sit chatting to friends whilst/after eating a nice meal, which Bangla does not fulfil for me these days. I nearly didn't go out on that Saturday because of these thoughts, but I did want to catch up with a couple of mates, so I did go out, and strangely enough, I enjoyed it, and even though I wasn't going to stop at Red Hot, in the end I did and was joined by another friend and quite also enjoyed that part of the evening, so maybe I won't give Bangla away completely!!

Of course I can just avoid downloading HEVC files which is probably the most sensible solution. And that's exactly what I do, because my Sony Smart TV will not cater for these HEVC files (H265) and nor will VLC media player. I've also got a "Format Factory" app on which I convert movies in the MKV format to MP4, before sending to an old friend in Australia, because his TV has a problem with the MKV format (and he's not computer literate) however this won't convert H265 either! All the time there is the option for the non-H265 movies, then this is the course I shall follow.

As I like both Tom Hanks and Denzil Washington I decided to download and watch the movie "Philadelphia" again, and it was a little different than I remember it, so I'm glad that I watched it again as it did show the human side of suffering with regards to HIV. This reminded me of a movie I saw many years ago called, "And The Band Played On" which included Matthew Modine and Alan Alda, which was very good, if a little slow, and rather than dealing with the subject like the previous movie, this was about the US government's inaction in trying to deal with this "plague" as it was called then, and also about French and US scientists trying to find out exactly what was causing this "plague", and their disagreements over who actually found the virus. It also bought into the picture one of the supposed initial spreaders of HIV in the US, and how he blatantly ignored his symptoms and lesions and still frequented bathhouses throughout the US and overseas, easy, as he was a steward on an airline. Well worth a watch if you can find it, as is the series on iPlayer called, "Aids: The Unheard Tapes" and some of the revelations (lip-synched by actors) from the victims themselves are an eye-opener, especially the one about "fisting" – – absolutely nauseating/horrendous.

A man decided to start his own small private zoo and wanted a couple more animals to complete it, so he wrote to the local zoo and asked, "I'm starting a small private zoo and I need a couple of mongooses". He looked at what he'd written and thought it didn't look right, so he rewrote it thus, "I'm starting a small private zoo, can you please send me a couple of mongeese". That still didn't look right so he decided to go down this route, "I'm starting a small private zoo, can you please send me a mongoose". PS. Can you please send me another one.

Agree, and to quote an old American saying, "she was about as popular as a rattlesnake in a lucky dip", this especially with the Labour Party shenanigans and the proposed "methane tax" and the "3 waters" bill, not to mention the increased crime rate, and poor policing, and Labour U-turns of late, and the list goes on......good riddance to her and Labour.

Good luck with that PPN and I won't spoil the fun for you, but there is a little "trick" which they use as they are about to take out the catheter, but I'll let you find out about that tomorrow!! As for me, well, I have gotten used to sticking a catheter up the old fella every night before I go to bed, and the catheter is quite a bit smaller than the one you have inserted in you, so no big deal for me, believe it or not!

I watched the movie, "The Pale Blue Eye" the other evening at the recommendation of a friend, and found it okay, nothing to write home about, but passed an evening! It stars Christian Bale and Toby Jones, with a few other actors, one who plays Edgar Allen Poe and it does plod at times, but towards the end it becomes very interesting – – enough said.

I wish..........................!!!!!!! I can and do eat chillies raw and in dishes, but to no avail! Anyway, off topic, however I wish Pumpuynarak all the best with his endeavours and hope the op continues to be successful.

Well there must have been some Chinese coming into the country earlier than this pic, mainly because I've encountered them in a couple of shops/supermarkets and I was not over enamoured to see them here, mainly because I don't like the lower class ignorant ones and also because none of them were wearing masks!

In most supermarkets, as Sheryl has said, and I find that I need a fairly large cupful/mug full to make it work, and just occasionally I add some liquid sorbitol, which is very potent so you have to be careful with it (I buy that from Lazada at about hundred baht per bottle) – – always had a slow digestive system, so taking Metamucil and the like doesn't do much at all unfortunately!