John Drake

Sometimes warnings and signs don't help. I remember after the 2011 flood, they raised Borom by almost 30 cm so it would act as a floodwall the next time there was one. But they forgot to adjust for it with new signs. Shortly thereafter a truck carrying a huge concrete pipe piece took out the sapanloi near my house. Late at night and nobody injured.

Then there will be a shut down.

This is what caused the problem. British Jack, bigger and taller, stood up and told the smaller Thai man to go home. Jack created a confrontation. But he got his wish. The Thai guy went home--and came back with his equalizer. It wasn't Jack's job to tell the guy to go home. And it wasn't smart. And now Jack cowers in his room, afraid to come outside. Might have been better to remain seated and then regretfully made a quiet exit.

Seems to me that chances are real high with Omicron that you will get infected within that 72 hour window and/or especially on a plane. Those two PCR tests upon arrival could really cause some misery for a lot of people who I suspect will test positive and then be on their way to hospitall quarantine.

Several have a 0.00 limit. And those are countries where people do not routinely drive down the wrong side of the street, pile entire families on one scooter, and pass inside the curb side of traffic.

Plenty of countries seem to think so. https://etsc.eu/issues/drink-driving/blood-alcohol-content-bac-drink-driving-limits-across-europe/

There is a crazy guy in my village. He comes from a wealthy family that tries to keep him safely away from others. But sometimes he breaks out. And when he does, he likes to sit in front of the gate to my house for hours and hours. He also drags plants from my neighbors' sidewalks and encloses himself with them. Then, he starts to chain smoke. I have never confronted this man. He's crazy and you never know what a crazy person will do. I call my housekeeper, and she calls the family, and they come by and pick him up and restore everyone's plants to the proper place. Doing anything else only risks escalating the situation into a confrontation that I would lose. Sometimes it takes a while to settle things and get my gate unblocked. That's better than a blood feud with the family or a trip to the police station 100 meters away.

Someone asking you for a beer twenty times is not normal, is it? At least I wouldn't think so. And I certainly wouldn't tell a Thai to go home in his own soi if I was unsure of his sobriety or mental state. I would just lift my haunches off the curb and go home myself. Look at the video, the other Thai sitting with Jack at the curb knew there was going to be trouble and he cleared off.

He did that, according to the OP, after "the Brit stood up and told the man to go home," which wasn't so smart, was it? Maybe the actual smart thing would have been for Jack to go home without challenging the guy after he was pestered for a free beer around the, oh, the sixth or seventh time??? One thing is for certain, life isn't going to be any easier around the soi for Jack now that he's blown this up into a national news story.

Well, I bet Jack wishes he hadn't been there, now.

What it pinpoints is that you got the basic facts wrong. I would think that anybody glancing at that video for five seconds could see the circumstances were conducive for trouble. The body language, the fact that the other person sitting on the curb with Jack had already skedaddled while Jack was still upending a bottle and then only belatedly tried to make a peace offering. Alcohol, a dark alley, and voila, now Jack has to cower inside his home because he fears Jason is out looking for him with his machete.

Did you look at the video? He's sitting on the curb.

Ah, the "it's common" excuse. The guy was sitting on a curb, drinking alcohol late at night, and, had things gone otherwise, would then have driven off on his motorcycle impaired. Yeah, it's common.

The common sense and intelligence part would have been for the <deleted> never to put himself in that situation in the first place.

There was Gordon at Khartoum. Now, there is Jack at Phraeksa.

A British lion.

Originally vaccinated with two shots in June. Got my third shot on 30 September. Going to need this every three or four months? Every other month? Or go through the entire thing again when they retool for every new variation? I do not want to spend the rest of my life organizing everything around the next round of Covid shots. The world will be in lockdown for ever.

I just wish we could go back to the good old days of only worrying about malaria, yellow fever, tsetse flies, and TB.

Depends on the farang. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/02/how-often-people-in-various-countries-shower/385470/

No doubt that Pfizer was hyped and people in Thailand wanted the brand name. Pfizer, the Gucci purse of vaccines.

Then, maybe Thailand can pick up Jeffrey Epstein's clientele. They must be looking for a new home. And they all wear expensive shirts, drive high end sports cars, and hobnob with European royalty. Just the sort of "upmarket" move to improve quality of persons slithering their way into Thailand.

I do hope the writers of that article consulted with the Chinese government, which isn't going to let anyone go anywhere for the foreseeable future.

Books. Electricity. Cool mornings and warm afternoons. A walk around the village. Maybe an occasional old movie. Can do that every day--plus some writing for journals. Sure beats the alternative of getting sick every Sunday worrying about everything piled up to do on Mondays when I worked.

Get rid of the Thai Pass: the quarantine, the insurance, and the expensive tests. It's been said on this forum probably thousands of times before: the single most enticing thing about coming to Thailand in the past was the immediacy of everything. Get on a plane and go, be visa exempt, and be able to extend with ease. As long as the country rejects that old model and resembles a military camp, the longer it will be before people return in any significant numbers.

Pretty soon, the only way to get here will be by tramp steamer.