Gerontion

LondonThai: That's true but the OP mentioned work surfaces/worktops. Raw adobe/cob isn't going to work in those situations. If you seal it with linseed oil or another drying oil, it might work in a domestic setting but I don't think it's going to work out very well in a hotel.

IraqRon: I've sent you a PM about this.

You can try soil stabilized with cement. I've not used it myself but it might be worth looking into.

I too am interested in using bamboo in a more permanent manner, and have found a couple of websites relating to its use in building, but really can't find info on preserving bamboo for permanent use.

There's another Thai based website which has a thread on this (I can't type the name of the website as Thaivisa ban any mention of it but do a google search) - someone's worked out a system involving introducing borax under high pressure. In Thailand, some people also soak bamboo - and other woods - in diesel to prevent termite attack.

Quick diversion into pendants' corner here:

For one cat, it is the "cat's yowling." For two cats going at it, it is the "cats' yowling."

Which is why I wrote: 'If there were a single cat or a single bone, one would write "It was the cat's yowling...it was the rotting bone's.."' The placement of the apostrophe is governed by plurality, not phonology.

If the name is "Peters," then the possessive is "Peters'," not "Peters's."

Not according to the Chicago Manual of Style (at http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/ch07/ch07_sec018.html)

The general rule covers most proper nouns, including names ending in s, x, or z, in both their singular and plural forms, as well as letters and numbers.

Kansas’s legislature

Chicago’s lakefront

Burns’s poems

Marx’s theories

Berlioz’s works

Strauss’s Vienna

Dickens’s novels

the Lincolns’ marriage

Williams’s reputation

the Williamses’ new house

Malraux’s masterpiece

Inez’s diary

the Martinezes’ daughter

Josquin des Prez’s motets

dinner at the Browns’ (that is, at the Browns’ home)

FDR’s legacy

1999’s heaviest snowstorm

The rule applies equally to company names that include a punctuation point.

The Oxford Style Manual confirms this (p.114 of the 2003 edition).

Use 's after non-classical or non-classicizing personal names ending in an s or z sound: Charles's Marx's Dickens's Leibnitz's Onassis's Zacharias's Collins's Tobias's

And yes, the "s" and "z" sounds do take on different rules according to some style manuals. And there certainly may be difference between different countries. I had to use The Chicago Manual of Style for both my doctoral dissertation and for a course I took on public affairs in the military, and this manual, perhaps considered the most authorative in the US, contends that there is no difference depending on the sound of the "s."

So what is the difference? I'm curious to know because I've not heard this; I've always used apostrophes according to the rules above.

According to that manual, a word which ends with an "s" merely gets an apostrophe to indicate its possessive, not an apostrophe and an extra "s."

Not according to their online edition (as above). Perhaps the printed one is different. It does, however, say (at http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/ch07/ch07_sec023.html)

7.23 An alternative practice

Those uncomfortable with the rules, exceptions, and options outlined above may prefer the system, formerly more common, of simply omitting the possessive s on all words ending in s—hence “Dylan Thomas’ poetry,” “Maria Callas’ singing,” and “that business’ main concern.” Though easy to apply, that usage disregards pronunciation and thus seems unnatural to many.

However, to add further confusion, the MLA Style Manual is one of the few which contend that an extra "s" has to be added to any word after the apostrophe to indicate the possessive. This manual is mostly used in the humanities, but it is not as highly accepted at The Chicago Manual of Style.

One of the few? I haven't seen any manuals recommending this. Which are they?

"It was the cats' yowling which kept me up." "It was the rotting bones' smell that permeated the room." "That is Mr. Peters' hat."

When an "s" has a "z" sound, pretty much all references agree that a simple apostrophe is correct. However, some refrences do contend that when an "s" sounds like an "s," then the apostrophe would be followed by another "s."

I'm not sure about your explanation. Without wishing to be too much of a pedant, it doesn't seem to be correct. "It was the cats' yowling which kept me up." "It was the rotting bones' smell that permeated the room." In these two cases, you have plural possessives, so they have an s'. If there were a single cat or a single bone, one would write "It was the cat's yowling...it was the rotting bone's.." In the third case, I'm guessing that the name is Mr Peters, in which case the rule is that the possessive is formed by adding 's (as in my earlier post). Mr Peters's. Although this is a rule which is often ignored, it is a rule nevertheless. I'm not sure where the distinction between /s/ and /z/ comes from but it's not relevant to the use of apostrophes.

Singular nouns ending in -s, such as Jesus, can have a possessive, such as "in Jesus' name" - not in Jesus's' name.

This is the exception, not the rule. The rule is that you add 's (so Mr Jones's car is blue). In some special cases, you add an apostrophe only. These special cases included some names (Jesus, Moses, and names from antiquity such as Achilles, Socrates, Aristophanes, etc.) and singular nouns formed from plurals (such as The Times).

Yes, it's obvious that an apostrophe is used to replace missing letters, but I also thought it was used to express possession as in 'The Kingdom of Thailand and it's inhabitants'.

Am I wrong?

In the case of its, yes but in general, no.

It should be '...its inhabitants' or '...the Kingdom of Thailand's inhabitants.'

Ozzy - thanks for your reply. Can I impose again and ask some more dumb questions? I'm not going to have access to sufficient water to top up the pond during the dry season to any appreciable effect. Does this make having a fish pond a non-starter? If I dig deeper to account for wet-/dry-season fluctuations in water level, will I encounter problems with having sludge in the bottom? Can anything be done about this?

As far as this forum is concerned, those posters who think that when there is more than one Thai, there are several Thai's.

Edit: Slightly tangential to the OP, but those who gratuitously slip in the odd bit of Thai really piss me off. You know what I mean: "I had song sahm beer chang last night with tee lak....blah...blah...idiot...blah" As if to show that they have done well by mastering 50 words of Thai in the 10 years that they've been here.

I'm thinking of putting in a fish pond on our land but unfortunately I know sod all about fish. Ideally, it'd provide 400-500(ish) fish a year to eat (not for commercial production). What sort of size pond am I looking at for that? And any recommendations for fish to raise? Thanks.

800 sq met (1/2 rai ) x1.2 -1.5 met deep would be ideal.

Initial stocking could be 500 mixed sex Tilapia (Pla Nin ) followed at 3 months by a few Snakehead catfish or Striped Giant Catfish and even a few Barramundi.

The Tilapia will breed and provide natural food for the Catties and Barra,

If you employ the green water method ,very little artificial food will be necessary as the Pla Nin are provided for by the Phyto-Plankton and and micro-organisms in the phosphate enriched water and their offspring provide food for the other varieties.

If top up water source is available, this method will supply fish for several years before you need to pump down and start afresh.

Thanks for the quick reply - very useful. It's given me something to investigate further.

I'm thinking of putting in a fish pond on our land but unfortunately I know sod all about fish. Ideally, it'd provide 400-500(ish) fish a year to eat (not for commercial production). What sort of size pond am I looking at for that? And any recommendations for fish to raise? Thanks.

When repainting a house I was renting some years ago in Thailand, I regularly received electric shocks off the wet walls. Took me a while to work it out - the first few times it happened I thought I had a trapped nerve; the thought the walls themselves might be live was so bizarre that it me ages to think of it.

A question or two for you Swelters (if you don't mind): Do you think reflecting foil and venting is sufficient for a roof in Thailand? What is the recommended number of air changes per hour? If you were building a house, is this (foil and venting) what you would do or is there something else?

You said she worked in pattaya? Probably her "side" job payed for that dell laptop

Whether or not you're joking, it's a stupid comment.

Nice OP. I like it.

Interesting stuff, Swelters. Please post more.

Amongst other things:

Hospital cleaner

Antiquarian book dealer

Drug dealer

Database designer

Nightclub promoter

Painter and decorator

Freelance writer/editor

Seller of antique tribal textiles

Designer

Assembler of Durex vending machines

Market stall holder

English teacher

General office serf/temp

Ripper-off of the DSS

There's been a profound inflation in academic awards in Britain - if that's where you're from - so it doesn't seem that improbable. The ex-polytechnics, in particular, hand out bullshit degrees at all levels to anyone who can bother to sit through the lectures/seminars. I was briefly involved in undergraduate awards at one of the better British universities (the department in which I worked was, I seem to remember, ranked 4th in the country) and the finals' board was a joke. If you hadn't been a complete arse, it was pretty difficult not to get a 2.1 and they moved heaven and earth to avoid failing a student.

Wow you're brilliant

Thank you.

I will still proudly volunteer to act on behalf of any legally recognized justice system to carry out that penalty.

Congratulations. You've now established that your masculine credentials are impeccable. Please now feel free to remove the stick-on hairy chest and extract the banana from your pants.

^ And that should - but won't - silence as least one train of idiocy being displayed here.

And right on cue....

No where on the planet (war times excepted) will you ever find people so cruel as a Thai man in in pursuit of physical satisfaction.

What I find odd on this forum is that whenever anything bad happens in Thailand someone will say that it also happens elsewhere. Is that what the forum is for to compare Thailand to other countries and therefore in some way justify it?

We live here in Thailand for many reasons (some good some bad) but overall we make a choice, that does not mean we have to accept that everything going on here is Ok.

A gang rape anywhere is reprehensible but saying it happened elsewhere does not make it ok.

That's true but often with these stories, on Thaivisa, there's an unstated air that anything that happens (and especially anything bad that happens) in Thailand happens because it's Thailand. In some sense, what happens in the West is just what happens, it's just the way things are but what happens in Thailand is all too often understood by many to be a flaw specifically in the "Thai character" (at least in as much as it's imagined by some of the people who post here). I think some people have the urge to say that women are gang-raped in every country not because they're trying to justify it but because they want to point out that this isn't a stick with which to beat Thailand; it's a stick with which to beat all our countries.

Unsurprisingly, he was acquitted. He claimed that his prescription for Seroxat, coupled with stress, had caused him to get pissed and abuse, in pretty ripe language, his fellow passengers, staff, the Buddha, and the King. Getting away with that stuff is one of the fringe benefits of being a colonel, I guess.

My only contact with the British Embassy has been when they charged me something like 1200 Baht for a letter to give to immigration, despite the fact that all they did was add my name and passport number to a standard letter (which took a couple of seconds to do). They also released my email address to third parties. Though, to be fair, if I had to work with the sun-burnt, tattooed chavs (and their slapper girlfriends) who fill the place, I'd probably not offer such a great service either.

Chavs and slappers thats no way to speak about her majestys diplomatic staff

I don't know. Chav seems a pretty good description. Anyone remember this?

"A senior British diplomat in Thailand broke through three pairs of plastic handcuffs, threatened to kill fellow airline passengers and abused cabin staff after drinking heavily on a flight to London in the aftermath of the tsunami, a court heard yesterday...At one point he screamed at cabin staff and passengers who tried to restrain him: "You are a fuc_king wanke_r, you're fuc_king dead. Do you know who I am? I'm the head of the British government in Thailand and you're treating me like this.""

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/jan/18/politics.ukcrime

My wife and I came back to Thailand (from England) last year and, like you, shipped a 20ft container. My wife was a returning post-grad student so in theory we could bring back household contents free of charge but we had a fair amount of stuff so took the precaution of paying an agent to clear everything for us (I think it cost 25,000 baht) and to arrange delivery (which obviously enough cost extra). The agent made it clear to us that paying him meant that there was no possibility of incurring any additional duties so I assume a fair chunk of the fee went to customs officials. When the container turned up it had not been opened since it had been sealed in England so I could have been importing rocket launchers for all customs knew.

My only contact with the British Embassy has been when they charged me something like 1200 Baht for a letter to give to immigration, despite the fact that all they did was add my name and passport number to a standard letter (which took a couple of seconds to do). They also released my email address to third parties. Though, to be fair, if I had to work with the sun-burnt, tattooed chavs (and their slapper girlfriends) who fill the place, I'd probably not offer such a great service either.