Robski

Should have come to me..

Sure UG whatever.

The topic is Russia's reaction to America's plans to place a missile system in Poland.

Why else would you watch it?

It would be beneficial for Europe to stear a course toward partnership with Russia and perhaps this will cause yet another schism between 'old' Europe and the US.

If Europe wants to whore itself, why not just bend over for China?

You ain't gonna catch much with bait like that UG, the worst Europe has to fear from the Chinese is the re-heated rice you get with your take-away.

Yep, what Cuban said. Good post.

I'm sure if they didn't want to wear it then they would soon protest.

Beach volleyball is played and practiced outside in the sun, I don't know any women that would want tan lines from shorts halfway down their legs.

Yep those Ruskies sure are coming back with avengance. Nationalist and streamlined, no political infighting, no dependant states to administer.

Massive natural resources as well as human resources and Nukes of course.

It would be beneficial for Europe to stear a course toward partnership with Russia and perhaps this will cause yet another schism between 'old' Europe and the US.

The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phased plan for what will be known as Euro English (Euro for short).

In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c". Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy. Also, the hard "c" will be replaced with "k." Not only will this klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced by "f".

This will make words like "fotograf" 20 per sent shorter.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"s in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.

By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing"th" by "z" and "W" by "V". During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou", and similar changes vud of kors; be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil b no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer. Ze drem vil finali kum tru.

2 for 1 happy hours in Soi 6.

Well we'd never get on a plane and leave our safe european homes if that was the case, but the road accident problems are a matter for an entirely different thread.

I have read previously that the Dengue mosquito is more active in the daytime, is this correct?

Perhaps replacing 'being British' by 'being a Sun reader' would make it that much truer.

Is this a seasonal problem or are the Dengue carrying mosquitos prevalent all year round?

Is this story from the Sun perhaps? I can see how his comments taken out of context could be turned and made to look like a threat.

Ah yes I just googled it, it's the Sun. Could tell straight away from the headline.

RUSSIA threatened to NUKE Poland yesterday as the world faced the prospect of a terrifying new Cold War.

A bit more context from The Telegraph.

The stand off between the two cold War powers was underlined by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who dismissed US claims that the silo is a deterrent against 'rogue states' like Iran as "a fairy tale".

He told reporters at the Black Sea resort of Sochi: "The deployment of new missile defence facilities in Europe is aimed against the Russian Federation."

Well it's difficult to lay the blame on the US theses days without getting bashed, but I think he's got a point.

I really don't see Thailand changing radically. Oh, there might be little subtle changes such as promoting more competent individuals to higher positions in government. But there is not a groundswell of support for radical change in Thailand. It would take a series of cathartic events to cause that. And until the vast majority of people in this country demand change, they will never have it because the people who are in power will always resist it.

You could take this statement and replace the word Thailand with virtually any other country and the statement would still ring true.

ow ow..crazy what goes through some peoples minds sometimes!

Reminds me of a story a friend (yes a friend, NOT me! ) told me years ago about her "first time". She was very nervous and when her boyfriend penetrated her, her muscles contracted around and he couldnt pull out. No matter what they tried she couldnt relax enough for him to pull out. Both of them began to get into a state of panic and eventually called up 999 to ask for advice. An ambulance was sent round to give her a muscle relaxant injection in order for him to withdraw.

Talk about a memorable first time eh! :D

Have you still got her phone number..?

Here's one more, I had to go and dig this post out of the South East Asia forum.

Vietnam: The Definitive Oral History, Told from All Sides, by Christian G Appy

I'd like to recommend this book to the guys on this forum that were involved in the conflict in Vietnam

and also to all of you that are interested not only in the conflict, but in the history and culture of Vietnam.

It's an oral history and comprises insightful introductions with short recollections of people involved in all aspects of the conflict on both sides,

covering the military and political aspects of the war, but also it's social, cultural and psychological effects.

It's a well reserched and presented book that is fascinating, revealing and moving.

ISBN: 978 0 09 101012 9

£14.99 paperback.

Reviews:

Vietnam: The Definitive Oral History, Told from All Sides, by Christian G Appy (Ebury, £14.99)

Appy means that subtitle about "told from all sides". His North and South Vietnamese contributions I expected, though the enduring duration of their fight and captivity always awes (a commando said goodbye to his 10-year-old son before a sortie that ended in imprisonment: when he next saw him, his son had an 11-year-old son of his own). More surprising are the Pentagon brass who started out gung-ho and stayed that way - nothing neo about his conservatism; and the US army nurse who told her son during the first Gulf war that if there was a draft he would be a conscientious objector since "if anybody's going it'll be your old mom". This covers the whole catastrophe, from the US's creep into the mission circa 1962 to "Taps" played on a tape recorder by such geezers as remember too much - and the Saigon manufacture of fake Zippo lighters, engraved with slogans and handcraftily vintaged, to sell to tourists. Overall, notwithstanding Oliver North's recollections of the sound and fury of defending Firebase Burt, I was left feeling distant and calm, possibly the only response to such waste, absurdity and political-military-industrial lies. Vera Rule http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2257063,00.html

VIETNAM: The Definitive Oral History Told from All Sides

by Christian G Appy

Ebury £19.99 pp574

Vietnam is a long time ago, and most young people today know the war — one of the great traumas of American history — only through Hollywood or as thousands of names on the black granite wall of the Vietnam war memorial in Washington. But for those who served and suffered, Americans and Vietnamese alike, communist and non-communist, it will always be a defining moment of their lives.

Christian Appy, an American history professor, has written an oral history of the conflict. It is an extraordinarily compelling and powerful book, disorientating to read when American and British forces are embroiled in another bloody and troubled conflict in a faraway land. I read it just a few days after President Bush admitted the possibility of an Iraq comparison with Vietnam, and it gave me distinct moments of déjà-vu.

Frank Maguire, for example, was an American army major who liked Vietnam, served three tours there and believed in the cause. He recalls how, when he first went home, he made speeches telling people that Americans were not just killing people but building and trying to improve their lives. In the end, though, the Americans failed miserably to understand the Vietnamese.

“I think it’s a national trait that we always feel we know what’s better for everybody,” says Maguire. “It was an attitude of misguided benevolence — that we know what’s good for them and they don’t really understand what’s happening. We really wanted to win their hearts and minds, except we could never find one or the other.”

Such benevolence, 32 years on, is one of America’s problems in Iraq. A senior state-department official controversially and publicly confirmed as much last weekend. There are obvious differences; no insurgent force in Iraq can be compared to the Vietcong; Saddam Hussein is not Ho Chi Minh; nobody can confuse Baghdad with Saigon. The current cost in lives is far lower than Vietnam, too. Although this October has been one of the bloodiest months since the 2003 invasion, with the deaths of at least 87 American servicemen and hundreds of Iraqis, these rising casualties are less than one day’s combat at the height of the Vietnam war. Then, 400 Americans were dying each week.

Yet just as the Vietnam era of the 1960s started with huge American self-confidence that it could put the world right by intervening against communism, the Bush presidency began, too, with grandiose, naive ideas of saving the Middle East through Saddam’s overthrow. Bush and the neocons saw the invasion as the critical fulcrum for creating democracy in a region of oppressive, corrupt regimes that is of vital importance to America. Three years on, America is preoccupied with many issues familiar to those who lived through Vietnam: an unwinnable war started on false pretences and with little knowledge of the history of the country it was invading, mounting casualties and atrocities, no clear exit strategy, all leading to disillusionment with the White House leadership.

Senator Edward Kennedy has called Iraq Bush’s Vietnam, and fewer and fewer Americans are disagreeing.

But Appy’s book is not a history of the Vietnam war or the policies that led to it, though there is a bit of that. It is a riveting portrait of what happened to some 135 Americans and Vietnamese, northerners and southerners, communists and non-communists. Their voices provide vivid, illuminating and often harrowing insights from a host of different angles.

The breadth of Appy’s interviews is the strength of this book. He talks to some of the key military players, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese military genius, and General William Westmoreland, the US commander, among them. The CIA operative Frank Snepp tells how he is so wrapped up trying to save his Vietnamese agents as Saigon falls that he neglects to evacuate a former girlfriend despite her threat to commit suicide. Later, he learns to his shame that she killed herself and their child rather than fall into the hands of the communists.

There are interviews with Senator John McCain, America’s most famous prisoner of war, and the survivors of My Lai, and the brave American helicopter pilots who intervened to try to stop the massacre. There is Mrs Thieu describing how, trapped beneath a pile of bodies, she was drowning in their blood. There is Larry Colburn, an American helicopter pilot who talks of his crew wading waist deep through the dead to rescue one child who was moving. The two are reunited many years later.

These stories really bite. Some are amusing. Bobbie Keith, the weather girl for Armed Forces Television in Saigon and the GIs’ pin-up, sometimes makes up the weather data just as American troops made up body-counts to convince their generals that they were winning the war. The rock star James Brown insisted on sporting a .45 and a US army uniform when he gave a show, to look like a GI. He said even the Vietcong had a ceasefire during his shows. They liked the funk, he tells Appy. “Then they went back and reloaded, boy. They were very smart.”

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol...ticle612173.ece

Two books by Jeff Noon, Vurt and Pollen.

Vurt (1993)

Vurt tells the story of Scribble and his "gang" the Stash Riders as they search for his missing sister Desdemona. Vurt refers to a drug/shared alternate reality that is accessed by sucking on color-coded feathers. Through some (never explained) mechanism, the dreams, mythology, and imaginings of humanity achieved objective reality in the Vurt and became "real". The book won the 1994 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Evidently there is a Vurt film in the works, but as of the date of this writing, Jeff Noon has stated on his public website that "Of the Vurt film, all has gone silent at the moment. Don’t hold your breath."

Pollen (1995)

Pollen;

Pollen is the sequel to Vurt and concerns the ongoing struggle between the real world and the vurtual world. When concerning the vurtual world, some references to Greek mythology are noticeable, including Persephone and Demeter, the river Styx and Charon, and Hades (portrayed by the character John Barleycorn).

Wikipedia.

redrus

Ah yes, I'm going to look out for these too. I'm glad I bumped this thread now, I'm a little bewildered by the Sci-Fi section and the myriad of unpronouncable fantasy worlds, but these look quite accessable. I've just read Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (1972) and it was brilliant.

It's set in our solar system so at least I could remember the name of the planets! The book has an excellent and rather subtle twist at the end, a quick read but very enjoyable.

Yes Sidhartha by Hermann Hesse is a fantastic book in the way the author animates the feelings of innocence lost,

a period we have all passed through but would perhaps be unable to encapsulate in such proximate detail.

I haven't read it in such a long time, I think that's one I shall buy soon.

John Steinbeck - The Grapes Of Wrath, an absolute masterpiece which must be the saddest work of fiction I've ever read,

I don't think I could bring myself to read it again, but still I would reccomend it to anyone that hasn't read it.

Boobs as in knockers, norks, jubblies, chesticles, funbags, rack, charleys, dumplings, tits!

There is it would seem finite resources for oil and gas, but at the moment there is still plenty to keep us going and enough left over to help economies develop.

The next 20-30 years should and indeed must see a transition to alternative and more efficient energy sources.

However I believe the recent hike in fuel prices is manufactured by the finacial markets to continue their income stream,

and the profits to stock owners after the drying up of credit and equities markets.

The hype over dwindling resources also serves the interests of governments, there's no doubt that resources must be secured for the future, but the fear and anxiety caused to the population as well as the increased financial constraints at a time of recession keeps many people less mobile and less willing to put their head above the parapet. I don't think this is particular to any ideology left or right, but the last twenty years have seen governments try to restrict liberties further and further and I think the oil 'crisis' is just another weapon in their arsenal.

Unfortunately the combination of market forces and government policy mean that people will suffer,

wether that is finacial hardship, further disenfranchisement within society, or death.

This winter in the UK it is predicted that many more old people will die because of the disparity between their incomes and their fuel costs, but on a global scale that is just the tip of the iceberg, in the very near future the disparity will cause hardship for many millions, perhaps death for many and in the long term when fuel relly does start to dry up and the replacement technologies are out of reach of a large proportion of the the worlds population there will be death and suffering and a disparity between the have's and have not's on a scale never seen before.

It could be different if markets were controled and government policies changes, but profiteering and greed have set the course for the future.

Hey my book thread got closed! Hold on that's a first .... what happened there?

Ok who recommended Hustler and Asian Babes? They're not books, they're reference manuals.

Can it be re-opened please?

Fantastic! Thanks a lot guys.

Looks rather empty at the moment, but I'm sure over time it will grow.

Hopefully this will be a useful addition to Bedlam.

If there are any threads out there in the back pages you think would be worthwhile putting into the sub-forum,

I guess the best thing to do would be to bump them up to the top of the main forum and then ask for them to be tranfered into here.

Oh, and do please play nicely.

Pink Floyd doesn't have to be deep and meaningful!

The clip from the film has got boobs in it so better not post that, you know where to find it though.

All together now.. Oooooooooh I need a dirty woman.

Thankyou, I think a sub-forum within Bedlam would be adequate.

As an example; I like to read and I also like to know what other people are reading.

I started a thread where people could recommend books to each other and not everybody is going to find that interesting, but some did.

I can read a book in a matter of days if I have time, or it could take me months so I'm not going to contribute to the thread often enough to keep it afloat, but there's always new books and there's always new ideas to consider so it's an ongoing thing.

If that thread was held in a sub-forum we could contribute without having to trawl through pages to find it and new members could perhaps find something of interest there too, you never know some of the ideas might even light a spark in Bedlam!

There are literary forums out there just as there are Religious and world news forums, but I'm not interested in the finer points of literary construction I just want to know what other people are reading and offer a few reccomendations to others.

So what else would belong in there? Some suggestions perhaps? But I guess anything that warrants debate that doesn't have a niche elswhere in TV and of course the more sensitive discussions that would get blown out of proportion in the regular forums.

I had a thought about a few moderation issues, but I guess you all are too and really that's not my department.

However I think we should be able to discuss ideas and reach a concensus.

A higher post count as an entry requirement? I think not, as the sub-forum should be comprised of threads from Bedlam with a more serious nature.

Maybe a system like news clippings where you can't automatically post a thread unless you are over a certain post count or have access although you can comment on threads, but you can request that a thread posted in Bedlam can be moved to the sub-forum.

It would take time for the sub-forum to mature, just has Bedlam itself has become more self moderating over a long period of time.

I guess there will be members that feel the freedom to discuss other peoples opinions in Bedlam might go to their head, but the moderation of ThaiVisa in general serves it's purpose well and I'm sure that if the same level of observation where applied to subjects in a sub-forum like news and religion, things should be kept on an even keel. Hopefully with the added respect for fellow members that Bedlam has seemed to manage it should be a more interesting for everyone. As for persistant trolls or flamers, well I'm sure you can guys can think up some suitable ways to make them see the error of their ways.

I'm not advocating a free for all of discussion on serious topics, although you never know stranger things have happenend, but rather a place where similar threads can be collected together to make them easier to access and contribute to.

Ok I think I've put my views across quite clearly so I leave it at that, let the thread run for a while and hopefully get some more input, it would be nice to get the thoughts of long term members that don't use Bedlam but contribute to the other forums.

I think the words were "lunacy and triviality", but hey if the cap fits.

My resoning behind a sub-forum is just a place to keep afloat some of the sometimes serious discussions that occur in Bedlam,

not a place to flex our intellectual muscle, just somewhere where people know they can go and contribute and serious and sensitive issues can be posted.

We have discussed Religion in a thread I think that was started by Suegha and I did learn quite a lot from it even if I didn't really contribute,

what I did learn was a little more respect and tolerance.

It would be nice to be able to find that thread easily to look back at some of the issues raised,

also new members coming in to Bedlam might find it interesting and want to add something to it, keeping the debate alive.

At the end of the day it's not going to affect me either way, I don't come here that often now, it's just an idea and quite a good one I think that will benefit everyone.

When I first came into Bedlam my first impressions where a big dissapointment and I think that is the impreesion a lot of members get after reaching the required status to get in.

Don't get me wrong it's been fun and sometimes interesting, but like a kiddies ride at the fairground it's not really going anywhere

and after you've been around for the thousandth time it does get rather boring.

There are a few posters that don't want to change and no doubt will get their way, after all it's 'their' comfort zone,

they are the same ones that were saying the same things when I first came to Bedlam and no doubt put many more off returning.

I thought it was selfish then and I think the attitude is selfish now, there are very few places on this world wide web that have the level of privacy and community

that this ThaiVisa forum offers, I just think a little corner of that space could be put to better use to benefit more people.