nisakiman

You're not being racist. Have you ever travelled in Pakistan? Same shit, somewhat different scenario. It's a cultural thing.

I'd probably have to say a sarkworth

BUMP

No-one else seems to be taking this seriously

SC

Cummon, StreetCowboy, does ANYONE take ANYTHING serious on these forums?

Where can I get a good hamburger or plate of Pad Thai?

There's a Sarkworths hamburger joint near Nana......

Isn't there?

Surely there must be....

Uh-huh..........

Anyone ever thought about starting a microbrewery in BKK?

Yeah, Tawang Daeng thought of it at about 15 years ago, and went ahead and did it.

Also the Londoner 13 years ago.

The Bitter in the Londoner seems to vary quite a bit. Sometimes its pretty good, other times its not so good. Its rather like a reasonable home-brew.

The Londoners two beers are very decent; expecially during happy hours. With the equipment they have you would think they would be a bit more creative and make seasonal brews, IPA's, stouts etc. Perhaps they have trained thai staff to brew their regulars and don't want to confuse them

Whatever happened to the German microbrewery in Don Muang? Did they relocate, or go out of business when Swampy opened?

They did a couple of very acceptable (albeit overpriced) beers there I seem to remember.

Got to go with sillyman there. I really don't like Chang, but Chang draught is totally different.

My favourite Thai beer without a doubt. Slips down very easily....

doesnt matter.

I have constant diahrea in thailand. Sometimes its hardcore, sometimes its very close to being normal stools but it's always wet and comes out in 5 secs.

Thanks to the ICE cubes and brushing my teeth with tap water, now i dont have to waste 25mins on the toilet, with a dry ass from the toilet paper and all the pushing

Fascinating. Please, tell us more.

I thought it was to register your approval (or not) of the post. That is, whether (or not) it made a positive contribution to the discussion / debate. Nothing to do with the personality of the poster. I've hit the green on posts that I've disagreed with, but I thought were well thought out and sensibly structured. I really hadn't seen it as a personal thing.

As an employer I refuse smokers and that will rattle the dickheads in the prejudice labour camps.

Simple deduction. Smoker needs a puff every hour at least - let's limit this to one. Building in Asoke 22nd floor. Takes the lift to smoke outside. Allow 3-5+ minutes to get down to the ground - a smoke and chat to his other puffing mate allow 5 and then 3-5 to get back up. 15 minutes per hour. I lose 2 hours a day in a normal working day. 5 day week = 10 hours. So 40 hours becomes 30 and a 25% drop in productivity apart from holding up other departments due to slow through put delays.

So last time I asked a man if he smoked and he said yes, I asked him if he would take a 25% drop in salary as he would work 25% less time? He walked out as they have all done since. Now I get my PA to do the interviews as I am still supposed to put up with applications but I love the look on their faces. None of them has a brain so far to figure out the 'why?'

But also as already mentioned, they smell, they offend clients and their clothes always reek (apart from their breath - just add coffee to the breath and its enough to make anyone puke). I have also noted most have extremely dirty fingernails and personal hygiene leaves a lot to be desired.

Sorry smokers - its a 'dying' habit and you are all losers.

If you asked me anything about my private life in relation to a job I was applying for (not that I've applied for a job in 30 years or so - I'm an employer, not an employee) I'd tell you to mind your own dam_n business. Lordy, some people are so self-righteous!

You really believe you command the moral high ground, don't you? I think "holier-than-thou" must be your watchword.

God preserve us from those who would impose their warped morality on the rest of the world...

Try VoipDiscount. (Google it). It's better than skype (but no video link, only audio) and very cheap.

My wife can call friends and family in LOS from here in Greece completely free, both landline and mobile. Only condition is that I must have some credit in my account. I generally put €10 on it about every 3 months or so, and that covers the calls I make to my daughters' mobiles in UK and gives the wife another 120 days free calls to Thailand.

Wow what a bunch of wanke_rs we have unearthed in this thread.

My parents smoke. I don't smoke. I don't care if the guy beside me smokes. My clothes will smell of all kinds of pollution (including my own sweat) so a bit of a smokey smell mixed in doesn't worry me. I can also walk past people in the street LEGALLY smoking without a fear that a couple of breaths of their smoke is going to give me cancer. I'm probably more likely to get cancer from all the preservatives in the food and the pollution from all sorts of things these days than inhaling a little bit of smoke.

A friend was having a smoke out on the footpath a few weeks ago. A woman wasn't watching where she was going and bumped his smoke and slightly burnt her arm. The woman went off on a rant and my friend just stood there and took it. In the end I just told her that we were standing there talking, if she can't watch what where she is walking then it's her fault, suck it up and <deleted> off.

If a person is smoking in a place that isn't banned that's fine, nothing to do with anyone else because it is LEGAL, if you don't like it then tough.

As for the poster saying the bars in Australia didn't have a problem being smoke free. I suggest you crawl out from under your rock. The smoking ban is the biggest reason many bar owners have gone bust. When it was first being determined most bar owners wanted the choice whether to place a smoking ban or not. Surely if it would be such a money spinner to be smoke free then all bars would have jumped at the chance, but that wasn't the case. All bars were made to be smoke free.

How about they be given a choice, if a bar has smokers, then non smokers have an option not to go there. If a bar doesn't allow smoking then smokers have the option of not going there.

I hate it when the do gooders impose their own will on what people should and shouldn't do. Harden up and move on to something important in your life than worrying about what others are doing to theirs.

Ah! Finally a sensible, measured post.

It never ceases to amaze me how vitriolic the zealots can be when they get on their high horses.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, really. Zealots, like bigots , always seem to resort to hysterical histrionics when promoting their pet cause. And of course insult; the favoured resort of the ignorant and uninformed.

Reason doesn't enter into it. There is no "live and let live" approach.

It's "I don't like it, so let's ban it so nobody can do it".

And it's true what Wallaby says about the bars. If having a non-smoking bar was such a good idea, why didn't all the bars voluntarily ban smoking? There was a pub chain in the UK that preempted the legislation by banning smoking in all their pubs. They lost so much business that they had to do a U-turn and remove the ban.

Chatuchak market should never allow smoking in the warren of stalls there, it's a conflagration waiting to happen. But out of the main market in the roadside bars and cafes, there is no rational reason at all to ban smoking. As already pointed out, it's just a money spinning scam.

Parp....

The march of the zealots continues.....

I'm sure there are a few posters here who remember "Darkie" toothpaste, with the black guy in the top hat on the label.

Then some years ago, without explanation, it became "Darlie", and the man in the top hat suddenly took on a deathly pallor!

BUT...........

Love those bikes Loz! They look immaculate. Great pics - be good to see some more.

One aspect of the global warming hullabaloo that I look forward to is someday reminiscing about the fear mongering and being able to tell my kids I never fell for it.  Of course no one will care because there will be another global crisis ongoing.

Yes, when all this AGW stuff has been exposed as a sham, we'll be being harangued (and no doubt taxed) because of the dire consequences of the impending ice age!

This is a post I lay no claim to authoring - I lifted it in its entirety from the comments section somewhere else. RickBradford is probably aware of it, as he sometimes contributes on the same site.

It is a long post, but those who have an interest in this subject, it makes for compelling reading.

scott_east_anglia Today 03:37 AM Recommended by

42 people The climatology field has not yet developed to the point where it can make reliable predictions about future climate change with enough warning to allow time for useful proactive adaptations. It is therefore ludicrous to give credence to alarmist predictions over the next century.

Around the 17th century we had a cold spell (the Little Ice Age - LIA) when the Thames and other bodies of water froze in cold Winters, allowing ice fairs to be held on them. Such ice fairs have not been possible since the early 19th century. Therefore it is indisputable that there has been a period of warming over the last couple of centuries as we recovered from that cold spell. It is alarmist shroud waving over the cause of the warming that has caused such a panic.

There appears to be a longish cycle of the solar magnetic field that has just peaked. It oscillated through the warmer bronze age, a cooler iron age, the warmer Roman empire, when the Romans brought vineyards to England, the Dark Ages, the Mediaeval Warm Period when there were vineyards in England during Chaucer's time, the Little Ice Age as mentioned above, and now our little warm spurt which according to satellite data has, temporarily at least, ceased.

The IPCC computer models did not predict the cessation of the warming trend, which illustrates that something is driving the climate that the models do not know about. In addition, we are once more starting to hear predictions of cooling and maybe a repeat of the Little Ice Age. Deja vous anyone?

Computer models do not produce evidence - they only produce whatever their programmers want them to produce, in what is therefore a circular argument. So far the models have only proved that the computers are working, and that the output outside of their training data sets has been wrong every time, so far.

Furthermore, there is no evidence, despite every effort to finesse it, of an increased greenhouse effect in the atmosphere (hot spots in the troposphere) that was predicted by the computer models. However, we don't hear much about that from the warming industry.

Meanwhile the case for the AGW hypothesis remains an argumentum ad ignorantium fallacy where it is claimed it must be true because they (the warming industry) allegedly can't think of anything else. This is equivalent to blaming witches for crop failures in the middle ages.

Unfounded fear of man-made global warming, rather than the climate change itself, is the problem.

It had been common knowledge for a couple of years before Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth' came out that over geological time periods the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere lagged behind temperature changes, typically by 800 years, so was driven by temperature rather than causing it. His graph was therefore a falsehood. CO2 has never driven climate change, or the Earth would not have cooled as it has after every past warming episode - runaway warming would have occurred instead, a long time ago.

Temperature and other data do not say anything about their causes. In addition correlation is not the same as causation, so neither settle anything either way

CO2 is already absorbing almost all of the energy that there is to be had in the relevant bands. Moreover, it does so fairly close to the Earth's surface. The effect is logarithmic so increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere now only has a slight effect. In addition, CO2 and the other trace gases are pretty unimportant as greenhouse gases go. The warming industry has been concentrating on the wrong atmospheric processes. Water vapour and the atmospheric processes associated with it, especially negative feedback from the cooling effect of low level clouds, seem to be a more fruitful line of research.

Svensmark, a Danish physicist, has found empirical evidence in support of his hypothesis that a weaker solar magnetic field allows more high energy cosmic particles to reach the lower atmosphere, where they enhance the conditions for low level cloud formation, leading to cooling, and vice versa. This has been covered in the book 'The Chilling Stars' by Svensmark and Calder.

Any calculation of greenhouse warming based on CO2 alone does not come up with an alarming figure. Hence the assumption of positive forcing from water vapour, which is the only thing producing a 'doomsday' scenario. There is no empirical evidence to justify such an assumption.

Furthermore, there is no correlation between temperature and CO2 concentration over geological time-scales that supports the contention that CO2 drives climate change. Even if there was, it would not be the same as causation.

In addition, the homogenisation of the surface temperature data was not peer reviewed and there are allegations of the adjustment of data to fit theories rather than the other way round. This is part of Dr Bellamy's, "Fiddling while the Earth doesn't burn." The best example was the hockey stick, which was one of the most spectacular scientific blunders of all time.

There appears to be a roughly 60 year oscillation superimposed on the upward trend in the homogenised surface temperature data, which is explained by the Pacific and Atlantic decadal oscillations. On the last down-swing that ended in the mid 1970s (while CO2 levels continued to rise) we heard portents of doom about an impending ice age. The last upswing that ended over 10 years ago according to satellite readings triggered the current scare about global warming. One thing that stands out is that there is no anthropogenic warming signature in the temperature oscillations since the end of the LIA.

Without real (empirical) evidence of more than an insignificant amount of AGW due to CO2 the warming industry remains dead in the water.

Unheralded in the MSM, solar observers predicted a reduction in the sun's magnetic field about now, which has come to pass as evinced by a paucity of sunspots. In the past the phenomenon has coincided with cooling periods, including the Little Ice Age, as per Svensmark's hypothesis. We could therefore be looking at some real cooling during the next few decades.

In addition, the very low sunspot level might be the start of another Maunder Minimum, and a precursor to a repeat of the LIA. There also appear to be additional longer cycles which are linked to ice ages and warm periods.

Incidentally, there may be evidence that the iron age started because a temperature downturn disrupted the flow of tin to the Middle East, forcing metalworkers in Cyprus in particular to seek alternatives to bronze.

The agrarian and industrial revolutions occurred in Britain while the world recovered from the LIA. The industrial revolution was predicated on two things in particular. The first was an increase in access to energy from burning fossil fuels instead of wood and charcoal, and the second was the development and application of scientific and technical knowledge to harness and make use of energy, where steam power in particular was the major enabler, along with technical ingenuity that led to power weaving looms, blast furnaces, and today's computers, for example. One direct outcome is our ability to support a large increase in the world-wide human population, an increase that is directly dependent for its existence on our increased energy consumption and our artful application of it.

Some people are determined to ignore the bigger picture and to link the slight global warming since the 19th century to the industrial revolution, extrapolating a doomsday climate scenario despite a total lack of real evidence that one begot the other in any significant way. In particular they tend to focus on the years since about 1975 and to ignore all else, primarily because it doesn't fit their theory. They have built an entire industry on the hypothesis. However, they cannot find empirical evidence to support their increasingly threadbare theoretical conjecture.

A false perception was created in our society that there was a defined, legitimate job to do, based on sound science. In fact the carbon dioxide global warming concept had become fixed in people’s minds as a result of relentless propaganda generated by those with a great variety of pre-existing agendas - some legitimate, some less so, for example: energy efficiency, reduced dependence on Middle Eastern oil, dissatisfaction with industrial society (neo-pasteralism), international competition, governmental desires for enhanced revenues (carbon taxes), and bureaucratic desires for enhanced power.

The whole western lifestyle is predicated on burning fuel to produce a lot of energy. Take that energy away and our lifestyle would collapse. Without electricity, for example, everything stops - literally. By claiming that we could be destroying the world by pumping combustion products from burning fossil fuels into the air, anti-west movements can attack us at the roots.

Various groups that would not normally give each other the time of day banded together in an unprecedented manner behind the CO2 flag, some good, some bad, some, like HRH Prince Charles, well-meaning but mistaken, but all with their own agendas. This has generated political implications.

Once politicians were involved, especially from the left, money followed in huge quantities. This created a 'positive forcing' and blew the whole structure out of all proportion. A lot of people now depend on the AGW industry for their living, creating a vast vested interest. Worse, the EU has bought into the illusion, which is dangerous since it is not subject to democratic control. There are also a lot of ex-communist apparatchiks seeking new ways to power since the USSR collapsed, and who see democracy as a problem, not a solution.

Unfortunately, after a huge campaign over decades, including in the education system, by many organisations with many different agendas (mostly anti-west or anti-industrialisation) there are a large number of brainwashed voters out there who erroneously believe that mankind has some control over these natural climatic changes, and where the voters go, the politicians follow, and they are not all benign beings under democratic control.

It now appears that the cover was recently blown on a covert 'Moriarity' organisation intent on imposing a non-democratic New World Government on the West initially through carbon rationing. It was hidden the the text of the draft Copenhagen treaty document. Similar intentions were revealed in the document published with a restricted circulation for the recent Bali conference. Such a mindset would suit ex soviet bloc apparatchiks intent on punishing us for the collapse of their beloved Soviet Union, and, of course, it was attractive to Bottler Brown and his kind.

Reducing energy consumption willy nilly in the short term appears to mean that the size of the world-wide human population that we can support must also reduce. An analogy would be forcing agriculture back to wooden ploughs, thus reducing the food supply, and therefore the number of people that can be fed. If so, then those who talk about short-term carbon saving measures (ie reducing overall energy consumption) are also talking about sentencing people and their children to death in their millions or perhaps even billions, while dismantling western civilisation and wasting trillions of money, all for a negligible impact on the climate. Without real evidence of significant AGW, and since the climate appears to be about to cool anyway, if enacted this could eventually land our beloved leaders into the dock at somewhere like the Hague.

As a final note, if the UK stopped CO2 production tomorrow, then China's increasing CO2 production would cancel out the sacrifice within a year. We would have destroyed our country for nothing. Other countries are laughing at the west and its AGW illusions all the way to the bank.

Reality is dawning in the corridors of power, and in academia. Face and reputation saving exits are being sought, and taken. We are seeing the beginning of a paradigm shift away from the IPCC alarmism, and towards an approach of adaptation to climate change (if any) rather than the hubris that we can control it.

However, politically it is too soon just to to dump the Zeitgeist of CAGW due to CO2 . That will have to be fed in gently as perceptions gradually change in the electorate as it dawns on them that writing computer programs to produce alarmist output does not affect the climate. So meanwhile we can pretend to blame the Chinese for warming, floods and all the rest of the alarmist stuff, while slowly withdrawing from the nutty renewable energy sources ideas, especially as the odds are that we heading for a cooling phase.

I think that most people are aware that there has been a general trend of global warming over the last century or so, which will probably peak sometime in the next fifty years or so. This has going on to a greater or lesser extent for millenia, dictated predominantly by sunspot activity. Humans certainly haven't helped the situation by decimating forests - the lungs of the planet, or by pumping out all sorts of toxic effluents polluting the atmosphere. People are, however becoming more environmentally aware. Take London, for instance. 50 years ago, it was a smog ridden atmospheric soup. Now the air is clean and breathable.So yes, we have been experiencing a slight warming of the planet. This has many positive aspects, insofar as it brings a lot more land into food cultivation mode.

But AGW? just a scaremongering scam to bleed more taxes out of the global populace and provide lucrative positions for an army of jobswoths The politicians love it.. How to pluck a goose with the minimum amount of hissing. Induce a guilt trip, convince people they are to blame and extracting taxes becomes much easier ("Think of your children...")

I've posted this quote before, but it bears re-posting.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Joseph Goebbels - Hitler's Propaganda Minister

And here I thought this was going to be a thread about the Thai fruit of the same word.

Aww Phuket

And talking of Thai fruit, I always used to wonder (until I was told where the word really came from) why they referred to us as guavas!

Funny old thing, language...

Move to Phuket forum, perhaps?

Funnily enough, the first time I was travelling in Thailand in '71, the main reason I went to Phuket was that I saw it on the map and thought "Oh wow, I have just got to go to an island called fukit, so I can say I've been there!".

Well, I was quite young then....

Thought the video would have been better if they hadn't made so many spelling mistakes. Am I being a pedant?

But then they complain that their fish and chips aren't as good as they used to get back in Scunthorpe and they cost more.

Don't forget the lack of Sarsons Malt Vinegar, too.

Do they have Sarsons in Manila?

Well I have to say that the guy certainly looks the part!

With the right mental attitude and the right laws in place, of course the narcotic trade can be eliminated. One just needs to have the will and determination to go through with the necessary measures.

Ah, so what would that mental attitude and those laws be then? The attitude and laws that have prevailed for the last 70 years, perhaps?

What part of "prohibition doesn't work" don't you understand? The "prohibition" bit, or the "doesn't work" bit?

I think you need to come down from your ivory tower and soak up a bit of reality.

Morning shot from the balcony.

(Not Thailand - I live in Greece)