blazes

Depends what you mean by "quality". I have never seen (out of the home) a Thai person reading a book. That small difference between Thailand and most Western towns and cities is a mark (imo) of how further advanced the latter are in obtaining (and using) a broad education.

Canada????

ILLEGAL, please. Call a spade a spade...

Hunted down? That'll be the day. The police are too busy looking for signs of islamophobia in people's communications (including thoughts perceived to be in your head and ready to be loosed upon the world).

What utter b*llsh!t. Just another grab for your wallet in the name of the climate "science" cult.

No way the debt-ridden West could risk war with China. Those in Taiwan who favour government from Beijing will yield up the country and, like the West, preserve their own economy. It will be just like the takeover of one corporation by another. Some takeovers are hostile, some friendly. Eva Air will be taken over by Air China (perhaps not even with a change of name.) Not a drop of blood spilt....

In what way precisely?

This review appeared in this week's Spectator. The tv series (Drops of God) is available in the usual places, but I have not yet watched it, so if anyone has, please react: Apple TV+ Drops of God is one of those gems of purest ray serene that cable TV prefers to keep hidden in its deep unfathomed caves because it thinks you want something more lowbrow. Try finding it by accident: you won’t. When I looked for it on Apple – which doesn’t have all that many shows – I had laboriously to type in its name. It wasn’t offered to me in the recommendations. If I hadn’t been tipped off by my friends Candy and Diarmuid, I would never have seen it. I had been lamenting, as I often do, the dearth of stuff to watch on TV that doesn’t put you through the emotional wringer. When I settle down for an evening on the sofa after a hard day’s not working, I want to be taken to a happy place rather than be overstimulated by some torture-porn atrocity about a small-town detective investigating grisly murders by an occult-inspired serial killer. Nor do I want sex; nor, particularly, yet more dystopian sci-fi; nor something self-consciously wry and quirky about a psychoanalyst featuring a rehabilitated Hollywood megastar. I want something more European in sensibility: oblique, meditative, art-house, intelligent, gentle. Drops of God does the job just perfectly. The premise is enticing. A French connoisseur of fine wines has just died and, being a tricksy, demanding, obsessive fellow he has left the potential heirs to his stupendous fortune – a magnificent Toyko apartment and the world’s best private cellar, worth gazillions – a challenge. They must blind taste and correctly identify a series of his most treasured and obscure vintages. Winner takes all. There are two contestants. One is his estranged daughter, Camille (Fleur Geffrier), whom he trained up when she was very young to identify every conceivable aroma, from lychee to moss, using first a Nez du Vin kit and then his private stock. The other is his former star student, a taciturn, handsome, otherwordly Japanese lad Issei Tomine (Tomohisa Yama<deleted>a), so meticulous in his quest for perfect knowledge that he even gets soil samples from all the world’s greatest terroirs sent to his home so that he can inhale their mineral complexity. Your sympathies waver between the rivals as you learn more about them. Like the fine wines they swirl, sniff and spit they are multi-layered, mysterious, the product of peculiar circumstance. Issei, though a bit of a cold fish with his immaculate, monochrome wardrobe and diffident manner, becomes much more likeable when you understand his background. His unloving mother is in thrall to the family patriarch, her unbending, fierce billionaire father (who refuses to give Issei a single sen of his diamond fortune unless he abandons all this wine-tasting with gaijin nonsense). Issei’s dad, the one who loves him, is treated as a second-class citizen. Camille, meanwhile, is attractive but bolshy and a bit of a home-wrecker. I’m not sure I approve of the way she muscles in on handsome childhood friend Thomas Chassangre (Tom Wozniczka), who is on the verge of marrying a nice girl on his idyllic Rhône estate. But as the father’s daughter she is surely the more deserving candidate. Also, she suffers from a pretty major underdog drawback: every time the tiniest amount of alcohol goes down her throat she develops a nose bleed, which makes accurate wine-tasting a near impossibility. If only they could both win! Obviously I’m not going to tell you how the show resolves this conundrum, but what I can say is that the various plot threads – the romances, the family disputes and estrangements, the competition – are eventually tied together in a way that leaves you with a warm glow. Yes, there’s going to be a second season. But unlike so many of these series, you’re not left with an irksome cliffhanger. Directed by Oded Ruskin, and adapted by Quoc Dang Tran from a manga series, Drops of God could have been quite dull: how, after all, do you make a gripping, attractive drama about taste and smell? But Ruskin has found a clever way of making the invisible visible (explosions of colour; journeys through labyrinthine mental libraries), the locations (from Paris and southern France to Trento in Italy, and Tokyo) are sumptuous, and even the minor characters so well developed and rounded that they start to feel like real friends (and enemies). It has been many years since I was an obsessive oenophile (not since I bought a couple of cases of en primeur 1990 Burgundy, in fact). And though I barely touch a drop of wine nowadays, this endlessly beguiling, inventive series has made me seriously reconsider the error of my ways.

Just came across this title: The Righteous Gemstones season 4. Anyone know it and can offer an opinion? Thanks.

Surely, the first mistake they made (apart from not having sufficient insurance) was spending time in India, the filthiest place in the world.

That's an old Soviet joke, the words attributed to Brezhnev.

Taxpayer money being poured down the drain for purposes a million miles away from a university's proper function of producing well-educated graduates - well-educated as in brains free of suffocating ideological nonsense. The deafening silence of academics is shameful as they consent to work within a system that strongly resembles the old Soviet Union.

I wouldn't like to be a fly anywhere near that creep.

Totally scandalous that these racist terrorist-supporters continue to practice in the NHS.

Note how the OP story never actually mentions the word "Islam". Most western countries run these stories as if the Religion of Peace did not exist.

Much ado about sod-all. Is there any one on this thread who can truly claim never to refer to others in these ways, especially after one has come across some retarded nonsense spewed out by a well-known politician or some idiot in one's workplace? Needless to say one can expect grovelling apologies from the miscreants....

Could ask the Dutch for advice -- they've been keeping the sea at bay for centuries. Ah,but I forgot....foreigners know nothing....

6 days seems a very short time to go on so long a journey. Surely he would be too knackered (even at that young age) to do anything more strenuous than sit on a bar stool.

"Ladies"???? How about ignorant bitches?

Just like the Russians, you think (Putin, Medvedev, Putin, Medvedev etc etc etc for ever)? But no, that copying of Russian practice would open Trump to the normal Dem accusation that he's a Russian "asset"!!! But fear not, they'll find some other hoax to flog to the masses.

This palm-reading is a classic example of "whistling in the dark".

Jill Biden (sorry: DR Jill Biden) was the loyal wife who called out to her hubby "You answered ALL the questions, Joe!" at the conclusion of her husband's last hurrah, when the whole country could finally see how senile the poor chump was, a condition that had been concealed wherever possible for three years until that night. Only people who regularly watched Fox News knew the full extent of his imbecility. And were not shocked by his inability to answer the powder-puff questions tossed his way. Yes, I suppose that kind of lying for your husband is a form of love.....

Gatwick is traditionally the bucket-and-spade airport, which may also reflect on Thailand's global position as a holiday destination.

Thanks. This is one of the best contributions to an AN thread on any subject that I have read in some time. Begins with the good stuff, than turns to the "oops" stuff, and what a brave confession follows. And it ends with a big laugh of common sense: yes, we all know that entering a Thai road is potentially a daily sentence of death. Well, ok, ALL of us live with a daily sentence of death, but why bring it on early? Thanks for that wonderful dose of common sense. The best medicine.

Well, rumour has it that Diane Abbott and Mr Jeremy Corbyn were offered, but were subsequently considered not genteel enough...