Johpa

Japanese industry has long wanted to get into the production of commercial airplanes and both Boeing and Airbus are having problems. Don Muang provides a ready-made locale for such a production area. I am not surprised that the Japanese aviation industry is showing interest. It does make sense.

So just what is an "inactive position"? Is it considered better or worse than being relocated to a remote province?

Hmm, i thought this thread would have died a long time ago - are we sure the OP is not just a doing a bit of 'gureilla marketing' here?

Anyway, let's not waste the opportunity to pick up some new vocab. Following this thread gave me this new word (from the Oxford River Press dictionary):

hagiography = การเขียนชีวประวัตินักบุญ

And I thought it might be something that would translate akin to "writing history in the style of M. L. Manich Jumsai".

Not a bash, a genuine question - why is it that a number of Americans, whilst being normal, educated and generally well-rounded people, struggle with the concept of irony?

Given that one of the most popular and influential TV shows in the US is "The Colbert Report" I would tend to disagree. In this case it is a combination of this rather two-dimensional media and my limited writing ability. I should use those little smiley things more often to signal my intent.

Those resistence groups are locally based, they have absolutely no intentions of taking on junta outside their support areas and conquering the whole country.

The real problem is that the junta is supported by a great number of people, and even more people will take the govt side if there's any foreign intervention.

The junta is only supported by guns and violence and by the few families who are allowed to profit. It is not actively supported by any of the non-Burman "minorities" who, when added up, make up the majority of the population. Yes, many of the minority groups have made various strategic agreements with the Junta, bu they do not nessecarily support the ruling generals. And Aung San Suu Kyi's movement, primarily ethnic Burmans, still has great support within the country. So the real problem is not that the junta is supported by any great number of people, but that it is supported by, apart from guns and brutality, foreign countries such as the ASEAN countries as well as China. all of whom have their own human rights abuse issues, and are willing to allow the Burmese generals to run amuck as long as they get their own profits and strategic goals.

Look, the world in not perfect, Paradise has yet to be found and Utopia remains a literary genre, but on the continuum of good and evil, the Burmese generals still hold the end position, and it is not on the good side of the continuum. Exactly how we face this, well I don't have the answer and nobody is calling for a foreign invasion, that is just a red herring. So call me a softie, but total appeasement does not appeal to my senses of fairness. Clinton putting some public pressure on ASEAN is a good thing. I don't really think the US thought that ASEAN would expel Burma, but putting on some diplomatic heat did not hurt.

I am pleased to see the Prime Minister stand-up to Mrs. Clinton and tell her to keep her nose out of the Asean business.

100% Agree

Get back to the US and sort your own internal issues out and keep out of other peoples and nations business.

But of course, as there is no better response to large scale human rights abuses and ethnic cleansings in one of the world's most brutal and corrupt regimes than appeasement. Besides, the Burmese generals even make the Chinese and Thai leaders look good in comparison, so yes, please keep then around and Ms. Clinton, please don't interfere as we know the US human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib were on such a similar scale.

Another idiot brings in Aub Grahib...ok, now name another one, and another one, and another one. What other country prosecutes its own soldiers for war crimes?

Whoa there partner, hold your horses, reread my post, and try to see the irony. I am on your side. This is one of the rare occasions I give kudos to Ms. Clinton.

I am pleased to see the Prime Minister stand-up to Mrs. Clinton and tell her to keep her nose out of the Asean business.

100% Agree

Get back to the US and sort your own internal issues out and keep out of other peoples and nations business.

But of course, as there is no better response to large scale human rights abuses and ethnic cleansings in one of the world's most brutal and corrupt regimes than appeasement. Besides, the Burmese generals even make the Chinese and Thai leaders look good in comparison, so yes, please keep then around and Ms. Clinton, please don't interfere as we know the US human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib were on such a similar scale.

As the saying goes "A fool and his money are easily parted".

What did these people think? That in the nation that is but a Banana Republic known for cheap blow jobs you could purchase elitism??

And it is phrases like "โดยจะจัดให้มีการโฟนอินของ" that bring my reading to a halt trying to parse the words "การโฟนอิน" into English.

As a veteran international travel writer, I can safely predict that it will take a lot longer than 6 months to undo the damage done by all the bad publicity the Land of Smiles has gotten in the last year - and, even worse, the bad word-of-mouth from travel industry professionals who no longer consider Thailand a reliable partner after the airport occupation, which had to be unique by any international standards. The fact that those responsible were not only allowed to do it, but now appear to be getting away with this very serious crime is causing Thailand to become a travel industry bete noir. The Foreign Minister and his cronies have succeeded in killing the fatted calf

Would that be the same fatted calf that the tourist industry professionals have been feasting upon for the past several decades? Rest assured that a few glib travel articles accompanied by glossy photos in the travel magazines along with the hints of promised affordable sexual pleasures will bring back the tourists. The tourist care not a whit about the local politics and have all but forgotten the airport occupation. If and when this recession/depression corrects itself, rest assured that the travel industry, from the biggies like Deithelm to the writers like yourself, will be quite pleased to support the same cast of characters to which you are now misdirecting your angst. As long as their are free tickets and kickbacks, the travel industry will forever be the cheerleaders and will not let internal political missteps get in their way.

The scams, the sex trade, the corruption, political upheavals, the double pricing are nothing new and have been around seemingly forever. None of these ever mattered much to the vast majority of the ex-pats who post here nor to the vast majority of the tourists who kept on coming. The problem is that a relatively small group of organized criminals within the financial sector infiltrated the highest levels of the US government, scammed the world, took a lot of money for themselves, and then caused a significant contraction of the money available to everyone else. It is the resulting global recession/depression that has caused the large downturn in tourism, and not any of these trivial pet peeves that ex-pats have been griping about ad nauseum for decades.

I've made the mistake of using the wrong title for a person. Reading this thread, I tried to get clarity from my GF....and ended up a little clearer, and a little more bemused and befuddled.

Whereas before I had nong, pi, and khun....I now have ya, na, ba, loong....and it all depends on not only my age, but my parent's age also. It also depends on status, and apparently it also depends on gender...I'm told to err on the side of caution if the title denotes the comparitive age of a woman.

There's a Thai gentleman we know here. GF is 33, I'm 45, our aquaintance is mid to late 50's. She calls him loong, but I musn't because although older than me by at least a decade, he is younger than my father....

"Khun" seems to be the safest allround.

There are a few other twists in the Thai kinship social structure. I am older than my brother-inlaw. But since he is married to my wife's older sister he is my elder (phii) and I am his younger (noong).

As far as your friend, as he is not family and he is only a 1/2 generation older than yourself (10 years) it would be unacceptable for you to call him uncle (lung) and not because of your father's age. However, were we talking about a significantly older woman, then you would take into account the senior/junior status relative to your own mother to decide whether to call her paa (elder) or naa (younger).

Khun is indeed the safest pronoun, especially amongst the Bangkok crowd as the odds are high they are Thai Chinese and not ethnic Thai and so tend to be a bit more formal and less comfortable with Thai kinship terms outside the immediate family. However, in ethnic Thai rural areas it is quite safe to address someone who is clearly, from the perspective of both sides, a full generation older than yourself as lung or khun lung (male) or as khun paa (female).

Does anyone shop King Power? Every time I pass through the airport all the shops are empty well apart from being overstaffed by 10 to 1 customer. King Power is expensive and a waste of time.

Yea, I always thought the scam of King Power was their merchandising and pricing and total monopoly status and not anything to do with the police. They exist solely for the business class travelers who need one last souvenir or trinket to bring back to their spouses to assuage their own guilt for having spent so much money on sexual pleasures.

And as one who has worked retail of decades, this couple could not be more guilty.

Using ขอโทษครับ kŏr tôht kráp doesn't seem quite right to me. Almost as if you are apologising for wanting the attention of a waiter. What are others' thoughts about this?

It is used commonly, just as in English when we say "excuse me" when getting the attention of a waiter. The literal translation of ขอโทษ is a bit more extreme as you are asking for punishment, perhaps a relic of the brutal feudal past, but it is used euphemistically.

Mr. Raj is indeed a gifted polyglot, but I can find nothing that would indicate that he has any significant standing in the linguistic community. I would tend to ascribe his truly exceptional language skills to genetics rather than to any particular methodology. He also appears to be a gifted motivational speaker, and motivation is of course a key ingredient to learning another language.

One minor footnote, to my aging and rusty ear it sounds a bit awkward to be using the informal familial pronoun noong with the formal particle khrap.

I have found that Bangkok folks do not use the familial pronouns such as noong, phii, or lung as commonly as do most others, especially those from more traditional smaller towns and villages where people attempt to place just about everyone into some sort of social grid. My close friends and family, all northern folk (Khon Muang), would feel quite at ease calling someone a generation younger noong in a restaurant setting, or even in a business setting. And I have also always used the term in such a situation. But I have also found myself unexpectedly in hot water when I addressed a younger colleague from Bangkok as noong. So I have learned that when I find myself in the presence of "Khon Thai", for that is how Khon Muang and Khon Isaan refer to Bangkok folks, I take on added deference and bring my speech up a notch or two in formality. There is the old adage amongst the Khon Muang about folks from Bangkok that they are "khop kan yaak".

Yeah for my family, I think we'll pass and just build our own anti-bodies during a nice hospital stay holiday if necessary. And for light cases, nothing more comfortable than being sick at home It's just the flu.

Yes, a young co-worker of mine here in the US went back to visit his family in Thailand this past month and caught the dreaded swine flu during the visit. He thought the symptoms were fairly ordinary and it kept him housebound for all of two days. So t'is a rare day here in TV land where I am in sync with the sentiments of Heng.

But as a lover of leftist conspiracy theories, ya gotta love the link between fear of the flu, Gilead Sciences (one of the primary companies profiting from the sale of flu vaccines) and that fear monger extraordinaire, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld.

"raan 'ahaan nik yuu thii nai?" is still there :-)

What do you think of the Haas reader and the Thai Cultural Reader? Do you feel that the combination of the three is as good as anything out there now?

I would assume that both are now a bit out of date and that similar readings that came across a tad more current could be written up. But I really don't know what else is out there as I have not taken a Thai class since 1984. I still have both books and as my Thai continues to degrade after each decade that I am no longer in-country, I find myself going back to the Jones reader in my forlorn attempts to halt the linguistic degradation of my Thai language skills.

Oh yea they always let shrimp farmers run around with fake banknotes, but only if they are informants.  Its a nice cover story.  Who's investigation team was it anyway N.Korea ?  The largest producer of fake banknotes.  Act of war by the way.  Hope he spills his guts to save his bottom.   Let dick the X VP at him.  You want some water buddy,  just lay down here,  I ll get ya some.

I am not sure about shrimp, but the story smells awfully fishy. But I too would assume that we are dealing with an intersection between some N. Koreans, who are pretty well known to be the source of the counterfeit notes, a few corrupt Police officers, and some hapless shrimp farmer who was blackmailed into being a mule to transport the currency into Bangkok.

How long ago did you study at AUA? I have the AUA books on the market now, and they are quite clunky.

I started with the AUA books and the cassette tapes back in 1981. I believe Brown was the voice at that time and one of the first sentences we had committed to memory was "raan 'ahaan nik yuu thii nai?" The methodology was a variation of the structural-response method popular through the 1970s but now considered politically incorrect by many linguists. Although frankly I don't see any significant increase in bilingualism in the US after several decades of using more "modern" methodologies. My former Thai professor was very successful using the AUA method, but he tended to have a very small class size, with under ten highly motivated students, and he had a wonderful personality that somehow lended itself to that methodology. We only used the AUA books for the first two quarters and began using the old Haas reader once we had a handle on the Thai alphabet. BY the middle of the second year we had migrated to the Jones et al "Thai Cultural Reader".

I realise that it is an old resource but I somehow managed to miss it when compiling my list of free Thai resources.

Now if it had been the J. Marvin Brown version of the AUA Thai course, which I used back in my college days, then you might have called it an "old resource", but this is a far newer text.

"Whom do you wish to speak to". I was taught that you could not end a sentence with a preposition. What do grammarians call 'to' nowadays?

Fortunately, modern linguistics has tossed out the old school 19th century grammarians who prescribe grammatical rules rather than describe and explain the grammar of any given language. People frequently use prepositions at the end of a sentence in English. A number of people have come up with syntactical rules that explain this, but the details are not important here. In this case 'to' is used as an preposition as it modifies the noun "who" which in this instance uses the slightly archaic case ending of 'whom'.

It too many ethnic people are allowed in, potentially it could become another Uramqi. I am not pointing to Hmong in particular.

You mean like when the Chinese colonize Uighur lands? Are the Thais somehow colonizing Hmong lands? I suppose you could make an argument for Thai colonization around Mae Hong Song, Mae Sariang, or even Pai. But I just can't parse the logical connection here with the situation in Uramqi.

My dad told me story of old Singapore. In the 60's, similar thing happen in Singapore. The Malay and Chinese were fighting just like in Uramqi now.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_riots_of_Singapore

Yes, well when one group expands or migrates into the territory of another group violent conflict tends to arise. The Han Chinese expansion into Southeast Asia was/is often met by violence just as have their more traditional colonial expansion into non-Chinese regions such as Tibet, the Tarim Basin, or the Uyghur Turkic regions. The Hmong on the other hand are a minority fleeing from oppression.

It too many ethnic people are allowed in, potentially it could become another Uramqi. I am not pointing to Hmong in particular.

You mean like when the Chinese colonize Uighur lands? Are the Thais somehow colonizing Hmong lands? I suppose you could make an argument for Thai colonization around Mae Hong Song, Mae Sariang, or even Pai. But I just can't parse the logical connection here with the situation in Uramqi.