Specialist

Scoobydoo, there seems to be a rather large body of history that would disagree with you.

Shouldn't that be "platitudinous ponderosity"? "Ponderous" is an adjective, and I don't see a noun nearby for the adjective to be modifying. (I'm an engineer, Flash. Words on paper are a significant part of my stock in trade.)

When you are trying to get a Bad Guy out, you have to be careful not to put a worse one in. At the same time, when the Bad Guy is really bad, lots of people are willing to overlook obvious flaws of the alleged Good Guy. Castro used this to his advantage in his campaign against Batista, and wound up owning Cuba for far longer than Batista lived. (And consider the liberal love affair with "Che" Guevara, who was not a nice or good person no matter how you look at him.)

You aren't the only one, Cav.

www.amazon.co.uk seems to be saying that they've got 8 listings for used Bose QC15 headsets, starting at £130 or so. (Actually, I wouldn't trust that low price: it is coming from China.) The QC3 headsets are almost as nice, even though they are on-ear instead of over-ear. I've used both.

Except that the Bangkok Post is now reporting that Gen Prayuth is calling Mr Suthep a liar, saying that no such discussions ever happened. Who are you going to believe?

I was in the local Best Buy a few years ago, looking for something else, when I discovered that they had Bose QuietComfort 15 noise-cancelling headphones for sale. It was one of the easiest and fastest purchase decisions I've ever made.

I used to buy Viagra from a tourist pharmacy on Suk Soi 11. Real thing, zero problems. When I'm in town, I currently buy asthma maintenance meds, precautionary antibiotics, and electrolyte packets from the pharmacy on the north side of Suk, just west of Soi 15. They're good people. Zero problems, good prices. (My asthma is such that I will be in DEEP trouble in a few days - as in ER run deep trouble - if I'm not properly maintenance medicated.)

The US Department of Defense was (and still is) very big on contingency planning. Contingency plan Rainbow 5 was "How do you fight simultaneous wars in Europe and the Pacific?" (It may have been specifically with Germany and Japan, I don't recall.) It called for fighting a holding action in the Pacific while you win the war in Europe, and then give the Pacific your undivided attention. And WHADDAYA KNOW, it worked! I may have already mentioned this. I was for a while reading some of the popular literature of the time. It made it quite clear that, by early to mid-1941, the US was planning on entering World War II, in Europe. Preparations and training were WELL underway by about June of 1941. It may just be an accident of history that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and set the date. I don't know.

The deadline was in fact extended today, to the 25th. I would be tempted to speculate that the government extended the deadline to encourage the bad boys to continue discarding their toys and phoning in their dumping locations, while they can still get a free pass for them. Once the sanctions kick in (which would have been today), the price of getting caught with those toys gets a LOT higher.

A 400cc thumper with a KICKSTARTER! And it's available in the US!! WAY COOL!!!

"... but said the war weapons found in his home were not his." Right. Uh-huh. So tell us, Mr Wanchai, whose war weapons ARE they? How did they find their way into YOUR home?

Very good point, Radioman. The way you kill these things is you start with the paws and tail and you work your way up to the head. There had to have been a lot of higher-ups, including quite a few police, who knew full well what was going on, and very carefully looked the other way (or, possibly, were very well-paid to look the other way).

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not quite crazy enough to try to drive in Bangkok traffic. Not when I'm only in town a few weeks a year.

Thank you.

Missy, you appear to subscribe to the very common "stand-alone war" model of the Vietnam Conflict. That model, while very convenient for the people who want to push the idea that the United States "lost" in Vietnam, is not even close to accurate. Vietnam was three, three, THREE wars in one! (to echo a very old TV commercial). First, it was an indigenous revolt, by the Viet Cong, against a government that they viewed as being thoroughly corrupt. That war ended with the utterly disastrous 1968 Tet Offensive, that destroyed the Viet Cong. (The VC were on their last legs by then. Someone got the bright idea of going all out, throwing ALL of the kitchen sinks into the party, in the hopes that they would convince the South Vietnamese government and the US that the war could not be won, and they would give up the fight. It didn't work. ARVN and USA took everything the VC could throw at them, said "That's all you got? Now it's OUR turn at bat!" and the rest is history. Second, it was a conventional land-grab war that had been flaring up on and off for about three thousand years, that normally fought itself to a standstill at right about the DMZ. This was how, and why, the North Vietnamese Army got involved. The VC asked for help, and Hanoi saw the opportunity to let the VC (from the South) soften up the ARVN and take all the early casualties. Post-Tet, only the NVA was still fighting on the North side. Third, and most important, Vietnam was an absolutely critical campaign of attrition in the Seventy Years War between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America. The Soviet Union lost that campaign, horribly. The People's Republic of China was also involved, and they bled almost as badly as the USSR did. Finally, as to the "US lost" claim: In 1972, the NVA, backstopped by the USSR and the PRC assembled one of the biggest mechanized armies ever seen on Planet Earth, bigger than Hitler's Wehrmacht ever fielded, and set it south. ARVN, with US air support, but essentially no US ground involvement, cut it to ribbons. Two years later, it having taken that long for them to lick their wounds and get their courage up, the NVA tried again. This time, with Nixon facing impeachment over Watergate, and Democrat control of Congress, the US Congress betrayed South Vietnam, withheld air cover, and voted ten rounds and one hand grenade for each South Vietnamese soldier. South Vietnam, having no hope, duly fell to the invaders.

Good news! Keep this up, extend this to Bangkok (especially, say, to the Asok end of Soi Cowboy, and I for one (and probably a lot of other guys) will be in *NO* hurry to see Gen Prayuth step down for the new elected government. If they manage to nail the jet ski scammers, someone will nominate Gen Prayuth for a special "friend to tourists" medal. And, of course, if he REALLY wants to make things interesting, start walking these scams up the food chain...

Spelling error, Missy. That's what he was pinging you on.

For many years, whenever Jerry Pournelle, the writer, talked about the Apollo-Saturn stack that Johnson Space Center turned into a lawn ornament, he would get incredibly bitter. I never understood why. Until he explained, late one night. That stack is not a test item, or a mockup. It was a fully-flight qualified stack. It was built to fly Apollo 19, one of the two flights NASA cancelled, basically because the TV ratings weren't good enough. Jerry was director of mission planning for Apollo 19. That was HIS bird. I don't think he's ever really recovered from that loss. You might get a lot of other people to lie about something that big, about claiming to have landed on the moon, if the stakes are high enough, but Jerry is not one of those people. Not for any amount of money. Or for anything else. Full Disclosure: I've known Jerry for years. As for some of the other claims: Recall that we had live TV footage, from the lunar surface, on ALL of the moon landings. Watch some of the footage of the astronauts jumping around, in their suits. The special effects state of the art in 1969-1971 was nowhere near good enough to fake that. For some things, it STILL isn't. When you're my age, or thereabouts, you grew up seeing live TV from orbit. You learned, very quickly, what free fall ("weightlessness") looked like. You figured out, very quickly, that it DIDN'T look like anything in the movies. When the movie "Apollo 13" came out, I saw it. When they got to the scene right after they'd made orbit, and the astronauts took off their helmets and gloves, I almost jumped right out of my seat AND MY SKIN, trying not to scream "HOW DID THEY DO THAT?!?!?!" Later in the movie, you see them sailing down the tunnel between the Lunar Module and the Command module. It wasn't until the credit roll, and I saw the line for the KC-135 crew, that I understood. That WAS real free fall. Ron Howard built his sets inside NASA's "Vomit Comet" KC-135 free fall training airplane. Tom Hanks and the other two whose names escape me logged more time in free fall than real astronauts do in training before they fly into space for real. Not to mention the cameramen and other crew, who you don't see.

That is a Windows 8 "feature". If you (or the OEM) install(s) a third-party anti-virus product (like McAfee or Norton Antivirus) (bletch and double bletch, in no particular order), it overrides the built-in Windows Defender (Firewall and anti-virus). Frequently, the OEM gets a nice kickback from McAfee or Norton for installing their "trial" version. After 30 days or so, the trial version demands that you start paying real money. The good news is that Windows 8 will enable Windows Defender, which includes the Windows Firewall, if you uninstall the third-party product. Been there, done that.

The fact that they hit a hospital tells you pretty much everything you need to know about them.

You ripen avocados in a brown paper bag at room temp. When they're about ripe, you move them to the fridge, if you aren't ready to use them that day. Avocados, coriander (cilantro), ... About time for a grocery store run. I feel the need for guacamole.

There's a flip side, which the Founding Fathers of the United States of America understood very well. Every democracy that ever existed committed suicide, sooner or later, when the majority of the electorate figured out that they could vote to enslave and impoverish the rest of the population.

Yes, bulletproof vests and teargas masks are weapons. Defensive weapons, but weapons nonetheless. They enabling the users to remain effective in combat when people not using them would be disabled or killed.

The one thing that is clear is that some SERIOUS planning went into the coup, to have everything in place and ready for the Go order. Once the order was given, the coup went down with clockwork precision.