JaiRai

good. http://news.yahoo.com/norwegian-muslims-form-human-ring-around-oslo-synagogue-102527616.html "There are many more peace mongers than warmongers," Abdullah said as organizers and Jewish community leaders stood side by side. "There’s still hope for humanity..."

Pffffft you think some of these foreigners are obnoxious... ever met Flashermac? He likes to drive up and down Ratchada in his Datsun B210 blasting this dang song over and over at an ear splitting volume... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfr2LtKe5cg

The cities of St Thomas and Jamaica... always been my favorite urban centers.

Negatory sir. Been reading about Myanmar and the Rohingya since 2009/2010 - and that's all accelerated in the past year with the UN calls to aid the situation. btw - She won't even say the word "Rohingya" in public as it's fraught with peril in that country (and I think she's an admirable woman). While I'm all for standing up to violent moslem/Islamic extremists - fuck them - that certainly doesn't include brutalizing a refugee population (or anyone) just because they're part of the moslem religion. Moslem does not equal terrorist. Violent mass murdering fuckwad rapist asshole for some dumbass twisted self serving belief equals terrorist. Just my .02

he started out comparing himself to elvis and the beatles.... now it's jesus and god. oh boy. one hopes people in general are getting more sophisticated with time. world is filled with kanyes. folks with a little talent (couple songs are OK), and a shitload of admiration for themselves coupled with a deficit of self criticism. this is all good for shits and giggles. oh yes. it's that mass of people that choose to elevate the kanyes of the world which can leave you feeling... aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!! why!?!?!?!? i try to resist having a dim worldview... i fucking try i swear. it's a tough battle.

http://bangkok.craigslist.co.th/fbh/4853470092.html (screenshot of post):

Do you guys all know each other or something? Well, I don't know ya but appreciate the input you've shared - hope it continues. Best wishes.

Was a being a bit tongue in cheek sir - I don't literally see it as a grand or not-so-grand philosophical expression of free speech. That said, however ridiculous the circumstances, the film does now have a significance beyond its content. But even if it didn't my opinion would've been the same. Fair to middling. One man's ceiling is another one's floor and all that.

In the past I've been critical of the site (stickman) -- elements I didn't like about it. Many of those things would be general criticisms I would level against the expat community of Thailand. But all that aside, I also found the site to be informative and probably the most successful in disseminating genuine info that helped people new (or not so new) to Thailand (who would otherwise be clueless). It's a body of mostly solid work spanning several years -- and that is an impressive feat. Here's a true story - after my first trip to LoS I came back and enrolled in a class at Wat Thai ( large Wat in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles). The class was held on Sat/Sun morning in the temple basement, and our instructor was an old Thai woman. The class was a motley mix of 2nd gen Thai immigrants born in LA, falangs married to Thais, backpackers, and others. One chap, a dentist, was in a quick relationship with a woman he met on a trip and was "very much in love" (according to him). To my surprise, the teacher told him to please be cautious sending this woman money until he knew her for a significant period of time. THEN - this surprised me most of all -- she wrote the words "stickman bangkok" on the whiteboard, and told the guys in the class to look him up -- in order to learn about pitfalls to avoid. She laughed and said she loved reading stickman. I would've never predicted that. Very very very true story. Whatever path you choose, good luck.

Finally watched "the interview" last night. Thought it was kinda lame and embarrassed that this is our historical symbol of free speech. gah! Two straight hours of teenage locker room humor wears thin after awhile. And I'm in the target audience of people who normally like that kind of stuff. Crazy mixed-up world.

Note - it looks like Time magazine author may have credibility issues and left gaps in the story(?). coconuts article questioning Time piece <snip> ---- "The harrowing, first-hand story written by Ian Lloyd Neubauer reports a damning account of police misconduct said to have happened at “a terrace bar in the Silom Road area†that is at odds with information and records provided by the police. “It was Christmas Eve and I was at the upstairs area of a terrace bar in the Silom Road area having a late-night drink,†Neubauer wrote in Time’s article published Jan. 20. “At around 2 a.m. I called it a night and descended to the ground floor. There I saw half a dozen police officers searching the premises and interrogating the bartender, who was handcuffed on a chair.†However inquiries with the police department responsible for that area insisted no such incident occurred Dec. 25 or around that date. Meanwhile, officers at a different police station in another neighborhood confirmed Neubauer was among five foreigners they said were detained on suspicion of drug use several kilometers away in the Sathon district at a restaurant known for selling drugs to its clients....."

----- *note Italy sees itself as least trustworthy

Agree on comments being superfluous. But.... aaaaaaaaaargh. I would like to propose an alternate theory, I propose that ending someone's life is in fact interfering with them... much. This is reality.

Yeah well sometimes business kinda sucks.... don't it?

I liked Michael Moore a lot when he first emerged with "Roger and Me," (film about the decline of Flint Michigan and the auto industry -- illustrating the corruption and apathy of executives bailing out with multi-million dollar packages while the front line staff got it pretty fucking bad), That's a good film. But when I saw Bowling for Columbine was pretty disgusted by the ambush of Charlton Heston. This is after Heston's already been diagnosed with Alzheimers and is an easy target - Moore pretended to do an interview on the NRA, and then pulled out a picture of a young child who was shot and implied that Heston's support of the NRA supported the shooting of children. I'm for better gun controls in America, but this scene was so fucking distasteful it tarnished my perception of Moore ---> it literally was blatant sensationalism in an attempt to get more attention. Just a disappointment. sidenote: After 9/11 there was reluctance by major media (in U.S.) to be critical of aggressive foreign policy, and they certainly regret that now in the aftermath of the Cheney/Bush.... ahhh nevermind, not going to start. Moore's film Farenheit 9/11 backfired ---> released just prior to the election to oppose Bush's 2nd term, it was just polarizing and didn't make any converts - rather soothed the egos of his fans. I'm happy his importance has diminished and now he has to resort to obnoxious tweets to get attention. He started brilliant but got too full of himself too quick.

It's a farce, a distraction. The country is subtly going to shit in several ways, specifically the economy (but hey, we got a train deal with China right? These junta boys sure do know how to make things thrive). Power is being consolidated, and guess what -- those simple country folks shouldn't be allowed to make important decisions. Kudos to the junta for slowly implementing a structure where they can't. Hooray for martial law, let's party. But even then, what's the purpose of going after Yingluck and threatening criminal charges... to shove folks nose in dung while they're already down? Pure unadulterated twats. The military morons are going to do more to rally people than Thaksin can (another apathetic figure in his own way). Any way you slice it - it's stupid and pointless to make a spectacle out of persecuting Yingluck, other than to satisfy the appetites of the goons in Suthep's legion. One gets a sense that a slow seismic shift is beginning to rumble. I hope my investment in Thai classes wasn't a waste and it's a place I can continue to be fascinated by (in a good way) five years from now.

When going to Bangkok, I always fly out of LAX, Tom Bradley Int'l Terminal. Words cannot capture how god fucking awful that experience is. Always have to get there several hours early and go through absurdly long lines for security checks. You're herded like cattle and those security folks take rude to a new level, further you just have to sit there and take it without complaint because you don't want to be flagged or delayed. Then when I get to Swampy it takes me about 20-40 minutes. For fucking everything. Included in that is me stopping to pick up a SIM and exchange a little money. The experience is soooooooo much better. I mean maybe LAX is setting the bar pretty low - but you want to experience sheer misery - fly international from there.

tough crowd

Ugh, sorry to OP for interrupting his thread. Quick addition, after thinking about this -- would definitely want to know if I was with a ladyboy, it would not be something I'd like to find out after sharing any sort of intimacy. So, while I have no problem at all with ladyboys, none... I do think they should be upfront about who/what they are if they're going to share sex/intimacy with a person. Deceiving people in that situation = not a good thing. No more interruptions.

YimSiam, you're a bright friendly guy. You seem to have a ladyboy fixation - now I understand. You're coming to terms with a crying game moment? Let it go. When I stayed a year in Berlin Germany (long time ago in 90s), there was this fella Stefan we'd hang out with - intelligent, funny, and absolutely convinced that every thai woman in the city (yes there was a thai population there) was in fact a ladyboy. You kinda remind me of him. I'm in the stickman camp on this one - not my thing. But hey, whatever, they're adults and not hurting anyone - i'm sure good and bad just like everyone else.

^^ hungover at Oskar bar one afternoon, went to the restroom and returning to my stool --- I smashed my regular glasses because I forgot I laid them on the seat. Was awfully sunny that day and I was irritable, even moreso now, and about to head home - one of the waitresses i knew well gave me her extra pair of shades. This ridiculously over-sized pair of sunglasses a la hollywood 1972. Well, the other waitresses seemed to think this funny when i put them on and began to say oooooh, he's jao-paw (due to the sunglasses). I thought the story was over with that. Couple weeks later I was back at Oskar in the evening with a girl I'd been hanging out with and the waitresses walk up -- ooooh, it's jao-paw. I kinda rolled my eyes and said 'no, i'm not jao-paw.... stop saying that~' - but they were too busy laughing at their own joke - and this infection spread to the girl i was with who began calling me jao-paw. And it spread even further from there. eventually i just gave up.

In 2010 I got the Flashermac tour of Thammasat (what was left of the old campus?) and Khao San Road. Flash was kind enough to point out the bullet holes in several buildings around KSR where shootouts had taken place just a couple days prior (between redshirts and government). The tour is a good one if you ever get the opportunity. You may walk till your feet are hurting [ he's in pretty damn good shape for a guy born during the US Civil War ] -- but all joking aside...

Surprised to see this in the BP - the stories floating around gain more and more credibility. Surprised to hear of Drummond's imminent departure. I don't view Thailand with rose tinted glasses (the grotesque corruption, the informal caste system, the meanness behind some of those smiles -- make one wince), but I do have some affection for the place. Hope it isn't totally going to shit. Very interesting read. http://www.bangkokpo...umvit-shakedown ------ It was about 9pm on a weeknight in March last year, and Mat, an American business consultant, was trying to hail a taxi on Sukhumvit Soi 36 when he was stopped by six policemen on motorcycles.

http://www.topix.com/forum/world/united-kingdom/TSSN25C2ODVIE58M7 It's a topic on Westerners being murdered in Thailand, and the thread is from 2009. Those kind of listings will always get supercharged responses with vitriol, I imagine anywhere. And though I agree with your sentiment, it's not Americans. Note: Most Americans I know see Thailand as exotic and mysterious. Budhhists and ladyboys and potent women and strange food. 90% couldn't find it on a map for sure (sad and pathetic... I know). They'd be disappointed to walk into Siam Paragon or Central and see the same old starbucks, sizzlers, McDonald's, subways, and 7-11's that choke the American landscape.