OPINION

Liquor logic lost

Re: "Restaurants voice concern over new alcohol law", (Business, Oct 29).

I am now enured to this ongoing nonsense. If I want to buy a few beers "after hours", I visit our local corner store, which snorts at puffing bureaucrats. If I want something stronger, within the Thought Police's aegis, I plan accordingly before visiting our local supermarket.

The sales staff know me well enough after so long and no longer point frantically to purchase imposition bans and times, prominently displayed in the booze section. Now, two minutes after 11am, they seductively suggest that maybe I should supplement my bounty with other highly expensive strong waters.

But, alas, they remain unsuccessful, unless I am in a Mexican or Japanese frame of mind.

Wake up, Thailand, your dwindling, lucrative, and thirsty tourist base will continue to move to Vietnam or elsewhere due to this anachronistic law and other reasons, because in the past, you could not control the extended lunchtime activities of your own well-oiled civil service.

Moreover, you largely turned a blind eye to this law after it was enacted in the 1970s until a sterner, unelected administration took charge in the mid-2000s, which empowered it and the holier-than-thou PostBag temperance movement that I admit makes a strong point in terms of intemperate alcohol use and subsequent fatal consequences on the roads and elsewhere.

Vegan remix

Re: "Mercy when eating", "Absurd logic" and "Vegan future", (PostBag, Oct 30, 25 and 23).

I read with interest various posters' recent views on vegan food.

I discovered the other day that there is a variant in Thailand known as "Vegan J", which apparently excludes "pungent" flavours like garlic and onion, which seems to me to make the stuff quite boring.

My local vegan eatery does a cracking pineapple soup akin to the flavour of a good curry soup, which I have discovered is greatly enhanced with the introduction of some chicken.

So I've decided to create a new variant called "Vegan C" (short for carnivore), for vegan food that works really well with meat.

Post readers are welcome to experiment with their own ideas.

Northern integrity

Re: "Operators jittery over cyber scams", (Business, Oct 21).

In a time when scams are all the news and nobody trusts purchases on the internet, I would like to mention some very positive activities with commercial deals I have conducted in my district.

With Marketplace and Chiang Mai Buy, Sell and Swap, I have successfully purchased several items, including watches, a telephone, a jacket and boots, by sending money via the ATM to the seller on trust that they will post the item to my address.

I have not once been cheated, a great credit to the honesty and decency of the northern people.