PeterRS

Apologies if this is old news for some but the popular - at least it was for many years, the more so as it was relatively close to the University and the 2-for-1 nights were certainly busy - Chiang Mai sauna House of Male has closed. I'm not sure if it happened last year or earlier. It had moved to new premises in 2021. So it joins so many of Chiang Mai's established gay venues that no longer exist. Once a veritable gay mecca Chiang Mai now has so little for the gay tourist apart from shopping and sightseeing - and Adam's Apple! Its one sauna Club One Seven is located in a lovely old teak house right on the river but to the south of town close to the bridge over to the huge Centara Hotel. In addition to private rooms it has a gym and a pool. According to the website Gay-in-Chiang-Mai it hosts naked nights four times a month. In addition to the sauna is has a Lanna style guest house. Whether it is now actually a guest house with a sauna or a sauna with a guest house attached I am not sure. But it is listed as being very gay friendly. I remember many happy evenings at House of Male over decades enjoying sex and simple meals and a wide range of drinks at the bar/cafe. Sad that it is no more. I have read about a branch of the Kaikan bath house somewhere in the city. Hopefully Chiang Mai residents can add more to this news.

Friends of mine are regular visitors at Panpuri onsen in Gaysorn Plaza. it's more expensive but they tell me it is usually busy with a lot of good looking buffed Thais and a few westerners. Like Kaikan the aim is to make contact to meet later, not to play around in the onsen. I have been a few times to another typical Japanese spa - Yunomori on Sathorn Soi 10 Sathorn. It is beautifully laid out and seems to attract mostly young and middle aged Thais, although i have seen some westerners there. I am told there is sometimes some playing around in the steam room, but have never seen it myself.

My apologies. @vinapu is quite correct.

Another 787 problem a couple of days ago when fire broke out soon after take-off on the left engine of a Delta jet flying from LAX to Atlanta. Video here -

He should never have been permitted anywhere near that room. I have annual MRI's at a public hospital. Not only have I to take off everything before putting on the hospital gown and entering the room, no one else is allowed anywhere near it at any time. I am also surprised that when you are given an MRI, you are also given to hold in one of your hands a small circular pump. Squeeze that and the machine automatically stops. Everyone being given an MRI is instructed how to use it prior to the procedure. Why neither the patient nor the technicians used that totally beats me. On the other had, I suppose, that punp may not actually switch off the magnets. I just do not know.

1. I constantly kick myself that I could have attended one of the Kleiber/Domingo performances when La Scala visited Japan. The three-opera season also included one of my favourites, Verdi's Simon Boccanegra with a stellar cast led by Claudio Abbado. With ticket prices so expensive I could only attend one. At that time I was much less aware of Kleiber's brilliance. C'est la vie! I only saw Jon Vickers once and that was in the Royal Opera's Peter Grimes. A shattering performance I will always remember! Incidentally, another reason Vickers would not sing the role of Tannhauser was his very deep Christian faith. He believed the character was immoral! 2. I consider Dame Margaret Price had one of the greatest soprano voices of the century. It was sometimes called "liquid gold". And one of the saddest is that there is so little on vdo available. In addition to the full Kleiber Tristan there is this youtube audio of the Liebestod at the end just before she dies. Is there any better version? I believe not. When he was invoved in casting the recording, he always wanted his good friend Dame Margaret with whom he had not only worked with but knew well as both lived in Munich. DGG executives did not like the idea, but it was a masterstroke. 3. Very few people could understand Kleiber. But as I noted above, he was adored more than any other conductor by orchestral musicians and singers - and indeed those who attended his very few performances. It is thought that he was always trying to be as good as his conductor father Erich Kleiber whom be worshipped, and never felt he achieved that. Yet great though Erich was, his son outshone him. And it may have been that realisation that all but made him a reclusive figure during the last ten years of his life prior to his death aged 74.

SInce the owner is Chinese and from reports quite a number of customers are Chinese, I suspect word of mouth alone should result in it becoming quite busy.

There are still many who believe that the three massive overnight bombings of the city by American and UK aircraft towards the end of the war were in fact a war crime. Many believed that Churchill intended to destroy what was a cultural landmark of major significance in retaliation for the Nazi bombing of Coventry earlier in the war. It was argued that there was little of military significance in the city apart from some railway junctions. I'm delighted you included Fabio Luisi's rendition of the Nozze di Figaro overture. He is one of the true major conductors of today. Some years ago he was hired by New York's Metropolitan Opera as the potential successor to James Levine. He would have been perfect. But the Met's GM, the perfectly dreadful Peter Gelb who should never have been given the job, decided as he has throughout his reign that he wanted someone younger. SInce we are discussing music and opera in particular, one of the finest orchestras in the world is the Dresden Staatskapelle. I am thrilled to have heard it several times on tour in Taipei, the latest with Thielemann conducting Wagner and Brahms. In my earlier post I mentioned Carlos Kleiber. A notoriously difficult conductor for managements (who generally failed to realise that he was a deeply private, sensitive and insecure personality) although utterly adored by singers, he was hired by Deutsche Grammophon for a CD recording of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in Dresden. He wanted a more youthful voice for isolde and chose the glorious Welsh soprano Dame Margaret Price, even though she could never have sung it in a full live performance. The result is magnificent. But Kleiber was unhappy (not unusual for him) and he ended up walking out of the recording before it was complete. He then threatened to sue DGG if they ever tried to release any of it. Fortunately for posterity, the engineers had been recording all the rehearsals as well as the 'takes'. In the end DGG did release the full opera and Kleiber did not sue. Amazingly the full opera is available on youtube. Remarkably, although the accolades for Kleiber as the finest conductor of the 20th century continue, in his lifetime it is extraordinary to realise he only conducted 400 opera performances and less than 100 symphony concerts. Thankfully there are a few videos available, including this of Beethoven's 7th Symphony with Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra. Many regard it as the finest ever recorded. But even for those who would not dream of sitting through more than a few minutes, do tr\y and watch the first five. See how Kleiber is unike almost every other conductor. He is truly living that music. How I wish I could have seen and heard him conduct.

Back in my first years in Hong Kong, the movie "Somewhere in Time" with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour was a massive hit in the city. It ran for months and became the longest running movie ever up to that time, even eclipsing Bruce Lee movies. Time! A friend asked me a question the other day that I have been asked a number of times before. If you could turn back the clock to any date and period in history, which would you choose - and why? The first time I was asked this a few years ago I assumed he meant in my llfetime and I had no hesitation in saying the first years I discovered Bangkok with its gogo bars and later the early saunas. Only later I realised the question referred to historical times. And all our memories of what had occurred thereafter would be erased - other than the fact that we knew we were gay. At first the great age of the debauched Roman Emperors, notably Tiberius and Nero, seemed attractive until the deep love of Hadrian and Antinous appeared to usher a period when love transcended lust. Would feelings have played such a large part in my life back in time? I suppose in many ages there was not much else for the well-off to do - and I would only go back in time if I had a certain income to allow me to enjoy myself. I also wonder if I would have known about the often ghastly lives that the majority of populations lived. Could I have survived as a dandy in England living as I wished and enjoying life and all its pleasures especially at a variety of sex clubs at the start of the Industrial Revolution in England knowing that most children as young as 8 had to work often as much of 16 hours a day? Probably only as much as I enjoy today knowing that we live in an era of political thieves and liars, climate change which everyone knows about but about which those in power do all but nothing, wars over religion which are still being fought as they have been for millennia, and massive economic inequality which is leading us down a series of dangerous paths. I'd rather not go back.

I have been to quite a few opera performances in my time and never thought about the tradition of applauding the conductor as he enters the orchestra pit. I think it is partly a mark of respect, in just the same way the audience applaud when a conductor walks to the podium in a symphony concert. I always do it, but I think it is also an ideal way of getting the audience to become perfectly quiet before an opera/concert starts. I actually do not like applause after a particularly well sung aria as this slows down the dramatic action. Nor am I a fan of applauding as the curtain rises just because the scenery is particularly impressive. I think applause should wait till the end of each Act. As @unicorn points out, although the designers' work is finished by then, on opening night all on the production team will appear on stage after the singers and take their own applause. I love two videos of the Richard Strauss opera Der Rosenkavalier, one conducted by Herbert von Karajan and the other by arguably the finest conductor of the 20th century Carlos Kleiber. Both enter the pit to applause but then do not pause: they start the orchestra virtually at the height of the applause. They get straight into the orchestral prelude which, prior to the curtain rising, depicts two of the main characters making passionate love in bed. It concludes with four quick "upthrusts" on the horns - and what that signifies is perfectly obvious! On a side note, a dozen years ago I spent three lovely days in Dresden just to attend a Rosenkavalier performance at the renowned Semper Opera. This was mostly destroyed during the war in the massive air raids on Dresden and it took the city 40 years to reconstuct it. It was where Strauss was Music Director for many years and many of his operas were given their premiere, although not Rosenkavalier. The acoustics are superb. Just next to the hotel where we stayed is the glorious Frauenkirche which was aso partially destroyed during the Dresden bombing. The interior is superb. A burst of colour hits you as you enter. The exterior of the Semper Opera The glorious interior of the Dresden Frauenkirche

I hope so. I have flown something like 8 million kms throughout a long life and career and the worst I have experienced have been aborted landings - for perfectly good reasons. The nearest I might have come to a crash was on one RTW trip in August 1998. Through the company's travel department I had been booked on Cathay Pacific, British Airways and American. A couple of weeks before travel, they called me and said if I was prepared to make small detours, they could get me a ticket upgraded to first class for the same price. This was on Singapore. Swissair and Delta. Well, that for me was a no brainer. Having completed my business in Europe, I backtracked from London to Geneva to pick up the regular morning Swissair MD11 aircraft for the flight to JFK. This was the first they had fitted with what we now take for granted on flights - video on demand. The flight was great. Roughly 10 days later, that exact same aircraft, this time flying the return sector from JFK to Geneva, crashed off Nova Scotia with the loss of all lives. One of the major causes of the crash was faulty wiring in the video on demand system which had led to a catastrophic fire. That could easily have occurred 10 days earlier, in which case I would have ended up at the bottom of the ocean. Sadly 229 passengers and crew did. But that thought never once put me off flying.

I don't have Tik Tok. Now I know why!

You have a landmark building that looks impressive and has become something of an icon. It is also a hotel with far too many rooms requiring queueing for almost everything and a galaxy of ordinary tourists gazing at you as they watch you swimming in the infinity pool 56-odd floors up. You pay little attention to the floods of complaints about the hotel's problems. It's doing it's job. It's putting Singapore on some map or other. But it still remains only #27 on Tripadvisor's list of top Singapore hotels, with several four star hotels above it. And fake 5-star reviews are still to be found on the site! Plus the nightly rate is around 100% more than other similar 5-star hotels. Forget it is you are thinking of booking. So what has the Singapore government decided to do with its Marina Bay Sand Hotel? Spend $8 billion to expand and renovate it. Well, hold on the renovation bit. Because the $8 billion is going to be spent on an extension. Not a fourth linked tower, but a totally new 55-storey tower all on its own which broke ground last Tuesday - and only a short distance from the original. Photos: Satdie Architects The new tower adds 570 more suites, presumably for all the Chinese and other Asians who come to gamble at the original's casino, which had planned to forbid Singaporens entry! Now SIgaporeans can purchase a daily pass for S$150 (US$117) or an annual pass for S$3,000 (US$2,336). Non-Singaporeans presumably enter for free. Not surprisingly, a lot of Singaporeans dislike the design of the new tower. "It sticks out like a sore thumb" is a common view whereas others compare it to a giant dehumidifier. The 87-year old Israeli architecht disagrees. "When it’s all said and done, people will feel it’s always been there,” Safdie argued. “And they will love it as much as they love this building, if not more, because I think the sum total of the two together is greater than the individual parts.” Hmmm! Time will no doubt tell. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/16/style/singapore-marina-bay-sands-expansion

I totally agree - but that was not the point of the post which was that Netanyahu nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Price is nothing but a disgusting joke.

In my earlier post I had suggested Epstein might have had his list "in his mind". I now withdraw that. That list must have had not only names of important people but the dates and places where he "helped" them. It would be impossible for all that detail to be in his head. Only a few key names with the relevant details, perhaps. But as I also stated, he was at the time of his death only guilty in the eyes of the public and the Manhattan DA. The legal process would likely have taken years. Who knows how many prosecutors and judges might be/have been on the list? We know as fact that he used people. That list is his key to continuing "success" with leverage over those from whom he himself needed help. Its possible destruction when he was only on the first step of the legal process is so unlikely has to be fiction.

So true. And is it not the case that most of those who claim to be Christians and who time after time quote passages from the bible, really know very little else of the totality of what it preaches? Equally, they take as gospel sayings that have come down throough millennia, not written down but spoken from one generation to the next. And we all know when tales are told, that every retelling has a variation, to the point where eventually no one really has much clue about the original.

In 2016 Vance opposed Trump in his election bid. Shows just how flakey the man is.

I am puttng this in the Gay Thailand forum but only because it involves sex. A major sex scandal in fact. It seems that a respected monk from a temple in Central Thailand has disappeared. Investigations by the bib led them to a woman who informed them she had slept with a considerable number of monks and then blackmailed them to keep the liaisons private. A search of her home led to the discovery of several mobile phones with tens of thousands of compromising photos and videos. These were not only of the missing monk but of several senior Buddhist figures. The invesitgations then led them to many temples. Although the monk at the heart of the scandal has disappeared, the woman has been arrested. Some of her clients were clearly not monks as one of the "gifts" she received was a Mercedes-Benz SLK200. She had also depositied 395 milliion baht into her account over the last three years. As as result of the ongoing investigation which has been at the centre of media attention in the country, at least nine abbots and senior monks have either been defrocked or dismissed. More here - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/17/monks-behaving-badly-the-sex-scandal-rocking-thailands-buddhist-clergy-ntwnfb

Televangelism was, i believe, born in the USA and it is in that country where it is most commonly practised. In the USA, Christ and Christianity is thrust down the throats of most citizens, even those who are immigrants, from the moment they get anywhere near school. SInce 1957 the words "In God We Trust" have been written on US currency. I recall one of the better US golf players telling the world in a TV interview after he'd won a tournament that his wife read part of the bible each day to their unborn child! I've heard of mothers playing recordings of Mozart, but never before actually reading from the scriptures! Even the national Anthem has these words - Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto: "In God is our trust": Not many remember that the British National Anthem, now usually sung in just two verses used to have six, the words to the last of which are - Lord, grant that Marshal Wade May by thy mighty aid Victory bring; May he sedition hush, and like a torrent rush Rebellious Scots to crush! God save the King! This was written and being sung long after the union of the Scottish and English crowns in 1603 (when in the absence of any children by Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots son James VI also became James 1 of England) and the union of the two parliaments in 1707. But the British do not have the same almost universal attraction to Christianity and certainly it is much more in the background. In the USA I am sure many who go to church and many who believe the televangelist con men do so out of genuine belief in the hereafter and that this will result in a better life after death. Decades ago I dispensed with the idea of heaven, hell and purgatory. I believe these were concepts to keep the masses in check. But a gazillion Americans still fervently believe at least in the existence of a "heaven" where they will once again meet up with their deceeased loved ones.

1. The root of the problem, surely, is that the democracy practised in many parts of the world is totally f--ked. Democracy hardly exists. Leaders are not elected on the basis of a majority vote or even on platforms which they then put into practice. Everyone lies! For some decades we have been in a period of change. I do not believe politics was really a major concern of the average citizen even after two World Wars. The system ran in its own way as it had almost always done. Whether a result of the long Cold War, of better education, or whatever, many more individuals now feel a right to be involved in the political process. But they have little clue what that process actually involves other then going into a booth to vote. They don't do their research. I think it was Thomas Jefferson who talked about the requirement for a knowledgeable electorate. He certainly did say, "To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpertual debt." I wonder how many Americans in the last few decades are even aware of that particular quote. 2. On which topic, in the USA but less in some other countries where there are quite strict spending limits in elections, as @stevenkesslar notes it doesn't matter which party you belong to the rich essentially control everything. Thanks to its politically biased Supreme Court, the rich can put in any amount of cash they want into elections of the candidates who will look after theit interests. And as also pointed out, fear means that neither party will piss them off by doing what almost everyone wants by raising their taxes. In an interview with the UK's Guardian newspaper about 15 or so years ago Warren Buffet stated he paid 17.7% compared to the 32.9% average paid by his office staff.

I don't see Epstein's murder - if such it was - as a warning. Who would it have warned? It was a massive relief. Epstein held in his mind, and perhaps even in a document somewhere not yet found, a very long list of names of prominent people for whom he had been a pimp. He had brought them underage girls. Some of these names we believe to have been leaked. But that list must include hundreds of the rich, famous and powerful. They are now breathing more easily due to his death.

Time on my hands! Ha! I work. The time I spend here is a very small part of my long days. And I have as much right to downvote any post as @Department_Of_Agriculture.

I suspect we will never know. When committed to jail, he was in a cell for two people. On the night of his death, his cellmate had been moved out for some inexplicable reason. Guards had been instructed to check Epstein's cell every 30 minutes. That was not done at all on the night he died. For 8 hours no guard checked his cell. Allegedly the two guards fell asleep and then forged documents. The two cameras in front of Epstein's cell both malfunctioned that night. Epstein's body was discovered at around 6.30 am. Again breaking protocol, no photo was taken of the body or the possibiity that it might be a crime scene. At 1.8m tall and weighing 85 kgs, the likelihood that Epstein could successfully commit suicide tied to the lower part of the bunk using part of a sheet has always been the subject of controversy. There were longer and stronger materials available in that cell. Epstein's was the first suicide in the Manhattan Correctional Centre since 1998. After a four-hour autopsy, the Medical Examiner ruled suicide by hanging as the cause of death. Yet Epstein's lawyers sent a pathologist to attend the autopsy. He did not agree with the findings, citing the breakage of some bones in the neck. Although this can sometimes happen in suicide, it is assumed far more likely to be a result of homicide by strangulation. After the death was confirmed, Trump made a speech basically blaming the Clintons and that he wanted a full investigation. Attorney General William Barr said he was "appalled" by Epstein's death while in custody. Yet the guards who totally failed in their duty were given a deferred prosecution deal. They should have gone to jail. They did not. Epstein's lawyers and his brother Mark reject the possiblity of suicide. When his lawyers met him on the day of his death, he was still relatively upbeat. He still had a bail appeal hearing coming up and then perhaps a lengthy delay prior to a trial. There was no reason for him to take his own life at that particular time in the justice process. Investigations were not just confined to New York. In France, one of Epstein's associates Jean-Luc Brunuel was arrested and charged with the rape of minors. He too allegedly committed suicide under circumstances that remain unclear. My money is on murder!

If there is one thing I recall from my early years in Hong Kong it is the tensions between North and South Korea. Having to visit Seoul many times in the 1980s meant coping with martial law, the worst effect of which was the midnight curfew. Be on the streets thereafter could - and for some did - mean being shot. Martial Law had been declared in 1960 by President Syngman Rhee, the strongman hated anti-nationalist imposed on South Korea by the United States. Since the end of the Korean War, the North had constantly taunted South Korea with endless illegal provocations. One of the most aggressive was the downing of a South Korean airliner en route from Baghdad with an intermediate stop in Bangkok in 1987. A bomb placed in the luggage racks caused the 707 to crash into the Andaman sea with the loss of 125 lives. But the most shattering event for South Koreans had nothing to do with North Korea. It occurred on 29 November 1979, my first year in Asia. At a cabinet meeting, Rhee's successor, the equally strong-man repressive dictator Park Chung-hee who had been in power for 18 years was holding a cabinet meeting. During the meeting, the Chief of his Presidential Security Guard shot and killed him. The assassin, Kim Jae-gyu, had grown up with Park in the same town and was a long time friend. He had even helped Park seize the Presidency in a coup and supported measures to enable him to abolish elections and tighten his grip on power. The reasons for the murder have never been entirely clear. Along with some others, Kim was quickly found guilty and hanged. Even though South Koreans are split on Park's legacy - the dictator who jailed, murdered and tortured to stay in power or the initiator of South Korea's economic miracle - the man who assassinated him is still regarded as a traitor. Now 46 years later Kim's family wants a retrial. Like Park, he is a polarising figure. Some see him as a ruthless killer blinded by power and ambition; others as a patriot who sacrificed himself to get rid of a dictator. Ironically, his retrial started yesterday, the same day as recently impeached President Yoon Suk-yeol went on trial on the same charge that sent Kim to the gallows. Much longer story here - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr5vp4q59lgo