PeterRS

"Airplane" was a great movie. Pity the clip ended before the co-pilot started leaking air and the stewardess had to give him a blow (up) job! My best line from the movie is when a stewardess (I know they should now be called flight attendants but that is how they they were described then) is offering tea and coffee. One 12-year old girl asks for coffee. "And how do you take your coffee, dear?" To which she responds, "Black, like my men!"

On a flight from Frankfurt to Seville in Spain in February last year with 205 aboard, the pilot took a toilet break. Almost as soon as he was out of the cockpit and the door closed, the co-pilot fainted due to a pre-exiting neurological condition that had not been picked up in the routine pilot medical checks. When the captain returned, his input requests that the door be opened failed 5 times. He eventually used an emergency code and took control of the aircraft. Since the autopilot was flying the plane at that point there was no danger, although in losing consciousness the co-pilot had knocked the controls. The captain decided to divert to Madrid where the co pilot was taken to hospital. It is not known how Lufthansa enabled the flight to continue. Presumaby it flew another first officer from Germany. What makes this scary is the remembrance of German Wings flight 9525 in March 2015 when the co-pilot locked the captain out of the aircraft and then deliberately committed suicde and mass murder by flying the plane into the Alps. As a result, aviation authorities in several countries mandated that there always be two individuals in a cockpit at any one time. If a pilot requires a toilet break, he will first be replaced by a senior purser. This was to ensure that the automatic entry code would never be disabled. Yet German airlines dropped this condition in 2017! The accident enquiry also recommended a loosening of doctor/patient confidentialilty in the case of pilots. It had been discovered that in discussions with his doctor, the German Wings co-pilot had discussed suicide. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/19/travel/lufthansa-flight-spain-no-pilot-report-intl-hnk

I have a Swiss friend who was diagnosed with prostate cancer aged 52 about 12 years ago. He elected for surgery and as a result changed his sexual requirements. He maintains he would be dead by now but for that diagnosis. A dear friend of many years in my home town died of prostate cancer aged 54. It is obvious from the above discussion that even the medical profession in different parts of the world may be uncertain of the benefits of screening other than at an older age. I think we should recall, however, that some personalities have died of prostate cancer at what might seem a relatively young age. The actor Gary Cooper aged 60. Guitarist Johnny Ramone aged 56. Writer and activist Eldridge Cleaver aged 52. Serial killer Carl Eugene Watts aged 52. Activist Stokey Carmichael aged 57. English soccer player and announcer Clive Charles aged 51. President of Ghana Kwame Nukruma aged 62. We are all responsible for our own lives. I'll therefore continue to get screened for prostate cancer whatever the benefits or otherwise. Note - that is not a recommendation for others to do so.

Your response makes several points which have absooutely nothing to do with my post. If you had read it clearly, you would have noted that I never pontificated about anything! I stated merely that there is a recommended minimum age for screening. I then put a question mark after 50 because I do not now what that age is (or did you fail to note the question mark?) I should have thought that obvious. Then you mention that prostate screening is not recommended routinely for anyone. Perhaps you can then answer why the best hospital in Bangkok, Bumrungrad Hospital, has prostate screening as part of its annual Executive Check-ups. That hospital recommends screening starts at 50. I do not know how good or otherwise the WebMD site is but it makes clear that "about 10% of men newly diagnosed with prostate cancer are under 55." Additionally it states "Around the world, there’s been an increase in early onset prostate cancer in men between 15 and 40 years old." It then adds about your country, "In the U.S., the average 5-year survival rate for prostate cancer is between 95% and 100% for men ages 40-80. For younger men, the 5-year survival rate is lower. For men ages 25-34, it’s 80%. For men ages 20-29, it’s 50%. For men ages 15-25, it’s 30%." https://www.webmd.com/prostate-cancer/prostate-cancer-in-younger-men

Agreed. But if Biden was suffering even from the early stages of prostate cancer while running for office a second time, not telling the public was disgraceful! Treated early, even in older men prostate cancer is curable. Don't those running for President have to issue a doctor's clean bill of health? I know Trump failed to do so in 2016 when his doctor eventually admitted Trump had dictated the letter the doctor wrote! But then Trump is Trump. Maybe - hopefully - he will drop down dead from a heart attack due to all the fast food he consumes.

I have no idea why but Nepalis are the largest South Asian Community in Japan - approx. 233,000. Many are students but there is also a large pool of Nepalese workers in low-paid unskilled jobs. Increasingly more educated Nepalis are filling jobs in the IT sector. The majority of nearly 30,000 live in Tokyo. No idea why you find so many gay guys other than the fact that Nepal is in the process of of legalising gay marriage.

Happens to us all now! And we don't even get a sexual thrill from it!

N95 masks? I think you are wrong. Let's also recall that while bird flu may be limited at present to birds and non-flying birdlike creatures - I can recall when Hong Kong culled hundreds of thousands of chickens due to bird flu - serious illnesses do spread from animals to humans. The clear example here was SARS in 2003. That was first discovered in Hong Kong and was traced to a visitor from Guangdong Province who had been sneezing in a hotel lift. Before then, it had appeared in China with some 300 or so infections and five deaths. It was then reported to the WHO. Although the number of deaths was relatively small - around 770 - and largely confined to Chinese communities in China, Hong Kong, Canada and Taiwan, there were many thousand non-lethal cases. I can recall returning to Bangkok on a TG flight and being very concerned about a passenger two rows in front of me who spent the entire flight coughing. It was no pandemic, but it caused a great deal of concern around the world. SARS was discovered in animals and had jumped the species barrier.

Oh! You clearly are soooo much younger than I thought! Have you learned how to work it now? 🤣

News today that former President Biden has an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has already spread to his bones. While we will all wish him well in such difficult times, there is one issue I find somewhat baffling. As I understand it, prostate cancer is a slow growing cancer. Even so, it is the second highest form of cancer death in the USA. As it is one of the most common cancers in men, generally men over a certain age (is it 50?) are recommended to have regular prostate cancer checks through either physical examination or simple PSA blood tests. How often did the White House doctors check his for this cancer? How did the cancer develop so quickly? Surely it had to have been identified at least in an early stage when he had his last White house medical check. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-prostate-cancer-symptoms-treatments/

Yet as a conciliator, Biden did not have a clean record. After the shambles of the Robert Bork nomnation for the Supreme Court under Reagan, there was a lot of pressure on Bush I to ensure his nominee to replace Justice William Brennan sailed through the process. David Soutar, a judge with a great deal of experience at several levels, won the seat by acclamation. Yet within a year the civil rights icon on the Court, Thurgood Marshall, announced he was standing down. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas as "the best person for the job", a description that has come to haunt him as much as Thomas. Based on his extensive inexperience Thomas clearly was very far from the best person. But he was black and an ultra-conservative and Bush and his cohorts pressed ahead. The nomination process was a near shambles. A former exacutive who had worked under him came before the Senate Committee, Professor Anita Hill, and accused him of sexual harassment. There were three other ladies waiting outside the court to back up Hill's claim. Professor Hill took a lie detector test and passed. To give Thomas time to refute the allegations, he was given a day before exonerating himself before the Committee. I happened to be living in Tokyo at that time and was having supper with friends that evening but we were riveted on the television to see how Thomas responded. Instead fo rebutting Ms. Hill's claims, Thomas resorted merely to what can only be described as a vicious angry rant against a system that failed "uppity blacks" like him. I turned to my friends and misquoted Shakespeare, "Methinks he doth protest too much!" Bush had been warned by his Attorney General that any attempt to replace one of the most revered liberal Justices with an ultra-conservative idealogue with little experience could backfire, just as the Bork nomination had backfired on Reagan. After hearing Thomas's vituperation, the Committee failed to call the three other women to back up Ms. Hill's claim, and Thomas was voted in as a Justice by a very narrow margin. The Chairman of that Judiciary Committee was -Joe Biden. Given the degree of controversy, I do not believe that committee led by Biden should have approved the Thomas nomination. It was a prime example of Biden the conciliator and it backfired with serious consequences, even if we only take into consideration the examples of Thomas's ethics violations in recent years. That the US has a system where Justices are political appointees, where there are no stringent ethics rules for Justices and, worse, that Justices are on the Court for life is, in my view, some form of madness. Either there should be a mandatory retirement age like the UK, or the appointment should be for a fixed term, like a President although for considerably longer.

In which media outlet was that quoted?

Since I stopped going to gay venues in 2019 . . .

I think the basic problem in the USA is that the vast majority of the population neither travel outside the USA nor have much interest in what happens outside the USA. That is why too much faith is paid to Congressmen and Senators - and to a certain extent Presidents and their teams - whom, people believe, know more than them. If only they realised the truth! The USA has made so many foreign policy mistakes since WWII, there are many experts around the world, not a few legal, who believe that people like McNamara and Kissinger should be tried for genocide. Kissinger's record, despite the spin he and his company worked hard to create, in many parts of the world is responsible for many millions of deaths. As McNamara admitted in his 'mea culpa' book, he and his Presidential colleagues "thought" they were doing right in Indo-China! Britain's Tony Blair also "thought" he was doing right by backing Bush II in the Gulf War. Like McNamara he finally offered a public apology. I don't recall Bush II ever apologising for anything, not even 9/11! Undoubtedly the mega-mistake was Afghanistan. I seem to recall that the withdrawal had in fact been agreed by the Trump administration. If so, Biden was left with a big problem. The way he went about it, though, was disastrous, not least for the Afghans who had taken a hugely risky gamble wth their lives to help the USA and the other alllied powers. I know from the arguments in the UK, that the way the withdrawal occurred and its speed was a huge folly. Why did the USA keep open the Kabul airport when the air base at Bagram was far better defended and far more suited to a mass evacuation? The USA secretly withdrew its large number of troops and handed the base back to the government in Kabul on July 2. Yet the Afghan governement troops could not hold it and the Taliban took over on 15 August. I have yet to see any logical reason why it was not kept in US hands and used for the evacuation. And as in the UK, many Afhghans who had filed the relevant paperwork to ensure their evacuation never got approval. The US civil servants were inundated and the process hideously slow. I happen to have spent my life in a business that deals with deadlines. We know two years agead of time what must happen on a certain date and a certain time. Our planning is geared up to ensuring that all along the way we meet a very extenisve series of secondary deadlines. We never once failed to meet a major deadline! Biden's people had more than 18 months - much of it clearly wasted. He could easily have used his Executive powers to speed up the Immigration process. He didn't. The fact is that the Taliban had not been beaten. Nor had they submitted to foreign demands. They merely realised that the best way of achieving their ends was partially to withdraw and make it seems as though this was permanent. Then they nodded ther heads and told all who would listen they had changed. The USA was totally taken in by the Taliban - as of course all the world now knows. The counter-argument I have read is that this could have resulted in mass attemped evacuations. I find little validity in this. The US and its alllies had a very specific duty to get its front line troops out. It got some. It left many behind. And the evacuation itself was somewhat similar to that in Cambodia nearly half a century earlier - all last-minute and virtually unprepared for. Israel/Palestine is another mega-disaster. Instead of being statesmanlike, lambasting Hamas and offering sympathy to israel, by not sitting on the fence at the outset and making known his own absolute support for Israel at every turn, he alienated much of the world. Certainly Israel deserved a lot more than sympathy after the Hamas attacks. But continuuing for so long to agree with israel's position and to back a murderer and crook like Netanyahu made it all worse. And when we know that nearly 50,000 Palestinians have been murdered, many women and children, and the remainder are close to starvation due to Israel's actions, and that the Gaza strip will require many billions to become remotely habitable again, Biden's backing has backfired spectacularly. You could count Ukraine as one of his partial successes but not when you consider that Ukraine's first requests and needs were met only after very, very long delays. I blame Biden for this. He has always regarded himself as the great conciliator. In times of war, time is crucial. Had he been faster off the mark and used his Executive powers, Ukraine might have been better off than it now is. I can't speak much for the situation within the USA, but the appointment of Merrick Garland was a mega-disaster. That this judge moved at a pace slower than a snail to nail Trump for his many excesses was a complete disaster. Trump could well have been in a far worse legal position in the run up to the election and the volume of his crimes might just have persuaded some of his on-the-fence supporters not to vote for him. And for Biden to sit back without pressing Garland at every turn to 'get moving fast' on Trump will not be a positive in his legacy. The President leads a team. He is responsible for the team. He failed most of his team and he failed most of the Americna people - in my view.

Agreed. But he had no agenda because he really did not expect to win. When Hillary blew it, he had to make one up very quickly and depended on others to feed him his policy nuts. Then he realised that he'd picked a group of idiots whose only error was they did not like him or what he was doing. So he started on the "You're fired!" trail. This time he absolutely knew he would wipe the shithouse with Biden. Not even Harris was going to affect his second coronation. So he had his plans and his allies all lined up behind him, ready to wipe his ass whenever he wished. How anyone in the Democratic Party seriously thought Biden could actually beat Trump needs a huge investigation. I can't speak for his policies within the US, but his actions overseas were desperately poor and basically ineffective. In the eyes of this outside observer, he was a rotten President. One might hope that some intelligent person would get their legal semi-automatic out of its case, send the secret service in all wrong directions and end the Trump turmoil once and for all. The problem with that, though, is Vance may end up an even more idiotic and senseless leader. The USA willingly got itself into this mess. They must now suffer the consequences.

I'd have thought that was a great idea. Then at least the boys might at least dance energetically. From my last bar hopping days, most of the guys seemed to care little about dancing or nothing other than chatting to each other - and their phones

Totally agree. Not only do they help others either planning a trip to the a Nang area or they may spur some to consider Da Nang whereas it has not been on their radar before. I have bared my soul a few times in this forum and it is amazing how understanding members here are.

Fair point, but not easy to distinguish in the dark when there seemed to be no light in the taxi! I found over many years that this only works if you are in one or two other countries - unless you have the conversion already in your head. On one of my many round-the-world trips, I found myself in seven countries. I would have a good idea of the Thai baht values in £ and US$, but with Euros, Hungarian forint, Danish kroner, Japanese ¥ and South Korean won I could not have survived without constantly checking exchange rates. And honestly, I have no idea how any young Thai who has never travelled to another country will get the hang of Vietnamese currency without constantly checking. Most other Asian currencies are relatively simple. Not so Vietnam with all those zeros.

My nomination from NPR - Pope meets Sinner As if the Pope does not meet sinners every day of the week LOL (Sinner in this case was of course the Italian Jannick Sinner, the World No. 1 mens tennis player, and the Pope is a tennis fan. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/15/nx-s1-5399048/pope-leo-jannik-sinner-italian-open

The XEC variant of covid19 is back in Thailand with more than 71,000 infected and 19 deaths this year - so far. The XEC is a variant of the Omicron strain first identified in Germany in June last year. Numbers in Thailand spiked significantly during the Songkran period. Symptoms appear to be similar to those of the other strains of covid. As with that original covid strain, wearing masks, maintaining distance, frequent washing of hands and self isolation if symptoms appear are recommended. I for one will start to wear masks again. https://www.nationthailand.com/news/general/40050055 This is old news worldwide but there had been few if any cases in Thailand until recently. An article in the Yale Medicine website dated December 20 last year suggests that although it is now the most common covid strain, indications are that symptoms are no more severe than earlier ones. Another article suggests booster vaccinations are advised, but I do not know of any medical facility in Thailand yet offering them. https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/3-things-to-know-about-xec-the-latest-covid-strain

I recall my first trip to Istanbul when there were something like 600,000 Turkish lire to $1. Having travelled extensively to many countries in the world I was very used to different currencies. A taxi back to the Hyatt hotel cost something like 5.4 million. It did not surprise me, although it should have, that the driver did not take me directly to the front door, instead stopping outside the entrance gate. I handed him a 10 million note. In a flash he turned around with a 5 million note in his hand and said I still owed him 400,000. I was certain I had given him 10 million, but assumed he had to be right. Having to count all those bloody '0's on the notes every time I paid for something was getting to me. So I coughed up. It was only when walking the short distance to the front of the hotel that I went through the transaction again in my head and realised I had been 'had'! Being conned out of little more than $8 was merely annoying and I was a lot more careful when another taxi tried the same trick. But when someone has spent all of a young life dealing with basically one currency, working out the Thai value of a seeming sackful of Vietnamese dong can't be easy!

To my thinking a gogo bar in which the boys are fully dressed is not a gogo bar!

You clearly exude so much charm and charisma! 🤣

I apologise. In my post I had meant to concentrate more on the problems i had experienced when starting out running my first company after a long period as an employee. I had not intended for you to respond to each little item as that is essentially your business. Still, I wish you the best of luck - in business and romance. I might perhaps add that when I arrived in Asia, I was frantically busy for my first couple of years and only had the very occsional passing sexual fling - apart from starting week-end trips to Bangkok. Certainly no time for romance. And then as if in a flash I saw him. A young man whom you would not call beautiful but who had tremendous charisma and personality, oozed charm, with a wide circle of friends and loved by almost everyone. That he should then fall for me I felt was staggering. But there was a problem. He lived in Japan and I met him on only my third visit when I was not at all used to the highways and byways of life in that country. However, he was essentially working freelance, spoke fluent English (his grandmother had been a Filippina) and wanted to see me again. Thereafter once a month I took the regular Friday Pan Am flight to Tokyo (still flying then and the tickets were cheap!), returning on the Sunday evening. I also took a 10 day holiday there and he came to spend 3 weeks with me in Hong Kong. Within six months we had started talking about finding a way to live together. And then it all came crashing down. No need to explain why. Faults on both sides, but I eventually came to realise many more on my side than his. He had been my first real love and he awoke in me a passion I had never experienced before. I was heartbroken. Yet I should have realised that with my work schedule and his living 3,000km away, whatever chance there might have been of being together was ultra-slim. It took me a good 8 months before i really got over that break-up. Yet some years later, he got in touch with me. He hoped I did not still feel angry and that we could perhaps become friends. By this time he was living much closer to me and we did meet for a lovely dinner. A lot was said and a chapter was closed. We continued to meet from time to time. He was very sadly to die quite young and i was pleased that his partner invited me to the funeral. I still think of him and smile every time.

I was under the impression that the 777X aircraft which form part of this package were firm orders from QR a couple of years ago.