PeterRS

In addition Cathay Pacific has opened all its seats on most flights in October for redemption using standard mileage awards.

Is there anything to do with 'Gay Bangkok' in the lists? Interesting though it is, this seems more suited to The Beer Bar thread where many more are likely to read it.

A wonderful post. Beautifully written with great honesty. You are never boring and always provide a different view from most of those expressed here. I'm not sure if you enjoy classical music but some of your history reminds me of Britain's finest pianist Sir Stephen Hough. Deeply religious as a teenager, he believed he was destined to become a priest. Music was his other passion and when he won one of the world's top piano competitions aged 21, he abandoned ideas to become a priest and instead became a concert pianist. Although gay he remained celebate well into his 30s. Signing autographs after a concert in New York, a young professional Asian man asked about future concerts in London. They arranged to meet there a month or so later. They have been a couple for around a quarter of a century. Hough is an extraordinary individual. In addition to being a pianist with more than 60 CDs to his name, he is also an accomplished painter, poet, composer and author. The Economist magazine named him one of 20 living polymaths. I thorougly recommend everyone to read his first book The FInal Retreat. It's a small slim volume about a priest at conflict with his views about the Church. He is a middle-aged gay man who tries to face up to Church teaching and increasing sexual desire. It is not about the recent scandals in the Catholic Church. It's more a personal journey which is troubling, depressing and . . . well, I cannot give the ending away. I hope those not interested in the subject will forgive my quoting from one chapter. Many focus on sexuality and gay sex. The focus here is on the priesthood. "I look back over my priesthood – twenty-five years, my anniversary is next year. How pointless it all seems, as if I had sailed to a desert island after my ordination and begun to live some weird fantasy life there about which no-one knew anything or cared. My memories are like shells, dry and empty and dead, the tide creeping in and out and slowly reducing them to sand. Blank squares in a out-of-date diary. "What did I think my life would be like after I was ordained? I'd iived around priests since infancy so I knew the public face, but I didn't know about the private failures and the sheer monotony of their lives. Failure: 'the omission of expected or required action', as one dictionary puts it. Interesting that it's defined as a passive fault ... omission. Jobs have goals, the achievement of which is their very definition. To be a pilot is to fly a plane. To be a bricklayer is to lay bricks. Priesthood is infallibly 'effective', so the theologians tell us ... but underneath theology's theoretical confidence is the constant undertow of practical failure. We fail to lift spirits or heal souls. We answer big questions with little lies. With a few exceptions we fail to make a difference, week after week. Omission is the invisible footprint behind every step."

Thank you.

Anyone got any idea when the Ron Howard movie will find its way into Thai cinemas?

I'm the same as you - I have no idea apart from immediate friends. But as most readers are perfectly well aware, working boys have their own network. They will know long before before anything mentioning the weather is posted on this site.

As I once wrote in another thread, Paul Kennedy's excellent book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers confirms this.

No doubt posting what might be a new event. As I have stated and no one has disputed, October is the height of the rainy season and Thailand floods every year, especially in Isaan. I fail to see how this is news to anyone - as it certainly would have been given the horrendous damage resulting from the floods in 2011.

I totally realise this. But flooding EVERY year is severe. It is always particularly more so when the tail end of a particularly bad typhoon hits Thailand as happened on Monday earlier this week. I witnessed those hours of heavy rain in Bangkok and it will have been much worse in Isaan. I feel badly for the farmers who were affected. But again I ask: has the flooding affected anyone who reads this Board more than the floods which happen every year at this time? Thankfully no flooding has been anywhere near as bad as the 2011 floods which affected tens of millions and caused US$46.5 billion in damages (World Bank estimate). In Bangkok I have a Thai friend whose home was so badly flooded the water was knee-deep for almost 2 months. Don Mueang airport had to be closed for more than 4 months. That had all started a couple of months earlier and the trigger was once again heavy typhoon rains int he north. With high tide in the Gulf of Thailand coming next month, many riverside hotels and businesses have already got sandbags at the ready.

Of course you are correct. But perhaps you can suggest how many working class guys living at sea level either read or contribute to this Board?

For goodness sake! It's the rainy season and every year the monsoon results in a great deal of rain in October. Why anyone should be surprised at heavy rains and occasional flooding in Bangkok totally beats me! And I totally fail to understand why it's newsworthy.

So true. I had an excellent guide who lived for part of each year in Dubai. His parents lived in Shiraz and for each of my four days in that city, he brought me a small fruit juice bottle of passable Shiraz wine made by his father. His only request was that I wash the bottles thoroughly before putting them in the hotel trash bin!

Finding a way round sanctions is not unusual. 4 years ago I spent a quite lovely 2 weeks in Iran. The country is stunningly beautiful and the people are so warm and generous. At that time Coca Cola was imported from Malaysia and lots of other allegedly banned goods imported from places like Dubai. Although I was from a country which imposes severe sanctions on the Iranian people, not one person was anything less than extremely hospitable. One morning I was so coffeed out from the free cups offered to me I simply had to start declining future offers. Most Iranians were perfectly happy to chat with me. The one thing I realised is that they have no real anger towards the west. But they all loathed the regime. They knew it was massively corrupt, even down to the Supreme Leader pocketing around $13 million in illegal gains daily. That many are now back on the streets in massive demonstrations against the regime is surely one mark of that loathing. I hope so much that this time they are successful and can start living more normal lives. Iran has a quite extraordinary history. Its people are extremely cultured and poetry is adored by most. Seeing the crowds reading poetry at the mausoleum in Shiraz to one of its most famous poets, Hafez, was very moving. It also has a rich cultural history in the arts, music and especially architecture. The huge main square in Esfahan is one of the most extraordinarily beautiful anywhere in the world.

WIth the XE currency converter presently showing 37.5, the Bangkok Post prediction might be a bit late. Looks like the rate will hit 38 by the end of this month. Lucky for some.

It's the rainy season! Does anyone NOT expect occasional flooding in Pattaya and Bangkok? The article is incorrect, though. What it fails to point out is that Monday's very heavy rain was not due to the monsoon. Rain during the summer monsoon period comes from the west or south west. Monday's was the result of the tail end of a serious typhoon hitting the country from the east. Earlier it had dumped a great deal of rainfall over central Vietnam. You cannot always trust what is written in some newspapers - and the Pattay Mail is hardly the most respected organ in the country for the quality of its news!

I can remember switching on the television just after I had arrived in San Francisco around 1986 or 87. On the screen was President Reagan's Surgeon General C. Everett Koop actually discussing HIV and AIDS at a time when the administration had remained silent on the issue for several of the early years. A devout conservative he finally put his medical knowledge above his conservative values. There he was on TV discussing means of transmission of the disease. He was particularly strong on the danger of transmission of HIV and other STDs as a result of rimming. Given the lack of action by the administration, I thought it extraordinary that Reagon's Surgeon General would actually come out with such gay sexual detail on public television.

In the UK he attended the spartan Gordonstoun School in the north of Scotland. This was founded by a German who left Germany in 1933.

You echo the sentiments of the 17th century French statesman Jean Baptiste Colbert. He wrote "If you enact a law and do not enforce it, you are condoning what you condemn."

I think your fact is very wrong. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal the Castro regime was responsible for 10,723 deaths from 1952 up to 2016. The dreadfully corrupt and in league organised crime President Batista's dictatorship having turned Cuba into a police state massacred more than 20,000 in 7 years. Many were first tortured in the most ghastly way imaginable. This is how TIME reported the American Bay of Pigs disaster at the time. "In the United Nations, U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson labored to explain to the world what was already self-evident: that the U.S. considered Castro a clear threat to hemisphere security and encouraged the Cuban exiles in their attempt to bring him down. Speaking with unusual intensity, Stevenson sought to accent the positive, reassuring Latin America in particular that the U.S. had no intention of reviving Yankee imperialism, but was acting in the interests of freedom after extreme, prolonged, unceasing provocation." So Batista's police state dictatorship represented "freedom". Just like Marcos murdering dictatorship in The Philippines, I expect. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/counting-victims-of-the-castro-regime-nearly-11000-to-date/ http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,897732-3,00.html

And who started this thread?????

They were basically German from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha because that was the title of Queen Victoria's German husband. Yet Queen Victoria herself was half German through her mother and spoke with a German accent all her life. It was George V who decided during World War 1 that a German name was hardly appropriate. He changed the name to Windsor, the castle outside London where the family spent much of its time. Even so, he had married Mary of Teck whose father was German. She cruise liner Queen Mary was named after her. It still remains at Long Beach California where for years it was a tourist attraction. Not to be forgotten is that one of Victoria's grandchildren became the Kaiser of Germany which was an enemy of the British during World War 1.

Yet again you leave out those in a committed partnership. The only major difference was getting to enjoy sex at different times of the day.

Another thread in this forum has become more one based on history. One poster likes to cherry-pick and discuss only what he considers historical facts that make his country look good. Yet virtually all countries carry frightful historical legacies. The massacre of entire civilisations in Central and South America by Spain and Portugal, for example, cannot merely be brushed aside. The treatment of indigenous peoples by Britain, Canada, Australia, the USA and others must not be forgotten. Slavery and colonisation resulted in the degrading of humanity on a humungous scale, and it was all to increase the profits of slave owners and colonial masters. Another issue that deserves discussion is raised in a perceptive article in today's The Guardian. This is based on extremely valid comments made by John Oliver in Last Week's Tonight Show. In it, Oliver tore into the theft of national artefacts from many colonised countries - and others just too weak to fend off the thieves. He cites a 2018 Report commissioned by the President of France which illustrates that over 90% of Africa's cultural heritage now resides in major museums' "sprawling collections of essentially 'stolen goods'". Add in Latin America, the Middle East and Asia and you have looting an unbelievable scale. Rightly he focussed on the British Museum. In expanding its colonial Empire, Britain stole vast quantities of treasure. One of the world's largest diamonds, the Koh-i-Noor, was stolen from the Prince of the Punjabi throne when the British illegally jailed his mother and forced him to sign the diamond away in return for her release. The Prince was just 10 years old. That diamond eventually found its way into the crown of the late Queen's mother. British history tells that it was a gift to Queen Victoria. It was stolen! More important to the people of Greece are the Elgin Marbles. Carved 2,500 years ago and placed atop the Parthenon in Athens, the British stole them in the early 1800s. One of the more recent arguments for their remaining in the UK is that the UK is better able to look after them properly for the benefit of future generations. They presently reside in the British Museum in London. That's a load of rubbish! It has been proved that the Museum curators damaged the stone when cleaning it with wire brushes in the 1930s. But as Oliver pointed out, "if you're ever looking for a missing artefact, nine times out of 10 it's in the British Museum." That Museum has 8 million artefacts, most from other parts of the world. Only 80,000 can be displayed at any one time. Why gives Britain the right to retain stolen goods when it cannot have them exhibited for all to see? "It can be pretty galling for people to find that their heritage, which is often part of a vibrant present-day culture, is sitting in storage in the British Museum's underground loot prison." More recently we know how difficult it has been to trace back ownership of the art looted by the Nazis. Obviously returning artefacts stolen centuries ago is also a complex matter. As an article in The Smithsonian Magazine makes clear, when unravelling colonial history - "you're dealing with countries that existed when the object was acquired but they may not exist now . . . Provinence is very complex and people aren't used to processing a chain of ownership." Yet it's hard not to agree with Oliver when he talks about the plunder of nations' greatest treasures throughout history by colonial dickheads. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/oct/03/john-oliver-stolen-antiquities-western-museums https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-koh-i-noor-diamondand-why-british-wont-give-it-back-180964660/

Typical troll-like post. @reader makes several unsubstantiated allegations on posts based totally on facts. After several requests, he then fails to respond to any questions raised by his responses. Then he goes further to attack the original poster. Was Beachlover his teacher? So now you spend most of an entire post going back over history after calling history "histrionic babble" - that is, history that you just don't like to recall. I agree. The valour of that one individual helicopter pilot was a superb example of the heroism that can happen sometimes during horrific wartime actions. But it can not and does not take anything away from the slaughter of more than 500 innocent civilians at My Lai with young girls first being raped before being put to death. Does one hero make up for the massacre of more than 500 souls? @reader only wants to remember historical facts that glorify the USA. Where were those heroes when the US and its CIA slaughtered many million more in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia - two of these wars being totally illegal as they were not authorised by Congress. Indeed, information was deliberately withheld from Congress. But then @reader does not want these discussed because they put the USA in a bad light. And he still will not justify the crippling US sanctions on Cuba apart from referring to the Soviet Union positioning nuclear weapons there 60 years ago. No one can cherry-pick history. Facts are facts - the good and the bad. Acknowledgement of both is vital if countries are to move forward.

Lke rimming with a tongue going right up your arse???? 🤣🤣🤣 Yuk!