PeterRS

How many times have we heard this question posed? Fact is: every time there is a major rain storm and parts of the city are temporarily flooded. Everyone knows that we are entering the period of the most intense monthly rainfall. Yet drains are always blocked, flood gates and pumps are not working properly, and so on and so forth. We are still at least 10 weeks from the high tide in the Gulf of Thailand. So that cannot be blamed this time. Apart from Jakarta, few other Asian cities that are low lying or have substantial low lying areas - Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, for example - seem to experience flooding on the level of Bangkok despite prolonged bursts of heavy monsoon rains. I can remember a time in the 1980s in Hong Kong when flyovers became raging waterfalls and small streets became canals. Hong Kong invested a great deal of cash in massive underground holding tanks on the north shore of the Island into which water coming down from both the hills and the sky was drained and redirected through tunnels to the sea on the south of the Island. Flooding is minimal now and is drained away quickly. I understand the 9.7 km long SMART tunnel which opened in Kuala Lumpur around 2010 has partly solved what used to be the disastrous flooding problem in the city centre. Singapore has rain for most of the year. It has a sophisticated system utilising many ways of getting rid of that water including pumps, catchment tanks and canals. It is still subject to occasional flash flooding but not nearly as bad as Bangkok. Yet Bangkok and other low lying parts of Thailand have seen little improvement in recent decades. Successive governments have acknowledged the problem and do virtually nothing about it. I recall durng the dreadful 2011 floods that one Minister seriously suggested assembling long-tail boats across the Chao Phraya river with their engines at full power to push the water from the north back upstream! Such is the intelligence of some who rise to Ministerial level in Thailand!

Let's all hope that the dreadful flooding of 2011 does not return in October. For those new to Thailand, this was a time when monsoon rains in the north over several months resulted in very full rivers flowing to the sea. This was made worse by the need to open up several dams and more than a few broken floodgates. These coincided with the annual high tide in the Gulf of Thailand when waters flowing up the Chao Phraya are higher. Sometimes this results in a small degree of flooding in the city. That year those waters coming down and up met in Bangkok and just to the north of the city with disastrous results. Parts of the city were flooded for months, including Don Mueang Airport which had to be closed for 4 months. The ground floor of one friend's house was under at least 3 feet of water for 3 months. It was not just Bangkok which suffered that year. 65 of the coutry's 76 Provinces were declared flood disaster zones.

Not at all. I think it is important to distinguish between types of meal. About 3 years ago, I called various hotels who advertised "high tea" and asked them what the cooked dish was that day. Even the chefs seemed not to know that high tea is not the same as afternoon tea!

I really shouldn't comment as I have not been in a bar for some years. However, I did also have this happen maybe 7 or 8 years ago. It turned out that the man my boy turned to was a regular at the bar, had offed the boy before at least once and was known as a good tipper. At that point, I had not even tipped my boy my usual 100 baht for sitting and chatting to me. I have no idea if your boy knew the other man but suspect that he did. I did not make a fuss as the last thing I wanted was a boy sitting next to me who really preferred to be with another guy he knew to tip well. My view is that buying a drink for a boy should give you some proprietorial rights unless another has told the mamasan he wants to take the boy out. But I don't think logical thinking is ever at the forefront of bar behaviour. Certainly making a scene would just make you look stupid in the eyes of all the bar workers. They'll mark you down as a trouble maker which could affect your enjoyment of any future visit you make.

The Health Minister is a joke and desperate to take over from the PM.

I can't wait for Japan to open its borders. The ¥ is at its lowest for years and any trip will certainly be cheaper than pre-covid.

This may be a political ploy but for 42% of the covid patients in Bangkok hospitals to be seriously ill and showing life-threatening symptoms is surely more than worryng.

A time without the slim, elegant, beautiful skating of Japan's Yuzuru Hanyu seems strange. He has been a part of our lives for virtually 10 years ever since he won the first of his two Olympic Figure Skating Men's Gold Medals back in Sochi in 2014. For me Hanyu has the perfect body for a men's skater - medium height, slim, lithe but not muscular. His progress over the ice was always serene, almost magical, his immersion in the music better than almost any other skater I have seen. His short programme in PyeongChang skating to a Chopin Ballade was definitely the finest skating I have ever seen. He himself was the perfection of beauty - although others naturally have other favourites. Now a series of injuries has forced him to retire at the age of 27. No more will we see that infectious smile, those long legs and pert little butt! Below a few memories including that mesmerising Chopin Ballade. For years there have been rumours that he is gay. He trained with the openly gay former skater Brian Orser in Canada and many of his costumes were made by a gay designer. There was even talk of a romance with another of Orser's students. As arguably Japan's most popular athlete with more websites dedicated to him than any other, hopefully he will now have more time out of the limelight to live the life he wants to lead.

13,000 taking part in the Pride event and 15,000 in the anti-Pride protest rally across the Square? It seems South Korea still has a very long way to go before the LGBT community is accepted. But then that country has always been something of an enigma. A country where the macho image of a man remains the ideal for the vast majority, where every male (with rare exceptions) must undergo almost two years of military service whatever their jobs and professions, where the salaryman leaves for the office every day and returns every evening, letting his wife manage the household finances. It's a country where the new President recently told the husband of the USA's Vice President, "homosexuality can be treated." Yet this same country is the centre of the K-Pop worldwide phenomenon, an entertainment which amost demands that its particpants undergo plastic surgery so thay all look more or less identical and where the boys look incredibly handsome. This in itself is all so new. When I was visiting Seoul many times in the 1980s and early 1990s, I saw no one who looked anything like a K-Pop star. Virtually all young guys seemed boring - at least to me. It was one of many Asia countries I just did not enjoy visiting. A recent Washington Post article underscores the generally homophobic nature of South Koreans. Despite the little progress that has been made recently, homosexuality is still a taboo issue in most households. Look back into Korean history, though, and it was certainly not always thus. During the three main Korean dyasties, homosexual activity was far from uncommon at Court. During the Silla Dynasty, King Hyegong was known for his adventures with other men. He was even described as "a man by appearance but a woman by nature." One group of his elite warriors were called the Hwarang or "Flower Boys", so called because of their homoeroticism and femininity. During the later Koryo Dynasty, King Mokjong and King Gongmin had several male lovers.When his wife died, Gongmin even went so far as to create a Ministry whose sole purpose was to seek out and recruit young men from all over the country to serve his Court. His sexual partners were called "little brother attendants!" King Chungseon is known to have had several long-term relationships with other men. In the Chosun era, it was members of the mobility which frequently engaged in same-sex relationships. As in Japan, travelling theatre groups developed providing various forms of entertainment. Often these included under-age "beautiful boys" and their entertainment included graphic representations of same-sex coupings. All finally came to an end in 1910 when Japan invaded Korea and imposed its often brutal and repressive regime. After those years and the years of virtual American occupation when it restored to power the loathed President/dictator Syngman Rhee, perhaps it's not surprising that, as in China and Japan, so many in the country have now forgotten their homosexual-acceptance pasts. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/11/south-korea-gender-lgbt-rights-president-yoon/

This has been a fairly regular topic in this foum and I could not agree more. Didn't we read relatively recently that all the TM6 arrival/departure forms had been moved to warehouses because there was nowhere to store them? When I go to Immigration in that vast barn of unused hideously expensive air-conditioned space at Chaengwattana, I see mountains of paperwork at every officers' desks. Because Thailand insists on pasports being carried at all time (although some use photocopies or laminated copies), the UK government is little better because to renew a 48-page passport it now insists that I have to copy every single page, have them couriered at my expense to the UK and have the new passport couried back again at my expense about 3 months later. But we are advised we can not use the passport during that 3-month waiting period. As one who usually travels vidtually every month, this is ridicuouos. About 10 years ago, all I had to do was take the passport to the Consulate in Wittayu and the new one would be ready at a fraction of the cost in a week. Our bureacratic world is going mad!

I am even more blown away. 13.1 billion light years away. Only 700 million years after the Big Bang? How does one actually measure that? How long has that light taken to reach the telescope? What was the Big Bang? I was always taught that if something inflates then it must do so into something - like a balloon inflating into the air around it or a ship displacing the water it sails in? What existed prior to the Big Bang? Into what did that monster explosion of matter expand? Try as I have, I just cannot get my mind around it!

I am totally blown away when I try to think of space, the big bang and how it is that we come to be living in such a vast universe. I simply cannot comprehend what happened and continues to happen 'out there'. So I am staggered by the early photos from the Webb telescope. That these images were taken just a few hundred million years after the big bang is to me just unbelievable. Images: NASA, BBC, CNN

Since you specifically mention Iraq, I assume you are referring to the USSR's assistance to the Iranians in its 8-year war against Iraq in the 1980s. But that was nowhere near the Putin era. For the period of most of that assistance Gorbachev was in charge of the USSR. Putin was not to appear of the horizon until Yeltsin picked him as his Deputy in 1999. Prior to the present war in Ukraine, Putin has been responsible for 3 wars - the second Chechen war, the war in Georgia and the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014/5. We should also remember that the ghastly Iran-Iraq war was started by Iraq when Hussein invaded Iran believing it to have been severaly weakened after the fall of the Shah. There was no love lost between the USSR and Iraq. Then again, this became all but a proxy war during the Cold War with the west supplying vast quatitites of armaments to Iraq. After all, there was no love lost between the west and Khomeini. If this is the wrong war, perhaps @tassojunior can let us know to which one he is referring amd provide a documentary source.

That glut is going to continue. We were told some years ago that the new mega-construction project 'One Bangkok' covering a large part of Rama 4 (and which has resulted in the demise of the old Dusit Thani Hotel) will include five luxury hotels!

I must admit I read only recent pages of the thread and then got caught up in the Taiwan/Ukraine discussion. I have no desire to read the rest of such a long thread and accept other readers comments. All I will add is that a previous owner also incurred the wrath of quite a few members. If you own a chat room Board, I guess you have the right to put forward your own views whenever you want. I only know that Moses lives in Moscow. It's his Board. He bought it. In my view he has the right to promote whatever views he holds just as others have every right to abandon it if they are unhappy with those views. Surely they can turn to the other two Boards or even start up their own if they wish.

I agree totally with @thaiophilus. That is a particularly long thread and basically compares parts of Ukraine with Taiwan. I don't see any proselytsing for Putin, merely what it is like to live in Russia and the various benefits citizens get from the state compared to Taiwan. Interestingly, though, Moses' main discussion seems to be with Dragonman, a poster who in one thread gets his history entirely wrong. He writes - "Taiwan (officially the Republic of China according to my passport) is not under the same pressure from the Mainland as Donetsk is under pressure from Ukraine. Like Donetsk, however, parts of the ROC were under bombing from the Mainland for years - look up the attacks on Quemoy and Matsu known as the First and Second Taiwan Strait Crises (the second was in 1958). Despite the claims of the PRC, it has never ruled Taiwan and the so-called "One China Consensus" is a lie. Until 1971 the Republic of China was a member of the UN and held a Security Council seat." He is certainly correct that after Mao took over China Taiwan was frequently attacked by the People's Republic. But his suggestion that China has never ruled Taiwan is nonsense. Naturally he will argue that he does not mention China - only the PRC and the Republic of China. But if he bothered to look into history, it is clear that at the 1943 Cairo Declaration with Roosevelt and Churchill in attendance and ratified under the 1945 Potsdam Agreement, it was agreed that all Japanese colonies would be returned to their original rulers. Imperial China had ruled Taiwan for almost 250 years prior to the Japanese invasion. It was therefore to a China ruled after the war by the murdering, thieving Chiang Kai-shek who had managed to take over the Kuomintang on the mainland after the death of Sun Yat-sen that Taiwan was returned. After Mao had won the civil war in China, Chiang and 2 million of his followers fled to Taiwan and took the "name" Republic of China with them. But Chiang never intended to remain in Taiwan. His followers committed many atrocities against the native Taiwanese. Probably he did not care because his attention, with the help of his fluent English-speaking Christian wife, Sung Mei-ling, who was particularly popular in Washington, was to reconquer mainland China. When Mao had won th civil war, those in the corridors of power in Washington were horrified. For years the question continued to be posed - "Who lost China?" Even so, Washington continued to recognise Chiang as the legitimate ruler of China, almost exclusively because they wanted a buffer in the South China Sea against a hated communist China - hence his party getting the seat at the UN. Washington also tried to overturn the Cairo and Potsdam agreements at a special Conference held in San Francisco around 1952. Neither Mao nor Chiang were invited. Some countries, notably Britain, were totally against what the US was planning to try to achieve. Britain had no intention of recognising a Taiwan under any sovereignty other than the rulers in Beijing. Chiang retained his vain hopes of returning to take over Beijing until Nixon decided that the US and China would mend fences and become friends in 1971. Chiang died in 1975. The one complicating factor in international law is that at the 1952 Conference when the Japanese officially handed over their colonial territories, they agreed to hand the Taiwan back to China but someone ensured that the document includes the term in use when they colonised it - the Republic of China rather than just China. Yet, when countries change their names, do the sovereign powers automatically change? Of course not! Much as I loathe to repeat it, Taiwan is irrevocably, officially and almost certainly in international law, a part of mainland China.

I also agree there seems quite a difference between the two sites. Sawatdee is definitely more Pattaya-centric. With respect I think that is just not true. So what if the owner of that board lives in Moscow? He took over the Board when it seemed it would bound to close. The owner, Moses, has been particularly helpful to both this Board and gaybuttonthai when each has had technical issues. Although i don't often read either much, I do look at them occasionally and I doubt it gaybuttonthai would exist without Moses' considerable help. As for sawatdee having a Putin bias, I doubt if any of the members of that site would agree. And I wonder where you got the idea that some posters stopped contributing for that particular reason? Again, I find that extremely difficult to believe - where is the proof? From what i see, Moses makes almost no contributions, so how can the Board have a Putin bias?

If that video rams home one point it is how disastrous the effects of covid and the tourism decline has been on the ordinary Thais who were barely able to scrape by without their usual sources of income. As for as those heading the tourism drive, without 16+ million Chinese tourists they probably have no alternative but to try and attract high spenders. Without them the industry and the economy as a whole has no chance of getting back to where it was in 2019. Then again Thais rarely admit they are wrong and so they will push on with the high-end tourism drive until either it's a success or they quietly and without publicity open the doors to far more lower-end tourists and backpackers. But the tourism industry is not doing itself much good the way prices for items like hotel rooms have been hiked. Hotels are never going to get back to anything near capacity when prices for many have been jacked up by 100%. We were thinking of a short staycation just in Bangkok. For August the price of the hotel we stayed in for a long week-end in February is now about 120% of the earlier rate we paid. To raise all prices and not have a menu of different prices to suit different budgets seems counter intuitive. The much smaller numbers of high-end tourists will pay for higher end rooms. So why not have a smallish number at lower rates? We've just abandoned our staycation

A little anecdote about the perfectly lovely Luang Prabang. I was there in 2003 and stayed in a newly opened small guest house on the banks of the Mekong run by a Lao who had spent many years sudying and working in Australia. I adored the short trip. One afternoon, I returned to the guest house to be told by the owner that I had just missed Mick Jagger sitting having a coffee with his daughter by the river. The Rolling Stones had had a concert in Mumbai cancelled and so Jagger had flown to Bangkok where he chartered a Bangkok Airways plane to visit Luang Prabang. The owner had actually met Jagger in Australia. He had often worked as a security guard at large-scale pop concerts. While on duty at a Stones Sydney concert, at one point Jagger went up to him, asked about his nationality and if he could get some marijuana. No problem said the Lao. I have a friend in the Embassy and he will get some sent down in the diplomatic bag overnight. Jagger recalled the unusual event and spent about 20 minutes withe the guest house owner. And I missed it!!!

I always wonder why so many people - even hotels - use the term "high tea" when it should be "afternoon tea". High tea is a totally separate meal that always includes one cooked dish and is generally taken around 6:00 pm. That said, i agree afternoon tea in the Mandarin-Oriental's Author's Lounge is a wonderully extravagant experience. But check beforehand if it will actually be served in the Lounge as that is frequently booked up for weddings. The last time I was there, afternoon tea was being served in the lobby. But the thread is about Sunday brunch. I have no hesitation of nominating the Sukhothai on Sathorn. It offers so much and an amazing variety you really should starve for days beforehand. But like all hotel Sunday brunches, it is really expensive. I also dislike the live jazz offered in many hotel Sunday bruch offerings. On the few occasions I go for Sunday brunch, I hate live music. I go with friends and want to chat without having to shout!

I did- twice. I saw one who looked Asian but was from Ecuador. Apart from the one identified as coming from indonesia there was one other not identified who could have been Asia. But no idea if he could be first or second generation Asian living in a South American country.

Anyone planning to fly from Heathrow over the summer should be aware that in addition to the cancellation of flights by carriers, Heathrow has informed airlines that it will fly a maximum of 100,000 passengers per day until Spetember 11. It has also advised airlines to stop selling seats for the peak season. This is in addition to the thousands of flights already withdrawn from the schedules. In summer 2019 Heathrow was handling around 125,000 passngers daily. One of those hardest hit will be Emirates even though it owns its own ground-handling and catering services. It flies 6 daily A380s from Heathrow to Dubai and is therefore able to get many more passengers out of the airport that those operating much smaller aircraft. That airline has slammed Heathrow for its inabiility to gear up as some of the airlilnes have done. Ridicuously it was given just 36 hours to comply wth capacity restrictions. When I go back to the UK, thankfully I elect to use smaller airports far from London. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/14/heathrow-emirates-airmageddon-summer-flights-disruption

What on earth is this 'contest'? It seems geared almost exclusively to guys from Central and South America. As far as I can see, no candidates from Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea, Australia, India and so many other countries. It seems similar to a couple of other 'contests' mentioned in this forum over the years - and they were pretty dodgy in terms of their titles matching the nationalities of the contestants. Interestingly, at least to me, winners of the much older Mister International in recent years included guys from England, India, Denmark, Columbia, Ireland, Spain and Brazil. Mistra-International only started in 2016 - but why so few candidates from around the world?

I have in the past railed against parts of the so-called democratic system as practised in the USA. Let me now redress the blaance a little by looking at the present disastrous situation that exists in the UK. For those who do not know much about the UK policial system, it is largely dependent on a series of constituencies, each of which eoects a Member of Parliament. Although there are more than two parties at Westminster, as in the USA there are two dominant ones - the Conservatives (often called the Tories) and Labour. Members of Parliament are elected on a first past the post system. So it can happen that the governing party has a minority of all votes cast. The outgoing Prime Minster Boris Johnson frequently boasted about he had created his party's large majority at the last election. If he were being truthful, he would admit that less than 30% of the electorate actually voted for that party. There was a very perceptive article in the Sunday edition of the Observer newspaper. Titled "The lesson from Johnson's tenure - British politics needs dragging into the 21st century", John Harris writes of the country's various crises - "One of our crises goes back centuries. The UK’s structures of government are based around an antiquated and centralised state, much of which was built during the distant days of empire, and that now barely functions. Swollen Whitehall departments cannot possibly do what ministers and civil servants claim. The Houses of Parliament are a shabby symbol of institutional decay. Thanks to the continued existence of the House of Lords, our legislators include a Russian-British newspaper proprietor, Ian Botham and 92 hereditary peers. And the way we elect the Commons is a creaking joke: the 'personal mandate' Johnson recently cited to try to keep himself in office amounted to the support of less than 30% of the electorate. "Worse still, there is a deep, symbiotic connection between the institutions of Westminster and Whitehall and the structures of privilege centred on a handful of private schools, and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Together, they have churned out people trained in the arcane ways of the establishment and how to network their way into power, but who usually turn out to be dangerous bullshitters and chancers. Johnson, obviously, was all this incarnate: once he had got to the top of a system that grants prime ministers mind-boggling levels of power, he could trample over constitutional conventions, push through legislation nullifying basic civil rights, and champion the breaking of international law . . . "Drastically altering our systems of power – and, via radical thinking about private education and Oxbridge, breaking up ancient networks of privilege and influence – would open the way to changes that would start to pull us out of our endless malaise: a huge housing drive, a basic income, security both within and without work, the kind of moves towards a closer relationship with Europe that the stupidities of current politics rule out. It would also quash the chances of another entitled would-be Tory autocrat wheedling their way into power. This is surely the lesson of the past three torrid years – that if Johnson’s time in power demonstrates one thing beyond question, it is the fact that British politics has to finally leave the 20th century." Johnson had been widely reviled virtually before he became Prime Minister. Like Trump in the USA whom he often resembles, he has lied, cheated, been beset by scandal, broken his own government's covid isolation rules, not once but several times, and was felled by his major character flaws. He is the first Prime Minster in history to have been fined by the police whilst in office. Two of his party members had recently to resign in disgrace, one for sexual offences against a teenage boy and another for watching porn on his mobile phone in parliament. Johnson was also caught changing his story on the way he handled allegations of sexual misconduct by a senior member of his government. Long seen as a redeemer, his own party has now dropped him like a stone. It was unfortunate for the UK that his Labour party opponent in the last general election was regarded as weak and unelectable because of his strong left-wing and other less than savoury views. Inmore countries, democracy without strong democratic institutions seems in serious danger of becoming close to some form of autocracy. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/10/lesson-boris-johnson-british-politics-21st-century-democracy

Fortunately this did not have the result of the tyre blowout on the ill-fated Air France Concorde. From the position of that gaping hole, it is clear the tyre issue was not on take-off for I cannot see how rubber could have been blown around the side of that large aircraft and then created an inward puncture. And since both Emirates and a passenger stated the incident occurred during the cruise level, something must have happened in the wheel well. Odd, though, how that had enough force to puncture the outer skin but not tear a hole in the lower deck.