thaiophilus

And a doctorate in Chapter IX - Of the Auparishtaka .

I suspect maybe @Louis has a mental picture of someone with a framed diploma on the wall, trained in all the exotic mysteries of the Orient?

Be careful what you wish for...

If @olddaddy was more attentive he'd have noticed a thread not long ago discussing the fact that Soi 4 is alread up for sale:

The extra hour is for the deportation formalities.

and the joke was that despite being better than Streep she starred in none of them.

Have you read the reviews of any of those programs mentioned? For example: "The problem with this documentary is it clearly started with the premise of Thailand is a country with so much danger, then set out to prove its own hypothesis, rather than investigate neutrally and let the evidence guide them to the answer. This makes it wholly biased and unreliable. Dreadfully amateurish documentary-making." ... and that's from the highest scoring 5/10 review. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt38286252/reviews/

Correct.

Way back in 2010 Andrew Drummond (journalist who used to cover the sleazy side of LoS, for those who don't know) had a story about a different establishment where one of the partners died in mysterious circumstances shortly after investing a lot of capital. I wonder if that's a mutation of the same story? I won't reference it here but it shouldn't be too hard to find.

Most browsers have a 'zoom' feature hidden somewhere in their menus.

According to The Men of Thailand circa 1997, it was in Silom soi 4, but "in late 1993 the owner of Rome Club began refusing entrance to patrons thought to be gay" and the action moved to soi 2.

The city that's so good they set it to music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqGJr2Bgo5w&list=RDnqGJr2Bgo5w&start_radio=1

The drawback with exotic airlines is that if there are technical problems they probably don't have a replacement aircraft where needed, so you're stuck. Larger airlines with more aircraft and frequent flights are more likely to be able to shuffle their schedule.

Not to dispute what you've said, but on a related note I've found that online review websites are useless for comparing airlines, because most of the reviews are of flights where something went horribly wrong. Pick almost any airline and there will be a worryingly long list of 1-star reviews from badly-treated customers. If they've had a satisfactory flight most people don't bother to leave a review. My only experience of problems with Gulf carriers was Emirates in 2020 when I had to cancel a flight because of COVID. They refunded my flight in full within a couple of days, and unlike many of the other airliness there was no pressure to rebook or accept vouchers instead of cash.

For all flights departing UK/EU (regardless of carrier nationality), or arriving in the UK/EU on a UK/EU airline, all that would be a legal requirement, not a courtesy from the airline.