Rogie

Further to the War on Drugs thread on the main forum: Honduras bans guns in violence-hit Colon region http://www.bbc.co.uk...merica-19095078

The 'war on drugs' in Honduras Reporter's Notebook: Collateral Damage of the US War on Drugs in Honduras? Read more: http://latino.foxnew.../#ixzz22kJCdGpC See also (short video clip) How the US is taking the war on drugs to Honduras http://www.bbc.co.uk...merica-18880775

Curiosity has landed! You'd think they'd all won Olympic gold medals - great scenes of jubilation inside the control room. Fascinating to watch. Nasa's Curiosity rover successfully lands on Mars http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-19144464

The 'English system' is rather strange. We are loathe to let go of our beloved imperial units but the pressures of the modern world dicate we need to accept metric units of measurement. But we shall never 'embrace' them with open arms - younger people maybe, but not my generation. As an ex-scientist I used metric units all my professional working life, but in the real world I prefer our miles over kilometres, our pints rather than litres and I weigh myself in stones not kilograms. However I lose no sleep having to order my apples or bananas in kg in the grocers or my cheese in grams or kg at the deli. One thing I definitely do not like is when I am asked my height and am obliged to give the answer in metres. Because I was brought up on feet and inches I cannot visualise in my mind what a height of say 1.75 metres is. I notice that evenin some metric countries such as Australia some people stick to feet and inches for height rather than metres.

When I arrived in Bangkok 15 years ago I was very green. My experience was similar to FH - it was a tout took me to a go-go place. I did buy a copy of Spartacus 10 years ago but rarely used it. Later on, another source of info was the awfully named Squirt, a website mainly specialising in cruising but I've long since abandoned that approach. But that doesn't count as it was post-internet. I remember reading how Kinsey wished to widen his net when he was taking people's 'histories' (resumes of their sex lives). He was short on homosexual sex - it took some doing but once he'd got inside the closed world of the homosexual venues he had a 'field day'. So, yes - certainly if you wanted a safe place to meet others, word of mouth and who you got to know was probably the only way back then. Cruising and cottaging went on of course but was fraught with danger, eg. entrapment, queer bashing, or worse a la Brokeback Mountain.

Is the Brady Bill proving effective ? Is it doing what it is supposed to do? I haven't heard of it so please excuse my ignorance. Something else i was unaware of - thank you for mentioning it. I wonder what makes men (and it's usually men!) - fully trained men, do crazy things from time to time? A good example is when a man gets it into his head he's God's gift to women. History is littered with the 'honey trap', tales of a femme fatale luring a politician, policeman or military man to act impulsively or out of character. There was a sad and rather pathetic case recently where a British man, following internet correspondence with a woman in Brazil, flew over to meet her. She wasn't at the airport but a friend of hers was. The friend said he had the woman's bag with him and she'd be really grateful if he'd take it with him and fly to somewhere in Europe where she'd meet him. Somewhere along the line he got stopped and his bag was found to to contain drugs. Now he's in prison awaiting trial. The 'woman of his dreams' really exists but of course the person he was in contact with on-line was a fraudster.

As a retired scientist it was the laboratory that interested me most. That is why I focussed on that in the quote in my OP. "These are really university laboratories that would normally fill up a room but which have been shrunk down - miniaturised - and made safe for the space environment, and then flown on this rover to Mars" But there's so much more. The Horizon programmee Mission to Mars referred to in the link was what ensnared me. I agree with Koko and Bob re the landing sequence. It is very ambitious - miraculous? quite possibly!

The Curiosity Rover - also called the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) - is set to land on Monday (GMT) for a minimum two-year exploration of a deep hole on Mars' equator known as Gale Crater. Touch-down is expected at 05:31 GMT (06:31 BST) Monday 6 August; 22:31 PDT, Sunday 5 August. http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-19112800

Team GB doing well. The country's really getting behind the Team now. The atmosphere at some of the events is quite fantastic. Today was 'Super Saturday' with some great results. 2 gold medals in rowing, one in cycling and three in athletics. They now have 14 golds and are currently 'top' when you take the country's population into account. I don't think any Brits are going to be sent to prison.

I'm kicking myself! That's all I knew about Othello too, that he was a Moor, so I would have used exactly the same reasoning as Koko if only I'd woken up.

Not like me to dodge a guess, but my knowledge of Shakespeare is terrible. I suppose if he wrote a play based on say Richard the LIonheart he might have mentioned Aleppo, but i've no idea if he did. It's very sad to see what's unfolding in Syria. The President was an ophthalmologist by profession living in London and regarded as a decent chap. I don't think he ever expected to become President. I visited Syria back in the early 90's and it's a fascinating country. The so-called crusader castles are amazing.

No sir, I never said that. The discussion was about diving so my comment applied to that. I draw a disinction between a qualitative sport such as diving and a 'quantitative' sport where the winner is the first to cross the finishing line (and if a camera is required to decide who crossed that line first that's an excellent use of modern technology). That's the key word, a pair of eyes. Yes it happens so fast, and I am going to assume all the judges have exactly the same vantage point, so that what they all 'see' is the same. They are judging on quality, not deciding which diver hit the water first. That is why I said if they could view the dive again in slow motion it would be wrong IMO. They have to use their trained senses to get an immediate feel for the dive, and that is where I believe their subconscience plays a vital role. What the judge 'sees' is a combination of light hitting his retina plus the way in which his brain interprets it. That makes it sound rather pedestrian but I believe one can never underestimate the brain's power. That's my simple layman's explanation - I do not expect to convince everyone!

Sorry for any confusion Bob, FH's right I was referring specifically to the diving. I think the underwater cameras are fine for the swimming, but I do query the point of showing the divers underwater. I haven't watched much diving so didn't realise it was a useful add-on when he messed up - I'll have to watch more keenly from now on. It seems to me a good idea to judge just once, the 'live' version. Once you start permitting replays or slow-motion replays where do you stop? You could end up watching it umpteen times in the hope of separating two competitors who're neck and neck. I wonder if they would use it if a diver had had a complaint made against him by another competitor? But then again I guess the judges are on the look out for any infringements. No, I reckon the (trained) human eye is unrivalled for its ability to discriminate. Tests have proved that even with an arsenal of sophisticated equipment what the eye perceives scores better, even when the scorer might not be aware of that himself! There was an example of that on TV a while back but I can't recall the exact details.

Maybe many years from now people will make the occasionl discovery of a 'crude contraption' found buried in the back gardens of old houses. "What the hell is this junk?" they might ask themselves. I guess owners of those things decided when times got a bit turbulent to bury their precious prime-possession with the idea of retrieving it when things cooled down. Except, rather like bags of gold coins or jewellery that are found even now, they never got to reclaim it. Sad, uh?

Can anyone tell me what is the purpose of all that? I grant an underwater camera is useful during a swimming race but who wants to see an underwater shot of a diver sinking and bobbing up to the surface? Once the diver hits the water that should be the end of it. The rest is simply superfluous. The judges don't award any points for the underwater section!

I would just love it if one of the male swimmers from some 'unsophisticated' country where swimming is off the radar competed in his speedos (whilst the other guys were swanning around in their hydrodynamic whatsimacallits) and grabbed gold. Remember 'Eric the Eel'?

Goodbye bahtstop, hello again Baht-Stop Message posted on bahtstop Forum this morning UK time: "The original Baht-stop is now live again, many thanks to all who joined and posted here in its absence, this board is now closed" Baht-Stop is running again and its original owner is back at the helm. "I started this Board in August, 2006, expecting I’d be retiring to Thailand someday. When I changed my mind in 2011 and decided to retire to Costa Rica, I was happy to hand the board over to some great guys. A year in Costa Rica, however, convinced me that I didn’t want to retire there. So, I headed back to the USA last April where I’ve been thinking seriously about taking the expat plunge again to Thailand. When I realized last week that the board needed new management, I decided to see if I could get the board back. Here I am, happy to be back. I hope all the regular posters and readers over the years will be back too. If you have any suggestions on how to improve the board, you're welcome to chime right in."

Mountain summits are frustrating for the photographer! Here is a short description I emailed to a few friends after returning from China in November 2002. "We had a couple of mountain ascents, one of which completely defies description. This was owing to the heavy shroud of mist that clung to it never lifting, so we went up it and came down it not much the wiser! The postcard sellers did brisk business, not many cameras seeing any action in such conditions. The other mountain was fine going up but the next morning (we stayed in hotels on the summit for both mountains) you-know-what had descended. For the second time we were denied a chance to see the sunrise over a mountain." The two peaks in question were Huang Shan (Yellow Mt) at approx 1800 metres and Tai Shan at 1545m. It's also said you'll live to be 100 if you climb Tai Shan!

I'm with Fountainhall on this one. I do not attach much weight to the 'fulsome' praise Mark Spitz bestows on his compatriot Phelps. It is surely human nature to be rooting for (1) an athlete from the same country as yourself, and (2) somebody competing in the same event(s) that you did. It is hardly likely Spitz is going to pour cold water on Phelps's achievement, is it? Most medals undisputably . . . and greatest swimmer ever . . .? I'm not going to dispute that either. But greatest Olympian? Let's come down to earth for a bit, as FH says swimmers have a greater choice of events in which to compete. I do agree however, that swimming well in one stroke does not automatically mean you can 'do them all', although it might well appear to be easy when you see them swimming the individual medley. The different styles are poles apart, so for example I am not aware of any swimmer winning gold medals in both breaststroke and butterfly, or backstroke and freestyle (front crawl). By no means a perfect analogy but imagine if there were four different styles in the high jump - the Fosbury Flop, the Boston Roll, and two others. Competitors could sign up for just one or they could try and enter for all four. It would be unlikely but certainly possible to imagine a high jumper of such excellence that he won the high jump in all four styles, and not only that he won in the individual medly where competitors are allowed one jump in each of the four styles, with the average height cleared being his 'score'. That would still only be five medals. But of course the high jumper, the long jumper, the discuss, javelin and hammer throwers can only realistically win one medal per games.

Sorry Moses if my wording came across as confusing. All I meant was that whoever happens to be President at the time. That is because basically, as the most powerful man in the world, wherever he directs his gaze internationally will cause ripples, not necessarily tidal waves, but people do take note, even if it's only other politicians or the chattering classes.

Did Sarah Palin ever come to Britain once she'd been put on the Republican ticket? I don't think so, but if she had she'd have been awarded the same courtesy shown to any visiting dignitary. It's then up to them whether they shoot their mouth off or maintain a diplomatic silence. Short of the POTUS himself, unless a politician (or indeed anyone else who expects their comments / opinions to be heeded) actually visits a foreign country, no amount of pontificating is going to cause the slightest ripple, whereas when a well-known person, politician, actor, singer, artist or whatever, takes the trouble to come over his comments carry weight.

I reckon he thinks he's the Pied Piper - the link at the bottom is just to the GT page with all the profiles, so not of much interest unless you fancy following khun Mildkoid to wherever it may lead.

A note on terminology: Baht-Stop = original one bahtstop = new one As to whether it would make sense or not, that is debatable. In favour of merging the original Baht-Stop with the recent bahtstop is the fact Baht-Stop started in 2006 so has been running for nearly 6 years, whereas bahtstop is a relative spring chicken, set up earlier this month (July). The new bahtstop was set up because whoever is behind it missed the old one and I presume hoped to entice members who'd posted on Baht-Stop and to re-capture the flavour of that Board. However, Baht-Stop's 'flavour' has over the years polarised opinion. There are some posters who have been turned off that Board by the behaviour of a fairly small minority. I think it is fair to say most of that group I have mentioned would be banned (or indeed already had been so were refugees seeking safe sanctuary on Baht-Stop) on almost any other Message Board. Hence the polarised opinion: should that kind of posting behaviour be tolerated or not? Those in favour presumably continued to read and post on Baht-Stop; those not in favour ceased to post or even bother reading it. The $64,000 question is: will Baht-Stop, upon resumption, be run in the same way as before? If it is then a case can be made to continue with bahtstop as the majority of its members who have commented so far seem to favour keeping it going as an alternative to Baht-Stop. It seems to me though, that if Baht-Stop were to carry on like before that would be a mistake. They would fail to attract many, if any, new active posters (the 'golden eggs' of any Board i.e those members who actually post), and would find it hard going trying to post civilised topics without the looneys messing things up. My preference would be for bahtstop to merge with a rejuvenated Baht-Stop and to have the moderator (Mod 1 as he calls himself) become a mod on Baht-Stop. Not necessarily to run it, I'm not saying that, but to assist whoever is appointed as the new owner of Baht-Stop. That would entail something of a risk, but assuming the two sides (original and breakaway factions, if may call them that) cooperate there is a reasonable chance it can combine the best of both worlds. However, posting on bahtstop earlier today, Mod 1 seems to favour continuing his new Board even after Baht-Stop bounces back. That begs the question, should it continue to call itself bahtstop?

I have now briefed myself and have successfully identified the male gymnasts are wearing mens stirrups and they cost around UKP 25 - 30. http://www.milanoleotards.co.uk/index.php?cPath=60 When I first starting watching football in the 1960's I used to laugh at those old newsreels showing players like Stanley Matthews and their 'long 'baggy' shorts. I expect the opposite happens now and kids today laugh when they see players from the 70's, 80's and 90's wearing what seems to them to be very short 'tight' shorts. But I agree with FH, I laugh at the baggy modern shorts in the same way I laughed at those vintage footballers from the 30's and 40's. And what about shirts? George Best got away with it back in the 60's but I deplore the modern trend for footballers to wear their shirts outside and over their shorts, instead of being neatly tucked in. It is rather pathetic to see a player come on as a substitute looking all neat and tidy and the referee checks all is in order, then as soon as the player runs on to the field he yanks his shirt out of his pants. Tennis players have also 'gone downhill' as far as their sartorial elegance is concerned, and don't get me going on golfers or Formula 1 drivers and their idiotic baseball caps!

Ah, re-reading post #5 I see what you meant by "centenarians only on paper". That's rather unbelievable though that somebody can live to be 125 and not arouse suspicion long before 'he' reached that (rather ripe) age. As far as I know only one person (a Frenchwoman) has been proven to live that long.