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I'm a bit like Firecat, I do love Brazil, but the saunas are not my favorite spot. But I manage. I do like being able to go into a bar or club here in Bangkok, and personally see and spend time with the boy that you like. In the saunas I feel more pressured to make a quick decision. In Bangkok, never pressured, except by the occasional mamasan. I know where all the heat the East Coast of the U.S. is. I think it is on vacation here in Thailand. It's been mid 90's with lots of sun. So I've been going out shopping and doing errands in the morning , then hanging around the pool or in the apartment afternoons waiting for the sun to set for dinner and evening fun. When the boys complain about the heat, then I know it's kicking in and they started complaining the last couple of days. Been hanging out at Hot Male most of my evenings. Have several friends that work here. I had a little situation develop over the last several days where the more I hang there, the closer some of them get to you. The last couple of nights, some of the boys have started asking me to buy them a drink. They are polite about it. It's very hard to convince these boys that not all Americans are rich. I buy a couple of boys a drink every night and try to spread it around. Last night one of the newer boys got a beer and slipped the payment slip into my bin. (they write a receipt for drinks and put it in a box next you at your seat and add them up when you leave for payment) I noticed , but so did his boss. Boss went off on the kid and was going to fire him. I did ask him to have him appoligize to me, but don't fire him. He agreed but did suspend him for 10 days. I am very good friends with the manager so we talked about it for a few minutes. He told me that they rarely have to fire anyone, but it does happen. He said he reprimands him in front of everybody as its a lesson of what can happen. I still feel bad, but it is stealing from a customer, and would be grounds for firing for most jobs. On a lighter note. I finally met up with a boy I have been after since the day I got here. Well worth the wait. This boy is Lao. I have been meeting up with mostly Vietnamese boys, but most are still in Vietnam for New Years. I didn't know what to expect. We have had a few drinks together, but he speaks about 10 words of English and I speak no Lao or Thai. But this boy is as cute as they come. All smiles and I do fall for that. So took him home without discussion of what we would get into. One thing I like about Thailand, the boys take shoes and sox off at the door, so when you get to the bedroom you don't have to go thru that when undressing them. I like to shower with boys. Thai boys don't, they like to start off alone, so didn't know where this boy stood. Ask, can we shower together? He was out of his clothes before I could undo one of my shirt buttons. Then undressed me, grabbed my hand and we headed to shower. Needless to say, as with my 2 favorite Viets, this boy was just as much an exhibitionist. Lucky me..I couldn't have begun to expect how much fun I would have with him, and will see him several more times. I like boys that aren't shy. I am now convinced that for the most part Thais are and most of the rest of the SE Asians aren't. (By my small scientific survey for the past year.) Tonight is a night off. I'm going to an Italian restaurant around the corner for a pizza and beer. Then spending the evening watching tv or reading a book. After a week of rice and vegetables, need something a bit different. Tomorrow will be grocery shopping and lunch at Siam Paragon. Then it's Friday night . Will it be, Thai, Lao, or Vietnamese. The decisions we have to make. (But leaning Lao)

And yet here we go again with 'trainers' and new equipment and more bales of hundred dollar bills thinking, "This time will be different." Arrgh! I suspect part of the problem is that our culture just does not give us the mental equipment to deal well with a multi-actor game where every player, state or sub-state, is simultaneously competing and cooperating with every other actor. Just one aspect of the situation: Sure the current bunch in Bagdad wants to defeat Isis and needs the Kurds right now to do so. But it sure as hell doesn't want to see the US build up Kurdistan so much that the Kurds can retain control of the Kirkuk oilfields after the dust settles. And it wants to peel off some of the Sunni tribes from their support of ISIS but can't offer anything that would allow the tribes to wriggle out from under the thumb of the Shias. Meanwhile each of the Sunni tribes has its separate interests, the various Shia militias on which the Bagdad regime is dependant but over which it has only marginal control go their own way, Iran plays its hand to boost both the militias it finances and the Assad dynasty in Syria. Did I forget to mention that the Kurds have ambitions of their own, have their own fractious political divisions and don't really give a hoot about ISIS except as it threatens what they regard as Greater Kurdistan. And while we're at it, don't leave out that ISIS took and now holds its chunk of Iraq only with the help and consent of disgruntled Sunni tribes and the old Bathist network. And that's just the briefest of overviews of Iraq. Syria is even more complicated. And we haven't even talked about the different goals of the 'coalition' that the US has assembled to do the fighting. The reality that any American administration is going to have to deal with is that the more of the heavy lifting the US does on the ground, the more its allies are going to shift their focus to their conflicting end games and jockey for advantages in the aftermath. Why waste resources fighting ISIS if the US will do it for you?

If you ask me, Obama is doing the right things, although I wish he had started a bit sooner. I've felt for some years that the answer to defeating Middle East terror groups lies primarily in the Middle East. The fact that there are now a few Middle East boots on the ground and a few Middle East planes in the sky is a good thing. But the best thing is that there are now Middle East clerics actually calling the terrorists out for the sociopaths they are, rather than ignoring them or trying to defend them. In my opinion, this is the most significant step yet in trying to rein in ISIS, and my take is that Obama and Kerry are the ones who got it to happen. A few years ago, I saw a projection that the U. S. would be energy independent within a decade or two. It now appears we are pretty close to that now, and that reduced reliance on business entanglements with the Middle East is another good thing that happened on Obama's watch. While I think it's good that the U. S. maintains a strong identity as a 'leader', I am much more comfortable in sharing that role with other like-minded nations. It's very easy to fall into the trap of being the 'only' country that can solve the world's problems. No doubt other countries would like for the U. S. to do all the heavy lifting while they enjoy the benefits, but I don't think that's fair to us. For one thing, it puts a huge target on our back alone. I like the way that Obama and Kerry have spread the responsibility of leadership among more countries. Of course, that means that our interests will not be the only ones represented, and that will be hard for some to accept. But, overall, I think it's a much more tenable position to share the labor and to also share the fruits of that labor. No doubt, there's a shift involved in going from the 'boss of the world' to being part of a group. In my opinion, it's a necessary shift and there will be discomfort along the way, as there always is with change. It will also happen over months and years, rather than days and weeks. While I would personally like to see that shift sooner rather than later, I believe there's a case to be made for having others ask for our help instead of shoving it down their throats. We already tried that under the Bush administration and we're still cleaning up that mess. In fact, my feeling is that ISIS came about primarily because of the power vacuums left by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld's misadventures in the Middle East. It will take some time to re-stabilize that part of the world and, if it's to remain stable, it will take a lot more than one country and one president to keep it that way. So, yes, I'm happy with the direction Obama and his team are taking. Even if others may not be.

I was talking about the coalition. All the countries I mentioned, with the exception perhaps of the Jordanians, have formidable fighting forces. Of course the Iraqi's didn't make the list. One would have hoped that they could have stepped up to the plate, but that ship apparently already sailed with billions of US dollars on board.

The whole disgusting mess is a black hole. There is no solution, none that I can see anyway. It's interesting how we lay this at the feet of Obama. It's a World problem. What would you have him do? Boots on the ground? Create another long drawn out war like Iraq or Afghanistan? I guess we all remember how well that worked out for us. There's enough blood on the American Flag. Time perhaps for our "friends" (insert roll eyes) in the Middle East to take a more commanding role. They've been at this for a thousand years, they should be good at it by now. OR for once, maybe just maybe, it would be nice to see the Iraqi's get their shit together. Failing that, word on the street is that Cheney and Busch would gladly come out of retirement. Since they are so good at this "war" thing. But I digress. P.S. MsAnn apologizes for the outburst. I do believe the brownies are about to come out of the oven, and I hear the tea pot whistling. I'll retreat to the kitchen now like a good wife should.

Closer than we thought? First full body transplant is two years away, surgeon claims Doctor plans to graft a living person's head on to a donor body using procedures he believes will soon be ready http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/25/first-full-body-transplant-two-years-away-surgeon-claim

This I want to see. CULTURE Why Inside the Commons is the funniest comedy of the year Whitehall farce: Sir Robert Rogers plays to the camera in Inside the Commons By Benji Wilson 9:00AM GMT 07 Feb 2015 When I heard that a BBC camera crew had been granted warts-and-all access to the Palace of Westminster for a documentary series, Inside the Commons, my first thought was, thats a lot of warts. My second thought was what on earth were the politicos thinking? Why would they let the veteran political film-maker Michael Cockerell in at all? In the run-up to an election, and at a time when respect for politicians runs somewhere alongside respect for Seventies DJs, how was letting in TVs quiet assassin, a man who does for political reputations what oxidisation does to cars, a good idea? Well, it wasnt a good idea, not for our elected members, anyway. Cockerell, with a forensic brilliance honed over years of taking down preening nitwits, quickly latched on to a trenchant metaphor and hammered it home that the Palace of Westminster is a mock gothic relic that is coming apart at the seams, and so is the institution it houses. The shots of peeling paintwork and crumbling stone intercut with images of politicians being berks undermined our democracy faster than a Saudi arms deal. But Inside the Commons did proffer an answer as to why the politicians would have let Cockerell in to do a Guy Fawkes in the first place. Politicians are all budding thespians, said Deputy Speaker Lindsay Hoyle at one point. That chilled me to the marrow have you ever been in a room full of budding thespians? Its the budding part of their thespianism thats truly blood-curdling theyre not even any good at it. And if you wanted an example, PMQs, filmed here at ground level for what we were told was the first time, as if that was a good thing, was the horror show writ large. What a tawdry carnival of mountebanks and yahoos. The sight of MPs bobbing standing up and sitting down in the hope that they might get a free hit and actually ask the PM a Q was an image of dumb futility as potent as anything Beckett ever dreamt up. If politicians are all budding thesps, what do you think happens when you put them in front of a camera? That was why they were queuing up to let Cockerell mug them. Michael Fabricant (a man whose hair has formed an uneasy coalition between Smashie, Nicey and a polenta bake) and then Nicholas Soames (in skull-and-crossbones comedy braces that require no further comment) and then Clerk of the House Robert Rogers (taking snuff) all did their bit to make MPs look as relevant as steam power. Cockerell cleverly kept the cameras away from Joe Public for most of the time and there were very few shots of windows or natural light, making the Commons look like an entirely inward-looking institution. Overall I was struck with the same feeling as when watching the auditions for The X Factor or Big Brother. Surely no one can want to be on television enough to commit these kinds of crimes against dignity? But they couldnt help themselves. Presumably it is the lust for attention that makes them want to stand in the first place. Cockerell simply served the choicest cuts on a platter in the edit and there you had it the funniest comedy of the year. I laughed my head off at that withering satire on politicians and after that I watched Rory Bremners Coalition Report. Satire has been pronounced dead more often than rock n roll, in general because reality Fabricants barnet, for example has overtaken it. And so theres always a feeling these days that Bremner himself is a relic of the type that Spitting Image might have mocked in the Eighties with a sheep on his head or something. Bremners satire, here with the help of a brilliant younger Brem-a-like called Matt Forde and a few old chums like John Bird, is indeed old-fashioned in as far as he simply pretends to be a politician and makes them all look like chumps a bit like Cockerell but with voices and wigs. But it works, up to a point, because Bremner always was, and still is, tack sharp and just angry enough. The problem is that this programme was a one-off, to mark five years of the Coalition government. Spitting Image, and indeed Bremner, Bird and Fortune, ran for years. To really make a mark, satire needs to be relentless. Spitting Image seared itself onto the public consciousness because John Major was dull and grey every single week. Satire cant just prod power once and then walk off it must keep prodding. Rory Bremners Coalition Report was funny, and at times devastating the song about zero-hours contracts, for example but you cant chop down a tree with a single axe blow. Someone needs to give Bremner a regular slot again. One of the things that both Bremner and Cockerell highlighted was our politicians distance from normal people. What any party would give to have motorbike racer, lorry mechanic and worlds least likely TV presenter Guy Martin on their ballot sheet. Hes a man you can see people voting for. Martin is the TV executives golden goose, a discovery who hasnt been to stage school and probably thought Channel 4 had something to do with CB radio before they signed him up. Unfortunately for Martin he made the mistake of appearing in a documentary about the Isle of Man TT, fell off, and became Grimsbys latest possibly first instant cult star. Martin has a sense of honesty that Cameron, Clegg and Miliband will never possess. And Channel 4 is not going to let its new discovery go. Hence, he is now being sent to any part of the world that a motorcycle can go. This time it is India. The curse of the celebrity travelogue is that it can quite quickly start to look like a spurious jolly for someone who could have just paid the airfare themselves and saved us their tedious observations. But this series has gone to the other extreme Were not making a holiday programme, were here to see the reality of India, Martin said on several occasions. We know full well, however, that the reality of any given place is really not available to anyone on a statement vehicle being followed by a camera crew, which left Our Guy in India betwixt and between: lengthy scenes of Martin pruning bushes on a tea plantation or watching a woman change a tyre certainly werent contrived, but they werent very interesting either. The problem is that theres really no reason for him to be doing any of this. Martins selling point is that he likes simple things that are not normal TV fodder riding bikes, drinking tea, fixing trucks. Viewers have fallen for him because he represents integrity in a medium where, like politics, these are scarce resources. But as Tony Blair found out, overplay the pretty straight guy card and eventually the public will smell a rat. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/11395052/Inside-the-Commons-review.html

It would be nice to say "It wasn't me!" with real conviction.

Firecat visits Thailand often and he has great luck with his dates from GayRomeo and other online sites. He just logs in and in 30 min or less, often has a boy at his hotel. I agree that Brazil is great for muscle but there are so many great muscle boys in Thailand as well. I love Hero Massage for that. There are other places to find this. Also, I agree that 3 ways are hard to get in Thailand as the boys are more shy. But, they are there and if you find the right lad, he will take you on a fun ride with 2 or 3 other sexy guys. I have had this happen tons there but it takes the right guy. In Brazil, I have rarely had an issue with any boy not wanting a 3 way. The hotels are no comparison as the ones in Thailand are cheaper and better quality. Never an issue with boys in your room. And, I hear all the time, "I don't like Asian guys." Well, I have take at least 5 of these people to Thailand and they fell in love with the country and the men there. In fact, 2 of the boys I took there from my days at Campus said that and both have Asian boyfriends now. There is so many great places in both Thailand and Brazil that I just never have a problem finding what I want in either place. Firecat does not like the sauna scene in Brazil. That prohibits a lot of his fun in Brazil. I don't like finding guys on GayRomeo but that does not prohibit me from finding great guys in Thailand as I can go to the massage places, the gogo bars, the discos or just the malls. Abundance of availability.

http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/50-weirdest-and-coolest-facts-lgbti-history200215 Some of the summaries are a bit loose with the facts but still a fun & intriguing compendium.

Grandma prefers THIS Black hole... So much more appealing and user friendly.

No. He is a pacifist. I think he can't get thru these next couple of years and let somebody else worry about it.

By no means are "we" doing enough. Never mind the "right" things. But, that is a separate issue. Best regards, RA1

Tu/We update: Cabins are free at M Mundo ?every night, but were free Mon night. Cabins are free at 117 Tues night. It was very busy. I saw my punter friend from M Mundo. He was on his ?3rd bottom. I ran into multiple other tops that would not bottom, guys that simply wanted too much $$, and 1 guy - a very good looking muscle boy, perhaps the best there - who was a total jerk and blew me off when I tried to say hi. The guy from the US said he was a bitch and had to lay down some rules before he would let the guy top him. I also saw guys that I had already done. One tried to set me up with a buddy of his, but it did not work out. With several of the boys, when I said 150 R$ was too much just for me to top them, there was no counter offer. Must be nice to be able to pay their way and get no business. LOL. I met a new boy, Alan. His 1st time there I think. I bought him some food and a juice. Did not kiss much, but I was very horny after striking out for the 30-60 min prior to engaging him. He wanted 200 and I paid it, just thinking with the small head I guess. His face was ave to better; body was mildly muscular, might have had some burns or other mild-mod old skin probs on his lower back. He sucked me with a condom on me, and I hate that. None the less the sex was hot and we both shot huge loads I never saw a garoto leave so fast after being paid. Not sure why. Weds was cloudy here. Completely by chance a guy contacted me via Grindr, where I must have worst ever picture of me posted. For 100 R$ we did everything. He was very close by and I went to his place. I would have offered to pay for overnight fun, but it never came up in our very limited conversation. I would gladly be with him again. Much cheaper and easier than 117 etc. He was more of a mildly musc twink, but completely hassle free. I am in Copa now and sort of cruising guys on the street here seems common. Also getting lots of hits via Adam4adam, Grindr, and Scruff. However, several of the guys are not even in Rio, so I have no idea why they contacted me. (Brazilia, SP, even NYC).