PeterRS

As retirement approaches how many of us I wonder have considered a cruise or two to some exotic part of the world? The more so nowadays given that there are several all-gay cruises to pick from - if that idea floats your boat, as it were. Quite a few, I expect, if only the prices were not quite so exorbitant. Some years ago friends of mine based in New York with little experience of Europe saved up for a one-week gay cruise from Barcelona to somewhere else in the Mediterranean and loved it. Others never got the chance to get near their ship. Sadly the Germans who had booked a package tour from their home city to join a cruise due to start from New York all died when their chartered Concorde aircraft crashed after they had transferred on to it in Paris in July 2000. Death is one dreadful if extremely remote possibility in denying you the chance to make your cruise. Recent media reports tell of another less final but almost equally awful cruise experience. Last year a company named Life at Sea advertised a three-year round the world cruise on board a smallish-sized ship limited to around 1,000 passengers. According to National Public Radio, the cheapest inside berth for a single passenger was US$196,000 this to include almost everything on the cruise. Move up to the 7th deck with a balcony and The Guardian reported it would set you back $562,000. Unlke most long cruises, this one would not pick up and let off passengers en route for shorter cruises. You had to sign up for the full three years. One American lady started out thinking this had to be a scam. But she had her attorney go through all the paperwork and the background of the company. She was more than satisfied. Another American, a former flight attendant from Florida, also loved the idea of three years around the world and also paid her 30% deposit. The balance became due in monthly payments starting one month prior to sailing. She then got rid of her house, put most of her belongings into long-term storage and prepared to set out for the start of her dream of a lifetime. The two accounts I have quoted have different start ports - one Miami, the other Istanbul - but in the light of what happened that's rather immaterial. The flight attendant sent her four small cases in advance to Miami. Days later the cruise company informed her the cruise had been rescheduled to start in The Bahamas. And just a few days after that the information came that the cruise was cancelled in its entirety! Some passengers had already flown to Istanbul ready to pick up the ship there. The company has promised to refund all deposits and the additional expenses of getting to the departure point/s. And the first lady claims some of the money has already been returned. But how do you suddenly reclaim three years of your life that you had assumed would be seeing the world on a semi-luxury liner? It seems the company, which is quite well established, had intended to purchase a 20-year old vessel named AIDA aura in late September before making cosmetic changes prior to the scheduled departure under a new name the MV Lara. Sometihng clearly happened in the negotiations for the ship was eventually sold to another company. Life at Sea had originally planned to refit one of its own vessels but opted instead to purchase the larger one. Ah! The best laid plans! Even so, despite all the hand-wringing, breast-beating, the angst, the resignations etc., Life at Sea has not given up. It is already accepting bookings for next year's 3-year cruise. Whether that will be on a luxury liner or a small dinghy remains to be seen. Oddlly, whereas I would have been near incandescent with rage, the former flight attendant has accepted everything remarkably calmly. She still has plans to travel, although on shorter trips. "It won't be the same as the round the world trip," she says, "but it will be my own adventure." Good luck, Madam! https://www.lifeatseacruises.com https://www.npr.org/2023/11/29/1215569569/life-at-sea-3-year-cruise-around-the-world-called-off#:~:text=This 3-year cruise around,leaving passengers in the lurch&text=via Getty Images-,When the Life at Sea cruise line failed to purchase,in November began to unravel.&text=They were promised the world. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/01/half-million-dollars-three-year-cruise-ship-possessions-liberating

I did eventually enrol in the 5-year membership. The cost was in a small way reduced by the perks since I travelled a great deal (until covid, that is). But when notice of the change was provicded at the end of July, I panicked. I could not easily get 500,000 to extend my membership through for the extra 15 years and ended up borrowing cash from a relative. I did go down to the Elite office where I insisted i see the membership manager. I gave her an earful about how the new regulations should only apply to new members. Sheepishly she agreed but said she could do nothing about it! So I prepared the papers for the 15-year extension, but then never had to submit them as my original benefits continue for another 18 months. Now that i am travelling quite a lot again and my Asian flights are all in economy class, I enjoy the freebies - the airport transfers, priority airport pass, lounge access, getting my free cart rides from the gates, 90-day reporting (rarely required now) just by dropping off my passport on Sathorn etc. - even though I know I could still get all that and would save lots without the Elite card. I guess one concern I do have is that I have only a tiny pension and for retirement now would basically have to lock away 800,000. At least that is the present amount. With rumours having been flying around for months, are the retirement visas limits also in line for a change? Absolutely no idea, but i do not want to take that chance. Whether I renew the Elite membership will depend on whether I stay in Thailand or not. Increasingly I am starting to consider other options.

It's total PR B/S. Ikea has had a city centre store in Hong Kong for several decades!

Although @Moses has come in for a bit of criticism in recent weeks for other issues, he does run the Siam Roads site which provides excellent guides in many cities around Asia. Presently there seem to be three guides in Bangkok and all get very good testimonials from those who have hired them. The guides have fixed daily and evening rates, can take you to all the known and several less-known sights in and around Bangkok. are not avaiable for sex but know and can take you to almost all the gay venues. Not sure of the cost and it seems to vary according to city/country. Plus naturally you pay all the guide's expenses. But I expect overall it's probably less expensive that paying the daily off fees and daily tips to a boy from a bar. Others may now more. https://siamroads.com

There was a thread or two on this some months ago after the Thai Elite people announced major changes to the programme. The original programme had several membership levels, the cheapest of which was a 5-year card for 500,000 Baht. Near the start of covid when strict quarantine requirements were introduced, there was a rumour that you could return to Thailand more easily with an Elite card. Not sure how true that was but it resulted in a jump in membership applications. So the price was quickly raised to 600,000! One of the benefits of the original card was that members could extend by 15 years for payment of another 500,000. So 1 million for 20 years - effectively 50,000 per year. But unlike retirement visas this was all cash out and non refundable. For the original memberships, there were several perks. Frequent travellers got up to 24 free airport limousine trips annually to and from the airport, concierge service at the airports and access to airport lounges. Great for some; lousy for most. For whatever reason - perhaps partly a result of Immigration having upped those opting for annual remittances to 800,000, more rich Russians and Chinese wanting long term visas, etc. - more retirees also started looking seriously at the card, even though it was never intended as a retirement visa-type option. It was one of Thaksin's programmes in the early 2000s to lure the rich to vacation regularly in Thailand! It had never taken off and the programme lost tons of cash. Around 2015 there were rumours the programme would be cancelled. But demand suddenly picked up in a big way. As a result, at the end of July all card holders were given three weeks notice of major changes to the programme. It was being completely revamped but no-one at Thai Elite was prepared to say what this meant in cash terms. All that was known was that the option to renew for 15 years was being withdrawn. The following Monday, I understand, there was a near riot at the Elite office on Sathorn with dozens of foreigners screaming at staff! It was certainly realised that prices would be going up and not unnaturally those already in the programme voiced their view that the new prices and more expensive perks should only apply to new and not existing members. End result, two things. Many existing members did immediately pay for the extra 15 years even though their original membership might still have had 3 or 4 years to run. Then on the deadline day - seriously, the very last day for renewing at the old levels - Thai Elite did a total about turn. Existing members were advised by email all their benefits of the original cards would remain for their duration. No need to renew until three months prior to expiry. In other words, a typical Thai screw-up! The new Thai Elite programme is certainly much more expensive and vastly less attractive for retirement purposes to all other than those with pots of cash. The cost of a new basic 5-year card has risen to 900,000. A 10-year card is 1.5 million, A 15-year card is 2.5 million and 20 years is 5 million (although allegedly the 20 year programme is limited to 100 per year and is only by invitation - whatever that really means! It does provide the member with 1 free domestic flight per year, 1 night hotel stay per year - and various other benefits that anyone who can pay that amount of cash would neither want nor need!). But to jerk up the cost from 1 million to 5 million for 20 years is a total rip-off in my view. It's now way too late to enrol in the original scheme. So I suggest it is not something potential retirees will ever want to consider -

Robert Morley always seemed to me to be a bit of a buffoon, but perhaps that's more a result of the parts he was given. The critic Leonard Maltin described him as "particularly effective when cast as a pompous windbag"! He was highly acnowleged for his London stage roles before he started being cast in movies. He was apparently offered a knighthood in 1975 but like several other personalities (David Bowie, John Cleese of Monty Python fame, scientist Stephen Hawking, actor Glenda Jackson) he declined the honour.

Wonder why they decided on World Water Festival. A Festival with the same name already exists in Kumamoto, Japan.

Even had he known about the Plan which we now know his Defence Forces were well aware of in detail a year in advance, it would no doubt have been difficult for him to do much about it. His main goal throughout his Prime Ministership has very obviously been the prevention of the creation of a Palestinian state. He is the one who insisted on letting Hamas have its own way in Gaza deliberately to reduce the authority of the Palestinian Authority. Once the present hostilities are over, whatever the result, he will no doubt be desperate to cling on to power. Hopefully Israeli citizens will call him to account and his days in government will be numbered.

Agreed. No one can deny that homophobia was pretty widespread before that particular version of the Bible was published. In England and Wales (before they were joined by Scotland and Northern Ireland), the Buggery Act of 1533 was passed. The Act defined buggery as an unnatural act against the will of God and man. Same sex sexual activity was thereafter punishable by death. Interesting, though, that when the crowns of Scotland and England were united in 1603 with King James VI of Scotland becoming also King James 1 of England and Wales, it was well known that although married he was homosexual and enjoyed the company and favours of a wide coterie of handsome young men, particularly the Dukes of Buckingham and Lenox and the Earl of Somerset. Historian Michael B. Young described him as "the most prominent homosexual figure in the early modern period." Yet James wrote a well-known book in which he railed against the sin of homosexuality! Kings were clearly above the law as James died aged 58 after suffering a stroke. The law was changed in 1868 to abolish the death penalty in favour of a long term in prison. It was under this law that Oscar Wilde was convicted at the end of the century. I believe the purpose of the film is not to suggest that homosexuality suddenly appeared in 1946, but that the word first appeared in a translation of The Bible in that particular year. This gave the conservative movement and Evangelicals a name to hang their loathing of the LGBTQ community. Interesting perhaps to note that the Greek word arsenokoitoi was correctly translated as far back as Martin Luther's 1534 translation in German. That and several future German and several other European language publications of The Bible translated the Leviticus sentence as "Man shall not lie with young boys (knabenschander - a word acknowledged to mean boys beween 8 and 12 yo) as he does with a woman, for it is an abomination." Moving foward to Leviticus 20:13, again the word is translated as "young boys". In Corinthians, yet again arsenokoitoi was at that time translated as "child molesters." Further, it was the Germans who created the word homosexual in 1862 but they did not use it in the publications of their Bibles. It's surely reasonably clear that the translators of the 1946 version in the USA deliberately inserted "homosexual" to further their own conservative agenda. As such, they altered the text of the most widely read book of faith with deliberate intent to stoke decades of homophobia.

A new documentary has just opened in New York, London and Los Angeles. 1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Cultures has as its premise the mistranslation of just one word in a 1946 publication of The Bible - in 1 Corinthians 6:9. It has long fuelled the Christian anti-gay movement that continues to thrive today, particularly with the Christian Right. The word "homosexual" first appears in translations of The Bible in 1946 when the Greek word malakoi was confused by scholars with a compound Greek word arsenokoitai. The former is defined as someone who is effeminate and leading a lazy, decadent life, whereas the latter basically means "male bed". While this could be interpreted as a man bedding a man, scholars then believed it also referred to abusive predatory behaviour and pederasty. When this version of the Bible was published, one gay seminarian took issue with the translations. He commenced a correspondence with the Head of the Translation Committee. As a result, the Committee agreed that there had indeed been a mistranslation. When the next publication of The Bible appeared in 1971, the Committee had changed the word "homosexuals" to "sexual perverts." By then, though, hundreds of millions of Bibles with the wrong translation had been circulated and purchased with the result that conservatives had had plenty of time to band together to push their anti-gay agenda. The Guardian article continues - The documentary [focuses] on the academia and research, featuring interviews with language experts and biblical scholars to provide context not just for the mistranslated verse, but the other “clobber” verses that have been cited by the Christian right as a condemnation of homosexuality. They explore Sodom and Gomorrah, and the historical context behind the Leviticus verse denouncing when “a man lies with a male as with a woman”; scholars believe the verse is not alluding to homosexuality, but to ritual pagan prostitution . . . The documentary, which opens this week, first premiered in 2022 and has already won 23 festival awards. But Roggio [producer and director Sharon Roggio] admitted that the film was struggling to get wider distribution. Even before its premiere, the documentary received a lot of backlash in the form of conservative articles, radio shows, videos and sermons all attempting to debunk the research – despite some never having watched the documentary, Roggio said . . . for gay Christians like Roggio, this mistranslation means everything. It means that “no one can dictate your relationship with God,” she said. “We’ve been told how we have to live as Christians, by putting away our identity, a part of ourselves. But you can totally be gay and Christian.” https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/dec/01/christian-homophobia-bible-mistranslation-1946-documentary

I forgot to add that one of the books that has most affected me during my many decades living in Asia is Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia by renowned British journalist and historian William Shawcross. Shawcross has impeccable credentials apart from the fact that his father Lord Shawcross was the lead British prosecutor at the WWII Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal. I read the original version when it was first published. The 2002 revised edition is fractionally less critical of Kissinger and Nixon but still a masterful piece of reporting and a devastating account of a foreign policy disaster. Of the revised edition, The Boston Globe wrote, "Remarkable and compelling . . . FIrst and foremost an American political thriller . . . where American officials spied on each other, lied to each other and falsified reports . . . ALL TOO REAL!" The New York Times wrote, "Sideshow excels . . . it has the sweep and shadows of a spy novel as it portrays the surreal world of power severed from morality." https://www.amazon.com/Sideshow-Kissinger-Nixon-Destruction-Cambodia/dp/081541224X

I mentioned Ben Hur recently. Although I was then very young, I just did not like his acting much, and that increased over the years so that I avoided most of his movies. He seemed to me such a stilted actor without the fluency of movement and speech that all major actors have. Decades later when he had all but given up movies (or they had given up him!) and before his dementia took hold, he appeared on the London stage in 1999 with his wife reading excerpts from something or other. The British critic Sheridan Morley who was related to several major British actors - his father was Robert Morley, Noel Coward was his godfather, his grandmother was Dame Gladys Cooper and one of his cousins is Dame Joanna Lumley whom many recall with much fondness from her appearances in the Absolutely Fabulous TV series - loathed the Hestons' performance. He wrote in his review that Heston's performance was "monumentally terrible" and that his wife was"suffereing from a talent by-pass." He then added that the management should recompense the patrons for having to sit through the performance during which, he added, the most moving thing about Heston on stage had been "his hairpiece." Ironically this disastrous review came at a time when Heston was publicly excoriating his felllow American actors for their reluctance to appear in live theatre, blaming it on their arrogance, greed and fear of bad reviews. Clearly bad timing!

This again is where some retired expats could easily help. Not perhaps in the actual teaching of English but in leading conversation classes at different levels of proficiency. This would surely also help Thai students thinking for themselves, a facility which seems sadly lacking in the Thai education system.

I am fortunate that for overnight flights I am able to treat myself to business class. With a window seat, there is usually a small compartment for personal belongings which it would be almost impossible for a thief to access without waking you. Best of all are the Qatar Q Suites which have doors in addition to small compartments and I am certain the excellent and attentive staff would recognise if someone was trying to access your little suite. I only had one problem with Qatar, but it was totally my fault. I had stupidly left my iPad in the suite on my return to BKK. It was quickly found and back in my possession a couple of days later.

So now Russia has gone even further in its actions against the LGBT community. On Thursday a landmark ruling by the country's Supreme Court declared what it terms "the international LGBTQ movement" an extremist movement and banned all its activities in the country. The landmark ruling on Thursday is set to further erode the rights of Russia’s LGBTQ community, who have faced an intensifying crackdown in recent years, as President Vladimir Putin seeks to shore up his image as defender of traditional moral values against the liberal West . . . Under Russian legislation, an organisation designated as extremist faces immediate dissolution, and its leaders face charges of up to 10 years in prison, according to the UN Human Rights Chief . . . In recent years, the Kremlin has introduced or expanded on a raft of anti-LGBTQ laws, a conservative shift that has intensified following the invasion of Ukraine. Presidential elections are due next year, with Putin widely expected to extend his rule. In July this year, Russia passed a law banning doctors from conducting gender reassignment surgeries, except in cases related to treating congenital physiological anomalies, in children. In December 2022, Putin signed into law a bill that expanded a ban on so-called LGBTQ “propaganda” in Russia, making it illegal for anyone to promote same-sex relationships or suggest that non-heterosexual orientations are “normal.” The package of amendments signed by Putin included heavier penalties for anyone promoting “non-traditional sexual relations and/or preferences,” as well as gender transition. The new law was an extension of legislation introduced in 2013, which banned the dissemination of LGBTQ-related information to minors. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/30/europe/russian-supreme-court-outlaws-the-lgbtq-community-as-extremist/index.html

That is what I have requested in my Thai will lodged with my lawyer and my partner. Please remember instructions on what is to be done with our bodies must be in writing and witnessed. If not, I believe the practice is to have the body sent back to your country presumably at the expense of your estate (but please correct me if that is not the case).

So we now now that israel knew of the blueprint for the detailed Hamas plans a full year before its ghastly attacks, yet disrgarded them as "aspirational" and :imaginary". The plans were exactly as happened a year later. Israeli Intelligence even code-named the attack plans "The Jericho Wall." The senior officials in the IDF just did not believe Hamas had the ability to carry out the plan. Prime Minister Netanyahu was apparently warned "again and again and again" about the iklihood of such an attack. https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/12/01/nyt-israel-intelligence-hamas-attack-blueprint-ac360-vpx.cnn

I doubt it. I have never been trained as a spy or interpreting intelligence. In one of my first jobs, though, I did have to sign the UK's Official Secrets Act. Although I was only in the job for 18 months, I was shocked to discover quite recently that my obligations under that Act remain in force for my lifetime! Hopefully MI5 and MI6 do not read this forum!

I suggest you read some of the earlier spy novels by John Le Carre who had himself worked for the UK Intelliigence Services - both the domestic MI5 and international MI6. Le Carre's prose makes it perfectly clear how Intelligence Services need to sift through every morsel of intelligence. Clearly the wrong conclusion may sometimes be arrived at. But at least when 'dots' are passed up the chain, someone must be looking at them much more closely than just assuming there is nothing to them. The USA screwed up. Israel screwed up. Britain screwed up massively re the Cambridge Spy Ring which operated on behalf of the Soviet Union for decades. After the defection of the first two in 1951, suspicion fell on the third, Kim Philby. But he passed every test and understandably had to resign from MI6. Although a Soviet defector had unmasked Philby as a spy in 1961, he was permitted to continue his job as a journalist in the Middle East, at the same time almost unbelievably returing to work for MI6. He finally defected to Moscow in 1963. The last two were elevated to high positions. Sir Anthony Blunt, spy No. 4 worked in Buckingham Palace as Surveyor of the Royal Art Collection. In 1979 Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher announced in the House of Commons that Blunt had been revealed to be a spy for the Soviet Union 15 years earlier. But he had been allowed to continue in his work in return for confessing all he knew. The fifth member of the 'Ring' John Cairncross had worked as a code breaker at Bletchley Park alongside Alan Turing. He was unmasked at the same time as Blunt, and similarly given immunity from prosecution in return for information about all his spying activites. Having passed on a great deal of secret information to their handlers over such a long period of time and given all the leads that seemingly pointed to both, that they were not imprisoned is a major stain on Britain's Intelligence Services. But the Intelligence World has changed a great deal since the 1960s. Clearly it needs to change even more in future.

More utter nonsense, given that you express your own views without any back-up or source material. I have never been anti-Semitic and have said so many times. But I have every right - subject to the Board administrator's approval - to condemn Hamas for its frightful atrocites (as I have done more than once) and at the same time condemn Israel for murdering well over 14,000 Palestinians, more than two thirds of whom are innocent women and children, and laying waste to vast tracts of Gaza.

I think CNN summed up his life and work succinctly this morning. To many he was revered; to many others he was reviled.But we should not, I suggest, consider his legacy without recalling that his German Jewish family fled to the USA in 1938 after suffering many humiliations at the hands of the Nazis. Nor that he was very much a product of the Cold War during which he was determined to protect American interests. I have read much about his career, mostly those parts which are more reviled today. Of his achievements, there is the ending of the Vietnam War for which he shared the Nobel Peace Prize (although this rather hides his many actions in the pursuit of that war), the major change in policy towards Mao's China, his many attempts to find a solution to the crises in the Middle East, and a gradual detente with the Soviet Union. On the negative side of the balance, I suppose the illegal invasion of Cambodia which resulted in the rise of the Khmer Rouge with the estimated murder of between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians, and engineering the murder of the elected President and the consequent coup in Chile are the ones that first come to mind. To that and other errors of judgement/deliberate policy decisions we have to add his agreement in advance by promising the USA would not interfere in any way when Pakistan invaded East Pakistan, a war that resulted in savage butchery and the consequent genocide of around 3 million Bengalis. As he said to Nixon when the war ended with the establishment of the state of Bangladesh, "Congratulations, Mr. President. You saved West Pakistan," a reference to a possible invasion by India with assistance from China. The late Christopher Hitchens was no fan of Kissinger. Indeed, one of his books is titled The Trial of Henry Kissinger. As the San Francisco Chronicle reviewer wrote, "he presents damning documentary evidence against Kissinger in case after case." In a two-article piece for The Guardian written in 2001 before some of the documents about Kissinger and the Presidents he worked under were declassified, there is this paragraph about the fact that after leaving office he became a fixture on the lists of those who were desperate to have him as one of their dinner guests - Everybody "knows", after all, that Kissinger inflicted terror and misery and mass death on that country [Cambodia], and great injury to the United States Constitution at the same time. (Everybody also "knows" that other vulnerable nations can lay claim to the same melancholy and hateful distinction, with incremental or "collateral" damage to American democracy keeping pace.) Yet the pudgy man standing in black tie at the Vogue party is not, surely, the man who ordered and sanctioned the destruction of civilian populations, the assassination of inconvenient politicians, the kidnapping and disappearance of soldiers and journalists and clerics who got in his way? Oh, but he is. It's exactly the same man. Later in the article he adds one sentence about Chile - Kissinger once observed that he saw no reason why a certain country should be allowed to "go Marxist" merely because "its people are irresponsible". https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/feb/24/pinochet.bookextracts Another expert who knew him and had been curator of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library said this morning, "Kissinger was a much greater hawk than most realised. His major flaw was that he failed to understand the human consequences of his strategic decisions." I wonder if the world will see his like again, a man with such huge influence on the occupants of the White House.

This sort of thing seems to happen with increasing regularity. I for one wonder how it is possible for reasonably large sums of cash to be carried around and placed in back pockets or in wallets in backpacks placed in a bus overhead compartment and thus remain out of sight of the owner. In this case, the headline mentions losing all his belongings. Yet the article seems at odds with that as it mentions merely a wallet and various documents. Whichever is correct (assuming the theft actually happened), having a reasonably large amount of cash in a backpack which the owner does not keep on his lap or under his seat with one or both feet on it beats me! That said, I do sometimes carry cash in a backpack - especially if I am going to Japan where cash is still frequently preferred - but that stays under my aircraft or bus seat where I can see that no-one touches it.

I wonder if you have in fact read the Official 9/11 Report. That makes it quite clear that the road to 9/11 had been quite clearly marked by dots, many dots of information which intelligence services had received and in some cases had passed on, but as @reader correctly points out those higher up the intelligence tree paid no attention to them. It is surely part of the job of intelligence services to analyse all the information they receive, research them and then come to a decision as to which might not be real. Prior to 9/11 - as it seems has also happened prior to the massacre in Israel - too many of the dots were not even investigated. In other words, no research was done. If an intelligence officer learns that there are young men seeking to learn to fly but only interested in take off and in-flight procedures with no interest in how actually to land a plane, that was certainly a huge dot that at the very least should have been investigated. It was not. But who anywhere seriously wants to fly yet has zero interest in how to land an aircraft? Sadly that was not something from a movie.

A fascinating list. But not all the movies can have been shown with intermissions in all countries, for I vividly recall seeing Titanic in Hong Kong with no intermission. Interesting perhaps that with the exception of the Lord of the Rings movies and 2 or 3 others, all others on the list seem to have been made in the 1900s. A poster earlier made reference to the long movie Oppenheimer. I saw it in the Paragon iMax Theatre. Personally I am glad it had no intermission as for me that would have killed much of the dramtaic tension. But I fully accept that others prefer intermissions.

Thanks. I note it refers merely to one country. Sorry the Titanic information is not correct. When it was released in 1997, the running time was 3 hours and 17 minutes. This required 17.7 standard reels of fiim running at 25 frames per second. Last year 5x35mm reels of the original film were sold at auction. Given the size of the projectors, it would frankly have been impossible for 17.7 reels to be loaded in one reel on to even a specially modified 1990s projector. This image is one for standard reels on a standard projector. On the other hand, as @kokopelli3 points out above, the old projectors were gradually removed from many major cinemas early in the 2000s when they were replaced by digital projection. Movies now come on a special hard drive and all the equipment in the projection booth has been significantly downsized. I have no idea where the information about queen-size bed reels of fiim could have come from. But I'd love to see a photo. https://www.shortpedia.com/en-in/did-You-Know/did-you-know-facts/did-you-know-the-famous-titanic-movie-was-177-reels-long-when-released-1637703653