Gaybutton

Many of you may be familiar with my article, "How to Obtain the Retirement Visa." If you would like to have it, please feel free to send an E-mail to me at gaybutton@gmail.com and I'll be happy to send you a copy. As many of you know, one of the ways to get the visa includes a letter from your embassy verifying your monthly retirement income. I have not yet had a chance to personally check this, but yesterday I was told by someone who holds the retirement visa that it is not , repeat not, necessary to obtain a new letter each year when you are about to apply for a new visa. According to his information, the original letter is valid until your passport expires. I hope that's correct. It would save a trip to Bangkok, going to the embassy at those terrible hours (The US embassy is open from 7:30 AM to 11:00 AM and then again from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM), and paying them the 1200 baht fee they require to issue the letter. If anyone has a chance to check this and verify the information before I have a chance to do it myself, please post what you are able to find out.

One of the things I always recommend to people who are taking strangers to their rooms is to have the desk clerk check the person's ID card and hold it until an "all clear" is received from the "farang" and the person leaves. I would still recommend that, but it may not be enough. Anyone reading the news in Pattaya is well aware that crime has been steadily on the increase. I've been reading more and more stories in which the "farang" does take that precaution and yet he still becomes a victim of theft, even when the hotel has made a copy of the criminal's ID card. In virtually every case, the "farang" has left money, mobile phones, cameras, or other valuables in plain sight. Apparently that is often too much of a temptation for would-be thieves, despite the ID card being left at the front desk. The thing to do is make sure there are no valuables accessible at all. Lock them in the room safe or leave them in the hotel safe. No matter how sweet and innocent looking the person you take to your room may be, it is a very risky mistake to have valuables accessible. The same people who become victims of these crimes probably are also reading these news items, and yet they still leave valuables in plain sight and then wonder why they became a victim. Most of the time the theft occurs when the "farang" is either in the bathroom or asleep. I know that many "farang" want the Thai boy to spend the night with them, but I don't recommend it. Until you really get to know the boy, I recommend short-time only. In other words, my recommendation is to do whatever it is you brought him to your room to do, give him his tip, and then send him home. It's sad to have to make such a recommendation, but that's the safest thing to do.

The following appears in the PATTAYA CITY NEWS (Click the link for photos: http://www.pattayacitynews.net/news_07_05_50_2.htm ): _____ English Man Arrested by Tourist Police Accused of Conducting Lewd Acts with Minors Police Colonel Choochart, the acting Commander of Tourist Police in Thailand led this press conference at the Tourist Police Station in South Pattaya on Sunday Afternoon which announced the arrest of an English National accused of conducting lewd acts with minors. Acting on an arrest warrant issued earlier in the week, the suspect was arrested at house number 51/27 in Soi Nong Yai in Banglamung. The warrant number 502/2550 dated 5th May stated that the suspect was alleged to have conducted sexual acts with three boys aged between 12 and 17. All three boys were found inside the house at the time of the arrest. At the Police Station, Mr. Richard Jeremy Morrish aged 66 originally from Sunderland in UK confessed to taking in the three boys after a request from their parents to support them through school. A laptop containing sexually explicit images of the boys was found along with pictures around the house. Mr. Morrish, a former teacher here in Thailand who is now living on a retirement visa denied all allegations and is now being held at Banglamung Police Station after bail was refused. The initial complaint came after one of the boys was caught glue sniffing and was told to leave the house by the suspect. The British Embassy in Bangkok is aware of the case and is arranging legal representation for Mr. Morrish.

Six

Most of these arrests I read about are not arrests stemming from someone taking an under-age boy "off" from a bar. Most of these arrests seem to occur with local "farang" residents who make "arrangements" in their own neighborhoods. The following appears in THE NATION: _____ Briton Arrested for Alleged Child Molestation Chonburi - A 66-year-old former English teacher was arrested Sunday for allegedly molesting two underage boys. Acting tourist police chief Pol. Col Chuchart Suwannakhom told a press conference that Morrish Richard Jeremy was arrested for having sex with a 12-year-old boy and 14-year-old boy and took their pictures. Chuchart said police found a lot of pornographic pictures of boys in the Briton's notebook computer. The Briton was arrested at his rented house in Chonburi's Banglamung district. Chuchart said the man adopted the two boys from their parents, promising to be their stepfather but later sexually abusing them by having them. The Nation

A few days ago the police launched a raid against the pirate software and DVD vendors at Tuk Com. The following appeared in the PATTAYA CITY NEWS: _____ 1.5 Million Baht raid of Tuk.Com IT Center in South Pattaya It is widely known that the Tuk.Com IT Center located on the South Pattaya Road sells copies of well known Audio CD’s and DVD Movies on the 4th Floor. The vendors run the risk of arrest and confiscation of the CD’s on a daily basis and we have reported on raids by Police at the Center on many occasions. This is one such raid conducted by Police Lieutenant Colonel Santi from Pattaya Police Station who conducted a raid of around 30 shops on the 4th Floor of the Center on Wednesday Night. On this occasion no vendors could be arrested as they were able to escape before the Police arrived. The Police entered each unattended shop and confiscated over 10,000 CD’s, VCD’s and DVD’s worth an estimated 1.5 Million Baht. The Police will conduct further investigations into the sale of these items at the Center and will attempt to locate and arrest the vendors as soon as they can. _____ Today I was in Tuk Com. Out of curiosity I went to the fourth floor. Lo and behold, every one of the vendors was back in business, fully stocked. Welcome to Thailand, y'all.

http://www.mosaikpattaya.com

I'm beginning to wonder if there actually are any professionals in Pattaya who know what they're doing. Of course, they might be highly professional . . . get paid big bucks to do the road work, but use cheap, inferior products with which to do the work, hire uneducated, unskilled workers, make a bundle, and to hell with the rest.

My guess is they are already as well aware of it as the rest of us. Why nothing much is done to relieve the problems is anybody's guess. Maybe they don't go down that street often enough for the problems to affect them personally. My guess is that if it did affect them personally the problems would be resolved within a week.

Locals and holiday travelers have been plagued for nearly a year now as the city has torn up roads (yet again) to install new, supposedly high capacity drainage pipes. For many years, whenever there are heavy rains, much of Pattaya floods because the current drainage system cannot even begin to cope. Lord only knows what is coming up out of those backed up pipes. As a result, there are heavy traffic jams while homes, shops, and streets get flooded out. Of course, major pothole problems occur during and after each each set of rains because of the shoddy work that went into building the roads in the first place, and even shoddier work in repairing the potholes. During every rain, it's still the same streets that flood. At this very moment, many of Pattaya's most heavily trafficked roads are already torn up while the new drainage pipes are being installed. The current rains only add to an already present and persistent problem. I probably don't even have to tell you that the roads and areas in which the new drainage pipes have already been installed were among the first to flood out during the heavy rains of the past few days. Most of the time, the Thai people just live with it and don't make a lot of noise about it. But now, even they have had enough. The following appears in the PATTAYA CITY NEWS: (see http://www.pattayacitynews.net/news_04_05_50.htm for photos) _____ Anger as Floods Return to Pattaya Despite New Drainage Pipes Installed by City Hall After four days of almost non-stop rain, Pattaya is clearly suffering as many areas are suffering from flooding. We were out around the City on Friday Night and saw for ourselves the surface water present in many areas as the cities recently modified drainage system clearly cannot cope and pipes blocked with sand and waste have not been cleared on a regular basis as promised by City Hall. Areas experiencing the worst floods were Soi Beokeow, Tepprasit Road in Jomtien, Soi Arunothai in Central Pattaya and the North end of Pattaya Third Road. The Pattaya City Call Center Number 1337 has been inundated with calls from residents complaining about the flood water and demanding immediate action from City Hall. According to weather reports, the rainstorms are now over for now allowing City Hall to survey the City and ask themselves why the Millions of Baht spend on new drainage pipes has clearly not made a difference.

An E-mail from a friend reminded me that it's been a long time since I wrote about Rhonda, of Norcross Travel. Many traveling to Thailand from the USA may not have heard of her and end up paying much more than necessary for airfare. I used Rhonda for my flights to Thailand for many years and she was always able to get airfares hundreds of dollars less than any other source I was ever able to find. She specializes in travel to Thailand. I suggest first trying to find the lowest airfares you can, but contacting Rhonda before you commit to anything. She'll probably be able to beat the price, and beat it by several hundred dollars. The toll free number for Norcross Travel is 1-888-888-7157. Make sure to specifically ask to speak to Rhonda. Also, if you want to be assured of getting flier miles, let Rhonda know that. Sometimes I took the lowest airfare she was able to get, but the fare did not include the miles. It may cost a little more, but the flier miles are worth a few extra bucks.

The PGF dinner was absolutely fabulous! "Madame Jim" did a marvelously entertaining job as Master of Ceremonies, as he always does. Bruno's was packed and many familiar faces were there, including Richard Burk, of the Amor Restaurant ( see http://www.amorrestaurant.com ), the owner of Café New Orleans (please forgive me - I just can't remember his name - - Alzheimer's) (see http://www.cafeneworleans.info ), Boxer of Boxer Travels (see http://www.boxertravels.net ), Mr. Graham of Sticky Rice magazine (see http://www.stickyrice.ws ), Rob Astbury, Gaypattayan, and others. The food was just excellent (see the menu in the post above). Fredi pulled out all the stops for this one and everything was delicious, cooked to perfection, and elegantly served by his wonderful staff. Wonderful prizes had been donated for the raffle, ranging from bottles of liquor to furniture to dinner vouchers at the Amor, Café New Orleans, and Bruno's. The top prize was a diamond ring, worth 56,000 baht, donated by Honest Gems. A great deal of money was raised, not only from the raffle, but also from very generous personal donations, both from many personally present and many who were not able to attend. The next PGF dinner will be at the Balcony Restaurant in North Pattaya. If you are fortunate enough to be in Pattaya when these events are held, try to be there for them. They are always wonderful, unforgettable evenings, and last night was no exception. It was one of the best ones yet.

For what it is worth, for reasons I don't understand this sort of thing happens when switching servers. When I had my own board, my web host company used to regularly screw things up. It seemed like once every six months or so they would switch servers and quite a number of messages went missing. Even backups failed to restore them. Some may remember the time when the entire message board disappeared and the whole thing had to be started all over again. It was quite frustrating, but there it is. It happens. The best anyone can do under the circumstances is to re-post any messages they felt were important, but are now missing. Try as he might, I don't think Stef will be able to restore any that are still missing. Those messages now reside in the Internet Twilight Zone.

The following appears in the BANGKOK POST: _____ NZ Telecom Denies Right to be Gay Wellington (dpa) - A woman's email to Telecom New Zealand's help-desk was rejected because the company's filter system found her name, Gay, "inappropriate for business-like communication," a newspaper reported on Sunday. Gay Hamilton, of Nelson, admitted that she did happen to be gay but was concerned that the country's biggest public company had spent time and resources deciding that the word was offensive, the Herald on Sunday reported. "If they do have to put content filters on, then maybe they should ensure that it only gets genuinely abusive words," she told the paper. Telecom's automated reply to her email said the message "was identified by our content filtering processes as containing language that may be considered inappropriate for business-like communication." It confirmed that the offending word was "gay". Public relations spokesman Lenska Papich said the response was triggered by Telecom's internal email monitoring system, which exists to "prevent misuse of email technologies in the workplace and act as a deterrent to harassment. "Our systems internally detect a number of words, including both the words gay and heterosexual, that could be deemed as inappropriate for use at work," she said.

Wowpow, if you have not already done so, I suggest sending a PM directly to Stef. He'll receive an E-mail letting him know he has a PM waiting and he'll become aware of the problem much faster that way. Stef is the one who handles the technical problems.

You should also delete the cache. Another problem is that some keylogger programs out there are sophisticated enough that they won't appear on the task manager. However, following the above advice is about the best you can do.

Regarding drinking water at 1 baht per liter, the only way I can think of to do that is to have a water filter installed. There are all kinds of makes and models available, but I don't trust them. I prefer to buy bottled drinking water. I buy mine from a local bottling outlet. It works out to about 2.4 baht per liter. Of course, they probably use the same kinds of water filters that I don't trust . . .

That's a very good guess. Perhaps the following article, from the PATTAYA CITY NEWS will clarify what was going on, and why: _____ Karaoke Bars, Go-Go Bars and Beer Bars Checked in Continuing Crackdown on Late Night Entertainment Venues Bar Owners who watch this program should be aware that a crackdown is currently ongoing in the Pattaya area. Pattaya Police in conjunction with Banglamung District Licensing Officers visited many late night entertainment venues on Friday Night. Soi Sunee Plaza and the Naklua Road were targeted on this night and we caught up with them at the Kunza Karaoke Club in Naklua where the staff were urine tested. A total of 10 staff members failed the test confirming the presence of met-amphetamine in their systems; however a search of the club did not uncover any narcotics on the premise. In this case a report of the incident was sent to the Provincial Governors Office who will decide if any revocation of licenses is warranted in this case. We understand the bar crackdown will continue for the next few weeks.

I agree with khaolakguy on this one, especially the part about "however much money you give will be never be enough." In most cases with which I'm familiar, that's the way it usually works out. To my mind, it doesn't matter whether the boy was taken "off" from a bar or not. In my opinion, no matter where the boy was working, Geezer comes closest to reasonable if a finite amount is to be set. Noy9000 originally asked: I think it needs to be clarified as to just how long "long-term" means. Are we talking about a matter of days, weeks, months? In my opinion, if it is a matter of days or weeks, a finite amount ought to work quite well, provided that you first make sure the boy understands what he will be getting and he agrees to it. When you start getting into months, then I believe that's when it starts becoming a different story and changes need to be made, depending on the circumstances.

I don't know if I'd go as far as to put it like that. You are making it sound like everyone in town is a thief. Far from it. The vast majority of people are perfectly honest, hard-working, friendly people who have just as much contempt for criminals as we do, whether the victims are Thai, "farang," or anyone else. As long as you use common sense and take proper precautions, as you would likely do in any tourist city in the world, the odds of becoming a crime victim in Pattaya are quite remote.

I'd like some more information about the casinos and hotel prices in Macau. When you said it's mostly Asian games, what were the games? I'm thinking of Pai Gow Poker. Other than that one, I don't know which games would be considered particularly Asian. What were some of the weird Blackjack rules? What were the table minimums? Most important of all, did you come out a winner?

What was that song from 'Beverly Hills Cop'? Wasn't it 'The Boys Are Back in Town'? They'll be back. Many of the bars have had very few customers in the first place for quite some time, without Songkran being a factor. As far as the boys are concerned, there are plenty of them. Many do return to their homes to celebrate Songkran with their families, but throughout Thailand the main Songkran celebrations take place on different days and Pattaya is usually the last of the celebrations. Most of the boys want to be back in Pattaya for the main Songkran day, which is today. While the big day in Pattaya is precisely what many "farang" want to avoid, it is exactly what most of the boys enjoy more than any other day in the entire year, so most are already back and are going to be out there today. You have nothing to worry about, lectricman11. Two weeks from now, when you get here, there will be more boys than you can handle.

The following appears in the PATTAYA CITY NEWS: _____ Pattaya Police Chief

I wonder who that might be . . . As for saving posts, there is no specific function that does that. You could always simply copy the posts and save them on a word processor, create a blog and save them there, or use another method to save them manually.

I'm going to start by taking exception to that comment. That comment pops up every so often, but it is simply not true. There were plenty of contributors, many of whom are now on this board. After years of dealing with it, I finally became sick and tired of all the nonsense and gossip and I changed the demeanor of my board so that its sole purpose was to provide information and answer questions. My board ran exactly as I wanted it to, thank you very much. To my mind, numbers of posts and numbers of contributors are meaningless. I fail to see how that has anything to do with whether a board is successful or not. There are other boards that have far greater numbers of posts than this one gets. It's always the same small group of people, though, trying to out-insult or out-smart-remark each other. If that is what constitutes a successful board, then I hope this board is not successful. The demise of my board was my own decision. When Thai authorities began to block web sites, my board was the first gay Thailand board to be blocked. I had no idea why it was blocked or what was going on and to this day I still don't. I made an effort to find out and never got anywhere. I had grown tired of constantly having to update articles and spending time seeking out information. I was in Thailand, retired, and ended up averaging five hours per day trying to keep up with everything. I had been seriously considering taking down the board anyhow and the blocking made that decision for me. It was a little difficult to run a board when it was blocked from my own location and I couldn't even access it. That is the reason I took it down. I even had problems just trying to take it down. I had to try and try again to catch one of the intermittent times the web site could be accessed just to be able to get in and take it offline. I moderate this board as I see fit and within the guidelines set forth by GayThailand. That's what I try to do anyway. Virtually all of the posts that were removed, and to date there have been very few - less than ten, from this board were removed by mutual consent among the moderators. We rarely act unilaterally. As for the flame posts directed at me that appear on other boards, I rarely respond to those for two reasons. One is simply considering the source. "Mean old Gaybutton won't let me post my crap. I'm telling my mommy." The other is that I would first have to give a damn about what others post about me. I don't. After so many years of involvement with message boards, I'm thick skinned enough that seeing myself called "Herr Gaybutton," "Gaybottom," "The Grand Ayatollah," "Control Freak," and all the other cute little names doesn't exactly cause my blood pressure to rise. The way I see it, contributors who wish to post valid, reliable information about the gay scene in Thailand, and post it honestly, are perfectly welcome here. Those who wish to abuse this board and/or use it to try to threaten, intimidate, or attack others are not going to be able to do so as long as GayThailand keeps me on as a moderator here and as long as I wish to remain a moderator here. Some people have tried and were warned not to continue. Those who decided to continue anyhow and apparently thought they could make up their own posting rules rather than abiding by ours have found themselves on moderated mode . . . permanently. Being on moderated mode doesn't mean they can't post at all. It means their post has to be approved first. If the post contains information, properly attributed if it comes from elsewhere, then it gets approved. If it contains attacks and flames, then it doesn't. It's just as simple as that. We have had a few flame wars appear on this board. In retrospect, I think we made a mistake by ever allowing it and I plead guilty to being a participant in it. It's not going to happen here again.