PeterRS

Reports indicate that the south of the country has been hit by its worst rainfall in 300 years. Ten Provinces have been hit with the city of Hat Yai being the worst. It experienced 335 mm in a single day. Desperate residents are perched on rooftops. More than 2 million peope have been affected. Military ships including an aircraft carrier with supplies, a flotilla of boats and rescue helicopters have been mobiised to help residents. 33 have aleady died. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg97wx144jo Hat Yai: photo Weerapong Narongkul Bangkok Post

Last month United opened up a new route - daily flights from BKK to HKG. Outward flight departs at 4:05pm and the return from Hong Kong at 09:10am. Being a new and just once a day service, there are special cheap fares on offer. The problem for Hong Kong bound passengers is that the aircraft flies on to Los Angeles. So like it or not you will have extra security checks at BKK!

They're convicted?

We have in another thread a lot of information about the scam centres located mostly in Myanmar. These trafficked up to 250,000 mostly from around Asia to work in mostly dreadful conditions persuading generally those from older generations around the world to part with their hard earned cash. Thankfully China has started to do something about this. With the help of the Thai authorities, one of the biggest scam chiefs, a Chinese national named She Zhijiang, has finally been sent back to Beijing. Today's Guardian newspaper highlights another form of scam, one operating in Amerca's heartland. Northwestern Mutual is one of America's most admired companies. Founded 168 years ago it sits at #109 in the Fortune 500 list. It also tops Forbes list of the best employers for university graduates. Internships which might lead to full time jobs are coveted by students. Posters at recruitment seninars tourinely tout the company as "The Career You Want at a Company You’ll Love." Although given the revelations in The Guardian article, I totally fail to understand why. Jeremy Barr, a senior at Texas A&M University, was attracted by the company's PR. He was chosen for an internship. Jeremy was offered a job in the company's Texas office. He was sent away with “market information surveys” to complete. The worksheets, seen by the Guardian, required Jeremy to interview 10 friends or family members about their finances – listing their names, occupations, phone numbers, and asking each of them to refer him to 10 more people he could contact about their financial planning . . . He was chosen for an internship. Jeremy was offered a job in the company's Texas office. In spite of its questionable practices, the insurance industry is doing all it can to prevent government interference. SInce 1998 it has spent $4 billion in lobbying fees. The training began immediately, but there were no crash courses in mutual funds or market trends. Instead, the new recruits were told to take out their phones, open their contacts, and upload at least 200 names into company software. Then start calling. The goal: 40 dials a day, documents seen by the Guardian show. Friends, cousins, ex-roommates, teammates, anyone who might answer. Jeremy was told to leave 20 missed calls at a time so it looked “urgent”. When someone finally picked up, there was a script to follow: a cheerful announcement of his new role, followed by an invitation to meet and discuss their financial future. If the person on the phone agrees to meet, their financials are input into Northwestern’s software, which spits out a financial plan. Invariably, it will recommend the most expensive life insurance product, known as “whole life”, according to internal documents and interviews with workers. A more senior adviser typically joins the call and gets half the commission. Reps have quotas for these meetings, according to 14 sources, and an internal document from the New York office, that requests five new bookings per week. According to the author, 21 current and former Northwestern workers all had the same stories. Recruitment, they said, is a decoy for harvesting contacts. Reps are not being groomed as future financial advisers, they claim, but pushed to sell life insurance to friends and family. After one month 80% of interns dropped out. Jeremy stayed on and became top of his group. But despite being the product Northwestern encourages all its employees to concentrate on, whole life policies make tons of profit. Many cash out within a few years when they realise they cannot afford the premiums. Those lost premiums are basically profit. Basically, though they are just a lousy investment. An investment in the S&P 500 in 1990 will have grown about 3,700% while a Northwestern policy would have yielded just 44% over the same period (based on its current dividend rate of 5.5%). So, a stock market investment will have grown about 85 times more than the cash value in a whole life policy. Inflation since 1990 is around 146% so the Northwestern investment would have lost value in real terms . . . [Like so many others] Jeremy, once the last intern standing, eventually broke too. He had sold more than 50 policies to clients which he knew often did not serve their best interest. Guilt caught up with him. Just over a year after that hopeful spring morning, he quit. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/nov/24/northwestern-mutual-insurance-jobs-hiring

A little curiosity. First, I am the world's lousiest cook. I can do eggs and a few other things, but I just have no interest in cooking whatever. Second I am an unashamed chocoholic. Friends of mine are going to Muscat next week where there is a much praised original chocolate shop run by two sisters. My friends have promised to bring me back some! So a dessert that always has my juices flowing is a chocolate mousse. Yet in all my years of travelling it is rare that I have found one that really had that gorgeous mixture of taste, texture and consistency, even in a top restaurant. Too many are just too thick. Few have the right texture, a sign that insufficient egg white has been folded into the mixture. The best I ever tasted was served as a buffet lunch item in the La Ronda revolving restaurant on the 33rd floor of Hong Kong's Furama Hotel, just along the waterfront from the iconic Mandarin Hotel. It was perfect in every respect, even to having just the merest dash of cognac to add to the flavour. I took guests and clients to that restaurant many, many times. It was a huge buffet. As common nowadays it had different sections, including unusually for those days an Indian section. After a couple of visits when I realised there was no chocolate mousse, I was told that only two smallish bowls were available for each lunch serving. From that day on, I advised all my colleagues that the first thing they had to get from the buffet table was a generous portion of chocolate mousse which would then wait on our table ready for dessert time. Worked a treat! Never in my travels have I found one to better this from the Furama Hotel. Sadly the great views and its chocolate mousse ended when the hotel closed in 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/food/2025/nov/25/whats-the-secret-to-great-chocolate-mousse-kitchen-aide

When the apps arrived, I too had more than considerable success. Not here in Bangkok as the bar, sauna and spa scene did not require additional hook-ups. In my Asian travels, though, they were a godsend and I met many guys including a few whom I met regularly for a period of time. Some sites were better than others in certain countries. There was a site named fridae.com which allegedly had half a million members and covered virtually the whole of Asia for several years. Meeting guys in South East Asia was easy. Another, I believe gaydar.com, was great for meeting guys especially in Taipei and Tokyo. Jack'd, Hornet and Grindr gradually become more prominent, and then for those of us in Asia Blue'd was for a time great on my travels outside Thailand. But apart from fridae, I have never paid any membership fees. Then fridae changed hands. It still exists but checking just now, under Personals it claims 1,521 members on line of whom 55 are in Thailand. Click on Thailand and you find just 2 - one aged 63 and the other 75! Try Taiwan. 58 supposedly onlne but only 6 listed and an average age around 50. Don't waste your money on that crap! For at least ten years the site has been at death's door. I still get hits on other sites when out of Thailand and have met a few guys. But as @jimmie50 writes, I first prefer to meet guys face to face now. A sign of ageing no doubt.

A somewhat ridiculous title, I know, but it rather nicely praphrases a long article in today's Guardian. We all know that Caravaggio is one of the gay world's favourite painters. We know that he himself was gay, at least for most of the time. We know that Caravaggio painted the model used in the painting Victorious Cupid which arrives at London's Wallace Collection tomorrow in three very different paintings and that he was his lover. We know this because the British traveller Richard Symonds saw the painting in 1649 and was told its subject has “the body & face of [Caravaggio’s] owne boy or servant that laid with him”. The name of this boy was Cecco. It was painted around 1600 for a well-known art collector. We know, too, that in those days it was not uncommon for artists to have sex with their models. It is claimed that Donatello was madly in love with his apprentice which to many seems obvious when they see his statue of David. The art historian Vasari claims that Leonardo da Vinci “took for his assistant the Milanese Salaì, who was most comely in grace and beauty, having fine locks curling in ringlets, in which Leonardo greatly delighted”. We do have to realise, though, that the latest historical studies illustrate that same-sex relationships in much of Italy in Caravaggio's time, depite the prohibition of the Church and the Courts, were far from uncommon. One historian has discovered that over a 70-year period in 15th century Florence, 13,000 men were convicted of sodomy - this in a city with just 40,000 inhabitants! Most were merely fined and continued with their sexual encounters. Across the channel in England, Caravaggio's slightly older contemporary the playright Christpher Marlowe is reported to have said “They that love not Tobacco and Boys are fools.” The painting is being lent to the Wallace Collection from its permanent home in Berlin and it can be viewed until April 12. There is no special entry fee. And what of Cecco? He went on to become a painter using the name Cecco del Caravaggio but of only average talent. One of his works is to be seen in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. As the Guardian article ends, it writes this - Four hundred years on, we might make more sense of the incredible painting that is coming to the Wallace Collection if we simply use that old word, sin. Caravaggio’s paintings shudder and provoke with sin – the supposedly sinful pleasures of sweet grapes, red wine and sex. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/nov/24/caravaggio-victorious-cupid-model-muse-wallace-collection

Many of the rules on prostitution and sex were devised in the immediate post war period, influenced less by the Japanese themselves and much more by the American occupiers. The Americans were in fact conflicted by their own attitudes to sex and morality. They had condemned the use of what became known as "comfort women" to provide sexual services to Japanese throughout the war. Yet the American occupiers in Japan had around 430,000 of its own troops stationed in the country and these were also young men with a high sex drive. Against this, the American view on morality was essentially conservative and its leaders did not want to be seen as condoning sex. For the Japanese there was another problem. Many of the young GIs arrived in Japan with venereal disease. So the Japanese agreed to brothels being opened but only for American military personnel. The occupying Americans' prudish attitude to sex went a lot further. Even though nudity in Japan was totally natural prior to the war with public bathing essential and whole families attending the same bathhouse (segregation was almost unheard of), this was considered going way too far in the eyes of the occupiers. Thus the Americans passed a law stipulating photos of female genitalia were banned in all media, which in those days basically meant print media. When Playboy first appeared, a small army of Japanese women used small knives to scratch out the pubic hair before it went on sale. With a series of equally conservative governments, the Japanese have never rescinded this law. It did not affect photos of males because the first gay magazine did not appear until 1971. By then, though, the rule was entrenched and was assumed to apply also to the male figure. Hence what I and most others consider the near idiotic situation of almost all gay porn for local consumption now having pixilation. What makes it so stupid is there are machines on sale in the country which will unpixilate photos! And a growing number of producers and indivduals are posting unpixilated vdos online. Some producers are starting to use utilize pixilation that is so tame it is almost unnnoticed. Yet no Japanese government will allow itself to be seen publicly as changing the law!

After my two meetings with him, I did see him omce more but did not approach him. It was about two months prior to his suicide. Friends and I were having a quick supper in the lobby of Hong Kong's Peninsula hotel prior to attending an Arts Festival concert in the Cultural Centre across the road. At one point I noticed a man sitting alone at a table by a window. It was Leslie. Clearly wrapped up in his own thoughts, he looked sad, his beautiful face then almost grey. Part of me was tempted to go up, reintroduce myself and remind him of the times we met. Then the better part of me just made me stay put with my friends. I have no idea why he was eating alone; indeed, why when feeling so obviously ill did he bother to come into such a public place where people would be bound to recognise him. But he ate alone, no one aware of who he was other that the wait staff who were all far too professional to bother him. I have before some time ago posted this PR photo for a 1981 film of three tragic young Hong Kong stars near the outset of their careers. Leslie is in the middle. On the right is Paul Cheung who became a successful radio DJ before committing suicide aged 30. On the left is Danny Chan who rose to fame a couple of years before Leslie and became a major figure in Hong Kong entertainment. He died of a drug overdose aged 35. I think Danny has the slightly better voice, although he stuck more with ballad-type songs rather than Leslie's often more edgy repertoire.

I don't think anyone's list is or will be odd. Thankfully we have all enjoyed different life experiences and it is interesting to compare those of others with one's own. Re college crushes, I could easily have put down three. I was too withdrawn at that stage to get far with two, but the third and I ended up after a year of "is he, isn't he?" concerns in a short but passionate affair. He is not on my list as we still meet up, even after all these years. As can happen, at university this one did not end on a happy note and that was largely my fault. But after a gap of some years, we bumped into each other again and have kept in touch. On my annual visits to the UK we usually meet up for a gossipy boozy lunch. We rarely talk about our college days but our gay lives since then figure prominently. He has even come to stay twice with me on short vacations to Thailand. In my working life, there must be at least six guys with whom I was close to, one for just one night, I would love to meet up with again.

That has always been a no-no as stated in all the agency regulations I have seen. Condoms are always mandatory. Did the boy agree?

I'm not so sure. The brown envelopes solution works well when a law affecting mostly Thais is in effect. When the Immigration Department is directly invoved, I suspect they will be much less effective. And if a Vietnamese is not permitted to enter more than twice a year, he'd surely be stopped at the border from entering the Kingdom on a third try.

I wonder why you feel that way. For health reasons, several decades ago I had to stay off the booze for a year. This was a time when everyone drank considerably more than they should have - and then got into their cars to drive home! Going out with friends and work colleagues, i got so tired of being constantly encouraged to have a drink. So I hit on the idea of my ordering a ginger ale as soon as I arrived at a bar. That stopped the pestering if only because it looked like a whisky soda.

Apologies for the error others have rightly noticed.

Long after the American Indians, I always assumed that as the USA was basically founded by a deeply religious sect from England seeking a place in which they could practice their own faith, a mention of God would be as essential at the time of the Declaration of Independence as it is even today in the Pledge of Allegiance - "one nation under God" and so on. I wonder how many Americans question which God, given that nearly 40% of the country is now non-caucasian. Interesting choice. I know he is a marvellous writer even though I have only read "The Swimming-Pool Library".

Although you've gone for more than three, I'd like to ask the reason for asking the initial three if "they were atheists.' Presumably you have a reason - and I expect it might have something to do with slavery.

Yes. I should perhaps have added a comma after "quite far" to make it more clear. I have had the set lunch there and much enjoyed it. The restaurant is clearly popular and has been almost full whenever I have been there.

I know that this was a thread topic 15 years ago and hope there has not been a more recent one. If there has, then do not bother to add to this. That earlier thread basically asked members to list three people living or dead - they would like to meet today - and why. The replies in the earlier thread basically included former lovers, best friends and close family members who had died as well as better known personalities. I expect the problem with those who died some time ago is that we would expect to meet them as they were then even though we have aged. I don't find that a problem. So I'll kick off. 1. The first man I fell truly and passionately in love with - a Japanese who like so many was tragically to die of AIDS. 2. Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing, the massively popular gay Hong Kong singer/actor with a worldwide following who equally tragically died too young, by suicide. He is no doubt best-known around the world for two of his large output of movies - Farewell My Concubine which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, and the much grittier Happy Together which was nominated for the Palme d'Or. I did have the pleasure of meeting him once professionally. Apart from his beauty - and he was indeed beautiful - he was equally interesting and fascinating to talk to. 3. I find keeping the number down to three is very difficult. There are dozens of historical figures I would love to meet, but I think I have a debt I need to repay to my father. He was a family doctor, a profession my siblings joined. I, on the other hand, had not the slightest interest in it. While my father never did anything other than encourage me in the career I wanted, I always felt a distance from him. He tried hard to get close to me, but I had some weird determination that I did not want that. Yet he was an extremely kindly man, adored by his patients, a doctor who had no qualms about getting out of bed at 3:00 in the morning if a patient called. He had also been a prisoner of war of the Germans for five years, being captured as the phoney war started. He should have been evacuated from Dunkirk but some of the men had been transferred west along the coast to the town of St. Valery. They were supposed to be picked up during the Dunkirk evacuation but there just were not enough boats. So only a year after getting married, he was not able to see my older sister until he was repatriated by the Russians when she was five. He never talked much about the war. This was something between the men he was looking after in the camps, not for family. Thankfully my brother has spent much of the last three years finding out a great deal from the families of fellow prisoners whom he has been able to track down. Soon he will print a book for family consumption. I guess I would like to tell him I am sorry that I put up a barrier between us and I wish I had known him better.

Now I am starting to drool LOL.

A friend and I used to do a lot of bar hopping on Sunday evenings. For a time Classic Boys at the end of Soi Twilight was one of our regulars. When they put the price of drinks up, we told the doorman we would not enter unless we were charged the "usual - i.e. old - price. It always worked, at least for the first drink. We never had to pay the increased price!

While I have always regarded the amount of a tip as an individual choice, I do find the issue of tipping interesting. When I first started regularly visiting bars and offing guys way back in 1980. I was giving tips of Bt. 500, and I believe this was what most if not all offered as 'off' tips . Certainly it was easier to give one note when the alternative would have been finding a few red Bt. 100 notes! With the US/Baht peg, that was the equivalent of US$20. With Thailand's economy only recently having started to develop in the 1970s, all the bars were staffed by Thai boys mostly from the countryside where the alternative was either working the paddy fields or in village Mom & Pop stores. Bt. 500 tips were therefore very welcome. Thailand's official inflation rate has fluctuated quite wildly from 19.7% in 1980, dipping thereafter to an average of around 4% for the rest of the decade, increasing to around an average of 5% in the 1990s (the decade when the massive economic crisis hit*) , down to around 3% in the 2000s and almost 0% in the 2010s, with one further spike in 2024 of 6.08% in 2024. If we assume that the average annual interest rate was 4%, the value of $20 would now be approx. $96 (assuming my calculations are correct!) A tip roughly equal to the Bt. 500 of the 1980s today should therefore be around Bt. 3,100. This does not take into account the effects of the social order campaigns of the early 2000s, the changing face of tourism, nor the surge in the country's economy offering young Thais much greater work opportunities and thereby making bar work much less attractive. In theory at least this should result in an increase in tips! Yet I still see posts in this and another chat room mentioning short time tips ranging generally from $1,500 to $2,000. There is even one poster (not on this Board) who put forward the view that with the minimum wage in Bangkok being just Bt. 400 per day, anyone being tipped Bt. 1,000 should be thrilled! That clearly takes no account of actual circumstances, even though there may be a certain logic to the argument! Not yet in the equation is the fact that most of the boys now come from neighbouring countries which have in general less developed economies and a larger workforce still on the bottom rungs of those economies. With demand and supply in operation, assuming they are attractive to bar goers, they can make a lot more in a much shorter time than would be possible at home. So the case is legitimately made for a lower tip rate. I don't know how to factor in the cost of regular travel between their countries and Thailand nor accommodation costs. But I guess Bt. 2,000 that is often mentioned in this Board is probably about right. Just my thoughts! *Just for interest, with the aim of eventually purchasing a small apartment in Bangkok, in 1998 I converted a large amount of sterling into Baht with HSBC in Hong Kong and placed it on a year's deposit at 20% interest. At the start of 1999, I placed all that and the accrued interest plus some more sterling on a 4 month deposit at an annual rate of 16%. I estimated I made a total of just under 40% interest during 16 months. How the official rates within Thailand averaged only around 4% during those two years I fail to comprehend!

Agreed. But @Keithambrose who has criticised others for not providing sources, this time himself gives no source. So we do not know if that is in one day or over a period of time. Checking the internet, the news seems to have come from among others Yahoo News and Japan Today which state "nearly 500,000 flight tickets were cancelled" and is "spread over three days." Bloomberg is under a paywall but its headline is very clear - Japan Tourism Faces $.1.2 Billion Hit As Trip Cancellations Spike On China Rift https://japantoday.com/category/national/500-000-china-japan-trips-thought-cancelled-after-travel-warning-analyst https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-20/japan-tourism-faces-1-2-billion-hit-as-trip-cancellations-spike-on-china-rift

Please read @macaroni21's blog post which was listed in another post on another thread - Empty buildings in the Jomtien Complex - just a day or so ago with particular reference to King of College - https://shamelessmacktwo.travel.blog/2025/11/17/thankfully-not-godzilla/

I did say "when the antismoking ban was first introduced" and that was around ten or more years ago. Those were the days when I used to visit bars regularly. Solid Bar, for example, had three such large signs yet the owner and almost all the boys smoked.

FIrst I agree wholeheartedly about the King of College operating model in Tokyo, although like @macaroni21 the timing is too late for me now. And getting back to one's hotel afterwards unless it is within walking distance of Shinjuku ni-chome means a very expensive taxi. Second, I can recall only too well @macaroni21's bar model first introduced in these forums many years ago under his earlier nick. The dividing up of a bar into several sections semed such an ideal development and I am sure it would have taken off with the older westerner crowd of those days. @Keithambrose doubts if brown envelopes would be sufficient to cover a naked section nowadays. He may well be right but I'm not so sure. As long as there is no actual sexual activity underway, I suspect it could be worth trying. The entrance fee to that part of the bar could be increased a little more to cover a larger brown envelope. There is always an assumption - one I have also put forward years ago - that by concentrating on the older westerner market, Thai bar owners have shot themselves in the foot by failing to attract through advertising or other means the newer younger Asian market. Yet going back to King of College and the basic Japanese system in what is a plethora of host bars all over that country, I have occasionally wondered if I and others are in fact correct: is the Asian market really going to be attracted by Thai bars where the primary purpose is to off guys for sex? Some certainly. I see South East Asians as a very obvious market. Apart from the fact that they are all close by, most have no issue with enjoying sex with the Thais, Cambodians, Lao, Vietnamese and Myanmar boys who people most of Bangkok's bars. With the larger markets of Japanese and South Koreans, I am not quite so sure. Generally speaking, I think the cultures of those countries make it more difficult for gay men openly to accept sex with, say, South East Asian guys. This is not a racist issue so much as a cultural one. Of course it is not a universal fact, but I think as a generality it is true. It's why Japanese gay friends who visit Bangkok will happily visit a sauna, go to a massage spa, see a show in a bar and then disappear off to a disco. For many, offing is not really their thing. A section of bars where the boys are naked could, in my view, be extremely attractve to them. I am certain at the very least it would encourage them to drink more(!)