PeterRS

I'm going to add three more vdo clips of extraordinary female voices, but in order not to derail this thread too much, I have added them in a new thread under Theatre, Art, Movies and Literature.

Moreschi was in his mid-40s when that recording was made and he was apparently petrified about the whole business of recording. He was probably never a more than an average singer and that recording is of interest merely because it highlights what a castrato sounded like virtually at the end of his career. It lacks the warmth, depth, fullness and beauty of a true castrato in his prime. As an historical record, though, it is fascinating. When he joined the Sistine Chapel Choir aged around 25, there were only six other castrati in the Choir, although its Director had once been a castrato Chorister himself. The year after the recording was made all the castrati in the Choir were pensioned off and employment of such voices in future banned.

Welcome to the joys of eating Asian-style!

The castrati came in different vocal styles. Gluck was the famous opera reformer and his most popular work today is Orfeo based on the tale of Orpheus who goes down to the underworld to take back his beloved Euridyce who has died. When first performed in Vienna in 1762 a few years after Mozart's birth, the title role was written for the famous mezzo-soprano castrato named Guadagni. When it was revised and performed in Italy some years later, the role was rewritten for a high soprano castrato Giuseppe Millico. There were also contralto castrati such as the hugely popular Senesino for whom Handel wrote many of his major operatic roles. Senesino was based in London for about 16 years where Handel then lived. As for Cherubino, this has traditionally been played by a woman with a mezzo-soprano voice. In the opera Cherubino is a teenage boy besotted by teenage love and is one of quite a few "trouser" roles in opera. Another teenage role is Octavian in Richard Strauss' most popular opera Der Rosenkavalier, always sung by a mezzo. There he also plays a teenager in love with a woman but who is much older. Indeed, the opening scene sees them in bed together after a short orchestral prelude depiciting their passionate love-making. As one critic wrote, that Prelude concludes with "four quick upthrusts on the horn"! I have never heard of counter-tenors singing the role of Cherubino. Much as I love Philippe Jaroussky's voice, the vdo is of a concert performance. He has never sung the role in a staged performance. I suppose somewhere in Germany there will be an opera house or two where directors trying to be modern have used counter-tenors in the role. But oddly, in the youtube excerpts I have listened to, the counter-tenor voice sounds less like that of a youngish boy! One of the greatest Cherubinos of the last century was the Spanish mezzo Teresa Berganza. Not only was she relatively small and therefore physically more suited to the part, when you listen to the subtlety she brings to the aria it's surely clear this is the voice Mozart intended foe the role.

What utter nonsense you spout! Since you do not understand the airline business, better you do not comment on it.

I have heard of this type of voice but never heard one. It seems to be a result of certain medical malformations - as, for example, a larynx that has not completely developed. This enables the normal chest/head voice to reach much higher than a normal tenor. Can't add any more. There was another voice - the super high tenor. This was very common in France, especially in the 19th century when composers like Berlioz wrote for it. This was a natural tenor voice but trained go considerably higher up the scale than a regular tenor voice. But the fashion for this high voice died out, perhaps as a result of the rise of the counter-tenor voice in the mid-20th century. The tight cord method certainly seems to have been used by the Ottoman Turks. But it took a long time for the genitals to finally fall off and I believe it was actually a more painful process than the knife! Castration was also practised in many dynasties in Imperial China. It was also sometimes used as a punishment. Because of the Chinese belief that the body must be buried whole, the excised organs were kept in jars, presumably with names stuck on them! Korea and Vietnam are two other countries where castration was not uncommon, especially in the Imperial courts. The French colonial power sometimes used castration as a means of degrading individual Vietnamese.

You obviously need a lesson on aircraft production. When a plane is in development after disucssions with customers, the manufacturer receives a number of orders. As it nears production, orders increase. Once it actually makes its maiden trial flight, orders continue to increase. There were more than 4,000 firm orders for the 737Max before the first one was delivered to an airline. And that had absolutely nothing to do with either covid or the two early crashes. Those at the end of a queue for new aircraft by both Boeing and Airbus are perfectly well aware that they will not have delivery of their orders for years and large orders will be spread over a number of years. Got it? So the comment about 6,000 orders and less than 1,500 manufactured is utterly meaningless!

Perhaps interesting that in the 17th and 18th centuries when boys with particularly beautiful voices prior to puberty were castrated to prevent the voice breaking into a lower register, they also had no anaesthetics. It will seem odd to us nowadays but castrati who became successful were virtually the pop singers of their day. Castration not only prevented the voice from changing, it did not stop other parts of the body from developing. Most castrati were known for their long limbs, tall bodies and incredible lung power. Women who attended operas or who had been successful in inviting a castrato to sing at one of their private soirees (for humongous fees) were aghast that a note could be held for well over a minute often with a crescendo starting in the middle and ending very loudly. Many would faint. Some sought them out as lovers for clearly they were considered "safe"! The few who reached the top earned fees akin to those earned by a Paul McCartney or an Elton John. Only a few did reach that top. Many boys were castrated by poor parents in the hope that fame and fortune would follow. For the vast majority it was merely poverty and a ruined life. Yet the top castrati virtually ruled the world of opera for a century from around 1680. The most famous was Farinelli whose life as a boy with a beautiful voice, a castrated singer and a sensuous lover whose brother would be a party to his seductions by quietly taking the place of Farinelli to achieve climax was made into a successful movie in 1994. It won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. To achieve the vocal sound, the technicians married the voices of a low counter-tenor with a high soprano.

I'm 100% with Barry Kenyon on this issue.

Obviously it was the bigger windows 😵

Sadly I have heard worse. Back in the early 1990s a group of teenage Hong Kong schoolboys returning to their housing estate were having an argument about A having "stolen" B's girlfriend. The argument became heated. A few got into a lift to go up to their homes. Two friends of B then held boy A down while B pulled down his shorts and cut off his penis. I was friendly with the Justice of the Peace who had to preside at the court trial and who told me the gory details when we were both having lunch in a nice restaurant in Tokyo! He said it was one of the saddest cases tried before him. The remains of the penis were never found and at that time the boy clearly had a pretty miserable life ahead of him. (Please, no jokes about a future as a ladyboy. This was much too serious an event.)

I think maybe you are confused and perhaps it was the other direction. Flights in to Narita never fly close to Fuji. The incoming flight path is just too far away to the east. It would be merely a speck in the distance.

On a slight side-track, I have several dozen photos of Mt. Fuji both from early evening southbound flights out of Narita and from one of the great viewing spots in the city - the restaurant on the top floor of the Garden Wing of the New Otani Hotel in Akasaka. But I got my best pic only a few years ago. I was on a daytime Cathay Pacific flight from Haneda to Hong Kong and then back to Bangkok. I knew it would pass to the east of Mt. Fuji and so had my camera at the ready - just in case we broke through the cloud cover and it came into view. It did. Magnificent views. You can easily make out the trails for walking to the top. Aicraft was an Airbus A330.

Attendance was numbered in the thousands - so absolutely in no way a comparison with Taipei Pride. The two events are very different as those attending the Games, I expect, were largely participants. Plus this year the Games were split between Hong Kong and Mexico thereby splitting attendance. Hong Kong does have its own Pride march. Again, though, the numbers historically have been tiny compared to Taiwan. In fact, I know of no Asian country whose Pride march numbers come within a small fraction of Taipei's - unless one includes Israel.

Thank you for the clarification. But with the greatest respect, I suggest you may well be wrong in suggesting that those making reports of short trips of a week or less might be coming from Asian members. In my view almost all are being made by westerners who live in nearby Asian countries or are on trips around more than one country. It's true there is no way we can be certain unless the owner/moderator can provide specific details. You do not sound patronising to Asians in the slightest, and I hope this comment comes across in the same way. Having lived in Asia for four decades and visited most countries a great many times, I have got used to manners of speech, typically local ways of saying things (as in virtually all Singaporeans saying "I saw 50 over people" whereas westerners say "I saw over 50 people") and so on. Typically also, sentence structure is understandably more limited and generally shorter. It may just be me, but I have not noticed much linguistic difference between reports made by long term and short term visitors. Obviously some Asians will not fit my mould, the more so those educated in the west. I remember meeting two tall, extremely handsome, slim young guys in a sauna in Hong Kong. Both spoke almost fluent English but were Chinese and lived in Shanghai. They were in Hong Kong for a week-end of shopping, partying and sex! When I lived in Hong Kong and Japan, I certainly made short week-end or sometimes one week visits to Bangkok - many of them, often side-trips as part of longer regional business trips. I do sincerely think the shorter trip reports in this forum are almost all western/expat generated. I hope I am wrong and, if so, will be glad to be corrected.

I've been to Kaohsiung 3 times but the last was 6 years ago and I expect my information is out of date. With nearly 3 million residents and more in the surrounding districts, there should be lots of gay guys. In addition to a handful of bars and a couple of saunas (one which did attract a younger crowd but older, less in-shape guys did not attract much attention - it was named hi-Man and had naked nights), the city also has its own Annual Gay Pride Parade. This year it is on Saturday 25 November. Attandance is usually numbered in the many thousands. As I recall, Friday and Saturday are by far the best nights. Thursday may be rather barren. One problem I found is that there are far fewer guys who speak even reasonable English on the apps and so hook-ups were less easy than in Taipei. If I were to go again, I'd try to arrage to meet someone from the apps on my arrival so that he could brief me on bars and other gay venues. Far fewer expats living in the city than in Taipei, and so you may find you are quite popular!

Two very pertinent posts with, as usual from @macaroni21, a lot of interesting points. I agree about Guide Sites. I have no idea how they can possibiy keep up to date unless they have a correspondents like @ChristianPFC in every country. The problem is that clearly there are some gay guys around the world who look at them and regard most of what they recommend as some sort of gospel. And with some of the sites relying on advertising, they will continue as long as the advertising revenue rolls in, no matter how many tourists finally discover that at least some of what they wrote was nonsense. I wrote earlier about one site which did have advertising from several major companies, including a hotel chain and airline. This site had clearly made up a two article trip to Bangkok and Chiang Mai allegedly by one of its staff. It was mostly b/s. I decided to write to the advertisers, first to congratulate them for helping gay travellers, but adding my comments on the made-up articles. I don't recall getting replies but I do know that website died quite soon thereafter. As far as this site is concerned, I did assist in writing I believe three of the city guides and the emphasis was on tourism rather than specifically gay tourism. I certainly agree they should be dated. Having just checked, I note that when you click underneath the city descriptions on the sub-heads Gay Bars, Gay Clubs, Gay Massage etc, in most cities there are no listings at all. I sincerely suggest to the Moderator that these sub-heads just be deleted. Bangkok certainly has some bars listed, but why is Maggie Choo's the first when only Sunday is the Gay Night? And why is Telephone still listed as such and not Circus, the new name adopted about 2 years ago? Incidentally I see it is still listed as Telephone under travelgay.com! Asian Members. I wish I could be as optimistic as I have been suggesting for several years that Asians, and preferably younger Asians, should be a natural target for rejuvenating membership on this site. but I really wonder where @macaroni21 gets his suggestions about numbers. As a regular reader and contributor, I definitely cannot see the same numbers, with the honourable exception of @spoon in Malaysia. I do think the problem with this site for Asians outside Thailand, in my view, is that the information on the gay scene is not sufficiently condensed. A young reader in Singapore, for example, has to wade through a lot of posts before finding information about specific massage spas - and Singaporeans are very into massage! For western readers, it's much easier and much quicker to find the relevant information. As an example, the Singapore-based Blowing Wind site appears specifically for a much younger readership (a great many in their 20s and 30s) and it does have an extensive Travel section with information all posted by readers on Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei and a host of other Asian cities. The last post on Bangkok was made less than an hour ago and is a very detailed description about Bantai Spa including their Line and Twitter IDs. Another made in the last 24 hours is a very detailed (again!) description of a hostel near the National Stadium and all the gay activity that goes on there. Finding travel information with a lot of detail on that site is a breeze. Not so on any of the gay Thailand sites IMHO.

Anyone who has read transcripts of the last phone messages made by these young people in the airless container truck can not fail to be moved to tears. They knew they were dying and were apologising to their families. So tragic!

It seems you are becoming paranoid about Russian aircraft. You deliberately choose a five year period which covered not just covid when air traffic internationally all but collapsed, you deliberately choose a 5-year period and an aircraft type when that aircraft was grounded internationally between March 2019 and 2020 and deliveries could not be made. You also did not tell us how many Russian-made aircraft were sold during that five-year period so we can compare! You seem to be of some sort of Russian airline crusade which gets facts wrong and offers very misleading information. You are on what the English could call, using a cricket analogy, a very sticky wicket. In other words, there is little point your continuing on this thread because you can never win your arguments.

Sadly not entirely true. Hong Kong residents have been kidnapped when en route to Taiwan and even here in Thailand. Granted, only a few, but one bookseller in 2015 was sentenced by a Chinese court to 10 years in jail.

Experts predict that the coming months will be the best for more than two decades to witness the Northern Lights. The sun is in the midst of some cycle or other which indicates that the period from January - October 2024 will be peak viewing months. I spent ten nights in Scandinavia in November 2014 including a 4-day ferry journey up the Norwegian coast from Bergen to Tromso hoping to see the Aurora. I did not bank of mostly bad weather with cloud on most days. It was only on my last night in FInaldn's Ivalo north of the Arctic Circle that the sky completely cleared and there was a spectacular light show between 11:00pm and 1:00am. This year treks to Scandinavia and the Far North will almost certainly be unnecessary. The Aurora should easily be seen in Canada, in Scotland and in some parts of the world further south. Just one word of warning. Aurora cruises in Scandinavia are being heavily promoted and look great in the brochures. But if you want even semi-decent photos, you need to use a time exposure and the motion of a ship makes that quite difficult. There are plenty of internet sites with advice on taking aurora photos. https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/northern-lights-forecast-diagram-graphic-2024-rcna99053

Sad indeed, but yet another US pastor discovered not to be leading the type of life such religious men are supposed to preach. And why make such posts on social media in such a tiny town where, as mayor, everyone knows you? Ironically, he rather forecast his own demise in comments made in March and quoted in that New York Post article - "Our community is very, very low crime, very low drug abuse. Our number one problem is suicide. It is sad. I think a lot of it has to do with the military. I think some of it has to do with social media and the reality of that. That’s the number one problem we have.”

You have definitely got me confused with another poster. Unlike some of my friends, I am not a regular club goer in Taipei and certainly would never have mentioned Candy. I don't even know what it is! I have mentioned the small Commander D which I have been to and is quite close to The Red House. G*Star is much bigger and probably the most famous. I hear that Abrazo, Bacio, Werk and Bush at B1 are among others worth considering. @hojacat wrote a post about Hunt being virtually a club but it seems to have a different dress theme each night. You can find the post earler in this forum. Best is to chat with some of the guys who go to the various Red House cafes for drinks or dinner. With the rainy season almost over, it will be packed at week-end nights and pretty busy the rest of the week. I go regularly for drinks to Sol Bar and the waiters there speak good English. They will know the latest 'in' places. Since it seems you don't like Taipei/Taiwan why bother going? Others really like it. Some love it.

Check his posts on this forum. He wrote quite a bit about The Philippines.

Here - Sorry you did not like the Boeing 747. I thought it was a fantastic aircraft and loved the hundreds of flights I made on it over a 35+ year period. Well, the Japanese and Russian sites you posted were not relevant, although you probably assumed no one would bother to try and translate them!