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We're not getting any younger so preference should indeed be the primary driver of decisions like this. A friend from home recently asked me why I traveled far and so frequently to Bangkok. "Doesn't that cost you a lot of money in your retirement?" "It does," I replied. "I can do it now or I suppose that I could wait until I'm 80 to do what I want."

Factors behind the strong baht are varied and extend beyond Trump's policies. The real power broker is the Central Bank (Thai's federal reserve). The wealthy and influential Thais who control the banking industry have an interest in a strong baht. Pitted against them are the Thais who control the export-driven industries who seek monetary easing and lower interest rates. The bankers have had the upper hand until now but that may be about to change. Actually, as little as quarter to a half-percent shift in the current interest-sensitive environment could change direction. The monetarists favor something in the range of 33 baht to the dollar. You're right, Peter, about the overall direction of tourist arrivals. A glance at the chart shows higher "highs" and higher "lows". Just as in stock prices, this is a positive indicator of future growth.

From Bloomberg Financial World-Beating Currency Is a Big, Big Headache for Thailand's Tourism Thailand’s tourism minister has blamed a surge in the baht for sapping tourist arrivals into Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy and says he’ll take up the matter with the central bank, highlighting rising concern over the currency’s gains. Arrivals have dropped because of the baht’s strength, Piphat Ratchakitprakarn, minister of tourism and sports, told reporters in Bangkok after he officially began his new role. Piphat said he’ll discuss with the Bank of Thailand and the finance minister what can be done to help support the industry. Thailand’s currency is among the strongest in emerging markets over the past 12 months, and the jump has been a headwind for an economy that’s also being hurt by the fall-out from global trade tensions. The central bank has signaled its concern about the advance, and on Wednesday Governor Veerathai Santiprabhob said he’s tracking the currency closely and is prepared to act. “The Thai baht’s strength is part of the reason why the number of tourists has dropped as those who come would get less money from their currencies to spend,” Piphat said on Thursday. “Tourism is considered to be one of our country’s main revenue drivers. I will do everything I can to make sure that arrivals increase and more revenue is generated than before.” Piphat’s aim to boost the number of arrivals contrasts with the view from his predecessor, Weerasak Kowsurat, who said Thailand should care less about increasing of quantity of travelers and focus instead on improving sustainable tourism to mitigate environmental impacts caused by too many visitors. Tourism is a key component of the economy, accounting for about a fifth of gross domestic product by some measures. Piphat said he was sticking to a recently-lowered target of 39.9 million arrivals but declined to comment on whether Thailand could hit its goal for 3.2 trillion baht in receipts this year. Arrivals in June fell to 2.9 million from 3.03 million a year earlier. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-18/world-beating-baht-is-a-big-big-headache-for-thailand-s-tourism ============================================================================ From Bangkok Post IMF urges Thailand to adopt fiscal reforms, monetary easing to support growth Thailand should adopt an expansionary policy mix, including fiscal reforms and monetary easing to help support growth, which has slowed amid rising global trade tensions, the International Monetary Fund said on Monday. The Thai economy grew by 4.1% in 2018, but growth in 2019–20 is expected to slow as uncertainty over trade tensions weigh on global demand, the IMF said in a statement after a staff visit to Southeast Asia's second-largest economy. Risks to the outlook are tilted to the downside, most notably the escalation of protectionism threatening the global trade system, the IMF said. "To support domestic demand, the team recommends an expansionary policy mix consisting of judicious use of fiscal space, fiscal reforms, and monetary easing consistent with a data-dependent approach," it said. "Given the delay in the enactment of the FY 2020 budget with the transition to the new government and the resulting lack of fiscal stimulus in the remaining months of 2019, as well as the moderation of the financial cycle, monetary easing would help support domestic demand and external rebalancing," it said. The Bank of Thailand has left its policy interest rate unchanged at 1.75% since tightening in December. It will next review policy on Aug 7. https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/1717271/imf-urges-thailand-to-adopt-fiscal-reforms-monetary-easing-to-support-growth

A new gay voice has published his first novel to wide acclaim. From the Wall Street Journal Magazine Ocean Vuong: America “Has Amnesia” About Tiger Woods How do we salvage an Asian-American identity that has been erased by the media? Poet Ocean Vuong poses the question about Woods as part of his acclaimed novel, ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’—while also examining the experience of immigrants in a culture that conflates conformity with survival The 30-year-old Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong structures his semi-autobiographical debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, as a long, devastating letter. It’s written by the narrator, Little Dog, to his mother, who is still shattered by the Vietnam War and living unmoored in America. Little Dog serves as a translator to his mother, who is illiterate. “I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours,” writes Little Dog. The character wants to be seen, and he wants his mother to be seen, so he tries to make sense of their lives as refugees by writing down their story, using words she may never read. Vuong, the author of the shattering, tender 2016 poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, brings the same magic to his prose. WSJ. spoke to Vuong by phone from his home in Northampton, Massachusetts about both the danger and importance of being seen as an immigrant in America, and why “cancel culture” isn’t the best way to make strides in literature. WSJ. Magazine: Tell us the differences between publishing a novel and poetry. Ocean Vuong: Any poet would tell you that you’re happy just to have a book of poems out into the world so you can tell your mother that you’ve done something with your life in the past ten years. Publishing a novel is a bit more like a parade, and I’m not a parade person. But I know it means that I did my job as a writer, that I made something that seemed interesting beyond my own gains. How much do you talk to your mother about what you do, and how much does she know about the book? I try to tell her but she’s not interested. To some extent it’s a relief. She’s very practical and a lot of the publishing world is almost beyond her imagination. She gets that I do these things; she doesn’t know why. She gets readings. She likes going to them. In fact, she can’t understand the words so she sits adjacent to me and looks at the audience. She says “I like what your words do to their faces.” I love how in the novel Little Dog describes to his mother what writing feels like for him. Little Dog really hopes that his mother would be able to read it, but still he can only say some of the things he says to her in the letter because he knows the chances are slim. It felt like the crisis of the moment for me: As Americans we often ask ourselves “Does my voice matter? Do I have a voice? Does my vote count?” These are obvious concerns on the political level, but it also feels potent on the private, domestic level. What happens when the person we are closest to doesn’t hear us? What happens if we spend our whole lives inches away from somebody and our language fails us, or rather we fail language’s potential? The protagonist is told from a very young age that being Vietnamese means he shouldn’t draw any more attention to himself. It’s a survival mechanism. He’s trying to write, so he’s trying to make himself known while his mother tried to erase him in order to protect him. The urge to blend in and be invisible is very common among refugee, immigrant communities. There’s an old Vietnamese saying: “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” Conformity as a means of survival is a part of an intergenerational clash in the diasporan experience. Do I say I’m Vietnamese or do I hide it? He realizes that he can only be Vietnamese-American, that it’s not even a choice. Little Dog refers to Tiger Woods as another product of this world that both you and he inhabit. What led you to Tiger Woods? I always knew Tiger Woods had roots in the Vietnam War. His father was a soldier there. How come we don’t hear about Woods’s origin? It’s an American phenomenon, as a culture, that we’re often wary of talking about someone’s pre-history. Because if we go pre- enough we’ll arrive at slavery and American genocide. So understandably, those in power, and those looking at this country in review, have amnesia. The same goes for isolated sports figures and celebrities. They are better as individual phenomenons that exist within the context of the sport. An interesting thing about Woods is that he often has his mother and father standing beside him on the green. That’s rare. We don’t see that in football. But few people have asked about them. How do we salvage an Asian American identity that has been erased by the media? The novel is one of the great places where that can happen. The more I learned about Woods, the more I saw parallels to my own family: the mixed-race identity, veterans coming through trauma after a war. Tiger Woods became more American to me after the research rather than just being a two-dimensional icon. You’ve talked about how you’ve studied writing and now you teach it, and how we can admire the dead white men of the canon of American Letters but also build on their legacy. As a teacher, I get this question a lot: What should we do? Should we cancel everybody? I get the impulse to cancel people because it’s a powerful, sweeping gesture. We can take often racist, often problematic writers off our syllabus and feel that we’ve reclaimed a space for someone else. My concern is that I don’t think that stops Whitman from appearing on the desks of school children for the next hundred years. Rather than elimination, we should focus on being more thorough. Instead of saying “this is the gold standard” we should say, “this work revolutionized American letters in some ways, but there are other places where the thinking fell apart.” Whitman created an incredible poetic line according to the King James Bible in an attempt to preserve the union side by side with Abraham Lincoln. Incredible! Whitman was also racist. We can hold those two truths simultaneously. I see the canon as a very well-curated list of white folks, but when you take the monoliths down into another sector, you can start to build the next sector for yourself. We can look at the canon as a list of white folks, but then we carry on. It’s a less combative approach. I never saw writing as something I had to fight against. I’m fighting against so much in the world. When it comes to writing—the moment where I have the most agency and the most control—I would like that space to be as collaborative as possible, even with the most difficult subjects and the difficult writers who came before. That’s also my approach to history, particularly with negotiating the Vietnam War. Because it was a civil war there was a polemic of polarity, but in fact when you look at the actual lived lives on the ground, it was incredibly messy. Some folks fought for whoever was closest. Some folks fought for whoever gave them food. Some folks fought because their fathers did. The political schema never quite fits into the reality of life on the ground in Vietnam. But the classroom and the page is where we can go to be back on the ground. It’s where we can say “Where does this narrative go wrong?” https://www.wsj.com/articles/ocean-vuong-america-has-amnesia-about-tiger-woods-11559662495?mod=WCP_magazine&reflink=brd_obamp_mag

Next time you find yourself in Lumpini you might want to try watching the guys pumping iron. Not as speedy as your farangs but a couple of decades younger.

You're going to premature ejaculate?

Funny but I'm always surprised by how little they sweat compared to westerners.

Agree. I'm sure the 10-minute walk from Patpong to my room easily falls within the local standard. If raining, a taxi is in order. If a guy is judging me by my expectation that he should be able and willing to walk 10 minutes, fair enough.

When a prospective off asks the inevitable "where you stay?" I name the place, adding, "it's a short walk from here." If he balks at the idea and mentions taxi, I move on to another guy. Fussy offs frequently portend more dissatisfaction once they get to the room.

If they were portraying contestants in a beauty contest, it was indeed great acting.

This was from my own experience two weeks ago. There were at least four ladyboy acts. The boy acts included a Phantom of the Opera routine and later one with elaborately dressed boys doing something involving the the light of the moon. The was a f show where the top used a phony dick. Acrobatic at times. The show was enthusiastically received by the nearly full house of an 80% (or greater) Asian audience, including many women.

No, I mean the new Dreamboy. Once you see a ladyboy squat down on stage and drop two simulated turds followed by another ladyboy who kneels down and puts them in her mouth, it tends to remain imprinted in the memory. Just when I thought there can't possibly be another ladbyboy act, I was wrong. Since Dreamboy Paradiso is part and parcel of the Dreamboy operation, it's quite possible the same ladyboys appear in both locations, as do some of the same guys.

I regularly shop Tops, Villa and Foodland and have nothing but good words for all of them. For seafood, I think Tops offers the freshest and widest selection. While Tops and Villa close at 9, Foodland (Patpong 2) is open 24/7 as is the attached restaurant, Took Lae Dee, where you can get good food at reasonable prices.

One visit to ML on recent trip reinforced impressions from two earlier visits. First, The stage show is focused on the guys and--unlike Dreamboy--not on the ladyboys. Second, it arguably has the best-looking array of young men (models and others) of any of the show clubs. Third, trust your instincts more than the advice of mamsans when it comes to off selections. The best seats (in my experience) tend to be the stools on your right as you're led in. They minimize the obstructions.

from NY Times (18 July) Google and Facebook Are Quietly Tracking You on Sex Websites Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are always watching you — even when you’re browsing pornography websites in incognito mode. Trackers from tech companies like Google and Facebook are logging your most personal browsing details, according to a forthcoming New Media & Society paper, which scanned 22,484 pornography websites. Where that data ultimately goes is not always clear. “These porn sites need to think more about the data that they hold and how it’s just as sensitive as something like health information,” said Elena Maris, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft and the study’s lead author. “Protecting this data is crucial to the safety of its visitors. And what we’ve seen suggests that these websites and platforms might not have thought all of this through like they should have.” The study’s other authors — Jennifer Henrichsen, doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, and Tim Libert, a Carnegie Mellon computer science instructor — found that 93 percent of the pornography websites they scanned sent data to an average of seven third-party domains. The authors used webXray, an open-source software tool, which detects and matches third party data requests to scan sites. Most of that information (79 percent of websites that transmitted user data) was sent via tracking cookies from outside companies. Web tracking varies around the web. Frequently users are tracked via cookies, which are bits of text downloaded by your web browser when you visit a site. Other times trackers come in the form of invisible embedded pixels on your screen. In most cases, these trackers help sites identify and classify repeat visitors. They can help you stay logged onto a site, record your preferences and help manage your advertising profiles. The study found that Google (or one of its subsidiary companies like the advertising platform DoubleClick) had trackers on 74 percent of the pornography sites. Trackers from the software company Oracle showed up on 24 percent of sites, and Facebook, which does not permit pornographic content or nudity on any of its platforms, had trackers on 10 percent of the sex websites scanned by the study. Why are the trackers there in the first place? Most of the third-party code embedded in these websites is currently standard practice in the publishing industry. The New York Times embeds similar trackers and collects, uses and shares data about readers as part of its business practices. Some trackers, like those for Google Analytics, provide mundane traffic data to the site. DoubleClick and others provide the infrastructure to run advertising. In exchange, these third-party companies receive data from the website’s visitors. Advertisers and platforms argue that this data is anonymous. And while some of it is basic (device type), other information (your I.P. address or your phone’s advertising identification number) could be used to reverse engineer your identity and match you with already existing marketing profiles. What these companies might be doing with pornography-site browsing data is a mystery. Oracle, which owns a number of large data broker and has been called a “privacy deathstar,” could, for example add data collected by trackers with its current profiles. In the cases of Google and Facebook, which refuse to host pornographic sexual content on a number of their platforms, it’s not always clear why they are collecting such sensitive information, even if unintentionally. Facebook and Google denied that potential information collected by their trackers on pornography websites was used for creating marketing profiles intended to advertise to individuals. “We don’t allow Google Ads on websites with adult content and we prohibit personalized advertising and advertising profiles based on a user’s sexual interests or related activities online,” a Google spokeswoman wrote in a statement. “Additionally, tags for our ad services are never allowed to transmit personally identifiable information isto Google.” A Facebook spokesman offered a similar explanation, noting that the company’s community guidelines forbid sex websites to use the company’s tracking tools for business purposes like advertising. Though Facebook’s pixel tracker is open for any third party to install on its website — you don’t need permission to embed it — the company suggested it blocks pornography sites and, in those cases, does not collect information from those properties. The spokesman suggested that when alerted to new sex websites using the tools, the company will enforce against them. Oracle did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But even if the data is technically anonymous and not used for targeted ads, some browsing information may still end up in the company logs. And when it comes to pornography websites, the most basic browsing data is intensely personal because it is revealing. As Dr. Libert and Dr. Maris note in the study, nearly 45 percent of pornography site URLs “expose or strongly suggest the site content” and in doing so might reveal a visitor’s sexual identity or orientation, or lead third parties to assume a visitor’s sexual interests. “It can be very sensitive,” Dr. Maris said, citing URLs for specific interests like bestiality, and teenage and incest content. “The fact that the mechanism for adult site tracking is so similar to, say, online retail should be a huge red flag,” Dr. Maris said. “This isn’t picking out a sweater and seeing it follow you across the web. This is so much more specific and deeply personal.” The study found that only 17 percent of the 22,484 sites scanned were encrypted, suggesting that troves of user data could be vulnerable to hacking or breaches. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/opinion/google-facebook-sex-websites.html

Yes, directly under Luckyboys.

That end of Patpong 2 was in complete darkness Monday for Buddhist Lent, the only light coming from the open door to the shop. The light fixtures have mostly been installed. It’s encouraging to see the place take shape. Besides the great location, it will have no massage competition on the strip. And there’s ample room for the boys to gather outside, protected from any rain by the overhang of the floor above. Given the heavy foot traffic, the business should fare better than in the old Twilight location.

An electrician was installing fixtures Monday night. When I asked “when open” the reply was “maybe one week.”

It began when a cat decided to explore the top of an electrical transformer on the second level of Patpong 2. It was rapidly dispatched to mell heaven and multiple venues were plunged into darkness, including Hotmale. Screwboy narrowly escaped but many of the smaller restaurants and lady bars on the first floor weren’t as fortunate. Leave it to the ladies, however, who lit candles, giving the bars as romantic an atmosphere as you’re going to find in Patpong on any given night. A half dozen utility workers arrived on a huge flatbed truck equipped with a crane. They proceeded to remove three old transformers with a single larger one. This was no easy feat. The team, several quite easy on the eyes in their hard hats and the thumping background music, created a modern Village People high-wire act to the delight of passers by. One of the bar girls, waving a plastic bag, appealed to them for the remains so she could give it a proper burial. Some of the Hotmale guys could be seen shirtless, viewing the nearby action from their second floor perch opposite Luckyboys.

In 17 years and 40 or so trips, I’ve had three guys ask me via email for money. I told all the three the same thing: when I’m in Bangkok I can help you but I never send anyone money because I need to save it for my next trip. They didn’t ask a second time. There are a lot of things this young man could be thinking. But if you choose to see the glass as always half empty you’ll never be able to view it as half full. You’ve come a long way to meet guys unlike those you meet at home. Carpe diem.

Thank you, Peter, for a fine contribution. The FCCT presentation, coupled with your analysis, do a great job of bringing the man to life. The last—and I believe most recent (2011)—book on Thompson that I’ve read was “The Ideal Man: the tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American way of war.” Here’s a review from The Asian Correspondent. https://asiancorrespondent.com/2011/11/review-of-the-ideal-man-the-tragedy-of-jim-thompson-and-the-american-way-of-war/ Although Thompson was many things to many people, I believe some members of this forum share one thing in particular with him: a love of Thailand and its people. I think readers may well find it difficult to read about this man without identifying just a bit with him.

The Jim Thompson House is a unique piece of modern Thai history and well worth the effort. He was a fascinating character in his own right and the mystery surrounding his disappearance remains.

Good things those mattresses can’t talk. Lol. Each one must have 30+ years of tales.

The location on Surawong near Sap rd. has closed. I was a frequent patron. Always found the food very tasty and the prices reasonsble, presented in a handsome dining room. Unfortunately it was situated in the commercially dead zone between soi Tarntawan and Sap rd.

The mattresses, that were tired when I stayed there on my first trip in 2002, are being carted out as I write.