Eh, I know. Second entry in this category and again I’m gonna pass out kudos rather than bitch slap some blogger. I promise this trend will not continue!

Today I’d like to give a shout out to Cruising For Sex (Thailand), not one of the more active boards around but it’s been up and running forever and generally stays true to purpose. I don’t click over to this site often.  Suck cinemas, restrooms for scoring, and other public places for quick anonymous sex just aren’t that big of a draw for me. But the bar reports are pretty good. And occasionally some other topic comes up that is of interest.

But my tip of the hat stems from a very specific time: last year when the Red Shirts turned downtown Bangkok into a war zone. CNN’s coverage sucked; frequent reports but only about 30% accurate and generally in line with whichever side offered up the easiest sound bite of the day. Looking for something a bit more accurate and timely I turned to the internet and started perusing blogs and forums several times a day.

Far too many of the blog posts were political rants with way too many immediately falling into the ‘poor rural Thais just trying to bring democracy to their country’ crap. And when the government would make a time specific proclamation and then let the deadline pass without action, the bloggers’ response just showed how little they understood about how Thai’s operate. Besides, I wasn’t looking for faulty opinions, but rather accurate on-site reportage of what was happening and where.

Poster after poster on the forums offered opinions instead of facts, and even the few who were posting from Bangkok couldn’t resist picking a side and then sharing their thoughts rather than their observations. And then came Cruising For Sex. The least likely place to get news.

A poster who uses the handle of Sextile provided daily commentary, observations from his frequent walks through the areas under siege. Yes, this guy’s over use of colored fonts is annoying as is his need to abbreviate as many words as possible – with the abbreviations sometimes ending up being longer than the word he decided to abbreviate. But the combination of the two makes his posts easy to pick out, and in this case each was well worth reading.

CNN would have done better by canning their on-site personnel and just reporting off of what sextile posted. No other blog, news source, or forum came close to providing accurate and timely info of what was going on as Cruising For Sex managed to do.

Sure, now they are back to discussing the best public restroom to score a quicky in, but they really soared there for a bit and I’ll be clicking over again when the next round of civil unrest breaks out in Thailand.

http://www.cruisingforsex.com/bb/thailand