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23 Sunday Jun 2013
Posted It's A Gay World, Stay In Bed Sundays
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22 Saturday Jun 2013
Posted End of the Week, It's A Gay World
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A short, just over 2 minute long behind the scenes video from an Attitude Thailand magazine shoot, Boy Striker shows off the many physical talents of male model and all around cutey Piya Chanasattu, April’s cover boy.
If you haven’t see The Man of Steel yet and need convincing beyond Henry Cavill, note that the movie is the work of the man who brought us the beefcake in 300, as well as these 22 Wildly Homoerotic Moments In Zack Snyder’s Movies.
9 of Thailand’s Coolest Guinness World Records includes a 400,000 baht pet wedding. Just be glad your boy special wasn’t part of that family.
Since I was a week early with my Father’s Day post, I guess I can bracket the holiday with Rise of the ‘Daddies’: A New (and Sexy) Gay Niche that holds out hope for those of us advancing in age. Kinda, sorta.
Now here’s something you’ll never see in Thailand: they are trying to decide whether to burn, crush, or donate $10 million worth of ivory in the Philippines. Thailand loves it elephants and is big on sticking an elephant on every tacky souvenir possible. Anyone else notice lately that those souvenirs are real elephant tusks?
Hungry In Bangkok, a foodie’s blog of the Big Mango’s restaurant scene, tries Ruen Thai at the Rose Hotel starting off the review with “I will not go into details about the hotel. But what makes Rose famous is their Thai restaurant.” Uh, not really. They give the place a big thumbs up for atmosphere, and loved the old teak house. The food? Not so much. It gets rave reviews on the message boards. But then so does the hotel. I’m beginning to think for some Location, Location, Location has more to do with their gonads than real estate.
Maybe it’s that the well-known scams in Thailand are so familiar – and easily avoidable – that I find them more humorous than a travel hazard. Those is Bali, however, strike me as just plain evil. All the hotel walls topped in barbed wire in Kuta may have something to do with that. Slight of hand during a money exchange seems to be a national pastime. And new scams seem to crop up on every visit I make. Punters love to trash-talk Phuket, but it ain’t got a thing on Bali. I wonder if that both are popular destinations for Aussies has anything to do with it?
The Buddha was big on divesting yourself of all the trappings money can buy and eschewing the pangs within your soul that lead you toward that lifestyle. How you interpret that I guess depends on the level of lifestyles of the rich and famous you’ve grown accustomed to. I mean you wouldn’t expect Beachball to start imaging he stays at 1-star hotels in Bangkok when he is used to imagining he stays in 5-star establishments now would you? But you do expect monks to do a bit better than Louis Vuitton luggage and private planes.
Awwww man! John, aka TOQ, started adding entries to his blog again back in April and I just found out about it. One of you bastards coulda given me a heads up. In any case, his pix of Songkran up-country are a delight as are his posts about everyday life in rural Thailand. As always.
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22 Saturday Jun 2013
Posted Dancing With the Devil, Eye Candy
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You’d think with my willingness to accept the flimsiest excuse to post pix of hot male flesh I’d find more uses for those of hotties in and out of their swimsuits enjoying the beach. But those puppies have been stacking up on my hard drive. No problemo. Thank God It’s Summer.
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21 Friday Jun 2013
Posted Buddhism 101
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According to Wikipedia, the English translation for chofah is ‘sky tassel’ which is a lot cooler than the Thai version that sounds like a sneeze. Not that the architectural details that top the roof lines of Thai wats are anything to sneeze about. As with most ornamentation on Thai temples, they have a meaning and a story; they don’t end up in such a prominent position purely by chance. But while their significance is not in question, just what they are supposed to represent often is.
Chofah are most often seen in the form of a stylized garuda, the mythical eagle-like creature of Buddhist legend by way of Hinduism. When there is a sharp break present, that’s probably a correct call. Gracefully flowing chofah that still have a bird-like appearance, some claim, are hongse instead. Which is also from Buddhist/Hindu myth, is sometimes called a hamsa instead, looks more like a swan than an eagle (though it is at times referred to as a male goose too), and is featured on the prow of the King of Thailand’s royal barge.
It doesn’t help that unlike much Thai art and ornamentation chofah are usually simple, yet sublime in design. Often their shape is suggestive with a minimum of detail. Some chofah are so heavily stylized you can’t be sure which bird-like creature they represent, and actually are supposed to be naga instead. There is also a version that look like a poorly rendered garuda, but is actually supposed to be a seated Buddha. Those shaped like an elephant, fortunately, are easily to figure out.
Also a well-used detail in Lao and Cambodian temples, it has been suggested that Hindu inspired chofah were originally intended to appease and appeal to those of that religion when the area was slowly moving to being predominately Buddhist. There is no arguing that the deities of the two religions are well-represented in SE Asian Buddhism. Some have even claimed the garuda//hongse debate on chofah is due to specific wats or areas attempting to appeal to specific Hindu belief systems; the garuda was the vehicle for the god Vishnu, the hongse the mount for the god Brahma. That theory has little to do with chofah that are shaped as a naga though, as he is the half sibling of the garuda and its sworn enemy.
Regardless of the design, chofah almost always are spiked. The belief is that its chofah protect a temple from flying demons; should an evil spirit fall from the sky it will be impaled on the point of the chofah and be unable to cause harm to the religious community. Which is even cooler than the sky tassel thingy.
And regardless of the design, what they are not are hang hong. A wat’s chofah are always at the peak of the roof, even when there are several peaks. Hang hong, which are almost always in the form of naga heads (though hongse are popular as hang hong too), are part of the roof’s bargeboards. They cover the ends of gables to prevent roof tiles from falling off. Which is more practical than spiking evil demons but not nearly as cool. But then it is position, not mythological creature that matters. And the naga used as hang hong too are generally considered part of a temple’s protection against danger, evil, and harm.
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21 Friday Jun 2013
Posted iPhone Fridays, It's A Gay World
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20 Thursday Jun 2013
Fans of Platinum Fashion Mall in Bangkok will all agree that as popular as Pratunam is as a shopping district, it is not for the fainthearted. Massive crowds, pushy pedestrians, parking lot-like traffic, motorcycles using the sidewalk as a dedicated traffic lane, and Bangkok’s sweltering heat combine to make it an unappealing area to anyone who is not a diehard shopaholic. And that’s just during the week. Come Saturday afternoon it can be too much even for those born to shop.
But the deals to be had, especially on clothing, are a Mecca to bargain hunters, both touri and what often seems to be half of Bangkok’s population alike. Experienced visitors know you can go mano y mano with the shop dealers who line the narrow, stifling aisles of the Pratunam Market if you prefer a little sweat with your shopping (okay, lots of sweat). Or you can step into the air conditioned not quite as sardines-in-a-can-like aisles of Platinum Fashion Mall. You may pay a bit for the comfort, but prices are so low anyway it may well be worth the financial sacrifice.
I’ve always wondered if Platinum was purposely named, or if it was a case of Pratunam being lost in translation into English. Grab a taxi to either and no matter how carefully you enunciate your intended destination there’s a good chance you’ll end up at the other. But then that has more to do with traffic than it does with your accent. And since the two are but a block – and a death-defying crossing of a street – away, it doesn’t really matter. You may even decide to take a local’s approach to life and just shop where you land. If you have good karma, that’ll be at Platinum.
Platinum Fashion Mall is like an indoor version of the Chatuchak Weekend Market. While it specializes in wholesale fashion clothing and accessories, with six floors of shopping space you’ll find someone selling just about whatever it is your heart desires. That is provided you can find them. Because Platinum too shares that characteristic with the Weekend Market. It is confusing as all hell. Despite each floor supposedly being devoted to a specific genre of merchandise. Thais aren’t big on following rules, and a floor devoted to a specific type of consumer goods is just a bit too close to sounding like a rule. Therefor it’s best to just ignore it. You’re better off browsing anyway. Whatever it was you were looking for is probably in the other building in the first place.
Thai aren’t big on reading maps either, no more so than women are. Or at least they are not big on the skill that entails. Which may explain why the mall is laid out in zones. Because while that would normally confuse the issue, for the already flummoxed it has zero effect. And for the small population of farang men in the mall, it levels the playing filed allowing them to feel just as lost and helpless as the rest of the crowd. Whoda thought shopping would provide you with a glimpse into the Thai collectivism culture where it’s all for one and one for all?
Fortunately, stumbling over a real bargain is the rule rather than exception at Platinum. And that’s a rule everyone can get behind. Primarily a wholesale market like the open-air Pratunam Market across the street, with very little effort you can walk away with a great deal. The trick is to buy in quantity. And since a quantity of 3 will usually land you the wholesale price, that’s not a difficult thing to do. Most of the stores are more stall than store and none carry what could be called an extensive selection of merchandise. But there’s always enough available to easily pick out three items – they do not have to be the exact same item to qualify as a bulk purchase. And when you can pick up a pair of jeans, cammies, or cargo pants for $15, why wouldn’t you stock up on a few pair?
The selection at Platinum is overwhelmingly geared toward women, but there are plenty of places selling clothing for men too. Many are small local designers; you can find some truly cool T-shirts that may cost you a bit more than the knock-offs available at street markets but which will not have some large corporation’s logo emblazoned across the chest either. There are even high-quality 100% cotton Ts without graphics, suitable for those who realize they are too old to be strolling around in Hollister’s or Aeropostale’s advertising. And if you want to upgrade to clubwear, you’ll find a nice range of duds that’ll keep you from looking like a dud. Or a dude. Or a rube.
You can of course find many of the same lines of clothing at MBK, a more manageable and traditional shopping mall popular with tourists and locals just a few minutes away. But the majority of small shops and stalls at MBK buy their merchandise from Platinum; come early and you can watch local divas in high heels manhandle massive bags filled with clothing down the aisles and out to the street to a waiting taxi. Not that you’ll realize the same prices they do, but you will avoid much of their mark-up by shopping at the source. Just like they do.
I’m always hard pressed to decide at what point during a trip to make a pilgrimage to Platinum. Especially when I have first-time visitors with me. On one hand it’s good to sneak a visit in early, before everyone blows their money elsewhere, paying a higher price for what they could get at Platinum. Which tends to piss some folk off. On the other hand, it’s good to make the trek to Platinum later during a trip when everyone is totally fed up with having to haggle over the price of every damn thing they want to buy. Negotiating is not necessary at Platinum. There’s the retail price, the wholesale price, and the give me a dozen price. And the store clerks will volunteer the discounted prices without you saying a word. The only problem with the first choice is that invariably means another visit before everyone hops back on the plane. And that’s more dangerous to your wallet than being tagged as jai dee by your boy du jour.
You may as well go ahead and leave home without it when it comes to credit cards though, cash is the name of the game at Platinum. And if you do find a stall that takes plastic, expect to pay a 3% surcharge for using your card. Many of the stores do not have a dressing room, most will walk you to the closest store that does. Even if that is nothing more than a small corner you’ll barely fit into with a curtain that may or may not provide you with a sense of privacy. Guys, who seldom try on clothes assuming they know what size they need, should exercise caution. A ‘L’ can be anything from a ‘S’ to a ‘M’. Though I do recall one vendor proudly telling me her L would fit because it was “America Size”. Which meant twice the size any other nationality would need for a comfortable, loose fit. (But she was right.)
Luggage – in case you buy more than what will fit in your suitcases – souvenirs, knickknacks, bedding and sheets, bags that work great for your camera or as a day pack, and lots and lots of silk are all available at Platinum too. What you won’t find are computers, electronics, or porn dvds. Those you’ll have to go next door to Pantip Plaza for. This being Thailand, you’ll find plenty of knock-offs and counterfeit goods at both malls.
With hours and hours of shopping on your agenda, you will need sustenance and Platinum Fashion Mall has you covered with that ever popular shopping mall standard, a food court. Platinum’s – often overflowing with hungry humanity – has 28 different booths offering a wide variety of mostly Thai and Asian food at low, low prices. It’s on the top floor. Platinum also has some of the standard American fast food joints splashed across the front of the mall (KFC is well represented, but I’m hoping your taste in food is better or at least as good as your taste in clothing).
A better choice to satisfy your hunger pains is across the street near the corner of Soi 30 where you’ll find one of the city’s best and most popular, chicken and rice stalls/restaurants. Kaiton Kao Mun has been around for 40 years. Affectionately known as the pink shirt chicken rice place, it draws huge crowds from early in the morning into the late afternoon. And then again all night long (Um, it’s closed from around 3 pm to around 5 pm). There is an imitator – because there always is in Bangkok – just a few yards away, but they wear green shirts. It’s one of those local places where you’ll just have to point at what you want, but everything on the menu is top-rate and unlike at KFC it’s all real chicken. And lunch will run you around 80 baht. Just look for the crowds. Or follow your nose.
Many recommend an early visit to Platinum to avoid some of the crowd. The mall opens at 8:00 am on Wednesdays and weekends, at 9:00 am on the other days. But that too is a suggestion rather than a fixed rule and many of the shops don’t open their doors until 10. Or later. Ditto for the other end of the work day. The mall officially closes at 10:00 pm, but you’ll be lucky to find anything other than the KFC open after 9. Or 8. You can also scope out your plan of attack by visiting the mall’s website, most of its 2,228 stores are listed and have pictures on-line of the type of merchandise they carry. The only danger in visiting their website first is it is almost as much of an ordeal as hitting the actual mall – you may have little energy left to do your shopping in person.
Getting to Platinum Fashion Mall is easy. Take a taxi from your hotel, or take the BTS to Chitlom Station and a taxi or tuk tuk from there. Due to the 24/7 gridlock, don’t be surprised if your taxi driver demands a fixed fare. Fortunately when your shopping jones has been sated and you are laden with bags full of all the hot deals you found, there is an amazingly organized taxi queue in front of the mall. Wait your turn, hop in, and tell the driver to take you to the nearest massage spa. You’ll need it.
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20 Thursday Jun 2013
Posted Absolutely Thursdays, It's A Gay World
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19 Wednesday Jun 2013
Posted It's A Gay World, Smells Like Science
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They say that money is the root of all evil. They say that money can’t buy happiness. I’m not sure who ‘they’ are, but suspect it is a bunch of poor people who’ve never bought a happy ending in Thailand. Money is a wonderful thing. It makes the world go round. Everyone wants it. Everyone needs it. And if you don’t think it is a fair trade for that which puts a smile on most people’s faces, you don’t know jack. Or capuchin monkeys. Or chimps, or bonobos. Sexpats in Pattaya, may well lend themselves to your argument, but even they readily spend their money on happy endings. It’s just that they love often their limited, dwindling cache of cash more than what it can bring. And by short changing the source, they often find themselves the ones who end up being the monkey’s uncle. ‘Cuz some of us just haven’t made it very far up that evolutionary tree.
And yup, that smells like science to me.
Economic researchers at Yale University managed to successfully train capuchin monkeys to understand and use currency. The result? The monkeys used their new found currency to buy sex. But wait! There’s more! Once they got the hang of what money was all about, our not-so-distant cousins began acting quite human-like. Yale’s capuchins responded to the vargarities of the market place, took to gambling like a duck to water, failed to save, stole when they could, and used money to buy more food than they could eat. And to buy a bit of nookie too, of course.
The capuchin, a New World monkey about the size of a scrawny one-year-old human baby, has a small brain. One that is pretty much focused on food and sex according to Yale economist Keith Chen. Along with his colleague, psychologist Laurie Santos, he set out to teach his capuchins to use money to buy grapes, apples, and Jello, a conditioning he thought possible considering their natural glutton-like desire for food. “You should really think of a capuchin as a bottomless stomach of want,’’ Chen says. ‘’You can feed them marshmallows all day, they’ll throw up and then come back for more.’’ Exchange ‘gin’ for ‘marshmallow’ and that starts sounding like a familiar tale. But then ‘a bottomless stomach of want’ probably already took you there.
Step #1, which took several months, was to teach the monkeys that small silver discs, the currency Chen decided on, had value as a means of exchange for treats, and would remain valuable again the next day. Obviously he didn’t factor in exchange rates. But then many potential sexpats when planning their big move don’t either. Step #2 involved presenting each monkey with a set handful of currency and allowing it to decide how much of its limited funds to spend on the treats it wanted to purchase. For example, that monkey might prefer grapes over cubes of Jello and would be willing to fork over twice the amount of silver discs for a grape. Much as a sexpat might value his next glass of gin over the cost of a cheap all-you-can-eat buffet dinner. This supposedly taught them the concept of budgeting. The monkeys, not the sexpats.
Next Chen introduced the idea of fluctuating monetary values to see what the monkeys would do if, for example, the two coin value of grapes dropped to the cost of one coin. And just like sexpats responding to a sale at their favorite boy bar, the monkeys adhered to the rules of utility maximization and price theory: when the price went down, they bought more (cue memory: they’ll throw up and then come back for more).
Following the idea that if you love food and sex to excess, you’re bound to love gambling too, Chen next introduced two gambling games to the primates. Both offered the same gamble, but one game started the monkey out with a grape and if by a flip of the coin he won, he got to keep his grape and won a bonus grape to boot. The second game started out with the monkey owning his original grape and a bonus grape. If he won he got to keep both, if he lost he had to give up his bonus grape. The games’ odds were identical and the laws of economics state because they represent such small stakes both games of chance should be treated equally.
But along with small stakes you are dealing with small brains and the monkeys responded favorably to game #1 while #2 they were not so big on. This phenomenon – known as loss aversion – is prevalent among humans too. No one likes to be a loser, even if there is no difference to your pocketbook. Even monkeys. Which wasn’t surprising to Chen. What he didn’t expect, however, was what he observed during the hectic gambling binge in the monkeys’ cage.
During the betting chaos the capuchins proved that they’d totally grasped the idea that the most distinguishing characteristic of money is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. While some of the monkeys were busy gambling (probably those who’d lived in Asia before their capture) one of the non-involved male monkeys traded one of his coins for something even more satisfying than a grape: he paid a female monkey to have sex with him. Proving prostitution probably is the world’s oldest profession, dating back even before the advent of man. And to prove it wasn’t just a fluke disguised as a bit of sex for sale, immediately after reaching orgasm the female monkey traded in her pay for a grape.
Anti-prostitution proponents like to cite all of the other horrible crimes that they love to lay at prostitution’s feet. Sadly, they may be onto something. Chen’s capuchins weren’t just into paying for sex. They were big on counterfeiting and thievery too. During a different experiment using cucumbers as a treat, but using the same monkeys, a research assistant sliced the cucumbers into discs. One capuchin picked up a slice, started to eat it and then ran over to a researcher to see if he could use it to buy something else (the study failed to note if he wanted to use the funny money to buy a grape or a quickie). And while none of the monkeys tried to save their money, instead spending every penny they had as soon as it hit their hot little hands, several were not above grabbing what wasn’t theirs.
Soon after Chen’s monkeys figured out what money was for, the researchers noted they would try to grab an extra disc or two more than their allotment whenever they could get away with it. So much for the phrase ‘human greed’. The coins were handed out in a chamber adjacent to the monkey’s communal cage. Once, one wily primate outdid his brethren in his quest to nab what was not his by grabbing the entire tray of coins, throwing it back into the main cage and then scurrying in after his loot – a combination jailbreak and bank heist. The researchers had to use grapes as tea money to get the coins back from the monkeys who’d all joined in on the thief’s good fortune, a reinforcement that in effect encouraged more stealing. Kinda like paying a bar boy who fails to perform.
While other primates tend to leave the baser crimes associated with the underworld to capuchins, they too give an opposable thumbs up to prostitution. Anthropologists studying wild chimps living in the Tai National Park in the Cote d’Ivoire found that female chimpanzees often offered sex in exchange for meat from male chimps. And, perhaps not surprising, the best male hunters ended up having the greatest number of paid sexual partners. Even chimps recognizee the value of a wealthy sugar daddy.
But more on point, the scientists also found that these acts of prostitution were seldom one-offs. “Our results strongly suggest that wild chimpanzees not only exchange meat for sex, but many do so on a long-term basis,” said Cristina Gomes of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Her study, published on-line in the Public Library of Science, suggests the phenomenon of a moneyboy turning into a LT relationship is not unique to Thailand. Chimps mastered that form of relationship long before Patpong and Pattaya were established.
And then there are the sex-crazed bonobos, the only species of ape other than humans to have sex facing each other. Sharing about 98.4% of our DNA, they are also one of the only species sexually active nearly year round, along with humans. Unlike humans, however, bonobos are almost entirely peaceful, being mostly vegetarians and pacifists . . . just when you thought I was gonna segue back into comparing Pattaya’s sexpat population to monkeys and apes.
No fear, there are some similarities: Bonobos regularly have gay and lesbian sex. And they have sex as much as several times a day, which would seem to be too often for purely reproductive purposes. Not that the gay and lesbian sex thingy promotes that agenda either. And for Beachball’s edification, since he considers self-awareness a hallmark of being a ‘genuine’ human being even though it is something he has not yet mastered himself, bonobos are one of the few animals that have passed the mirror-self recognition test, which is the capability of understanding that their duplicate in a mirror is not a different bonobo on the other side of a window. But more importantly, bonobos frequently exchange fruit and other goodies for sexual favors too; prostitution among primates is a popular economic transaction. But then we can all agree that money in and of itself has no value. It’s what you can use money to buy that counts. And an orgasm, evidently, is one of the animal kingdom’s most highly valued consumer goods.
Though just like not all humans – or sex tourists – engage in prostitution, not all apes do either. Some are just as happy to barter their goods for some good whacking material (uh, I’m talking about apes now, not Boo Hoo). A study out of Duke University showed that male rhesus macaques willingly give up something they value highly (juice) just for the chance to drool over the sight of female macaque’s hindquarters. Yup, rhesus monkeys are ass men. Or as the researchers put it, “Virtually all of the male monkeys will give up juice to see female hindquarters … they really value those images.”
Macaques, however, are not as big on gay sex as bonobos are. Duke’s scientists found that to get their monkeys to look at boy booty researchers had to bribe them with larger glasses of juice. So even monkeys will go gay for pay. But at least they understand the economic prerequisite of paying bigger bucks to be sexually satisfied by a straight boy, or one who would otherwise not want to have anything to do with you. We can only hope that Pattaya’s sexpats may one day come to that realization themselves.
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