BSR

Hurricane Hillary was a total bust in Las Vegas, phew! The heavy rains all passed to the west of us. At 11pm Sunday, when the rain was supposed to be heaviest, it wasn't raining at all. The pleasant consequence of Hillary is that it brought beautiful cool weather for a few days, 70s & 80s, when the normal highs are 108-110°.

If you don't plan to or can't move, then you have to tell yourself that the weather is great, even if it isn't. In Boston, tons of people wear shorts whenever the temperature reaches 50°. Mind you, wearing shorts isn't really comfortable at 50°, but it's a coping mechanism, "hey, the weather's not that bad - you can wear shorts 6 months of the year!" If Canadian winters are so wonderful, why do zillions of Canadian snowbirds flock to warm climates in the winter?

Apparently you can't be bothered with context. I was responding to @KeepItReal's claim that San Francisco was just fine and that he knew that because he had visited a few times. I even concede later in my post that this was just one woman's experience. Funny how you had no problem with his anecdote. PS: have you gone on the Doom Loop Walking Tour yet? It sounds like hella fun! How can a city with a $14.6 billion annual budget be a model of urban decay? How can it spend $776.8 million per year on police and have no rule of law to show for it? How can it spend $690 million on homeless services and receive an official United Nations condemnation for its treatment of the homeless ("cruel and inhuman"; "violation of multiple human rights")?

The first time I felt old was at 34yo. The supermarket had a big sign posted that for alcohol purchases all shoppers who appear under 40 must show photo ID - no exceptions. I was getting my driver's license ready when the cashier (who looked like a teenager) just told me the total, without asking for ID. I was going to complain to the manager, but this was a couple of decades before the Karen phenomenon.

Gotta love the entrepreneurial spirit! From the NY Post: ""A local guide now offers a “Downtown Doom Loop Walking Tour,” to “start at City Hall, and continue through Mid-Market, the Tenderloin, and Union Square. We will view the open-air drug markets, the abandoned tech offices, the outposts of the nonprofit industrial complex, and the deserted department stores." I haven't visited San Francisco since 2010, but this really makes me want to go back!

¡Enhorabuena! Your wedding website is lovely. Never thought I'd want to crash a total stranger's wedding, LOL. From "érase una vez" -> a Rentmen twist -> "fueron felices y comieron perdices," your story is a 21st century gay fairytale.

You say San Francisco is perfectly safe (or as safe as any big city can be) because you've been there a few times recently whereas what I read & see on the Internet is wrong because I haven't been visited (well, not since 2010). Sure you wanna go with that? That was your experience. Hey, good for you. I lived in NYC from 1984-87 and routinely walked home or took the subway at 4-5am (because I was too poor to afford cabfare, LOL). I never came close to getting mugged or assaulted. I can't say I felt perfectly safe on the subway during those hours, but I never felt threatened either. Does that mean NYC back then was a safe city? Oh, heck no! The crime statistics prove that NYC was a rather unsafe city in the mid-80s. I was just lucky. I recently saw an interview with a 20-year SF resident who moved for a number reasons, crime being a big one. Even though she lived in a good neighborhood (she was a top exec at a Fortune 100 company), her car was broken into 5 times in 5 months. She saw open drug use and needles in the streets. Is she right because she lived there whereas you're wrong because you just visited? Not necessarily because again it's just 1 person's experience. Just as @jessmapex argues that conservative media likes to paint a dark picture of San Francisco to demonize the city's politics, I have to think the opposite is true with some forum members, that they are minimizing the city's very serious problems, again, because of politics.

I didn't realize that the San Francisco Chronicle was conservative media. Thanks for the heads up.

Fair enough, but is anything she reported in the above article untrue? The San Francisco mayor, district attorney, and many members of this forum bend over backward to sing the city's praises and minimize the crime, homelessness, and drug use. At least we have someone reporting the less-than-rosey happenings so that we get the whole truth. A partial truth is still a lie.

Maybe not where you live and hang out, but elsewhere ... "Workers at San Francisco's Federal Building located on 7th and Mission streets are reportedly being advised to work from home due to safety concerns over crime." (I couldn't link the original SF Chronicle article because it's paywalled.)

Uh, you must be new to the carpool ...

Actually, a homeless person in San Francisco can shoot up and ignore basic sanitation (i.e., poop on the sidewalk). It might not be exactly legal, but they certainly won't get arrested or fined for doing so.

Shipping the homeless away is a trick done all over. NYC did it in 2009 and on a much larger scale in 2019. Part of the rationale was to send them to places with a lower cost of living, yet the city sent some homeless to Hawaii where the rents are insane. Also, homelessness isn't a crime. You can't lock people up for being homeless, even if it's "for their own good."

I recently saw an interesting interview with a homeless advocate. He works in LA, not SF, but I'm it's true everywhere. He said that many assume that the homeless lost their housing because they have a drug problem, but he said many women become addicts after becoming homeless. Virtually 100% of homeless women get raped. Many turn to drugs to numb the trauma of rape, and many get addicted to meth to help them stay awake and walking around all night, when the risk of getting raped is higher. He didn't have numbers or studies to back this up, just his personal experience, but I can see how it happens.

He had an old school variety show in Las Vegas for a brief time: singing, dancing, comedy bits. I didn't know who was before seeing his show, but was pleasantly surprised. He's a very talented guy.

I'm sure I've heard her songs playing in the background because her music is everywhere, but I couldn't name a single TS song to save my life. I do like her generosity to her crew, which seems to have come as a very pleasant surprise to all recipients. Maybe I'll look up her songs one day.

I used to be a huge Ben Shapiro fan. I still like him a lot but am starting to disagree with him more & more. Don't know if that's good or bad. Anyway, my favorite thing about Ben is his impersonations. I wish Bernie Sanders were in the news more because Ben's Bernie impersonation makes me fall out of my chair laughing.

I can't believe I'm recommending this series, but if you want a guilty pleasure, watch Fake Profile on Netflix. OMG, total trash, I almost felt dirty after finishing it, but only on an anonymous Internet forum can I admit I really enjoyed it *facepalmofshame* A Las Vegas "erotic dancer" (the ultra-high-end erotic cabaret where she dances doesn't exist in the real world, or at least not in Las Vegas) hooks up via Tinder with a Colombian doctor who visits Vegas regularly. After 4 months of dating, she decides to surprise him by visiting him in Cartagena and discovers he totally lied on his Tinder profile (oh, shock!). The single doctor turns out to be a married real estate developer with 2 kids. Instead of crying all the way back to Vegas, the dancer decides to piss her fake profile boyfriend off by renting the house directly across from his. The telenovela unfolds with betrayals, lies, corporate sabotage, hidden cameras, bribes, blackmail, and of course lots & lots of sex. I can't begin to count how many times I said to myself, "omg, this is so awful!" as I clicked on the next episode to keep binging. Oh, and the Tinder liar takes his clothes off a lot, which might have been an eensy motivating factor for continuing to watch this trashfest.

I really enjoyed The Patients of Dr. Garcia, a 10-episode series on Netflix. I was wary going into it because it deals with a loaded subject, the Spanish Civil War, a conflict in which there are no good guys. If you favor one side in the slightest, you enrage the other side, yet somehow the series manages to tell its story without venturing into politics. The first 4 episodes are a bit slow, gotta be patient, because they're more history lesson than drama. But the story kicks into gear in Episode 5 and really engages you. Dr. Garcia gets branded a communist, even though he's really just a doctor trying to save the life of a man who happened to be on that side. The men form a bond that deepens when the former red discovers a scheme to transport former Nazis to Argentina and give them new identities. Great storytelling and 2 really strong actors make Dr. Garcia really worth seeing. I highly recommend.

Who could endure such a psycho control freak? Lemme guess, zero "severance package." The sugardaddy spent money like a rock star as long as sugarbaby was under his thumb, but hyperposessive types make sure SB is penniless once it's over.

Kansas City circa 1980, a super-divey neighborhood actually had a drive-in movie theater that showed porn flicks. When I went with a couple of friends, all of us 16yo, the ticket guy gave us a look but didn't bother to ask for ID. Ugh, they showed the worst porn ever made, but at least I can check "porn drive-in" off my bucket list (not that it was actually on my bucket list).

Wow, I must be too focused on shopping because I've never once seen a hot (or even significantly better than average) guy at Walmart. Costco and Trader Joe's are a very different story, however.

I disagree. I keep hearing 2 more rate increases, 1 this month + 1 in September, because Jerome still sees inflation as a problem. While inflation has declined to 3%, the Consumer Price Index remains stubbornly high at 4.8% I've also heard that Powell doesn't plan to drop the rate until 2025 because, again, he still sees inflation as a problem. Granted, what one hears Powell will do and what he actually ends up doing might be 2 very different things. But if Powell does act as predicted, that would disprove your assumption, "we can all agree there is really no inflation problem in the US right now."

It's hard to know what the truth is. I share your skepticism about Wikipedia. It's great for cut & dried topics, like height of the Empire State Building, but questionable (to say the least) for more politically charged issues, like gay beheadings. Even Iran, which in the past has been brazenly unapologetic about gay executions, has been classifying them as other crimes, usually pedophilia, to avoid international condemnation. If countries are routinely executing gays for the "crime" of being gay, what possible benefit do they gain by letting the whole world know? Both the Saudis and the US desperately need to avoid the public relations nightmare. Better to classify gay executions as "other" crimes so that we can keep buying oil and the Saudis can keep buying military hardware.

Are subtitles available? I kept fiddling trying to get subtitles, but everything I did caused a popup to stop the video.