BSR

Thanks for the clarification. So it sounds like this tragedy is quite similar to the Rhode Island Station nightclub fire, where the stage’s pyrotechnic display, basically big fountain candles, set fire to highly flammable acoustic foam.

How tragic, at least 47 dead. Sparklers set fire to the ceiling? Wow, that’s some unbelievably flammable ceiling material.

Can you document these cases of gays being fired just because they’re gay?

The link doesn’t open up an article, it just returns you back to this thread.

Of course, I could never be so gluttonous, but I found the hyperbole amusing **avoidseyecontact**

I didn’t know this about George Michael. Sharing this in the spirit of Christmas …

Uh, is this a thing in Australia?

This has to be AI, right? Even so, it’s an awesome ad!

I just found this on YouTube, the whole Peanuts Christmas Special. I remember watching it year after year as a kid, never grew tired of it. At 20:23, Linus gives a monologue on the significance of Christmas: the birth of Jesus Christ. Apparently the network told Charles Schultz to cut it, but Schultz insisted, to the point he threatened to cancel the whole project unless the true meaning of Christmas made it into the final version. Schultz won the battle, and generations of kids grew up watching A Charlie Brown Christmas. I’ll make it a point to watch it tomorrow, haven’t seen it in years. This is my first Christmas in hot weather, kinda odd seeing all the Christmas decorations while walking around in the sweltering heat and humidity. Hopefully it will make the day feel a little more Christmasy here in Manila, or at least more like the Christmas I remember growing up. Whether you celebrate the birth of Christ or not, Merry Christmas to all!

Let’s remember that Archie Bunker’s offscreen son was Norman Lear, the show’s executive producer. Lear publicly acknowledged that the character of Archie Bunker was modeled after his real-life father Herman Lear. Of course Norman loved his father, but what surprised and deeply touched Lear was that as flawed as Archie was, America ended up loving his father.

People, not exactly the gold standard in journalism, reports that both Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle have been murdered and that the killer is his son. The murder of two people is tragic. If the killer is indeed his son, that adds an order of magnitude to the tragedy that’s hard to wrap your head around.

Yeah, I assumed as much, although it would make a great reality show challenge: “First contestant to successfully put their leggings on over their sweatpants wins this week’s immunity!”

It was the vision of Philippe Chatrier, former president of the International Tennis Federation. His first big project when he assumed ITF leadership in 1977 was to bring back tennis as an Olympic sport, with the goal of spreading the popularity of the sport to the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries. Not familiar with the impact of tennis’s Olympic return on other countries, but I know the Soviet Union almost immediately started junior development programs, which spawned champions like Natalia Zvereva, Yevgeny Kafelnikov, and Marat Safin. Even though the Soviet sports factories shut down decades ago, tennis did manage to take root, with seemingly countless top 100 ATP & WTA players currently from former Soviet bloc countries.

After putting off dental work for far too long, I will finally buckle down and get everything done in Manila, where I’m hoping the out-of-pocket costs are 30% what they would be in the US. I would have gone to the dentist in Madrid had I been there for 6 straight months, but the 90-day gap between stays complicated matters.

I saw it because I knew it wasn’t a rom-com but instead a critique on our materialistic society. In that sense, I thought the movie worked. The characters’ unhealthy obsession with salary, real estate, career, and even height made me uncomfortable, which was the whole point. Yes, Dakota Johnson was better than I expected. I love Chris Evans, but he’s too old to be playing a 37yo. And Pedro Pascal’s apartment was To. Die. For.

On those days when I struggle to separate reality from porn, Matt Gutman usually plays a prominent role …

This has been discussed in other threads. In Spain and many LatAm countries, you have black and blond. Moreno is black or very dark brown whereas rubio is any shade lighter than very dark brown. So no, he isn’t even remotely “blond” in the US, but in his native Argentina apparently “blond” is defined differently.

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Sometimes you have to accept that a destination just isn’t going to work out for you. While I don’t regret going, I can’t say I much enjoyed Bogotá. First, an odd experience: a couple with a baby approached me in the street, asking if I could help them out because they really needed food for the baby. When I told them I had no Colombian pesos, they asked if I could buy them food for the baby at the pharmacy, where I could pay with a card. I agreed, we set off to the Farmatodo, where the husband grabbed 8 huge boxes of baby food & formula. When it came time to pay, 2,195,000 COP sounded like a heckuva lot of money, but I just went with it. Imagine my dismay when I converted it later, $578! But I was OK with it because it was all food for their baby, who frankly didn’t look all that well-fed. I was touched that they didn’t buy a single item for themselves; I saw with my own 2 eyes that it was all for the baby. They were Venezuelan migrants who tried to go to the US but got kicked out of Mexico for lacking a visa and were now just headed back to Venezuela. Unfortunately, the story has a sad ending. I saw them again my last full day in Bogotá. They told me they were stopped by a cop when he saw they were carrying around so much baby food/formula. When the couple couldn’t show a receipt (although everything was in the pharmacy’s bags, which you have to pay extra for and are kept behind the counter), the cop confiscated everything! They asked to go back to the pharmacy, where the clerk or management could verify that everything was legit paid for, but nope. I was happy to help the couple out, but I sure as hell didn’t want my $578 purchase going to a corrupt cop. Anyway, back on topic … I hired another guy. Unfortunately, he didn’t work out either. From the moment we met, it was all D-R-A-M-A with this guy. I had to listen to all his dramas of the day, and as if that weren’t enough, he took a call from a friend (yes, he left his cell on and was responding to texts during the session) who got kicked out of her place. Cut the session short (although only 15 minutes out of the 2 hours), grabbed his money, and off he went. By the way, he charged double the fee of the first guy, 600K (still just $160, so not complaining!). Oh well, the 2 stars I met in Barcelona more than balance out the 2 duds I got in Bogotá. Not a bad track record given that I didn’t have a site like CoM to get client reviews. When I think of the cost of 2 hours in the US, it’s easy to write off the less-than-stellar hires. I was sick in bed the whole first day in Bogotá, lacked energy and felt tired all week, didn’t get used to the altitude until my last day there, the sad story of the Venezuelan family, no great hires … all add up to a meh visit. On top of all that, I actually struggled to understand Colombians, which surprised me because at least from TV, the Colombian accent/pronunciation is one of the easier ones outside of Spain for me to understand. I easily understood my 2 working guys (no background noise helped) but struggled a bit while out & about in restaurants, stores, etc. On the plus side, the Museum of Gold more than lived up to its billing, a spectacular collection of centuries- and some millennia-old works of gold. And the coffee is even better than I expected. I went every day to a café around the corner from the Airbnb, where I sampled a few of their single-origin coffees, ranging from very good to the best coffee I’ve ever had. So there you have it, my Bogotá trip report. Hopefully other forum members have better luck than I did.

The Latin mass has become a way that some governments tag individuals as extreme right. It is controversial even within the Church itself. Pope Francis was its most prominent opponent and took measures to suppress its practice.

I’m pretty sure he got “complacent” by mistranslating the Spanish “complaciente,” which means the same thing as “complaisant” (I had no idea that was a word in English). As for “morbo,” while its standard definition is morbidity or morbidness, in slang it means sexual attraction. “Tener (to have) morbo” means to be or to get horny; “dar (to give) morbo” means to make horny. “Me das morbo” means you make me hot/horny.

Tell us how your session with him goes.

He starts his ad with “My world, my rules” … uh, that’s supposed to entice me to hire him??