BSR

Mexican food looks and smells so appealing, but since they add a ton of cilantro to so many dishes, I can't eat it. Yup, I'm in that ~10% who thinks cilantro tastes like soap. Sometimes I see a Mexican recipe that sounds really good and wonder if I could sub out the cilantro for Italian parsley or another herb.

A player's name on the entry list means even less than I thought. I just read over on MTF that all active players with a ranking above the direct entry cutoff get automatically placed on the Australian Open entry list. Also, I was mistaken about no fine or penalty. If a player withdraws less than 42 days before the start date, he gets sanctioned (I didn't bother to read the 90-page PDF to find out what the "sanction" is). In any case, a player can always get a doctor's certification of injury (big air quotes around "injury") to weasel out of whatever fine or penalty.

I liked one of the comments, something like, "Why do people go to touristy places and then trash them because of all the tourists there?"

Correct, a player's name on the entry list is simply a placeholder. The player can withdraw at any time before his first match, without fine or penalty. But a last-minute withdrawal is kind of a sh*tty thing to do, and given Novak's longstanding relationship with Tennis Australia in general and Craig Tiley in particular, I doubt Novak plans on making a big public statement by pulling out last-minute. I'm guessing that Novak sincerely intends to play. Novak may already be vaccinated, but like I said in a previous post, he has a rather extreme view of privacy. He attended a concert in NYC that required proof of vaccination for entry. Maybe he got the shot, maybe a connection sneaked him in against the rules, who knows?

According to the ATP website, Novak is on the entry list for both the ATP Cup and the Australian Open. I keep reading conflicting reports on whether unvaccinated players (~35% of the men are unvaxxed) will be allowed to play, or even to enter the country. The Victoria premier said that unvaxxed players would be barred from entry, yet the WTA said that unvaxxed players would be allowed to play but with a 14-day hard quarantine (i.e., the player is not allowed to leave their hotel room, which means no practice and very limited training) and regular testing. Honestly, I can't be sure what's going on. Rafa and Dominic Thiem are also on the AO entry list. Notable absences are Roger, who announced a while ago that he would not be ready for Australia, and Stan Wawrinka, who's been out for so long I forgot what his injury was. On the women's side, the most notable absence is Serena. Uh oh, hamstring injuries are notoriously slow to heal, and it looks like hers was a rough one. Either that, or she's about to make a retirement announcement. Also out is the oft-injured Bianca Andreescu.

Good catch, Charlie. I liked his ad because he is wowza hot but missed the incongruity of Spanish-speaking and MidEast Arab. Is Maghreb (a word I didn't know until I learned it in Spanish) considered part of the Middle East? I always thought of Northern Africa as geographically separate, but maybe this escort disagrees. A Moroccan tourist once told me that in the north of Morocco, they speak Spanish exactly as it's spoken in Spain. I just looked it up on Wiki, and yup, apparently ~4.5% of Moroccans speak Spanish. I guess that's not surprising given that the northern coast of Morocco used to be Spanish territory and today it gets all the Spanish TV and radio (the Strait of Gibraltar is only 9 miles wide). Also, Spain still has 2 exclaves on Morocco's north coast, the cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Who knows what this guy's story is. Gotta hear it from the horse's mouth, I guess. But given his impressive physical assets, asking about his ethnic & linguistic background might be understandably low on a client's list of priorities.

Let's try to look at this from the escort's point of view ...

I disagree. Disinformation can spread by many other means: the water cooler at work, friends hanging out, neighbors chatting, the guy next to you at the gym, etc. If someone posts something inaccurate on social media, it gives others the opportunity to post evidence proving the inaccuracy. My biggest problem with the argument that disinformation should not be allowed on social media is that a few oligarchs get to decide what is & isn't true. Social media oligarchs quashed the story about Hunter Biden's laptop before the 2020 election because it was allegedly "disinformation." Well, whaddya know, the NY Post's story turned out to be 100% true. Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey just wanted to protect Biden. 43K votes in 3 state's would have flipped the election to Trump. Such is the power of those who decide what is & isn't "disinformation."

According to his father, Novak will most likely skip the Australian Open. I've never liked Novak's dad, seems like a bit of a nutjob. I never quite know what to make of the dad's public statements, but there you have it.

OK, I get your point. Believe me, I'd love to see Josh Cavallo Instagramming and tweeting pictures of himself all around Qatar waving a Pride flag or wearing a big bold Pride t-shirt. Since I imagine the Qatari government wouldn't like that much, I'd fear for his safety. Hopefully, the supposed social justice warriors in FIFA, the ones so quick to penalize the Mexican national team because their fans shouted homophobic taunts, would support Cavallo's efforts and take whatever measures necessary to ensure Cavallo's safety.

I'm sorry, did I deny you medical care unless you stopped using all caps? Because that would indeed be totalitarian. What I did was give a suggestion. You are free to ignore my suggestion, with no repercussions whatsoever. Not exactly Stalin's Soviet Union. Drama Queen much? If you add up all the people who suffer heart attacks, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and its many complications, 13 types of obesity-related cancers, you end up with millions of people who caused their own health problems, and these millions are clogging up and burdening our our health care system. You think that vaccine refusers are "different" and should be treated differently. To me, both groups brought their health problems on themselves. If you're going to deny vaccine refusers hospital care, then you have to deny the obese as well. But no matter what I say, what arguments I make, you will insist the unvaccinated are "different." We'll just have to agree to disagree (again, that was a suggestion, ignore it if you like). The costs of a stay in ICU can be stratospheric. If insurance companies jack up rates or even cancel policies for vaccine refusers, that's a logical business decision, just like a rate increase for smokers or the obese. I just don't want government mandating rate increases or policy cancellations, because that is tyranny. If hospitals are indeed overloaded, have run out of beds, and have literally no choice but to turn some patients away, I guess I would be OK with triaging hospital care based on vaccination status. I am left wondering how often that actually happens, as opposed to hysteria drummed up by would-be authoritarians, because it sounds like you & @Unicorn are using denial of care as a cudgel to punish the unvaxxed, not as a terrible decision necessary in a critical emergency situation.

First of all, when using all caps, less is more. "No other self-inflicting health condition has this impact"? You really need to read more about the American epidemic of obesity and its massive impact on public health: heart attack, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis, mental health disorders, 13 types of cancer, etc. As much as @Unicorn and I disagree on other issues, we do agree that even the "unworthy" and "self-inflicted" have a right to medical care. From his post above, it's clear that while unicorn would be privately disgusted by a drunk driver who suffered serious injury, he would never refuse that drunk driver the medical care he needs. I assume he extends that same principle to vaxx refusers. You believe that the end justifies the means, that society must employ any and all authoritarian measures necessary to achieve 100% vaccination. I believe that totalitarianism can only create far greater problems than it purportedly solves.

The difference is every spectator in the stadium could see that the legendary Owens was black. On the soccer field, Josh Cavallo looks like any other player.

But the issue of debate was not risk to others; the issue was triaging medical care based on vaccine status. You've repeated countless times your argument about risk to others. We are all quite familiar with it. You want to use every means available to coerce vaccine refusers to submit to the vaccine, an end I sympathize with even though I find the means unacceptable. I am simply arguing that whatever principles you apply to the triaging of medical care must be done across the board. If an unvaccinated person is denied hospital care for Covid, as @Monarchy79 proposes, then all "self-inflicted" health problems (and the list is so very long) must also be denied hospital care. You can't single out just the Covid issue.

A woman passenger allegedly breastfed a cat on board a Delta flight from Atlanta Is this for real?? "Woman breastfeeds cat" would be bizarre enough, "on a plane" jacks it up a couple of orders of magnitude. Can you imagine being the poor flight attendant who had to deal with this woman? Or the person in the seat next to her? Wow, just when you thought you'd heard it all.

If we are going to go down the slippery slope of blaming hospital patients for their maladies, let's go whole hog. Some health issues are truly beyond one's control, but most have a root cause in the patient's behavior and lifestyle: smoking, obesity, etc. Sure, getting a jab is a lot easier than losing weight, but obesity is still within one's control. If you are going to triage hospital care based on patient behavior, you have to factor in all the patient's behavior and decisions, not just Covid vaccination. I don't have a problem with insurance companies jacking up rates or even denying coverage altogether to vaxx refusers. I just don't understand why it has to be government mandated. Let insurance companies decide for themselves how to best conduct their business as opposed to the government micromanaging.

Covid is not an automatic death sentence. With treatment, many with severe cases do survive. By denying the unvaccinated access to hospital care, you are the one who chooses that they die.

You are wielding the power of government as a means of coercion, then when someone challenges you, you call them entitled and self-absorbed. Leftists get so nasty whenever they don't get their way.

You claim you never proposed letting people die, yet you want to bar the unvaccinated from Covid-related hospital care. If a person with Covid needs to go to the hospital, their case is very serious and without hospital care they will likely die. So yes, you did propose letting people die, no matter how much you try to deny it. "Anyone who doesn't do what I want must die!" Leftists have such beautiful powers of persuasion.

Everything Stalin did was for "the greater good." Everything Mao did was for "the greater good." When Pol Pot killed alnost a quarter of Cambodia's population, he did so for "the greater good." Needless to say, leftists lose me when they propose letting people die for "the greater good."

"Anyone who does not do what we want must die!" No, not authoritarian at all.

I don't know enough about Josh Cavallo or even World Cup soccer to opine on whether or not he should boycott, but it feels like the horse already left the barn. FIFA sanctioned the Mexican national team by barring fans from attending 2 home games because the fans used a homophobic slur to taunt the opposing team. At the same time, soccer's international governing body gives the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, a country which makes being gay a crime. So apparently FIFA thinks it's horribly wrong to call LGBTs mean names, but throwing an LGBT person in prison for the simple "crime" of being gay is totally OK.

The post was the punchline. I got the joke just fine without a smiley.

Oops, sorry about the typo in my previous post. I meant Tesla Model 3, not X. The 3 w/self-driving is $55-69K depending on drivetrain & options. The Model X starts at almost $100K.

"foolish, sad comment"? Maybe it was just a joke. At least that's the way I took it. A base model Tesla 3 with self-steering but no other options is $55,000, top of the line & loaded is $69,000. No, not a Bentayga, or even a Mercedes S Class, but not a Toyota Corolla either.