BSR

As the old saying goes: When you marry for money, you spend the rest of your life paying for it. Being kept is no different.

To all Brazilophiles, How much Portuguese do you know? If your Portuguese is (very) limited, are you still able to get by? How do you work things out with sauna guys & escorts with limited language capability? I've always wanted to visit Brazil, but my pronunciation of Portuguese is hopeless. I'm afraid that even if I made an effort to learn the language (which is notoriously difficult), Brazilians wouldn't understand me because of my awful pronunciation.

I don't know what shocked me more, that Playboy had a man on the cover or that Playboy was still in publication.

Did you ever go to Lamars before it got sold? The old Lamars donuts would turn all of us into Homer Simpson. The new Lamars tastes meh, like any other donut. Forget 20%, I'd pay a 200% increase for a dozen of old Lamars donuts.

Pepe Ocio, Spanish actor. This is probably just my personal preference since he was very handsome as a young man.

My eyes popped when I read that a version was done in Basque. With only ~750,000 Basque speakers, there's not exactly a huge market for Basque music. A friend in Spain has a Basque friend. Of course, I asked him to speak Basque for me. It sounds like no other language on Earth. Wow, you can find anything on the Internet nowadays. I actually managed to find a video of the Basque version. I couldn't figure out how to embed the Vimeo vid, but hopefully this link works ... Zu zara

A Spanish series "Un paso adelante" (one step forward) just became available on Netflix. It's pretty much a copy of "Fame," except that this school for the performing arts is in Madrid. Be advised, the plots and dialogue are pretty bad, almost painful at times. But you can fast forward through them to watch just the dance numbers, which are absolutely top-notch. Some were so good I rewound & rewatched them 3-4 times. One flamenco number I must have watched at least 10 times.

Out of curiosity, I did the conversion. At $3CD/liter, that comes to $9.15US/gallon!

Those who favor taxpayer funding for stadiums use some very shady accounting to exaggerate future tax revenue from jobs created and new business generated. Unfortunately, reality always falls well short of the projections' starry-eyed optimism. In the end, the taxpayers end up forking over a lot of money to the team owners to keep the team in their city. It's welfare for billionaires.

I think Scott Bakula was ~60yo when this photo was taken. Sometimes, age is just a number.

Any self-respecting discussion about sexy daddies must include Scott Bakula. I'm stretching things a bit because I found a horrible pic of him as a young man. Still, comparing photos of a young Scott Bakula vs. more recent ones, I think he was much hotter as a daddy.

Ah, brings back such memories. I used to watch "Cold Case" just for Danny Pino, just about the handsomest guy I've ever seen. Edited to add: I never saw him take his shirt off on "Cold Case," so frustrating, LOL. But I found this just now ...

"Girl from Ipanema" is a bit of stretch since the English lyrics version has been around for decades, but since I don't understand a word of Portuguese and because it's one of my fave songs of all time, I'll include it here. Besides, I think it sounds prettier in Portuguese.

You always want go give people the benefit of a doubt. I tell myself that there might be a perfectly legit reason an escort has changed his name a few times (don't ask me what that reason would be). But then you hear accounts like this & understand. @nycman Thanks for the warning.

Not a celebrity, a politician. This photo of President of Spain Pedro Sanchez as a young man was recently tweeted out. I think he's so much handsomer now at 49yo.

Thanks for the post. Even though I don't understand a single word, I really like this song!

Rupert Graves was a pretty young thing, but I think he's much hotter now.

If you're posting pics, please try to find at least one each of the celebrity as a youth and as a silver fox. The first daddy who i think looks better now than in his youth is Leonardo Sbaraglia, an Argentine actor maybe not that well known to Americans but super-famous in the hispanosphere. Good-looking as a young man, but drop-dead gorgeous today.

If a person revealed how much someone else earned, that would be inappropriate. If a board member wants to reveal how much he himself earns, hey, that's up to him.

As a die-hard car guy, I'm actually lusting more after Gable's car than Gable himself, LOL.

To connect with a song, I think you need to understand the lyrics. But do you have a favorite song in a language that you don't understand? I first heard "Jo mai mai" (Catalan, I think it translates to "never have I ever") when I saw a YouTube video of the gay subplot in "Barcelona Summer Night." Because I loved the tune & the singer's voice, i listened to it a bunch of times before looking up a translation. Besides, since the video plays out the lyrics, you don't really need a translation. If you have a fave song in another language, try to post a YouTube video or recording of it so we can give it a listen.

To be honest, I don't know. But contrary to what @nycman says, I doubt katulongs who cannot take care of themselves just die. While the Philippines has no social safety net, the Filipino custom is that if you cannot take care of yourself, someone will take you in, even someone you have little or no relationship with. If a katulong does not have a good enough relationship with her employer, my guess is that she reaches out to her family or goes back to her home town or old neighborhood. Someone will take her in, even a distant relative or someone from her town who simply has the means to take someone in. But (had to be a "but," right?) if the katulong needs expensive medical care (and "expensive" in the Philippines is a pretty low bar), she probably meets the same fate as other Filipinos who don't have money for a doctor: too bad, you die.

$5.95 for regular?!?!

To an American, a katulong's life might sound horrible, but in many cases, it's not that bad, certainly orders of magnitude better than homelessness and starvation. While $40/month is very little money, keep in mind that a katulong has no expenses. They get room & board as standard compensation. Most katulongs get clothes and shoes as gifts from their employer. If the katulong works out well (a good katulong is hard to find), the family will often pay for the katulong's medical expenses, which is huge in the Philippines. Remember, the Philippines has no social safety net. If you need a medical care but don't have money, too bad, you die. Harsh, but that's 3rd World reality. After many years with a good family, a katulong becomes part of the family. The katulong who basically raised my mother and her 5 siblings lived with my uncle in Baguio for almost a decade after she was too old to work. He even brought her with him to America, where she got to see San Francisco, New York, and Disney World. And in her final days when she needed a full-time caregiver, my uncle's 2 katulongs took care of her. One of my uncle's current katulongs has also become part of the family. She's older & won't be working much longer. I imagine she'll get the same arrangement, living with my uncle, who will take care of her medical expenses and will make sure she gets a full-time caregiver should she need it.

Sharyl Atkinson is a great journalist at CNN. With his good looks and charisma, Anderson Cooper is a CNN star. There's a difference. For example, Atkinson would never stage that bogus photo to greatly exaggerate flooding like Cooper did. His mother also paid Anderson's tuition at the posh Dalton School (currently $55,210/year) and Yale. Again, not exactly chump change. When Cooper started making big money, he was nice enough to pay his mother back for Yale.