BSR

So what do you watch? Or what will you watch after canceling Amazon Prime?

Add me to the Madrid column. Barcelona is nice enough, but I can't say I love it. Madrid, on the other hand, I love Love LOVE! And like you, I don't like Gaudí architecture. I saw a rendering of what Sagrada Familia will look like when finished. Eek! I thought it looked hideous! Venice is magic. I can walk around for hours/days and just soak it all in. But best to avoid it on the weekends because the number of tourists doubles and the crowds get to be too much.

I had the world's biggest crush on Javier Fernandez & followed figure skating quite closely while he was competing. But since he retired, I lost interest. Gotta say, watching his long program at the Pyeongchang Olympics was the most nerve-wracking 4 minutes of my life. I honestly thought I was gonna have a heart attack ?

Only one other forum: menstennisforum.com It's good for getting the opinions of other tennis geeks plus I learn a lot of tennis news that I wouldn't pick up anywhere else. The bad side is the unbelievable nastiness between the rival "gangs" -- the Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic fan bases are like nations at war. I mean, I live & die by Novak's wins & losses, but even I can't get worked up like these people do.

LOL, I haven't been to the shoe museum, but the next time I'm in Manila, it's on my must-do list. By the way, the butterfly dress (what Imelda is wearing in one of the photos) is traditional Filipino garb. My aunt recently attended a wedding where the bride & groom requested all guests to wear traditional attire, but my aunt swears she will never be caught dead in a butterfly dress. She had to ask special permission from the couple to wear a regular gown. I accused her of being afraid of unleashing her inner Imelda. She laughed & admitted that the former first lady was probably the root cause of her distaste for the style.

Thanks for posting the video; it's a very funny episode. I started watching "Taxi" because I had such a crush on a young Tony Danza, but luckily for me, it was a good sit-com on its own merits, hotty factor aside. That episode must have been ~40 years ago, pretty edgy humor for the time.

With regard to fakes, I'd much rather that board members overdo it, "it" being the warnings, the proof of fake pictures, the bad reviews. Since some clients follow the goings-on of this forum just occasionally, multiple warnings will hopefully reach more people. It's like erring on the side of caution.

I saw an interesting feature about the most overrated & most underrated tourist attraction in each state. For example, Nevada's most overrated was the Las Vegas Strip & most underrated was Red Rock Canyon. I agree about the Strip, but my underrated pick would be the Valley of Fire - huge red rock formations in a valley of white silica sand. For my old home state of Massachusetts, most overrated was Plymouth Rock - 100% agree! I was expecting something substantial, maybe not the size of Gilbraltar but at least a good-sized boulder. Nope, they might as well call it Plymouth Pebble. The most underrated is the Berkshires, the mountains in western Mass. The Berkshires are nice, but my pick would be the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I thought it would be interesting if forum members posted their picks for their own state or city. Final thought: most overrated for New York was the Statue of Liberty. Again, totally agree! Don't ever climb the damn thing. The stairs are very long, steep & narrow, and when you finally get to the crown, the windows are dingy as hell & don't even face Manhattan. Their underrated pick was Niagara Falls. I'd nominate the Gaiety Theater, but it closed years ago.

Maybe he's just a Saint-Exupéry fan.

From the Philippines, we first moved to Brandon, Manitoba. While my poor mother was absolutely traumatized by the cold, my brother & I had the time of our lives playing in the snow. There are tons of pictures of us in our little snowsuits, as if a Canadian prairie winter were heaven on earth. Alas, 16 years in Las Vegas has turned me into a hothouse flower.

Also Madrid? That looks like the Estanque Grande.

"Zombie kiss" is another sexy short, but sad, not cute/funny like the previous one. Still worth watching, though. Again, English subtitles are available in settings.

By "sexy," I don't mean porn (sorry if that disappoints, LOL). You can turn on English subtitles in the settings. The Spanish subtitles are fixed, probably because the two characters speak a couple of sentences in Catalan (I don't understand why). I've had a crush on the shirtless guy for years. It's a pleasant way to kill 6 minutes. By the way, "alirón" is just an interjection in Spanish, kind of like "yay" or "hurray."

Here's a story about a guy who took the stock: artist David Choe accepted Facebook stock instead of a fee of $60K for painting the offices of the then unknown startup. That stock is now worth $200 million.

@marylander1940 does that whenever he can't come up with an argument.

In the clip below, Antonio Banderas opens the 2021 Goyas, Spain's version of the Oscars. A few women at my old job were simply nutty over Banderas, and I never understood why. I never thought he was good-looking or sexy. That said, I gotta say he looks awfully good here, especially for a 59-year-old man. He might have had some work done, but he doesn't have that stretched-too-tight plastic surgery look or that escaped-from-Madame-Tussaud botox look. He just looks like a guy who's taken good care of himself and as a result has aged very well.

Hmm, I don't know if "surprised" is quite the right word. I think of my cousin who married an Army man. She knew what to expect as a military wife, but actually living through it -- the long deployments abroad, long stretches her husband was completely out of contact, his mood/personality changes after the deaths of friends -- was on a whole other level. I think Diana, as young & naive as she was, did have some idea of what royal life would be like, but living it was a completely different dimension.

¡Equilicuá! I knew "kinky" wasn't quite right, but I couldn't come up with the right word. "Piggy" is a better translation. I'm such a disaster at translation because even though I understand perfectly what the person is saying, I can't come up with how best to say it in English. And by the time I figure it out 5 minutes later, the guy has spat out five more paragraphs. That's why my jaw drops when I hear simultaneous translators in action. I remember hearing the two feeds of a Spanish speaker and the UN translator and marveling at how the translation was bullseye perfect, every word, every nuance. OK, I know they go to school for 6 years for oral translation, but still ... if I studied for decades, I could never master it. To me, it'd be like studying to walk on water. After 6 years of study, practice & training, I'd still sink like a rock.

On a bit of a tangent, early on in Rafa Nadal's career, I would sometimes listen to his English and be like, "huh wha??" I started translating his English word for word back into Spanish, and only then I could figure out what he was trying to say. That's kind of how I felt after reading this guy's ad. Certainly if you switch up the translations a bit -- instead of "educated but very morbid," try "well-mannered but very kinky" -- the ad makes more sense. I think it's his way of saying he's a gentleman on the streets but a wh**e in the sheets.

Morbo/morboso literally translate to morbidness/morbid but colloquially people use them to mean kink/kinky. Also, many native Spanish speakers translate "educado" to educated when a better translation would be well-mannered or polite (note: "educado" can also mean educated, but I don't think that's what this guy was trying to say).

While tennis players usually don't wear a watch during matches, Rafa Nadal wears Richard Mille timepieces, which run $725K-775K. The crazy thing is that he has lost one (did he have insurance?), one got stolen (later recovered), and almost lost a third (found by another player in the locker room. I guess if you're not paying for a watch that costs 3/4 of a $million, you don't have to be that careful with it.

Hmm, interesting, at the next conservative or Republican gathering I attend, I'll keep an eye out for the particularly handsome "assistant" in a bigwig's entourage.

Just google "foods poisonous to dogs" to get a surprisingly long list. The ones I was unaware of were macadamia nuts & caffeine. Not that I ever planned on having morning coffee with my dog, but at least I knew that if I ever spilled some, I had to wipe it up immediately & make sure the dog didn't get near it.

Hmm, he certainly has some interesting pronunciations. He pronounces the hard G, instead of Birming-ham (which is how we Yanks say it), he says Birming-Gam. And he pronounces "book" to rhyme with Luke. Those pronounciations are certainly different from what I'm used to, but I don't really struggle to understand him.

Thanks. Wow, the man was hella handsome. I just read Nader's Wiki entry. It sounds like he had a helluva life and despite the Hollywood closet, a happy one. Good for him.