BSR

I use tunnelbear for my ipad and desktop. Presume it should work the same on a mobile phone.

Thanks for the tip. I downloaded tunnelbear, but unfortunately Spain is not an option as one of the virtual locations.

Hello techies! I downloaded a VPN app for my phone and tablet that allows me to watch TV programs from Spain that would otherwise be geoblocked. I tried to download the same thing for my laptop, but it doesn't work. Does anyone know a VPN program that I can use for a laptop?

By the way, is use of a VPN illegal? In which case, everything above, when I say "I," I mean "a friend." Thanks in advance!

These two aren't world champs but the video itself is stunning.

 

Thanks for posting this vid. I actually saw it before, during my YouTube tango binge, but I really enjoyed it a second time. The lighting, the cityscape seen through the studio windows, and of course the talent of the two gents make for a beautiful performance.

I just found a male-male number performed by the world champion I mentioned in the above post. The choreography is simply amazing:

I came across these videos a while ago. The two dancers are very good (to my untrained eye).

I've read that tango is the only style of ballroom dancing that was often danced by two men back in the day (like early 20th century). Since one of the ways a woman judged a man was by his tango skills, guys would get together & practice tango to up their game (not sure if that's fact or urban legend). That early tradition of male-male tango was revived recently with the Queer Tango movement. Also, professional tango dancers occasionally revive the male-male roots of tango. Queer tango usually has the same eroticism as "heteronormative" tango whereas professional male-male tango performances do not. Here is a great number performed by two brothers:

I just love tango. I spotted a really handsome tango professional (former world champion) on the Internet, and my crush inspired me to watch all his performances on YouTube. It was a great way to gain an appreciation for the art form :-D

I mentioned that it was 36 degrees in Canberra yesterday, but it rained over night and it was pleasant today. The rain came with a lightshow as seen here (long exposure, obviously)

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Beautiful photo, but zoinks! it looks like the end of the world.

On Tumblr I follow an account that posts pix of naked guys with small cocks - smallsmallerthesmallest if you want to do a search. The captions are even derogatory sometimes. But the guys are always naked (how else would you see their size?), and I find about 90% of them are smokin' hot. Most of the guys are probably a little smaller than average (porn probably distorts our notion of "average"), but I even find plenty of the teeny-tiny guys really sexy i guess I'm not much of a size queen.

Notorious nutcase. In 10 days he is going to be in LA, Singapore, NYC, DC, Chicago and Honolulu?

I can't help but think that there is a method to his madness. Running a Rentmen ad runs about $100/month (someone please correct me if that's off), and this guy has been running an ad for years. Maybe every once in a great while, he finds a client willing to cough up the cash or a sugar daddy willing to keep him for a while. My guess is that he gets lucky only once in a blue moon, but often enough to justify the cost of the ad.

I like Novak and Roger, and have a possibly irrational distaste for Rafa. I missed most of Novak's game because the cricket was on at the same time.

Mike, I'm curious, where does the Australian Open rank in the hierarchy of Australian sporting events? For example, in the US the biggest sporting event by far is the Super Bowl, followed by the NBA Final, and the World Series. Sure, the US Open is a big deal, but it's a peripheral sport at best. Even the biggest US Open matches draw just a 6-7% TV ratings share. In contrast, for some big Wimbledon matches as many as half of British households are watching.

From my very distant vantage point here in the US, it seems that the Australian Open's significance in Australia is closer to the Wimbledon end of the spectrum, but I'd like to get an "insider's" perspective.

So much better than the 'traditional'/heteronormative approach of suppressing your urges until they spill out in an affair, or 'cheating', thus destroying an otherwise excellent relationship. Bravo.

I can understand the "heteronormative approach" because of the risk,of pregnancy. If a man has sex with someone else and that woman gets pregnant, the ramifications are awfully weighty. If the other woman decides to have the baby, then the man and by inevitable consequence his wife will pay a heavy emotional and financial price. If a woman has sex with another man & gets pregnant, the fallout is similarly life-changing.

To those gay men who have an open marriage, if it works for all involved, more power to ya!

What makes the brutal heat even worse is that the court absorbs so much heat. The air temperature was about 40°C (104°F) for Novak's match, but the court temperature was said to be 60°C (140°F). Running all around a tennis court in those conditions isn't uncomfortable, it's physically dangerous.

True, tennis is a business, but the AusOpen is well-suited to continue in excessive heat because the three stadium courts all have retractable roofs. In excessive heat, just close the roofs and crank up the AC. Those courts feature all the big stars anyway, so the TV ratings will be just fine. On the outer courts, just delay play until 6 pm and play into the night (all the courts have lights).

Norm ? That's exactly the point of the NEW current climate. Noone cares what the NORM used to be, it's about what it is NOW, and that's a NO, so whether they are GAY and at a GAY event dancing nude, or in a turtleneck at Church, keep your hands and mouths to yourself !

Hustlaball is hardly comparable to a workplace like a bank, or even a Hollywood producer's office. Would I lick a guy's asshole uninvited? No, definitely not, but I can't say I'm shocked that somebody, drunk and all horned up in a sea of near-naked men, would do so.

That said, I didn't witness the incidents in question. At face value, it sounds like the kind of thing that, as Lance points out, you pretty much have to put up with in that setting. But if I saw first-hand what happened, I very well might agree the guys in the audience went way too far.

I've never attended Hustlaball, but from pictures & videos I thought that touching the dancers was standard procedure. Has anyone who has attended confirm or deny?

If touching the dancers was the norm in past years, did the unwritten rules change because of the Me Too movement?

If touching the dancers was not the norm in the past, then I can understand the complaints. If it was the norm, then I have a harder time sympathizing. True, you should never touch another person, especially in an intimate area, without consent. But if touching was the norm in past years, then the dancers knew what they were signing up for.

WOW

All the never-ending tucking & sliding & storing would get old pretty quick, although it sounds like the resident of this micro-flat is quite used to it. If this micro-apartment were priced according to square footage (Barcelona is not a cheap city), then perhaps I could get used to it while enjoying all the money I'm saving. This particular unit looks much more live-able than most micro-units I've seen.

Dead eyes of a sociopath.

I don't know if they're the dead eyes of a sociopath, but he does have that "dead" look of a too far gone drug addict. One of the symptoms of meth addiction is violence, often in the extreme. The motive for murder might have been a deep-seated conflict between the two, or Woodward might have been sparked into violence over nothing at all.

Ya, I'd rather be moving on a bike than waiting on a cold subway platform.

 

From my twitter: Boy people give you funny looks when you're checking out a CitiBike at 4am in 6° weather. Like they've never seen a cheap hooker off to a partying client before.

 

Kevin Slater

Zoinks! you have my undying admiration! Even though I spent 3 years of my childhood in Canada, one year in almost arctic Brandon MB and two years in Toronto, then lived in Boston for a couple of decades, I was never that tough in cold weather. Now that I live in sunny and (in the summer) blazing hot Las Vegas, I'm pretty sure I'd be the world's biggest wuss in single-digit temps. The thought of riding a bike in way-sub-zero windchill almost gives me a heart attack.

But I gotta hand it to ya, you are indeed saving buckets of cash by taking CitiBike everywhere. When I lived in NYC, my friends used to tease me for being the Cab Queen because I took taxis so often (no Uber back then). That's a vice that adds up far too fast. Perhaps New Yorkers grumble about the cost of the subway, but I think the fares are quite reasonable. But if you're not even taking the subway, then your bank balances must be tickled pink

I have a great apartment with a playroom and sling. As for outcalls, if CitiBike doesn't go there, neither do I.

 

I occasionally put $20 on my metrocard or take an Über, so sure, let's call my transportation budget $200 a year.

 

Kevin Slater

You even take CitiBike in the dead of winter? A friend of mine back in Boston rode his bike everywhere, even in the worst of Boston winter, because he didn't have a car and found public transportation too inconvenient. It looks like an awfully chilly winter in the Northeast, so if you take CitiBike in these temps, wow, more power to ya!

Gross.

 

Expenses may not have moved that much. Sure, rent is higher, but ditching the car saved a lot. (My annual transportation budget is now $160 to CitiBike.)

 

Kevin Slater

You never take cabs, Ubers, or the subway?

Steamer trunks? Who’s buying steamer trunks? Who’s still traveling by steamer? And they certainly won’t fit in an overhead or beneath the seat in front of you. Lol

I know someone who's a Louis Vuitton salesperson. She said you'd be surprised by how often people buy steamer trunks, despite their exorbitant cost and questionable practicality. She said the buyers use them for their private jets.

Bottom line: It's your money. Don't ever apologize for spending it.

In my opinion, it all boils down to one question: If you can't enjoy your money, why bother working?

If he has not texted you back, it seems likely he shorted you out of spite (he was unhappy with you or the session)

Or maybe this (ex-)client is just a cheap selfish f*ckface. My theory is that assholes sh*t on other people if they think they can get away with it. Would this client go into a convenience store and try to steal $60 from the register? Probably not because with the witness plus security cameras, there's a good chance he'd get caught. But he had no problem stealing $60 from you (shorting your fee by $60 is flat-out theft in my book) because he knew he could walk out the door before you realized you'd been shorted. Even if you counted the money right away, he could just pretend to be mortified about his "innocent" mistake, no big deal.

They say that we are so quick to see in others what is true of ourselves. If so, then this ex-client trusts no one because he's a lying, cheating sack of sh*t and assumes the same of everybody around him. Karma has already caught up to this asshole because any person who trusts absolutely nobody lives an awfully lonely life.

 

TruHart1

That reminds me of a Gary Shandling joke. He said that whenever he was feeling bad about himself, he would go to the supermarket, take a package of kielbasa, and shove it halfway into his pants. Then when a woman told him, "Excuse me, uh, I think you have a kielbasa in your pants," he pretended to get all embarrassed and said, "Oh, gosh, thanks."

I've only skimmed through this thread, but has anyone mentioned Steve Grand? If that delicious non-country (apparently he hates getting labeled as a country singer) escorted for $500/hour, the five Benjamin's would fly out of my wallet so fast, they'd shatter the sound barrier.

Currently, a cable TV subscriber must select a whole package of channels, i.e., the broadcast networks plus dozens of cable channels like Discovery, USA, TNT, ESPN. These packages give the cable TV subscriber a couple hundred channels even though it seems almost everybody watches just a handful on a regular or even semi-regular basis. Each channel carried by your cable provider comes at a price. For some like ESPN, it's huge. I've heard as high as $20/month. That's right, some cable subscribers are paying $20 a month out of their total cable bill for a channel they might never watch. Other channels cost almost nothing, but collectively these dozens (hundreds?) of channels add up to a monster cable bill.

I keep hearing chatter about "debundling" cable channels. That means that a cable subscriber would get all the broadcast channels and then pick & choose other channels a la carte. So, for example, you could pay for basic (the broadcast channels) plus ESPN and Tennis Channel, and pay ~$45/mo instead of the $100+/month for the full bundle. The upside for the subscriber is obvious, but the downside for a lot of cable networks will be disastrous because a lot of them will lose almost all their current subscribers.

I don't know what exactly is preventing the debundling of cable packages. With so many subscribers cutting the cord, the pressure on cable providers to debundle mounts. The percentage of cord-cutters among millennials is particularly high. I cut the cord about 7 years ago, in part because of exorbitant cost, in part because I was watching too much damn TV. But if cable TV were debundled, I'd probably re-subscribe.

I can see the need for cell coverage in national parks in cases of hiking & climbing accidents or animal attacks. No matter how careful and responsible people are, these kinds of emergencies are going to arise. If cell service can speed up the dispatching of emergency services and help track location, then I'm all for it. If you fell and broke your ankle in what felt like the middle of nowhere and you could decide there and then - cell coverage or no cell coverage - I'm guessing a unanimous vote for cell coverage.

But is it possible to get coverage all throughout a park with just cell towers along the periphery? I can't imagine it's possible to put towers up within the park, yet many parks are so vast it's hard to imagine coverage extends all the way through. William, can your brother get coverage all over Yellowstone?