Luv2play

I've watched a number of Hustlaball film clips of the events in Berlin and London from 8 or 9 years ago and if the Vegas event is anything similar, I can't imagine myself going in the current pandemic. Just seems surreal to me.

As Wordsworth wrote (I'll paraphrase) "Nothing can bring back The splendor in the grass The glory in the flower But we can find strength In what remains behind"

Good advice.

I think he’s dead and you would be safe to post it.

The young Queen Elizabeth had really great legs.😜

The OP should have stipulated who the someone was that he was going to send money to in another country. Most of us here in the forum have good relations with a banking institution and indeed most of our monetary transactions revolve around having a sound credit history which underpins everything we take for granted in navigation our way around people and places. I’m not in the habit of asking but I always assume that providers may not have a credit rating like mine that grants me access to the priciest hotels with just a credit card. Especially providers in third world countries may have no access to banking services. That’s where WU comes in. Unlike PayPal and many other non banking facilitators, which require a credit card to utilize their services, WU only requires someone to have an ID to pick up money sent from abroad.

I wasn't trying to rationalize anything. Just setting the record straight.

Maybe Western Union has had to become more competitive with these other newer services. Bit I haven't been a comparison between the different companies.

I should have mentioned that I can access Western Union directly on my banking website, just like e-transfers. The latter require the recipient to have an email and a link to a Canadian bank so does not apply to all cases where I am sending money to someone.

I don't know about all these newer means of transferring money to recipients in third countries but I have used Western Union and it is great because it doesn't require the recipient to have banking contacts, which can be an issue in third world countries. Even in the US it works well as their offices are conveniently located in large cities like San Francisco.

Interesting story. I had a brief fling with a dancer from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet in the 1970's. He was gorgeous. He left the ballet and became the principal dancer in a hit Broadway play in the early 80s, partnering with a Hollywood legend. She was aging, however, and her legs gave out less than a year into the run, and was replaced by another, younger, soon to become Hollywood legend. Great memories.

The few times I visited San Francisco decades ago, I had rental cars and one time a friend who lived there loaned me his car for a week as he was away. Since it is a relatively compact city, it is not very far to get to places in and about SF. I felt if I lived there I would have a compact car, since parking was an issue and today I would make that an e-car. The price of gas at the pump would not bother me.

Probably should wear pleated pants if they still exist. OTOH, he doesn't look bad in the pants he's wearing. 😉

I had a brief fling with a Haitian guy years ago in Montreal. He was extremely tall and extremely black, just a gorgeous guy. But he went back to Haiti in the 70s and I never saw him again. He was named Max and had a fashion business named MaxSwell.

That fire was a tragedy.

My sister had a horse which I gave the name Mystic. She was a thoroughbred descended from Secretariat. Was tried out at 2 on the racetrack but didn't live up to its breeding. So my sis got her for a song and had her for 24 years. I rode her the odd time but she was too small for me. I only rode a horse bareback once. Now I'm quite partial to it. Lol.

Ponies are for young guys. I rode them until I was 40 and then never got on one again. I had never been thrown off one and didn't want to keep riding until that happened. Lol

I've just put two cars away for the winter and am keeping the SUV for daily driving. All cars are paid for and each spring I say I should get rid of at least one. But then in the spring I get in and drive the other two, one a faithful 20 yo Mercedes, and the other my sports car roadster and say to myself, what the heck.

Interesting about your spouse. I studied architecture for two years but didn't complete the course. I put as much emphasis on how a house looks on the outside as in the interior since I spend a lot of time in both spaces, except for the winter. I now live in the best house I have ever had for this combination. It's got the charm of a mid-19th century stone house on a large lot with inside space I modified a little to suit my needs, like turning a main floor bedroom into a library and enlarging the living room by 3 feet by subtracting from the former main floor bedroom. And like a previous poster said, my house has the perfect orientation for rooms and outside decks taking advantage of sunlight during different times of the day.

The poster said Switzerland of America, which made no sense. The ignorance lies elsewhere.

America is not the name of the continent and is the name of a country. North America is the name of the continent and includes Canada, America (United States), and Mexico.

I would love to see him but our border restrictions are still a hassle.

Well, if we can tell stories about holiday work without the restriction of being Xmas, my first real job was at a retail store (Canada's largest at the time) over the first holiday weekend of the summer in 1964. I was 17. I was only hired for the 3 day weekend but did such a great job selling kitchen wares that they offered me a job in the warehouse out in the burbs. I worked there for the rest of the summer and met this hunky guy, 4 years older, who only lived a block away in a rooming house from where I lived in Montreal with my parents in a large apartment similar to the ones on Park Avenue in NYC. So we started traveling together on the bus to go to and from work. He lived right across from the Montreal Forum and that August we listened to the Beatles from his balcony as they played their concert. All we heard was racket through the open windows. My 14 yo sister had gone with her friends to scream at the event. He had started inviting me in to his room for tea after work and I was sorely tempted to make a move on him but was too shy and awkward to make the first move and he never initiated a move. At the end of the summer another guy from the warehouse, who was also a hunk, moved in with him and they shared a double bed in that small room. A year later he called me out of the blue just to say hi. I never heard from him again but I sometimes wished I had made that move. At the time, I was a virgin and it was too big a leap. Oh, at the end of the summer they offered me a full time job but I declined as I was going off to university.

So I just checked the stats and see that about 15,000 people with HIV die annually in the US but from any cause, not specifically from their infection with HIV. This could include old age or any number of other causes. This does not surprise me since just in my own experience here in Canada, one does not read or hear about people dying of AIDS so much any more, unlike during the height of the epidemic. I was in Toronto recently and went to the park in the Gay Village to see the memorial there and read the names of people I knew who died of AIDs back in the day. No new names have been added to the plaques for years now. The names were grouped by years and they started to peter out in the early 2000s as effective treatments were introduced.

I think part of the problem may be that AIDs has largely disappeared in North America to people who are infected now living with HIV and under treatment for it which keeps AIDs at bay. It is still a problem in the third world where effective drugs are not as available as here. Somehow the conversation has not kept up with the situation which has changed from twenty years ago.