mike carey

I considered typing 'bert mah rahts' but figured that may have needed subtitles even in this forum. 😁

Pita now has the opportunity to hang around for an Olympic games in the city where he lives. It's only 11 years away!

There is really no holiday that is considered to mark either the beginning or the end of summer here, I was just playing with the fact that our Labour Day is at the start of October (well, it is in NSW, SA and the ACT, other states and territories have it in March (first or second Monday) or May (link to May Day). Australia Day (26 Jan) is seen as the end of the summer holidays, and return to school, to serious government processes and serious business, but that is not the end of summer. The switch between football and cricket seasons is probably a better proxy for season change. Melbourne Cup Day, first Tuesday in November is sometimes considered the start of the summer 'silly season' when much of the country 'turns off' until Australia Day. Canberra has a couple of quirky 'rules' (popular currency only, nothing official) to mark seasons. Heaters should not be turned on until Anzac Day (25 April) because doing so would be soft in our relatively cold climate, and tomato seedlings should not be planted before Melbourne Cup Day because of the risk of frost. In northern Australia, summer and winter are not significant as seasons, the big distinction is between the wet and dry seasons. From an indigenous perspective in the Top End (of the Northern Territory) there are six seasons. https://www.experiencethewild.com.au/?p=Birding-Info-Weather-Seasons (Europeans are called Balanda by first Australians there. It is derived from Hollander.)

Whether it's the result of bullying or complicity, there are politicians state and federal in the US who have resisted or declined to use or even allow proof of vaccination. But with the Canadian border the 'But mah rights' crowd face a different circumstance, a foreign government (or to be precise, a foreign border official) who tells them that their right not to carry proof ends at the border, and they have a simple choice, show proof or climb back on that plane and go home.

Interesting that health care systems have the capacity to record pronoun preferences, but in most settings a practitioner will only use the preferred pronoun if they need to talk about the patient to others. In most of their interactions the pronoun in use would be 'you'. That's not to minimise the importance of using their preferred pronoun in those settings. (At times using the person's name may be preferable, but that's a separate issue.)

I wouldn't make that assumption. Yesterday I sent an RM message to a guy in NZ who I've chatted with intermittently about meeting for a while (he was previously in Oz but in a different city, and now, well 'Delta') and he responded within two hours. His RM ad says he last logged in on 31 May. Since then he has also activated his 'Available Now' notice multiple times. So, it's clear they can do stuff without being 'logged in'.

Not an absolutely auspicious name if you have some knowledge of Australian, in particular Tasmanian, colonial history, admittedly with a different spelling of his last name. Long story short, Pearce escaped with several companions from the penal station at Macquarie Harbour on the west coast of Tasmania. His companions were intended for, and used as his rations for the arduous cross-country journey to Hobart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pearce

Ever so slightly a surprise in the men's football. Australia 2 - Argentina 0

I guess here the rule should be not to wear white before Labour Day. (It's the first Monday in October in some states here.)

It was a cold morning in the nation's capital today. https://twitter.com/cosmicpinot/status/1417955596477763586?s=20

I'm not one, but my observation is that they are both. The new ones are long term contributors to the forum and they use their time reading and contributing here to enforce the rules and remind others about them.

The sense of elation is not as profound as it was in 1993 when Juan Antonio Samaranch announced that the winner was Syderney, but this afternoon in Tokyo the IOC announced that the 2032 games will be in Brisbane. Australia will join the US in having three summer games host cities (obviously Los Angeles will have hosted three itself by then, and London has hosted three as well). I hope I live to see it!

Bon anniversaire!

@Unicorneven when I was having frequent hearing tests and they suggested it was as good as it had ever been, I sometimes had difficulty hearing things in some settings. I have no idea what was going on there, but I suspect part of it is expecting not to be able to hear in some circumstances. Someone in a mask could be one of those. I haven't had any problem giving the person collecting contact tracing information at the supermarket entry my name and number (my phone can't do QR codes), or talking to other staff in shops, nor have I had any noticeable problems talking to people. I have to think that there is an element of expecting not to be able to hear someone in a mask rather than an actual problem.

I really hope that they don't have to cancel the final trial event for the 2020 Paralympics!

I had noticed that the spacing is different than it was in the old system, but it's symptomatic of a feature that often comes up in MS Word styles. That is, lines are single spaced but paragraphs build in a half or full line spacing after the text of the paragraph. When it was in a Word document I knew enough about it to either let it do its thing or to make sure that all the vertical spacing was done with line spacing rather than clear space after a paragraph. It's possible that I could do that here, but for the most part if it looks right in the input box it will look right when it's posted. (In Word, I used to always work with the formatting symbols turned on so I knew what it was doing.)

As others have said, apart from the privacy aspects (which may or may not matter depending on your preferences and the issue involved) some things are geo-blocked. I know a lot of Australian broadcast media are only available in this country, and the same sort of restrictions are imposed elsewhere. I frequently see youtube and some cable TV content from the US that 'the up-loader has not made available in your country'. I've never seen the need to use a VPN to see it, I just move on, but I can understand why people would do so. For the most part, if you use Facebook or Google you've lost any privacy anyway, so I'm not sure that protecting any that remains is worth the effort.

Last rights are fine, we just want to avoid any last rites!

The couple of accounts above are astonishing. A caveat, I haven't applied for a passport in the age of Covid, but as mine was stolen last year, I called to cancel it [irrevocably as it turns out] and it was recovered within 24 hours, I'll have to renew it soon. When I renewed it a few years ago I filled in the renewal form on-line, took the form and my passport to the post office where I submitted the application (the post office took the photo I used for the new passport). They cut the corners off my old passport, effectively cancelling it, but gave it back to me. I paid the new passport fee by credit card at the post office, and they sent it off. My new passport was delivered by registered mail two or three weeks later, and that was the standard processing, not the express rate. Governments can do things efficiently if they want to.

I think there are arguments on both sides of this. I don't see a problem if two people carry out their entire relationship 'in character', but I don't think it's ideal. If I were one of the participants, I would absolutely insist that dom/sub role play was just that. From my perspective it would be imperative that I have a respectful equal relationship with the other party until the role-play session starts, and after it ends. When it starts is open for discussion, say from when the door opens when we meet, or from when we've had a discussion in the same room, even perhaps a drink before flicking the switch to role play. I had an on-line discussion with a master who seemed to want me to be completely submissive in my interactions with him. I accept that may be a thing, but it's not a thing I was prepared to consider.

+ 1

@Cure69'Late bloomer' here, but I didn't go down the 'path expected' I just didn't go anywhere. Busy professional life enabled me to ignore that part of my make-up. It wasn't that I denied it, I just didn't see what is now obvious. I brushed it off when others asked me when I would marry and didn't ask myself that question, at least not seriously. I eventually did, and answered it to myself quickly, but kept it to myself without acting on it for a while longer. I'm now in my 60s. Did I miss out on things, as you feel you did? Hell yes, but I take the view that it is what it is and I'm not trying to catch up with what I may have missed. I have missed those things, now it's a matter of making the best of the rest of my life. Regretting the past is for me a waste of energy. I realise it's far more complex for you, you have 20 or so years of an adult life that is at odds with how you see yourself now, and have to work out how, or even if to disentangle the two. For me, my earlier life is not at odds with the current version, I've just added a new strand to my identity. I didn't put an ad in the paper, but I was quickly found by a couple of [then] current and past work colleagues when I joined an online forum. I'm still in the mode of not advertising my sexuality, but not trying to hide it. My sister is gay, so that was one conversation I eventually had that wasn't too difficult. I haven't been very good at finding social or romantic contacts (if I'd been good at that I may have found an opposite sex one because 'straight' is the default and assumed identity in this society even when you don't consciously adopt it). I did join a gay camping group and had good interactions with others there, but nothing beyond its outings. I came to this community because I had hired once or twice and saw hiring companions as being a great way to overcome my nervousness and inexperience in sexual matters, and the forum has helped me overcome my nervousness with the hiring process. I have also found it to be a great place for all sorts of discussions on those and other issues. I hope that others will contribute to the discussion.

Translation of @azdr0710's post above: This thread was created in 2003. It is theoretically possible that the gentleman in question is DQ (who is a member of the forum, btw). There is also an off-chance that the original poster will see your question and answer it, but it if I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting. He hasn't visited the forum for six years.

I saw that, PK and had a brief chat with him on Twitter. I hope it works. (I retweeted it for what that's worth, I probably don't have enough followers in LA to form a basketball team, but it will at least add to the RT numbers.)

A bit of levity in a time of covid. This morning when he was announcing exposure sites in Melbourne, the Victorian chief health officer noted that a pub that had held a EURO 2020 final event was one of them. He said that since there would have been a lot of people eating and drinking they wouldn't always have been wearing masks. He also noted that there would have been a lot of shouting 'and among the England fans, crying'. He had prefaced his remarks by saying that what he was about to say was relevant to soccer fans, particularly to soccer fans who consider themselves to be football fans. I understand that is a distinction that would resonate in the US as well. (In Melbourne, if you say 'football' it is universally taken to mean AFL football.)