mike carey

Are you saying that is a bad thing? (Disclosure, I haven't flown anything other than QF (or their codeshares AA, AS and NZ) in at least 15 years.) [i think I may have just answered my own question.]

This makes sense to me. I've had no difficulty maintaining a conversation with several overseas ecorts when I've started by saying I'm in Australia and plan to visit your country in the next 12 months.. That's how my meeting with Alec Andrews was arranged, and he was not the only one. I have also met a number of escorts socially (such as at Forum functions), and followed them on Twitter. I've chatted with several of them by DM or exchanged comments on their tweets, and they seem happy to do that. Of course, in those cases, they know that I travel, so it may seem to them to be time well spent rather than wasted, or they might just like chatting to me.

@Oliver is the organiser of the forum Palm Springs weekend, and is building this list as an extension of the e-mail list he has for sending details of that function to members attending. You can DM him on here.

Do you have a different suggestion?

My heartfelt thanks to @Orin and @RadioRob for the phoenix act on the site. The lights went out at 8pm Monday my time so I didn't have @Charlie's problem of finding a full day of mundane tasks to do, only an evening of having to watch TV undistracted. I share the profound relief others have shared in this thread.

Off topic but in the next postcode, I was watching a doco about the Shetland Islands a few years back.They were chatting with one man who lamented that with his short history there he was treated as a blow in. 'When did you arrive?' His family had only been there since Culloden. That was in 1746.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that much of the market there is western expats and not Emiratis.

I'd been thinking about this clip from Q&A (from 2014), a weekly panel show on the ABC, but only just thought to actually look for it. In it a conservative member of Parliament (some would say, with considerable justification 'idiosyncratic') from the deep north of Queensland is asked a question about his attitude towards homosexuality (he once famously claimed that there were no homosexuals in his electorate). He rambles on for a while before Josh cuts him off to take him to task on the issue. 'There's an app called Grindr, I'll put it on your phone.' It's very much Josh being Josh.

Yes and no. I don't know the status of the institutions affected by the fires, and how far back that status goes, but until 1994 South Africa was two countries. The white part was a first world country surrounded by third world conditions. Funding would certainly be a constraint for any capital expenditures since 1994, although perhaps less so in Western Cape province than in some other parts of the country. If they lacked state of the art fire suppression systems in 1994, that to me would be stupidity, or more charitably negligence. Lack of maintenance or modernising the systems since then can reasonably be attributed to the reasons you cite.

The same reason there was a photographer there to capture the scene.

I was chatting about this with an escort I was seeing a few days ago. He has worked here and in the UK and has had a couple of issues with clients reversing Paypal payments (not with Paypal itself), which he said he was able to resolve. He now won't see clients who want to use it, although he will use bank payment methods. He didn't actually say whether he prefers them or cash.

This isn't so much 'funny' in a laugh out loud sort of way, more 'makes you laugh' in an smh way.

So, Channel 9 News here is making this confident prediction about the Prince's funeral. I suspect this may not have been what they intended to convey, but I fervently hope that they are correct. Even at the funeral for a man of his age, such a thing would be unbecoming.

Not everywhere. We've had no cases for about six months other than those that could be traced to people in quarantine hotels. Same in New Zealand, and we will finally be able to travel to and from there starting Monday without quarantine. Despite our relative success in containing the virus, our vaccine roll-out has been excruciatingly slow. Some might say 'botched'. We won't see our borders open for some time, and our vaccination rates will be a bigger factor in the decision than those for potential arrivals. Businesses and those who used to travel widely will soon become restive, but most people are very happy to keep the borders closed and the virus out. As a big country with a wide variety of places to travel we are taking to the skies (and to the road) domestically in increasing numbers. Qantas expects to exceed pre-covid levels of flying within the country in the coming months. All that said, it's widely recognised that we can't live in a gilded cage forever and we'll have to accept the higher risk that comes from more open travel sooner rather than later. I'll be over the moon if I can make it to the DC forum lunch in January, but I ain't buying tickets just yet.

Meta AF!

Blessed are the cheesemakers.

I don't send photos but I do have an RM account with one non-explicit photo. I do almost invariably make my first approach using the RM chat function, but I don't ask anyone to view my profile, and some I've hired didn't look. At an intellectual level, I know that the ground rules are, or should be as you and @HoleTrainer set out, but from reading these forums it seems that it's not unknown for escorts to operate differently, so I err on the side of telling a prospective hire more rather than less about myself.

The DC event is different. For a start it's January in DC so the pool party takes on a whole different ambience. (Spoiler: there is no pool party.) The forum event there is essentially a brunch in the Du Pont Circle area. It is timed to coincide with MAL and many of the forum members attend some MAL events. In addition to the brunch, there is usually a contingent who would meet at a strip club, and some meet informally. The last time I attended, in 2019, about a dozen of us went to a bar on (IIRC) P street for a couple of hours after the brunch. Another significant difference is that for the Palm Springs weekend, most people stay in two or three resorts, so there's a degree of collegiality lacking in DC where people are scattered between numerous hotels across the District. (There was extensive discussion about both the 2016 and 2019 events in these pages, both about the preparations for them and the post-match reports, that would give you a good idea about what happened.) That said, I have enjoyed both my DC trips (even in a perverse way enjoying the three days I was snowed in in 2016). As you would expect I made each of them pretexts for longer vacations in the NE.

Usually the boards of companies have had their way on things they put to shareholder meetings, many shareholders being passive investors. In Australia there has been a growing trend for large shareholders to become more closely involved in the management of firms they own shares in. This is largely due to the rise of what are known as 'industry superannuation funds'. These are not-for-profit retirement savings funds managed jointly by unions and employers in different industries (such as construction, retail, hospitality) that since the introduction of compulsory superannuation savings have come to manage billions of dollars of members' funds. Unlike the for-profit retail management funds (run by banks, mutual funds and the like) they take a long term view of the earnings of the money they manage, and thus are interest in the long term viability of the firms they own. For example they look at the future exposure to fossil fuel industries, which is becoming risky not just because of climate change but also because alternatives are becoming cheaper all the time. If companies aren't looking 20 years into the future on issues like that, the super funds will push them to do so by talking to the companies but if necessary by voting their stock against proposals put to shareholder meetings. Perhaps the most potent weapon they have under Australian company law it to vote against the remuneration package that has to be put to general meetings. A 25% vote against it in two consecutive years results in all board positions being declared vacant. These funds are successful because they have lower fees than retail funds and have consistently earned the best returns on members' money.

I'm sure there are people eagerly anticipating pillow talk about the relative merits of Apple and Android phones.

I am shocked, shocked I tell you. Who would have thought?

A little bit clever.

Saturday afternoon and here I am in the Qantas Lounge at Sydney airport about to board my flight. Well, in an hour or so to be precise but you get the idea. Unfortunately my flight is to Canberra, not to the place I would rather be right now, and I think you can guess where that is, but still, these are my first flights since last January. I have so far seen one report of how @David-SF's party went (thank you @PeterMxM), and hope that the tree-planting went off with suitable solemnity. I wish you all a convivial weekend together (and whatever other activities you choose to undertake), I shall certainly be thinking of you. xoxoxox

Strongly agree on this ferry trip. I spent a night on one of the islands on my trip through there.