mike carey

Happy birthday!!

The happiest of happy birthdays!

What is this 'paying by check at the grocery store' of which so many of you speak. [*no I'm not talking about the spelling of check/cheque. Here grocery stores do not accept cheques at all.]

He's apparently not readily available at the moment. Whether that will change is not clear.

Seven to 10 days for me, but I sometimes lose track of the time. I spend time in two houses, so how many times I've slept in the two beds can be hard to keep track of.

Both are fascinating but in completely different ways. Rapa Nui for those statues, and as a study of the results of an unsustainable society, and the Galápagos Islands as a kaleidoscopic display of natural history and geology. It takes longer to do the Galápagos justice.

@VictorPowers is the only one about whom I'd alert others to on that score. (Teasing alert, not serious comment.)

He was escortrod in here but his profile is closed, and his RM ad seems to be gone too.

Interesting, if the ATO sends a cheque, it is always the bottom quarter (or thereabouts) of an A4 page (perforated so it can be removed neatly), the top part of that page has all the explanatory information and goes onto extra (cheque-free) pages if there is more information to convey.

Shoes and socks.

I've seen discussion of this elsewhere, including IIRC from Dan Savage (not that he has the final word). Much of it has been along the lines that there are separate strands of sexual attraction of which physical and romantic attraction are two. Both are real but not everyone is attracted to the same gender for both, or to the same gender for both in equal measure. This society would prioritise the opposite sex attraction over the same sex one whichever way those preferences fell and say, 'not gay'. I don't think we should do that, but rather allow the person concerned to decide how to describe themselves. (I noticed what I did there, I conflated sex and gender, and wrote as if both were binary. That was not part of the point I was making.)

Thanks Matt, well focussed comments.

I'm sure he's been too engaged with the real world to have been in here, but it's @David-SF birthday on 6 Sep. Happy birthday mate, hope you are having a great day (with a friend, I'm sure).

I think the red thumbs up under your name on the left of the screen answers your question. Guy was apparently initially unable to identify you as being the donor he read as 'douterman'.

That strikes me as not insurance but a savings plan. Insurance should provide you with the same benefit regardless of how long you have paid premiums, and cease to offer any benefit if you cease payments. I guess if you knew what it offered when you started the plan, what you call it isn't important. (I have an endowment insurance policy which offers a death payout and separately a savings element that I can cash out or add to the payout if I die while the policy is active. It seemed like a good idea at the time but in retrospect it was a poor investment.)

To a regular poster, it's annoying, but if you were an infrequent or irregular poster who had asked a specific question, it would be useful as you'd receive an e-mail when a reply was posted to your question.

Proof positive that the ancient Greeks had discovered the Americas! Why weren't we told?

Happy birthday, hope you have a great day.

To reiterate one point that's in the FAQ linked to above, make sure you omit the leading zero on UK phone numbers. When I installed WhatsApp, the application automatically detected all the numbers in my contact list that used it (I already had most of my contacts in the full international format). In my phone's contact list entries that were WhatsApp enabled had an icon for the app.

Leaving aside crossings (Channel, Irish Sea, Japan to Russia, Danish straits, Cook Strait, San Juan Islands) I've been on two, 14 days cruising the Antarctic Peninsula from southern Argentina, and a week in the Galápagos Islands. Both were on small ships and unlike those mentioned as hopping between dully similar ports, those were to successive stops in richly varied natural settings. Both were superb.

Actually, I was a little sad about it.

You can go now.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/image/8969252-3x2-940x627.jpg

+1. Well, not the Detroit part. My first impressions of you, @Kurtis Wolfe, were not from your porn or other social media presence, it was from your whip-smart and insightful contributions to this forum. That was prompted me to look at you more closely, and none of that changed my opinions of you, and nor has any of the febrile conversation in this thread. I agree, I would have let some of the hypercritical comments go. Everyone has a view about how other people should run their businesses, few of them are grounded in enough knowledge to be taken seriously unless they are limited to 'this is how my interactions with you affected me'. Even those comments are more credible if they relate to an actual business dealing not a hypothetical discussion. Good luck, mate, you still have some fans in here!

You could be right.