mike carey

And people wonder why, despite not yet meeting him, I talk Peter up in here.

I was going by last year when there was one meal planned in advance but a second one was organised by e-mail in the couple of days before the weekend.

`American fare` is whatever the restaurant wants it to be.

I don't see airline food as a big deal. There is always more than enough over the course of the flight (note, my reference point is QF not US carriers), some of the food is good, some questionable. I've had some really good meals on flights. But if I don't like it, it's not as if I'm going to starve to death.

The basics are that there are several restaurant meal meetings and a pool party at Oliver`s house. There is a mixture of working guys and clients, some of which are paired off, but some just come for the chance to meet each other. If you search this site for threads about the Palm Springs weekend you will find several of them covering previous years. It`s a great weekend, friends, fellowship and intimate relationships all rolled into a few days. You can be as sexual or as social as you like, or not, it`s just great fun with a twist.

Bon anniversaire! Hope you had/have a great day. You plan events, I hope you have planned this one well.

I have fond memories of some of the restaurants in the old market district of Omaha.

Peter is one of a kind. A couple of years ago I was considering a potential trip to LV for a reunion and was asking in the forum about the city and its opportunities. He didn't know me from Adam but said words to the effect that if things weren't working out call him and he'd make things right. My trip didn't happen but he had been gracious and friendly since then. For me, that's a winning approach.

Lol, I suspect that he is not the only person to have added a trip to Las Vegas to their to-do list because certain gentlemen are there!

My experience in Germany is decades old, but an anecdote nonetheless. (In general I found enough people who could speak English to get by.) On the train from Warsaw to Berlin, the DDR customs/immigration guys were speaking Polish to the other people in the compartment but when I handed them my passport they switched to good English. I did not expect that from Ossies.

'Rooting' is far more general than that, it's generic slang for sexual intercourse. Here, boned has the connotation of being violated rather than just having sex. Boned is also used in a non-sexual context. I looked in the Oxford and it cites 'root' as Australian, NZ and Irish slang. Regardless of that, we tend to take up each other's slang more readily than we do American slang (although we generally understand that, so 'rooting' for a team doesn't always attract mirth as we know what you mean). We also use 'rooting around' in that sense. Perhaps as a derivative of its sexual meaning 'rooted' can mean exhausted (shagged and fucked can also be used that way).

Happy birthday, Brian! Hope you are having a great day. Even in Indianapolis.

Bon anniversaire!

Oh, it does mean that. Australians are constantly amused by Americans who root for football teams, and why they discuss that promiscuity so publicly.

Lol, it's not 'correct' (or incorrect for that matter), it's one convention of how to punctuate a list. Pro- and anti-Oxford comma advocates can be rather dogmatic in their views! IDGAF. Yes it does avoid ambiguity when there is ambiguity in the way the list is written. I use that comma, or other punctuation, if there is any ambiguity and omit it if there is not. I found it interesting having worked in both systems that the USAF writing guide mandated its use whereas the RAAF (actually Australian Defence Force) guide said the default was to omit it.

The Oxford comma is a cult.

Bon anniversaire!

The mass of your fee in pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters or pieces of eight is not something I had previously put my mind to. Something else to consider, @VictorPowers! I'm guessing that Australian or Canadian $2 coins is not something that would interest you!

To start off the conversation, I always used two spaces after a full stop, and it made sense with fixed width fonts (as used with typewriters). Now, I use one space, and the previous comments on proportional fonts are apposite. Yes, Microsoft reinforced this as its grammar check threw in those green squiggly lines under the text when you used two spaces, but it never auto-corrected when I was using it (if it did, you can turn off auto-corrects item by item). I never learnt typing, it wasn't a thing when I was at school, but when I went to uni I did teach myself to touch type (I still look at times but I use the correct fingers for each letter!) by sticking paper over the keys on my typewriter.

*notes for a meeting with CollegeDom, say Abba are wonderful and anyone who disagrees is a fool. That should make him like me*

'Kies' would probably rhyme with 'pies', so not a useful example. I would say Australia is diverse, so the use of 'are' for the US is not a given. I would interpret 'is' to mean the country as a whole is diverse irrespective of state boundaries (which it is) and 'are' to mean that the states as entities in the country are diverse in that they are different from each other (which they also are). I have never seen 'money are' and I'm usually aware of British usage. I'm with others that words like university, council, staff, parliament and congress could take either singular or plural verbs. Sometimes for slightly different meanings, and sometimes just different writing styles.

Him: 'Nothing personal, merely my professional opinion.' You: 'You might wish to reserve your professional opinions for your own patients. If you've managed to retain any.' (Please forgive my underlying assumption there.)

It was about 6.30am Saturday here, but I didn't get up for it, some cloud was forecast. That time of day is perfect for the red colour as the light has a long angled passage through the atmosphere.

Yes, straws are only a small part of the problem, but they are an easy one. There are people for whom a durable aid to drinking is necessary, but as noted there are steel and glass alternatives. Of which more in a moment. And there is the paper version (less robust, of course) that we used to use. All sorts of marine plastics are a threat to sea turtles, and all sorts end up in the gyres. Straws are a particularly visible one that wildlife rescue services see. Plastic bags that look like jellyfish are a more insidious threat. This week the second season of 'War on Waste' started on ABC television here and a sea turtle made from straws is one of the props they are using, taking it into McDonalds and pubs to argue the case. (They had a number of pubs agree to join an anti-straw campaign not by banning them but by taking them off the counter and only supplying them when they were asked for, with a sign on the bar explaining what they were doing. As they used tens of thousands a year, they had an economic incentive to join in.) Reducing unnecessary plastic is a long game, scale of impact and ease of taking each step are separate parts of it, both need to be done and every bit counts. Last year's War on Waste had disposable coffee cups as a focus issue, they are made of paper layered with plastic and cannot be recycled. We use over a billion a year. The program caused a spike of shops selling reusable cups, and customers being prepared to carry a cup with them. There has also been a controversy here as supermarkets phased out single use plastic carry-bags in the states where they had not already been banned and instead sold reusable bags of various types. (War on Waste had also rolled a 3m-diameter ball of plastic bags around to press for their withdrawal from use, embarrassing politicians out for a run or at an event.) From the protests you'd think the world had come to an end. Those of us in states where they were already banned rolled our eyes, and said 'Get over it, taking your own bags isn't hard'. Councils are being pressured (successfully) to ban plastic cutlery at outdoor events and mandate compostable ones. I had previously seen people advocate carrying cutlery with you rather than take disposable ones when you buy take-away food. If there is a common theme, it is that you can take your own reusable item rather than take a single use plastic version when you buy something. Whether you are forced to by a ban or decide to for your own reasons it's not difficult once you get into the habit. (You don't forget your wallet, or not often.) People could carry a straw with them if they like using one, and they could live without disposable ones. Here, we've managed it with shopping bags, people are doing it with coffee cups. Replacing plastic straws is a small action with a small effect, but remember that straw that broke the camel's back.

In a news panel show a couple of years ago one of the panellists referred to a good outcome in some political context as a 'happy ending', to the considerable mirth of the rest of the panel and much of the audience. She had no idea what was funny about what she had said. Not so much a gay issue but an example of a less than universally known meaning for innocent sounding words.