mike carey

I appreciate the comments here telling clients the thing that they have consistently been offered and had delivered, sometimes with gusto, in overnight sessions is not possible and all the reasons why that is so.

Bloody hell. The TUC at it again.

Mod's Note A member some time ago reminded us that this is about the way Mr Mangione was being fetishised, and that there was a thread in the Lounge about the crime. I made a comment as a Mod saying 'Exactly' in reply to it. A reminder to keep discussions on that aspect of the fallout from Mr Thompson's alleged murder. If you can't manage that, you'll be aware of what can happen to the thread. We have had quite a few reports of content here and taken action where necessary, and also deleted some of the comments that have gone too far. I realise some members may have preferred us to be more active in doing that (and some that we did less). We will continue to monitor this, and the complementary thread and edit them as necessary.

Heaven FORFEND!! Seriously though, I wasn't, it was a throw-away line not really aimed at anyone. But I expected (in fact hoped) that someone would take it as a challenge, and your name did cross my mind. I actually thought you were more likely to respond to me calling NYC a foreign place! Tehe.

On two continents, Boxing Day means the Boxing Day [cricket] test. 80,000 people were in the Melbourne Cricket Ground to see day 1 of this, the fourth test in the series, this year between Australia and India. Nine hours later, the same rituals were being played out at Centurion Park in metro Pretoria where South Africa is playing Pakistan in the first of two tests. The home teams were ahead in both matches after the first day's play, Australia having amassed a large score and Pakistan having been bowled out cheaply. Both Australia and South Africa will play a New Years test starting on 3 Jan, in Sydney and at Newlands in Cape Town respectively. Boxing Day and New Years tests are also being played in Zimbabwe against Afghanistan but there are none in New Zealand as they played their tests against England in December. The other big events of the day here are the Boxing Day sales, which have lost some of their fervour now that Black Friday is becoming a thing here (despite there being no Thanksgiving and no actual Black Friday), and of course the spectacular start of the Sydney to Hobart yacht race. Boxes? Yes, being flattened and consigned to the recycling bin.

This same, or at least a similar vein of conversation comes up in many threads about 'foreign' places (you know, like LA (don't say anything, Vegas), DC or NYC) and it's always 'I wouldn't [not 'I don't'] feel safe there, I'm too obviously [gay/American/Western/touristy/white], so I know I'll be targetted. The thread about Playa del Carmen is a case in point. The reality is, blend in, don't be conspicuous [dress/mannerisms/what you carry] and you'll mostly be fine. I'm not in a rush to go to most of the Islamic Middle East [yes I have walked around in a mall in Kuwait City, but I was there in atypical circumstances and wearing camo] but would not hesitate to go there if there were a particular reason. Do I care about their politics and religious practices, yes, but that's not the only place I have such concerns. I do understand many of the concerns, even those of some of our more excitable posters, but generally the intersection of valid moral concerns and valid safety concerns is there but it's small so you can consider them separately, and it's up to you whether either make the region a no-go area. On the morality side, I'm firmly in the 'I'd prefer not to' rather than the 'I refuse to' camp. Happily, there are options other than the ME3 airlines and layovers in their hub cities. Maybe I'm odd (no comments from the usual suspects, please) but I use public transport in the three US cities I mentioned above, and not reluctantly. I don't fear for my safety, but I do try to be aware of my surroundings and watch my six and, as I would in Sydney or Melbourne, listen to my gut. If you don't see anything in a destination that interests you (or in the case of Playa del Carmen, you've read that the things you want in a Mexican city are lacking, but are available somewhere else) don't go there. If you're interested in a place, spend more time researching how to be safe there rather than search endlessly for every little reason why it might be dangerous. On second thoughts, I'm not going to NYC again because someone might throw a one cent piece from a window and hit me on the head and kill me.

You want to make his ass straight?

It all seems to melt here - it's 36°C today (about 97 of those other ones).

I can remember cards being displayed on mantel piece, hanging from a string from one end of it to the other (no concerns about them accidentally falling into the fire, of course) or slotted into venetian blinds. You can't do that with an e-mail. Still, I neither sent nor received any this year. Not so far, anyway.

And happy holidays to you too, @samhexum. I'll leave Martian dust storms and dry ice snow to you, though. Some things are constant though, it's Australe.

+1. Although on my one trip Drake Passage lulled us into a false sense of security. Southbound it was a mill pond. North bound, not so much. Pulling into the lee of Cape Horn was blessed relief, but short lived.

Game, set and match.

Whatever holidays you celebrate, have a fulfilling and enjoyable holiday season. A special call to those who celebrate Chanukah or Christmas which started or is being celebrated today.

You do realise that Platinum is not a 'ranking', but rather it's an advertising priority level that escorts pay for? His ad is still up, he visited it today and is showing as 'available now', and in the almost two years since the previous post here, has had numerous RM reviews (with several raters having written multiple reviews) all but one of them five stars.

Warning: This is not about chicken cacciatore, but instead is a diversion onto a tangent about immigrant or 'ethnic' cuisines, which had become one of the themes of this thread. Pizza (the actual dish, not the standard CoM reference) isn't chicken cacciatore either but it fits one of the themes of the thread, so here we are. I couldn't help but think of our discussions about the authenticity of CC recipes and the complications of recipes that migrate between countries when I heard this interview on ABC RN this afternoon. It is with the author of a book about Balkan cuisine, Irena Janakievska, a London lawyer who had emigrated from North Macedonia in the 80s. It's a fascinating examination of the overlay of a largely shared cuisine that is shared across the sharply divergent politics of the region. It also talks to the difficulty, perhaps more pronounced in diaspora communities, of convincing elderly cooks to document their recipes, and be more precise than 'a bit' of this, 'a handful' of that, 'some herbs' and 'enough of' that to make the right consistency. It runs for about 18 minutes. Balkan food and nationalism - ABC listen WWW.ABC.NET.AU A Macedonian-British food writer celebrates the foods from the region she was born in, while also noting the misplaced...

USN Harbour Tug Santaquin manoeuvring USS Portland into her berth at Naval Amphibious Base, Little Creek VA in 1991. This photo was literally the top of my search for YTB 824.

24 hour sexual marathons? A man is not an antechinus!

5280 is an easy number to remember!

The HSC is the final external examination that high school students sit in the NSW education system, and a new English Literature syllabus has recently been released. Here is an op-ed published in the Australian Financial Review, a newspaper. I loved the analysis the author brought to the subject and his liberal use of literary references. I was particularly taken by his observation that there are enough works by women (among other groups) that the syllabus could consist of entirely of them (or of works by men called 'Charles') without compromising its excellence. What the Dickens have they done to the year 12 English syllabus? Charles Dickens, George Orwell and Sylvia Plath will all disappear from the HSC English syllabus in NSW, but their replacements aren’t too shabby. Charles Dickens is among the classic authors who will be dropped from the NSW English syllabus from 2027. Jonty Claypole Dec 24, 2024 – 5.00am Please bureaucrats, I want some more. Some more Dickens, that is. Forget Spotify Unwrapped – the most eagerly anticipated reveal in literary circles at the end of this year was the announcement of what books NSW students would have to study for their higher school certificate from 2027. And I’m afraid it was Hard Times for fans of Dickens, as well as a host of other classic authors, in what is formally known as the NSW HSC English Prescriptions 2027-28. As the chief executive of Red Room Poetry, a non-profit dedicated to fostering engagement with poetry in Australia, and co-host of the Secret Life of Books podcast, imagine my horror at discovering that Dickens, George Orwell, Sylvia Plath and others have vanished from the syllabus. It put me in mind of Winston Smith disappearing into the Ministry of Love in Nineteen Eighty-Four. A generation of students won’t get that reference any more. If you’re wondering why you should care, keep in mind that an English syllabus is far more than a collection of challenging books that most students never go near again. Those books contain stories, history, characters and values. A syllabus is a statement about who we are, what we value, and where we are going. It can be confident and future-facing or it can be reactionary and inward-looking. It is a political statement as much as a cultural one. As a life-long devotee of Dickens – the greatest novelist who ever lived, obviously! – my knee-jerk reaction was outrage. And not just because I love his work. A few weeks ago, I explored the life of the great African-American writer James Baldwin on the Secret Life of Books with my co-host Sophie Gee. Baldwin grew up in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance in 1930s New York, when black writers and artists claimed a central role in the intellectual life of the nation. Yet the writer who inspired Baldwin most was Charles Dickens. He once said that he read A Tale of Two Cities, set during the French Revolution, “over and over and over again”. It was the character of Madame Defarge, a bloodthirsty radical, that spoke to Baldwin the most. “I recognised that unrelenting hatred”, he wrote, “for it was all up and down my street, and in my father’s face and voice.” Dickens’ novel about Paris in the 1790s gave Baldwin a language to explore white supremacist America in the 1930s – and the influence of Madame Defarge’s homicidal rage is evident on every page of his incendiary debut Go Tell It On The Mountain. Dickens’ work, like all great art, transcends time and place. Or at least did, until it ran aground in NSW. My reaction to Sylvia Plath’s banishment was similar. If I had a dollar for every time a poet has told me that it was Plath’s work that inspired them to write, well … I wouldn’t be a millionaire, but I could buy a few rounds at Poetry in the Pub. For a few hours I simmered in rage. Then I looked more closely at the new syllabus, and realised I had missed the bigger picture. Change can be a good thing For a start, it’s apparent that for every classic writer dropped, another has been put in. Goodbye Great Expectations, John Donne and T.S. Eliot; hello Pride and Prejudice, William Blake and Yeats. That swap, I had to admit, is hardly evidence of dumbing-down. The reality is that there are hundreds of classic authors, and the syllabus can only manage a few dozen at any given moment. Maybe the change is good. After all, you only need to read Jane Austen to know that it’s improper to dance with the same partner all night. Undeniably, the new syllabus is also far more representative of our society today. Women, First Nations and Asian-Australian writers are more present than ever before. Anyone who worries that this is mere wokeism – the triumph of identity politics over quality – should bear in mind that the HSC syllabus could feature nothing but women or First Nations or Asian-Australian writers, not to mention writers called “Charles”, without compromising excellence. Our culture is not short of canonical authors. The syllabus is particularly canny when it comes to pairings: when two works, usually a historic and a contemporary one, are studied together to explore connections, contrasts, or shared themes, ideas, and perspectives. Students will now be expected to study the poetry of John Keats, alongside Jane Campion’s brilliant biopic of the romantic poet and his love affair with the literal girl-next-door, Bright Star. Meanwhile poet William Blake is teamed with Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 mystery novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead with its (deranged) Blake-obsessed narrator. Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway is paired with Stephen Daldry’s Dalloway-esque film The Hours. These pairings provide vital context, but make an important intellectual point too. Classics are not hermetically sealed messages-in-bottles washing up on different shores at different times, but are in constant conversation with other writers. Just as Dickens spoke to Baldwin. Or, to use a more contemporary example, as Mark Twain did to Percival Everett in this year’s bestseller, James, which reimagines Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective. The syllabus I was taught at school wasn’t half so sophisticated. The texts we studied were like Shelley’s collapsed colossal statue in the desert. Solitary, grim, devoid of context. More likely to inspire despair than wonder. Golden age for Australian poetry The increased focus on contemporary poetry in the syllabus is also welcome. Australia is going through a golden age for the art form. Poets are winning national awards and slam poetry fills venues. The BBC was so intrigued, it brought its Contains Strong Language festival to Sydney this year (with the support of the ABC and Red Room Poetry) to broadcast six hours of poetry-based programming to millions of people in the UK and around the world. For this renaissance to continue, we depend upon our schools to fire the creativity of students. This means exposing students to a broad range of poetry – as Dante wrote, ‘from a little spark may burst a flame’ – and the syllabus does this well. First Nations poet Ali Cobby Eckermann is among the additions to the NSW English syllabus. Ali Cobby Eckermann, Evelyn Araluen and Samuel Wagan Watson are First Nations poets of exceptional talent. Omar Musa and Ouyang Yu, likewise, speak – unforgettably – to their experience as Asian-Australians. From elsewhere in the English-speaking world, Louise Gluck, Carol Ann Duffy and Raymond Antrobus represent different schools of modern poetry. And even if you are more of a Dead Poets Society type, there is still plenty of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to moon over. Finally, the greater presence of First Nations writers is a sign of a confident society that appreciates its literary uniqueness. Many European cultures do not have an indigenous culture to re-energise tired canons. In aesthetic terms alone, this is a great gift, which is why other countries around the world are looking enviously at current innovations in Australian literature. The impact of Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, for instance, is not dissimilar to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in the 18th century – it pushes the art form into new territory in a way that is both exciting and unsettling. A syllabus should cast the net wide, with something to engage every student who might otherwise wonder what the point of English literature is. You can quibble about the detail of who’s in and who’s out, but NSW has met that brief. I believe it will inspire not one future James Baldwin, but many. And while I’m sorry to see Dickens go, I’m sure he’ll be back before long. After all, he packed too many of his undesirables off to the then-colony of New South Wales – whether the Artful Dodger or Mr Micawber (not to mention two of Dickens’ own sons) – for us to eliminate him entirely from our history. Jonty Claypole is chief executive of Red Room Poetry and co-host of the Secret Life Of Books podcast.

Everyone knows that LA in conversation (and usually in written text) means Los Angeles [and specifically the one in California, not Los Angeles, IN (Indiana not India) - spoiler I don't think there is one} and not Los Altos or Los Alamos. At least in North America it does, but if I said I was going to LA to some random person in the main street of my rural Australian town, so would they. But some people make merry by ostentatiously misunderstanding such things, and we love them for it!

Only if you leave the cash, if it leaves you it is the parter.

Let's confine our comments to addressing Daniel's situation and not revive any disagreements on other issues.

And did.

Yes, and everybody else is wrong.

The framing of your question is interesting. You ask 'How could they still provide a great service', but then you said that you didn't like it when they revealed they had a partner. So your summary question, 'How could you adjust your guilty feeling to enjoy the experience?' captures what you are actually asking. It's not how they can do it but how can you manage your feelings about it. My answer to the whole question is that if a provider has a partner, they are already dealing with how to manage it. They may still be coming to terms with it and their relationship, or they may have a settled routine and a partner who understands and accepts (at least to a point) their work commitments. Clients probably should not fret about how the provider manages it, and allow them the space to manage their lives as they wish. Providers perhaps need to be judicious in whom they tell as they cannot be sure whether it would be an issue for a client. Whether a client can deal with the idea that their provider is 'cheating' on a partner is something for the client to deal with (and it's really none of their business whether the provider and their partner think they are cheating). If the client can't deal with any feelings they have about a partnered provider, that's an issue for them to resolve, not the provider. But in the end, if a client can't come to terms with the idea they can walk away.