mike carey

Not silly, we learn the same lesson but in reverse. I'm used to the sun being in the north. Anyone travelling in the hemisphere they aren't familiar with faces the same realisation (the sun being north somehow seems 'natural' because a compass tells you north, the sun tells you north, that sort of thing). The thing about this that first struck me forcefully is that the sun moves across the sky clockwise in the north, so shadows also move clockwise. I first realised that when I sat near the edge of the shadow of a tree (in Omaha, as it happens), and rather than extend away from me as the day progressed, it moved the other way and I was in the sun in less than 20 minutes. I hadn't even considered it, I had just intuitively anticipated how it would move. Wrongly! As you grow up, you just 'know' how the world works.

I hope you enjoy the weekend, @Jason Dutch. Many of us look forward to coming back each year.

Took me a moment.

Perhaps. I'm not a provider, but I've been here long enough and read enough said on both sides of these transactions and on both sides of this debate to know that nothing is absolute. There are people here who have been burnt often enough by either flakes or by deposits that were not honoured to have formed unwavering rules for what they demand or will accept. Others, probably more often clients than active escorts, have yet to have such a disappointment. I have also read providers who treat flakes as a cost of doing business, and say that the incidence is sufficiently rare that they are prepared to absorb the risk of not having a deposit. But they are often those sufficiently established that they have honed their antennae, and either require a deposit or simply decline an appointment if enough flags are raised. There are many professions where there is a substantial literature of what works and does not in the business, and on the benefits and pitfalls of various strategies. This is perhaps not one of them. Its rules are not sub rosa, that is the province of that other ancient profession, but they less obvious than some other more public professions. I suspect that there will always be providers willing, at times, to accept appointments without a deposit, and clients willing to take the risk of paying one, some even if the deposit is substantial.

I would expect nothing less, Rob! And PK, please count me in (also sans bells, although I may reconsider that part).

Watch what you are saying there!

Another one that keeps cropping up is when they are talking about academic results, and the script mentions a 3.8 GPA, for which the narrator calmly intones 3.8 gigapascals. (For those unaware, pascal is the metric unit of pressure. I've never been able to conceptualise car tyre pressure in kPa, but that's me.)

There is a separate thread about this gentleman as an escort.

I've been watching some mindless YouTube videos that are spoken narratives with random images or videos, sometimes relevant to the story, often not, and the narrative also in printed text on the screen. The mismatches and howlers in the spoken versus written narrative are frequent, as are random flips into Chinese, Cantonese, Vietnamese, French, Italian and whatever other language the software selects, usually only for a few seconds. One frequent flip is for the spoken narrative to spell out amounts of money as, say 'dollars 142 zero zero zero' and sometimes substitute 'ling ling ling' for the zeros. That's Mandarin. The videos are a variety of morality tales of familial or financial betrayal, parents' wildly extreme favouring of a 'golden child' over another to the point of heartless and absolutely complete exploitation of the, often by then adult, non-favoured child. You get the picture. Small variations on a few themes, but enough different twists and even witty or pointed one-liners for you not to give up on the whole genre. Well, over the last week or so I had heard hospital scenes where they would refer to a 'for line' in the narrative, and my mind dismissed it as something that I could ignore because not knowing what they were talking about didn't detract from the story being told and I couldn't be bothered stopping and trying to work it out. Fast forward to today, and I happened to be watching the screen at the same time as they repeated the phrase, and I had to snort my coffee. The text on the screen showing when they mentioned the 'for line' said 'IV line'.

A timely and sobering recollection, @nycman!

Following up almost 12 months later, and I was wondering how your experience went at HK, @MassageDrew? Since then, I've flown from Sydney to LAX on Cathay, and the transfer was smooth. Some cautions though, the terminal is massive. With the number of flights, the indicator boards are very busy, scrolling through successive screens of departures, so you have to pay attention. They are also in both Chinese (standard and simplified characters) and English, so that's another level of complexity. I opened my flight in the Cathay app as a confirmation check, not to accept it over the screens or vice versa, but to see if they matched. I had several hours, so I had plenty of time to stop, take a breath, and continue, and for a pit stop in the Deck (yeah, showing off). And yes, there is a security check between the arrival and departure concourses for transit passengers. I'll be back there next month flying to and from the Palm Springs weekend.

It seems to me, being a 'fan of green' is not altogether unusual in these parts.

Scientifically Proven™

There is this old thread from when he was in South Florida.

Moderator's Note Gentlemen, this thread is about an escort. Clearly there are differences of opinion, some robustly stated, among the members talking here. Please confine your comments to the gentleman himself. This is not the place to attack each other for having opinions that differ from yours, not matter how firmly held they might be.

That was today?

Could you come to Australia and buy the most fuel-efficient car you can, please?

I guess this puts a whole new spin on the idea of those fairy tales with a happy ending (as opposed to the Andersen ones that often did not).

Fixed.

That makes sense. I haven't used either of those two American Express hotel programmes, but I have looked at what they offer occasionally. I also tend to book hotels with the hotel sites, in part because they tend to offer the same or a better price, but also for those hotel loyalty programme of which I am a member. If I use Amex (or Qantas) it's usually because they have a particularly attractive deal or there is an incentive (for example extra points or a rebate) available. For flights, I use Amex more often, the platinum offers can be attractive, but will also check airline sites for comparison, and when I do the comparison on the exchange rate of the day, the fares have usually been the same. While some US airlines, like American, bill me in AUD when I use an Australian credit card, others bill in USD, so booking them via Amex I avoid the 3% foreign currency card surcharge. My bottom line is to check all options, they each have their plusses and minuses.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's possible to find information on this man, but as far as I am aware, none provides anything that would confirm that he is an escort. We don't need to feed speculation as to whether he does by posting links to social media accounts you may find. Ed: We're taking a closer look at a few questions that arise from this thread (not about the thread itself).

But EVs are the work of the devil.

From one museum piece to another, the first price I can remember, and I didn't have a car until my early 20s so I suspect it wasn't until then or shortly earlier, was 10 cents a litre (so that places it after 1974 when we went metric).

This can be a challenge. Anyone who cooks will adapt how they do it to the equipment they have available. If the equipment you have changes for any reason, not just moving house, you have to adapt to the change. At present, my usual kitchen has one oven, four hotplates, a microwave (not one with a convection capability although I have had one of those in the past) and most recently an air fryer. (The air fryer has been a revelation, cooking some things, refreshing things like pastries, bread rolls and croissants, but it sort of counts as an oven for some things. It's not essential but I like it. From my observation, it wouldn't work for keeping things warm but, noting that it's smaller, you could use it to cook and the oven to keep things warm.) At various times I've had other appliances - rice cookers and electric skillets - that could replace or supplement what I have now. Having two ovens could make you careless about how you rely on them. What needs to be served straight from the oven, and what can be cooked in advance and kept warm then put back in the oven before serving to bring up to the right temperature? Do you need to plan more carefully, can you cook some things in a microwave or on a stove top rather than an oven? Can you plan your meal so as not to need two ovens? Professional kitchens have a large array of cooking methods, but they also need to cook multiple meals simultaneously, using diverse cooking methods. Some things can be in large pots on a stove top, some need to be served immediately on cooking, some can use prepared sauces while others need to have sauces made in the same pan as the dish was cooked. It all comes down to understanding the equipment you have available, what you want to cook, and how (and whether) it's possible with what you have.