Charlie

Dental offices are open in CA for routine procedures, not just emergencies. The price my spouse and I paid for cleaning at our regular dentist, and what I paid for an exam at my periodontist last week, haven't changed...yet.

Bacon's comment was a favorite of the 18th century English literary set.

According to the Gospel of John, when he is being questioned by Pilate, Jesus says, "I came onto the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth." Pilate's response, according to the King James Version, was "What is truth?" The rest of the quote is Francis Bacon's gloss in his essay, Of Truth, which is probably more often quoted than the rest of the original verse in the Bible (or the rest of Bacon's sententious essay).

Is this a trick political question?

According to The Desert Sun, the National Weather Service reported that it hit 121 in Palm Springs just before 4pm yesterday. It wasn't the hottest temperature in CA, however, because it was 127 in Death Valley.

Sorry I missed your request. It was heavenly at 6000 ft: 82 degrees, sunny and clean mountain air, a cool breeze....sigh...

Be careful not to get any lube on that fur.

When we went to Lowe's to buy a new clothes dryer, the salesman looked in the computer, and it said that there was one unit of the model we liked in their stock. So he went to look for it to be sure it was there. It took him 25 minutes, but he finally found it. That's what I want in customer service.

I think of "preventive" as an adjective, "preventative" as a noun.

The high in Palm Springs yesterday was a record-breaker for the date: 121. (The highest ever recorded here was 123.) Today is supposed to be "slightly" cooler. We are going to get in the car and drive up into the mountains for the day, because it should be only in the low 90s there.

It is 9:25pm: the sun set long ago, the wind at my house is blowing from the NW at 20mph, but the temperature is still 100 degrees. Paradise?

The last time I had sex in Pensacola was in 1967, so my advice isn't likely to be of use.

"So," "Well" and "Yes" at the beginning of an answer are all simply fillers to indicate that the speaker understands and intends to respond to the question, but they give him a few extra seconds to think about what he will say. "That's a good question" serves the same function.

Like my father, I started losing my hair in my early 20s, and being gay, I was very sensitive about it. I was persuaded to get a hairpiece, before the change in my appearance became dramatically obvious, but I found it a real nuisance to maintain it, and awkward when I was having sex ("Don't run your fingers through my hair!!"). After less than a year I decided I would be better off just going natural, so I put the hairpiece in a box in the back of my closet, where I discovered it years later and threw it out.

Bruce Ackerman's The Failure of the Founding Fathers, about all the poorly thought out details that the 1787 convention included in the Constitution, as well as the details they should have included but didn't. His thesis is that the founders wrote a document that assumed there wouldn't be political parties in the new country, and therefore failed to adequately accommodate the two party system that developed almost immediately. It helps to have some background in political science and the history of the period to follow his arguments, but it is a sharp analysis.

Most people don't carry their cell phones on their person all the time, and when you have fallen in the bathroom and your cell phone is on the dresser in your bedroom, it won't do much good.

When our gym closed in March, my 84 yr old spouse decided to start walking for exercise, because there was nothing else he could think of to do: he gave up biking several years ago, and we no longer have our own pool to swim. Palm Springs is pretty flat and laid out in a fairly regular grid pattern, so he got out local maps and plotted a series of 3 mile walks. Some were from our house, and some from places in town to which he would drive and park. For a while he was keeping to a schedule of one every other day. A walk usually took him one and a quarter hours, because he would sometimes stop to relax for a minute or to look carefully at something. He always told me his walking route before he left the house, so that if he didn't return in a reasonable amount of time, I would know where to search for him. This was fine when the weather was still co-operating, but now when the temperature can be over 100 by 9am, it is much more difficult, because he doesn't feel like starting out before the sun is up. So he is only doing it occasionally when circumstances line up favorably, and he can already feel the diminution in his energy level and conditioning. I really hope our small gym will be usable again for him soon. It opened for only a few days last month, then quickly closed again when one of the staff tested positive. I don't use the gym, because I think exercise should be fun, and I have been able to continue playing tennis regularly for most of the shutdown.

For me it would depend entirely on the murder. I wouldn't want to own a house in which a famous murder had taken place, because it might be an unwanted attraction for people who were interested in the murder. A run-of-the-mill murder wouldn't necessarily turn me off, especially if it wasn't too recent. The first house we owned was almost a century old and had housed numerous occupants before us, so I had no idea what might have occurred there.

It got a great review in the LA Times. But how many people choose Phoenix for a "destination wedding"? Apparently, one of the comic ironies about the movie is that it is not about Palm Springs at all, but about being trapped forever at a "destination wedding."

I have always enjoyed walking, as long as I can do it at my own pace, and in a location where there is something interesting to see that I would miss or be unable to savor if I were in a vehicle. I don't do it for exercise, unless there is no other way for me to get exercise. I hate walking on a treadmill.

What I hate is calling customer service and getting an automated response which requires me to choose one of a few numbers to press, but none of them reflect my actual problem. So I consider them and press the one that seems least inappropriate, and I get transferred to another group of choices which are even worse. It usually means I have to hang up and start over, and by then I am really pissed off.

I don't think he has simply reproduced an old ad, so the age given is probably deliberate. Perhaps he didn't realize that the review would be combined with old ones that would make him appear to have been underage when he was advertising on Rentboy and traveling around working as an escort years ago. He certainly is attractive enough now not to need to shave years from his age. And yes, @rvwnsd, I was also struck by the length of the reviews from years ago ago, and the fact that reviewers even named the other escorts whom they had reviewed. I apologise to Ben for putting him on the spot by suggesting that interested clients consult him; I should have cleared that with him first.

There is a very long new review for this escort today, and the escort's age is given as "30s"; on his Rentmen ad, he lists his age as 32. However, he has reviews on this site that go back fifteen years! Two of the early reviewers claim to have learned about him from Ben Nicholas, and Ben confirms to me that it is the same guy, but definitely older than he claims. The reviews tend to be long, well written, and somewhat similar in content; the new review has one sentence that is almost identical to one in the last review, which is from 2010. The encounters described took place in a variety of cities. The reviewers' self-descriptions are different in detail but remarkably similar in general profile, and they all sound like most escorts' ideal client. Most claim to have written other reviews on the site, and a couple of handles do look familiar, but none are names of members currently active here. You might want to check with Ben if you are interested in Jonathan.

Looks like a slippery slope.

My cousin in rural northern Wisconsin just messaged me that the "tropical" heat there was causing mosquitoes to thrive, making outdoor work difficult. OTOH, my snowbird neighbor who is back in Seattle invited us to come visit, because the high there yesterday was 67.