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Charlie

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Everything posted by Charlie

  1. Tennis officials have finally realized that asking ball kids to constantly handle the players' dirty towels is not a good idea, even without a viral pandemic, and it was announced just before the Indian Wells tournament was cancelled altogether that players would have to deal with their own towels for the first time. In the unsanctioned matches that were play in Florida last month, the players each had his own set of balls to play with, and were not supposed to touch the other player's balls (yes, I am aware of the double entendre ).
  2. I agree that tennis can survive without the Big Three, and I often prefer to watch new players. But many casual fans watch only the slams and a few other major tournaments, and only if a big name they are familiar with is playing. That is not good news for the financial interests of the Open, which are already under serious stress.
  3. I doubt that any one of the Big Three will show up if the US Open is held on schedule, which will be a serious problem for the sponsors. Nothing like that has happened to a slam since the 1973 Wimbledon, when the top players boycotted the tournament.
  4. But I buy whatever my housecleaner tells me she prefers to use.
  5. Perhaps the best response would be: "Which stats would you like to know?" Then you can decide whether you want to provide them.
  6. I have been retired for 18 years, my spouse for 23 years. We have a small mortgage and a car lease (which is treated like a loan), which are in both names. All utility bills are in my name. I have several credit cards, which I use regularly, and pay off completely every month (and always have: I have never had an unpaid balance on a credit card); he has a few cards, but hardly ever uses them for anything. Despite the difference in the way each of us uses credit, our FICO scores are almost identical, never differing by more than a few points. I have no memory of what our scores were before we retired (did they have FICO scores then?), but they are always well above 800. Perhaps Unicorn trusts the members here to give him a broader perspective than he would get from his financial advisor. I get most of the useful practical advice I need from posters here.
  7. I have tried to find Clorox and Lysol Toilet Bowl Cleaner at three different stores in the past few days, with no luck.
  8. When an escort's ad says he "speaks" all these languages, it doesn't mean he is fluent in them. I have an Ivy League degree, have lived in a few foreign countries, have studied four languages academically, and I love opera, so I can muddle through some very simple conversations about familiar topics. When I travel outside the US, I often carry a dictionary of the local language. However, if I say hello to you in Serbo-Croatian or Japanese, please don't respond by asking me what I think about the effects of climate change on herbivores. When an escort says he speaks five languages, it may only mean that he can quote his fee for certain acts in those languages.
  9. After reading the article posted above, I then went on to another linked article on cnbc, in which the WHO a little later walked back the claim that Van Kerkhove had made in the interview about spread by asymptomatic spreaders being very rare. Trying to keep up with these things is really difficult.
  10. Charlie

    Vintage men

    Al Parker?
  11. Charles Atlas also sold body-building materials and advice. I remember buying some when I was an adolescent, but I no longer can remember what they were. It never occurred to me that I could just buy him instead.
  12. My nephew's wife has a doctorate in physical therapy from USC.
  13. I came out very young, so almost all of my first experiences were with guys who were older than I was, even 30-40 years older, because they were the guys who were available. Therefore, I never got fixated on youth as an essential attribute of sexual attractiveness. When I started hiring, in my mid 30s, I tended to go for guys around my own age, and I was in my 50s before my hires generally were younger than I was, though rarely more than about 20 years younger. The oldest escort I ever hired admitted to being 59, but he was handsome, very well built and had incredible soft, smooth skin. Nowadays I sort of think of anyone younger than 50 as a kid, so they are more like masturbation fantasy material than someone with whom I would actually consider having sex. One sees very few ads for escorts who admit to being over 40, but I think there should be a market for them, and anyone over 60 should probably have some unusual specialty to offer.
  14. Part 3.b. specifies that there should be a monitored system for pool use in place. It "recommends" that a "designated onsite manager or other responsible person" do the monitoring of the pool use but does not say that the monitoring is not required. Admittedly, the wording of item 2 is squishy, but someone has to do the monitoring at some point, and there is no one on the current staff who has "supervision" of the two pools (in two widely separated sections of the community) as his or her specific duty. The system described in the document is fairly specific about how the pools are to be used, and that can't very well be monitored by someone who isn't present at the pools, which are open from 7am to 9pm (early and late hours are popular times for pool use in a hot desert). Contracted maintenance staff can't be used for that purpose, so unless enough responsible volunteers from among the residents can be found to do the monitoring, staff will have to be hired to do it. Until now at least, the city's own COVID regulations have required someone to be present to do the monitoring, which is why the pools have remained closed. Current management staff consists of six individuals (one of them physically disabled), five of them working remotely from home.
  15. Aha! I didn't read the one you posted, which is for LA county. The Riverside county restrictions up till now have not contained anything like this, and the city of Palm Springs has even more restrictions than the county. The news that gyms could open next week was only announced here yesterday afternoon, and I haven't seen any county update to their regulations yet. Pools here were allowed to open a couple of weeks ago, but only with the one person at a time restriction, so our management has not re-opened them at all. If the new regulations here are like those you quote, things will be much better. However, the distancing requirements for equipment in the gym will still be a problem. BTW, where did you find the statement about residential complexes and staff moderating? I couldn't find it in the link that you posted. Maybe we are not reading the same document.
  16. We are a 55+ community. Our gym space is fairly small, so the repositioning of equipment would require elimination of some of the most used ones, like the treadmills. The two outdoor pools are large, and the surroundings are also used by sunbathers, so allowing only one person at a time into the enclosed pool areas is unreasonable, and would also end the popular aquatic classes. Perhaps most onerous is that the regulations assume the spaces have full-time staff monitoring them; we have no staff to do that, only maintenance people, and the expense of hiring them would be substantial.
  17. Probably not, since they are all part of the physical community property which needs to continue to be maintained, even if they can't be used at present. Eventually the regulations will be adjusted or eliminated, but some of the requirements will actually cost more money to meet, so the HOA fees will go up. HOA fees are not like rent: the residents own the community property, so we vote on the fees.
  18. CA has announced that gyms may open in a week, but the requirements are clearly designed with large commercial gyms in mind. There is no way that the small gym for residents in my HOA can be compliant with all the details. The same problem has arisen with our pools and all the other recreational facilities for our residents. I fear that all our amenities are going to be wiped out by new regulations.
  19. I started to get pedicures a year ago when I accepted that I no longer could see my toenails clearly enough to safely cut them. I had no idea they could be so pleasurable.
  20. You can't have a "convention" if people don't convene. How else does one have a smoke-filled back room where agreements are worked out? Will there be riots outside, like Chicago in 1968? If no city wants the convention, will Trump hold a private get-together at Mar-a-Lago? Will those who wear masks caucus separately from those who don't? Will there be a betting line on how many conventioneers develop COVID within two weeks after the convention? Most importantly, will Melania give a speech? This nominating convention will be very different from any other we have seen.
  21. I don't think you know (or care) very much about how the Nobel Prize winners are chosen. The prize for medicine is decided by a small committee within a Swedish institute, who take recommendations and then chose three candidates for the prize, to be voted upon by the 50 members of the faculty of medicine (usually all Swedes) within the institute. The prestige that has come to be associated with the award is largely due to the very large prize money that goes with it. The academy refuses to reveal the reasons for their award choice until 50 years after it has been awarded. One of the other two men who won the prize along with Montagnier was later investigated for his ties to AstraZeneca (big pharma), which provided financial support to some of the Nobel activities as well as to two members of the committee. Many international scientists criticized the committee for not giving a joint award to both Montagnier and Gallo, and questioned the fact that Presidents Reagan and Chirac privately negotiated how credit would be divided between the two men when the questions arose about patents for AIDS drugs. To quote you, "You are not factoring that there is an agenda, by big pharma and the media," not to mention by governments and institutions.
  22. And you seem to have a blind trust in the glitter of the Nobel Prize, as though it is the definitive answer to an objective question and not as politically influenced as many other issues. Even Montagnier himself expressed surprise that he received the prize alone instead of jointly with American scientist Robert Gallo, since although Montagnier identified the virus first, it was Gallo who was first to prove that it caused AIDS. Since receiving the Nobel, BTW, Montagnier has made other scientific claims that experts have found highly questionable, not just the latest one about COVID-19. Any examination of the history of the Nobel Prizes would raise doubts in many people's minds about the quality of the choices, and of those who were not chosen.
  23. This reminds me of my late best friend, a New York opera queen who owned four fur coats which he often wore to the Met. One summer he took a vacation trip to South Dakota and came back raving about the beauty of the Black Hills and his desire to retire there. When I told his sister that, she rolled her eyes and said, "Where is he going to wear the coats?"
  24. I wonder how many 22 yr olds can afford to live in an expensive gay urban neighborhood and hire escorts. When I was that age I had to nurse one beer through an evening at a bar.
  25. I was born and raised in a small northern suburb that was 100% white. I was an only child of older lower middle class parents who were fairly conservative Republicans (they thought Eisenhower was too liberal) and their lives revolved around the Episcopal church. I really had no idea what racism was, because my parents and neighbors never expressed any openly racist ideas. My first personal exposure to any black person came when I was sent one summer to stay with my maternal grandmother, who lived in a a small town on the Hudson River in upstate New York. Her only neighbor was Edna McGinnis, a middle-aged black woman, who I discovered was also her best friend there. Then I discovered that the house in which my grandmother lived had been a station on the "underground railroad" before the Civil War, and escaped slaves had been hidden in a secret room in the house. Edna was a great story-teller, she often invited me over for lunch, and it was the first time that black people became real for me. When I returned home, I talked a lot about Nana's friend Edna, but my parents just listened and made no comment. I never had any interaction with a black person my own age until I went away to college. It was a small liberal arts school with only a handful of middle-class black students who tended to stick together, but one of them was in a couple of the same classes with me; we had the same interests and tastes, and he soon became my closest friend at school. I also suspected that he was gay, which he was, although he didn't realize it yet. Through David I got to know the other black students at school, and sometimes we all did things together where I realized I was the only white person in the group. He lived in a town near mine, and when we traveled home together for holidays, I introduced him to my parents, and they never commented about his race (or about the fact that his parents were more educated than they were and lived in a better suburb). My parents' best friends were a couple from our church, whom I knew and liked. I was a senior in college when the man was transferred to a job in Newport News, Virginia, and we went to visit and stay with them. At dinner that night, the man started to talk about their new town, and he said the best thing about the neighborhood was that, "The police make sure the niggers stay in their own neighborhood at night and don't come over here." I was stunned. My parents looked uncomfortable but didn't say anything. These were people I had always looked up to, and we were guests in their home, so I didn't know what to do, and I followed my parents' lead and stayed silent. But the next day I told my parents that I wanted to leave, and they understood why I was upset, but my father said, "That's just the way Ernest is. He says things like that because he grew up in Bermuda where it was normal to talk about black people that way." Maybe, but my grandmother also grew up in Bermuda, and I never heard her say anything like that. My father said he'd make an excuse for us to leave later that day, which we did. My parents' relationship with the couple withered naturally because of the geographical separation, and I managed to avoid ever seeing them again, but I learned from the experience that my parents were not openly racist themselves, but they could accept people who were. I certainly did not accept the lesson to just ignore what people said, but I did learn that bigotry is not the only defining aspect of a person, so I have had friends with whom I disagree about race, religion and politics, and will tell them so, but I don't necessarily expect them to change, and it doesn't mean the end of the friendship unless the person becomes so attached to his or her bias that it does become their only defining aspect. Four years ago I was shocked to discover that one of my oldest and dearest friends was an active Trump supporter, although nothing in her background would have suggested that to me. We still communicate weekly, tiptoeing around politics, because we both know that we won't change one another's mind. Another of my longtime friends eventually became one of my mother's good friends in her old age, because he was also a Republican and an active Episcopalian; he was also gay and black. On the other hand, my friend David, with whom I remained friends for about ten years after college--he even moved in with me for awhile--eventually became a "race man" and pretty much cut me out of his life because I was "too white." So it goes.
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