Charlie

Unfortunately, this is a case in which politics and a disease have become so intertwined that it is difficult to talk about one without reference to the other, and much of our discussion about our daily lives these days concerns issues related to CoVid. For example, she was very eager to see the restrictions on most activities lifted in Florida, so she could return to the gym (unmasked) and eating in restaurants, because she thought that there shouldn't have been restrictions imposed in the first place. She thought many "deaths from CoVid" were really not due to CoVid at all. That's the kind of thing I find hard to ignore, or to discuss without getting into politics.

I am having a somewhat more subtle problem with one of my oldest friends since high school. At considerable personal effort and expense, she took care of her brother (my best friend) when he was dying of AIDS, and later took care of his boyfriend when he was dying of cancer; she has lived with her brain-damaged (motorcycle accident) husband for many years. She has always had lesbian and gay friends, and has straight white women friends with black husbands. She has a medical technology degree, has lived and traveled all over the world, is fluent in a couple of languages, and has always been a supportive friend to my partner and me. Therefore, I was very surprised four years ago to discover that she was a strong Trump supporter, and she preferred that we not talk about politics. I am now finding that she doesn't believe the statistics about CoVid-19--even though she retired from working in a hospital in Florida!--and thinks it is being hyped by Democrats for political gain. She told me after the 2016 election that some of her friends permanently dropped her because of her Trump support. She shies away from any attempt from me to talk about her belief in Trump and Democratic conspiracies. I don't want to break off our long relationship, but I am finding it increasingly difficult to ignore the elephant in the room, especially since we communicate frequently by email and phone. I don't want this thread to be moved to the Politics forum, because it is really about how we deal with personal relationships that are interrupted by any kind of conflict over subjects that are important to us.

I am not going to do a search, but I think that you and I both saw this movie together in a theater years ago, and commented on it here.

The Bacon quote is so familiar to me from the literature of the Enlightenment period that it hadn't occurred to me that others might not recognize it. I guess Neo-Classical writers like Alexander Pope are not read much any more.

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.