Charlie

The only person I have ever known with the first name "Markku" was from Finland.

Wellington, NZ?

If he is in Manchester, why does he call himself CharlieLondon?

When I was in my mid 20s, I was invited to a sex party at an apartment in Baltimore. There were about a dozen guys, and everyone was moving around, either having sex or watching someone else throughout the couple of hours that it lasted. One attractive blond appeared to be getting gang fucked, and enjoying it, so I joined the line to fuck him. Later, as the party was drawing to a close, we started a conversation, and I discovered to my amazement that he had shared a hospital room in San Antonio with my best friend a couple of years earlier when they were in the Air Force! I asked him if he had had any recent contact with my friend Richard, and he said that he wanted to, but he didn't know how to contact him, so I gave him Richard's phone number in New York. A couple of weeks later, Ricard called to tell me that Glenn had called and had been staying in his Manhattan apartment with him as a guest, but Richard did not thank me for giving Glenn his phone number: Richard had to evict him because Glenn kept dragging numbers in from off the street for spontaneous orgies.

It is worth noting that these couples are not typical native-born Americans expats. Fawcett's wife appears to be a Spaniard who works there, and therefore is already at home in that culture (her mother and grown children live there, too). Sweeney's husband was born in Hungary and left as a child, but probably had already developed some native facility in the language. Hungarian is a very difficult language to learn, especially for an elderly person, because it is unrelated to any other language that an American is likely to have been exposed to (unless one grew up in a Finnish-American community in the upper Midwest).

One only has to read the news to see how the environment can be filled with "nonstop political stuff from all sides" in many parts of the world. However, as a foreigner, you also have no influence over decisions that may affect your own life there (like the American couple in the post above who have retired to Hungary).

He's got his daddy's eyes

We rented an AirBNB house in Portland, OR, one July, and I was surprised to discover it had no a/c. The owner said, "Don't worry: there's a portable fan up in the attic."

But it was a dry heat!🙄

I also have had a Citizen Eco-Drive for several years, and have been very happy with it. As long as I leave it out in daylight, it never stops running.

Funny that this thread should pop up again just now. I took my partner watch-shopping yesterday, because his expensive old Olympus needs a new battery, but he can no longer read the small face (with no numerals) because his eyesight is so bad. So I persuaded him it was time to buy a cheap new watch that he can actually read. We went to the Mall and stopped first at Macy's. I said we were looking for a cheap watch, and the salesperson said they sold no watch for less than $100. We ended up at J.C. Penney, which was having a sale on Timex watches. We found a watch with a large white face, black hands, and large black numerals, for $49. He loves it.

People in SoCal use abbreviations for almost everywhere. LA is always Los Angeles, OC is standard for Orange County, and SD is usually San Diego.

Reminds me of a provider I hired in Manhattan many years ago who had a barber's chair in his living room for just such scenes.

Nothing disrupts the equilibrium in a friendship or a romantic relationship more than one party having money and the other party wanting/needing it. That's why prenuptial agreements exist. Your relationship started as an agreed-upon commercial exchange (not slavery), and if you expect it to morph into something different, he has to be willing to discuss the subject dispassionately. His unwillingness to do that should be a red flag for you, because although your original image of him has changed, his conception of you may not have changed. As a somewhat comparable situation, when my partner and I met, there was a big difference in our ages and incomes. Before we agreed to settle down together, we had frank discussions about how we felt about those differences, how money and expenses would be shared, and who would be responsible for what. As time went by and conditions changed, we always revisited those topics to be sure both of us were comfortable with our original decisions and to change them when it seemed appropriate (e.g., he bought our first house, but we shared the cost of subsequent homes equally). You and your "friend" need to have the same kinds of conversations.

Thanks for reminding me of the historical reason why the friezes were not being properly maintained at the time that Elgin made his argument for removing them to London.. Of course, Elgin did not know what the Greeks would do after they won their war of independence from the Turks, so the British Museum felt that technically they had a right to keep artwork that they had gone to considerable trouble to obtain. As I said, attitudes have changed over the years toward art that many people now considered to have been "stolen" from the "rightful owners." Museums are now facing the same pressures to return anthropological holdings, such as corpses, to the descendants of the cultural groups from which they were taken.

Smorgasbord

Narcissus? (jerks off looking at an image of himself)

Right now (Fri., 1:10pm) the ad says he is still in California City, CA. Maybe he struck paydirt there.

When I was first introduced to the gay world and its terminology, I was told that "trade" basically meant any straight male who was willing to receive sexual attention (usually a blow job) from a gay male, without doing anything in return; "rough trade" usually meant someone who demanded payment for the interaction.

The Parthenon friezes were probably considered more culturally important to educated Britons of 19th century London than they were to most citizens of 19th century Athens, who were doing nothing to preserve them. For most Orthodox Greeks, they were remnants of a false religion which they had rejected. Two hundred years later, perspectives on relations between material art and the culture that created it have changed, particularly among educated persons everywhere, and questions of ownership are no longer considered simple judicial matters. Rational arguments can be made for returning the art to Greece or for keeping the work at the British Museum, and one side will certainly be dissatisfied with whatever the outcome is.

According to his RM ad, tomorrow he is going to be in California City, which is actually a small town (11K population) in the Mojave Desert. I don't think he is going to drum up a lot of new business there.

Years ago I introduced two of my closest gay friends to one another. Although they were born and lived on two different continents, they both had the same birthday (06/06). Both of them had a straight brother and sister; the sister was childless, the straight brother was married with three children, and the straight brothers were both called Greg!!! Surely that can't all be coincidence, can it?🤔

I'd like to take a tumble in his rumble seat.

I clicked on this thread mainly because I went to an actual pig-butchering once. It was an annual event in the small town in Czechoslovakia where I worked thirty years ago. Everyone got together at a farm on a Saturday to take part in butchering a fattened hog and taking home various pieces to cook.

My first hire took place in New York City in November 1978. It was provoked by the fact that my father had died a couple of weeks earlier in Virginia, and I had just returned from a long visit to family, during which I arranged the funeral, and afterwards drove my mother to New Jersey for the burial of his ashes. I left my mother with family in NJ and returned alone to my apartment in NYC, and I was physically and emotionally exhausted. I was also horny, and I didn't want to go out cruising--I wanted good sex with an attractive guy, efficient and guaranteed. I called an ad in a gay rag for a service called Chelsea Men, and made an arrangement to go to their place on West 16th St. It was in an old building, and at the office there was a guy sitting at a desk, whom I recognized as an old face from a Village bar, and lounging on a sofa there were three young men who were obviously available. However, I had called in advance and arranged to hire someone whose description fit exactly what I was looking for, for $55. But the man at the desk said the guy I had arranged for turned out not to be available after all. I smelled a bait-and-switch, in which I would be pressured to take one of the kids on the sofa, none of whom were what I wanted at all. So I persuaded the guy to go through his lists, and he found someone whose description sounded more acceptable. He called the guy, and I agreed to wait until he arrived. He told me to go into another room in the office, which contained a double bed; he told me to get undressed and wait in the bed. I had been waiting impatiently in the bed for about a half hour, when the door into the room opened, and in walked "Daniel," a 6'4" Australian of Italian/Lebanese background, with an advertised 10 " cock. He was in his late 20s and not conventionally handsome, but he was masculine and sexy, and I came twice in the next hour, although the whole process seemed rather mechanical. Then he quickly dressed and left . I cleaned up in the attached bathroom, dressed, and went out to the front desk, where I paid my $55 in cash, and left. And did I go home relaxed and ready for bed? No. The whole experience had stimulated but frustrated me to the point that I wanted much more. So I decided to go to the Ramrod, where I socialized with friends, and was hit on by a cute little Irish muscle builder. I decided not to go home with him, but on Christopher St, I was picked up by an attractive older man, who took me back to his place, where I had even better sex than I had with Daniel, for another couple of hours--for free! It was another year before I decided it was worthwhile to try paying for sexual satisfaction again.