Charlie

Obviously a model rather a player: no one has played with one of those wooden Spalding racquets in years.

Every time this thread gets revived, other names pop into my head, like Jerry Herman and Andy Warhol.

I can understand why a symphony orchestra would break such a long opera into separate performances, but I wouldn't want to hear it that way. I don't even like intermissions, unless I need to go to the restroom. I find operas like Reingold and Ariadne auf Naxos best when they are done with no intermission, although it is a strain on my bladder.

Act III is about 80 minutes long. Of course, Tristan is dead before the end of the first hour, and Isolde gets all the good music after that.

It's finally over! Nadal wins a stunner, after almost five hours.

I'm sure I have mentioned somewhere before this thread the time I went home with a Belgian (NOT Steven Draker) who pulled a chest out from under his bed. In it were two full sewer cleaners' kits, which he wanted us to wear while we had sex. They weren't noticeably dirty, but the smell was pretty pungent.

Like Vienna, Bratislava is charming because it is structurally an old Hapsburg city (it used to be called Pressburg). Unfortunately, Slovakia on the whole is a fairly conservative, reactionary country, unlike the Czech Republic. Czecho-Slovakia was created after World War I by the western allies, largely because the Czechs and Slovaks spoke almost the same language, but their cultures were very different. The Czech half was industrialized and oriented toward secular western Europe, while the Slovak half was primarily agricultural and heavily Catholic. The split into separate countries after the collapse of the Iron Curtain has accentuated their differences. I would be more inclined to opt for Slovenia, which is more liberal, and has better weather.

For a change, someone who looks younger than his advertised age.

If Medvedev can beat Nadal in the final, I think that a year from now he could be one of the Big Three.

After five years of living with my spouse and me, at 94 my mother voluntarily moved into a CCC, because she felt that she would be more comfortable living among her age peers, and we would be more comfortable having our own home again.

You're right. I hadn't realized that it really wasn't a CCC.

Gorgeous, but that is not a tennis racquet.

Thanks for the correction: it was Fountaingrove.

If the only thing about the escort that matters to him is that the escort is black, that is a fetish. If he is simply more strongly attracted to handsome black men than other men, that is a preference.

No, I had foolishly brought everything in a huge suitcase--it was my first trip to Europe, and I didn't realize how much I would come to hate that suitcase.

Mud wrestling.

At night under a bridge in Luxembourg City, with a guy who picked me up on the street only a couple of hours after I arrived in the country on a flight from New York. I had no idea where he had taken me or how to get back to my hotel, and he didn't speak much English. But I was young, and it was my first opportunity to have sex in Europe.

There is a very nice one called Forestgrove in Santa Rosa, but it is for fairly affluent gay professionals (the kind of people who expect there to be a full-time pet-sitter on staff). A friend of ours purchased an apartment there about five years ago, but unfortunately he died right after he moved in, so I never got a report on his reaction to living there. It is in the same neighborhood as the big wildfire in Santa Rosa, so I don't know how much it was affected by the destruction there.

My mother spent her final years (age 94-102) in such a community, starting in assisted living and ending in nursing care, and it was a good situation for her. My partner and I actually visited several continuing care communities a few years ago, because they seemed like an ideal solution to our situation (no children to take care of us, and no family in a position to take responsibility for us). The problem is that most are really designed for straight couples or singles. We spent two days in one that was very nice, and they designated a very likeable resident gay couple to shepherd us around. However, we got the impression that most of the residents were rather conservative upper middle class straight folks, and the gay couple admitted that among almost a thousand residents, they were the only male couple! We felt the administration were trying to recruit us as tokens so they could claim to state authorities that they were diversified. The ones here in the Coachella Valley were more relaxed about sexual diversity, but they were also out of our price range. We did find one that we really liked in a university town, and we almost bought into it, but they didn't have a memory care facility, which is necessary for my spouse. One has to really investigate these communities carefully, because they don't always have all the services they claim in their brochures.

As a descendant of Bermudans, I wish I could have attended.

I had a few wet dreams when I was young, but not after I learned how to avoid them.

Medvedev's play today was brilliant, but he was helped by Wawrinka, who played the worst match I have ever seen from him.

Possibly. I always use Firefox. A couple of nights ago, however, I could enter this box, but it wouldn't post. Then later it did.

When looking for a new place to retire, one should also try to consider the possibility that you may be retired for a long time. When you are in your 70s and 80s, your wants and needs will probably turn out to be somewhat different from what you wanted and needed in your 60s, and you don't want to be stuck in the wrong place if you no longer have the means or energy to move again. When my parents retired at 65, they relocated to the perfect place for them. But as a new widow at 75, my mother realized that it no longer met her needs, and she relocated to yet another completely new area, which was just right--at that time. At 89, that place no longer worked for her, and she had to make another major relocation. Before retiring anywhere, it's worthwhile to project what your life is going to be like if you live there ten or twenty years from now.

In the 1960s, my best friend was stationed at the Air Force base in Wichita. He loved the town and its gay community. Then he got caught up in an Air Force witch hunt for gay personnel in Wichita who were interacting with the local community, and was arrested by military police at the home of his civilian boyfriend. He was discharged, along with several of his comrades, and his boyfriend said he never wanted to see him again, because the exposure had ruined his life in Wichita. I have been to Kansas a few times, but I have never had any desire to visit Wichita.