Charlie

Djokovic has never really been a favorite with the fans, because he came along and overshadowed Roger and Rafa's tennis bromance by actually outplaying both of them. I would not be surprised if he ended up passing some of their most cherished records, since he is a few years younger than they are, provided he can stay healthy.

Aren't the Eskimos reputed to have done that--put granny on an iceberg? Seriously, though, I think I would go crazy on a cruise till the end of my days. I get antsy on a ferry boat.

Barcelona, of course.

I occasionally get a call on my landline phone that identifies the caller as myself. I never answer, and I never leave me a voicemail.

People are always surprised by the sound of their own voice. ("Is that what I sound like?!")

The last time I got a quote of $60 from a real escort was in 1978.

At least one male in every generation of my mother's family seems to inherit a congenital heart condition, but it skips around in odd ways. My grandfather died of it at 55, and his grandson (my cousin) died of it at 30, yet my uncle (the male in the middle) lived to 91 with no heart problems. Luckily, I have never had any heart issues.

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.