Charlie

You can't predict how a poster will respond to receiving a PM from you, but it doesn't hurt to try. Explain what post of his made you interested in a more private interaction than simply responding within a thread. You will probably learn more about the person from his reply, or lack thereof. Two posters here PMed me out of the blue years ago, when I posted that I was planning to move to PS, because each of them was contemplating the same move but had said nothing about it on the site. We arranged to meet in person as soon as we moved, and each of them became close personal friends of mine as a result.

Well, if he were gay, I assume that I would have crossed paths with him or at least heard about him during the 38 years I lived in Philadelphia and moved in "arty" gay circles, but neither his name nor any of the information about him included in the Wikipedia bio rings a bell with me.

The first time I got a notice that said "X is following you," it creeped me out.

March is a good time to come to Palm Springs. This year it is already sunny and in the 80s, and it's only early February. However, I live here, so I want to go somewhere else. This year I am going to Austin in late March, because that is usually a good time for Texas weatherwise.

Finally! I'll bet a lot of folks will show up at work tomorrow a little bedraggled.

See the recent thread about Bob Patrick, who I believe is about 67.

I recognize several of the men in that crowd outside the Coleherne, where I could be found frequently in the 1970s.

21 to 35 for me.

OMFG! indeed. I am shaken to the core.

"Kink" is neither a sexual orientation nor a gender identity. It is simply a subjective label for an enormous range of activities which anyone can engage in occasionally, even unwillingly. Leave it out, or else the group identity becomes so amorphous it is not worth a label.

And I admire your bank account.

YourHunk was the best sex I ever had in California. However, I would caution that most of the photos in his ad are the same ones he was using when I hired him ten years ago, so I would ask him for more recent ones.

Me, too.

Do a search of the posts, because there was another thread on this same topic not long ago.

Contact Daddy.

I occasionally joined a friend at Lutece for special occasions, because he loved it, but I never thought it was worth the price.

How could I have forgotten that recording of Die Tote Stadt, which I used to listen to often? I also saw her live in the role at NYCO in 1975, with John Alexander, another good singer who could sometimes rise to greatness.

Somehow I missed the news of Neblett's death back in November, and only realized it when I saw a tiny "in memoriam" in the LA Times today, which would have been her 72nd birthday. She was a beautiful woman who could be electrifying at her best. I saw her many times at the NYCO, and later at the Met and Covent Garden, in a wide variety of roles: in Mefistofele, Prince Igor, Louise, Fliegende Hollaender, Tosca, etc. The most memorable was as Minnie in Fanciula del West in a gorgeous production at Covent Garden in the 1970s. Unfortunately, she could also be staggeringly bad on occasion; I remember one performance where there were murmurs in the audience that she must be drunk, and she certainly looked and sounded that way. It was an uneven career, but I am surprised that she passed with so little notice.

I don't know if @WilliamM did, but I was there many years ago, when it was still Yugoslavia. I actually liked Split better than Dubrovnik, because it seemed more like a real city than a museum piece.

A belated HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

I keep thinking about doing a river cruise. I used to want to do one of the French barge cruises which move slowly, so that you can walk or bike along the canal paths, but I think I am past that phase. I get lots of literature from the companies that do European river cruises, and one of these days I will do one of them. My problem is that almost everywhere they stop is someplace I have already been, or someplace that doesn't interest me. The single friends I know who have taken them always go with a companion, and they have indicated that the passengers seem to be almost entirely couples.

My most memorable meal in a restaurant in France was actually at a very upscale Vietnamese restaurant in Paris, where the highlight was perfumed eel soup.

Before WWII, the Sudetenland was part of the new nation of Czechoslovakia, so the public schools used Czech as the language of instruction, although a majority of the population were ethnic Germans. In 1938, the Czechs were forced to cede the Sudetenland to Germany, and the Sudeten Germans fought for Germany. At the end of the war, the German residents were forced to leave their homes, and the area was re-settled with Czechs. During the Communist years, when the East Germans were only allowed to travel to Warsaw Pact countries, many of them went to the Sudetenland for their vacations, because the older Czechs could still speak and understand German. I lived and worked in the Sudetenland shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the tourist industry in the area still was heavily dependent on the Germans.

In theory, it may make sense to use "they" when a singular person's gender is bi or indeterminate, but the lack of normal subject-verb agreement in "they is" is very distracting, because 95% of listeners won't understand the point and will just think of it as a grammatical error. Of course, you might argue that it opens an opportunity to explain the topic of gender orientation, but more than likely a simple statement will end up getting lost in a long discussion like this thread.

"Whoso" and "hym" are the same person (it is a reflexive statement: "whoever finds himself" would be the modern English wording), so the "whoso" is singular. "Whoso [whoever]" is not gendered, and the "himself" is masculine only because the fallback pronoun in English is masculine when the person's gender is unknown. Speakers and writers in English often switch at that point to the genderless plural "they" with the proper plural verb (in this case, the future tense verb is the same for both singular and plural), because it is easier to be inclusive of both genders with a genderless plural pronoun. The Pardoner's audience is both men and women, and he does not know who among them may take up his offer (he undoubtedly hopes several of them will, not just one male). Forgive me, I am a pedant.