Charlie

Beauty, as someone once said, is in the eye of the beholder. Most people will agree on certain standards of attractiveness in their own culture, as do I, but we all have our individual quirks that don't make aesthetic sense to someone else. The first time I became aware of being sexually attracted to another male was when I saw a black and white professional studio head shot photo of the grandson of one of my grandmother's friends. He was in his early 20s, slightly dorky, wearing glasses, but there was just something about his smile.... I found myself thinking, "It would be nice to kiss him." And then I realized that I had a hard-on.

Is Mike Pence standing by to count the vote?

In 80 years, a smaller portion of the Earth will be habitable for human beings, and the size of the human population will undoubtedly decline to reflect that reality, but the Earth will still exist, and so will Homo sapiens, even if civilization looks somewhat different from what we are accustomed to now.

I wouldn't call this a "daddy issue:" Bruno was probably about the same age as the guy giving him the BJ, who was obviously much taller than Bruno. But this would definitely fit nicely in "Autoerotica."

I, too, have boxes of letters from the 60s to 90s. The main difference is that with email I not only have the letters I received, but also the ones that I sent, and my computer can do a quick search through them to find what I want.

The recent post about answering the phone raised the observation that many people consider email an antiquated technology. I have been a prolific letter writer since my teens, and it has always been my primary means of communicating with friends and family. Often I didn't have a phone for personal calls--in college, living in other countries, traveling--but I could always write a letter and mail it. Non-local phone calls were also expensive, and required use of an intermediary like a long distance operator. The first time I lived in Europe, I brought a tape recorder with me, made cassette tapes, and mailed them back every week to my spouse in the US. When email became available at the end of the 20th century, I saw it as the perfect solution to my communication needs, especially for recipients at a distance. Now I use it even when I could use a phone, even for brief messages. Of course, many of my friends and family are also elderly, and don't like trying to text on a cell phone. The main disadvantage to email is that I need more equipment that just a pen, a piece of paper and a stamp, or a working phone. Also, I can't get an immediate response the way I can with a phone call, and I don't even know if my communication has been received unless I get a reply, but that is equally true of snail mail. The clutter of spam/scam emails is a nuisance, but they are easy to recognize and ignore, and the number of spam texts is getting just as bad. So, what is your attitude toward email? Have you abandoned it in favor of newer options?

During the pandemic, FaceTime has turned out to be an excellent way for me to interact with doctors who do telemedicine. Otherwise, I rarely use it.

Of course I know that email is for old-timers, but I use texting only for very short messages.

More of my phone calls are spam/scam than legitimate, so I never answer unless I recognize the name or number of the caller. My landline carrier actually warns "potential spam" on the ID. My landline and cell phones are set to automatically go to voicemail after 4 rings, so I check my voicemail regularly, just in case the call was legitimate; most spammers don't bother to leave messages. If I am near my landline phone when someone is leaving a message, I can hear them, and can break in and take the call if I realize that it is someone I want to talk to. I'm old and retired, so I don't have to deal with work-related calls, and I don't have family or friends who call me very often--most of my communication with them is through email. The majority of my legitimate phone calls are from medical providers.

My doctor got the Pfizer for the first three shots, but chose the Moderna for the 4th.

My doctor mentioned to me two days ago that he expects another booster to be available for most people relatively soon.

I don't think of a muscular, very hairy 30 year old as a "young lad," especially when he looks even older than 30.

Is it only people who don't believe in vaccination that you can't admire, or is it anyone who doesn't believe in whatever you consider to be "science" that you can't admire?

Your don't admire someone who has the courage of his convictions, even when he knows that doing so will probably cost him something that he sincerely wants?

I admire him for his willingness to pay the price for his beliefs, even though I don't agree with them. In other news, he is still ranked #1.

They had realized that its effects had other possibilities, but it had not yet been approved for erectile dysfunction.

No, about 30 years ago.

But the distance from my house to Costco is roundtrip 20 miles farther than the distance to my local gas station.

But think of all the gas I use just to get back and forth to Costco or Sam's Club.

Years ago, a friend of mine had a relation who worked for a pharmaceutical company. He told her she should invest some money in the company, because it was working on a new drug that would be a big seller. She was reluctant to take a chance, so she didn't do it. She told me, "I think he's wrong about it selling well, because I don't like the sound of the name--it's called Viagra."

I paid $4.78/gal for regular today at my usual Phillips 76 station in Palm Springs.

I don't believe in playing with things that I don't really understand and could make costly mistakes. I don't service my own car, and I don't invest my own money. I was lucky that when I started working at 23, one of the contractual requirements my employer made was that employees join a TIAA-CREF retirement plan, in which we had to invest a set percentage of our paycheck, and the employer would match it. I left everything in their hands, and I retired at 59 with a very comfortable income which has remained steady through all kinds of economic ups and downs. When my spouse got a jump in salary thirty-five years ago, he decided he needed a financial advisor, and he found one through a recommendation from a friend. Several years later, he unexpectedly inherited a substantial sum, and he turned that over to the advisor as well. Nick kept the investments growing, not dramatically but steadily, and we left everything in his hands. He was an independent advisor, but he worked through Schwab. When Nick announced last year that he was retiring at 82, I panicked for a moment, but he recommended that we move everything to an independent advisor whom he had known for years and trusted absolutely. Rather than try to find someone on my own, or--heaven forbid!--try to manage it myself, we moved it all to the new guy. So far, so good, but he does seem to want us to be more involved in investment decisions than we were with Nick, and I am really not too comfortable with that. BTW, because I am an old-fashioned type who was raised by working class parents, I think all those brokerage numbers on paper are nice to look at, but I never think of them as REAL money, so I always keep a stash of cash in traditional bank accounts, which would probably horrify an advisor.

It's being surrounded by all that black leather that turns him on.

Sweet photo of two late pornstars. (I know what you are feeling there, Al. I had my hand in there, too.)

If I saw only the handle, I would expect a female escort named Zoe to be advertising.