Charlie

This would be a more useful household device for me than an electric can-opener.

Part of the problem is the assumption that "gay" and "homosexual" are equivalent definitions. A similar false equivalence was common before the 1960s, when it was assumed that an "effeminate" man must be "homosexual," and vice versa. The six stereotypes listed above are probably more commonly true of "gay" men than of homosexual men in general. Many "gay" men, BTW, subscribe to the same kind of "bull-dyke" stereotypes about lesbians.

His written English needs proofreading, yet he claims to also speak fifteen other languages, including Russian, Greek, Magyar and Hindi? I wonder about his math skills.

Boys! Boys! Glass bottles are not a good idea in a space where everyone walks barefoot!!

Calling oneself a "stud" while advertising basically as a bottom seems like a misuse of the term ("mare," of course, doesn't sound right either).

I admit that martial rape is somewhat special (it would make a category in the Fetish Forum) , but I think you meant marital rape.

I have eaten at restaurants rarely since the beginning of COVID, but one of the things that drove me crazy when restaurants first re-opened was the elimination of everything normally found on the table, not just menus. The few times I have eaten out recently, I see the salt and pepper, condiments, etc., are back on the table, yet they are touched more often by the customers than the menus, so I don't see why eliminating the menus is claimed as a health measure.

There's a Legacy thread for that.

"On, Wisconsin! On to victory!" (though I don't know what sport they are playing)

I wish I had encountered him when I was pony-trekking in Iceland.

If you mean contemporary music when I was a teenager, then it would be young Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. Music CDs hadn't been invented yet, so we bought 7 inch vinyl discs to play on our record players (you could play both sides of the disc, A and B). I didn't watch soap operas. The only thing I watched during the day was Dick Clark's "American Bandstand" after school (on black-and-white TV). My parents put their retirement money in CDs. My mother went back to work when I was in high school; her fulltime white collar job paid a salary of $2500/year. We needed the money, because I wanted to go to a private liberal arts college, and the tuition alone cost $1200/year! Things didn't seem simple to me at all in 2000: I had to learn how to use a personal computer to access that new thing called the Internet if I wanted to find escorts. (When I was a teenager, the only computers were big main frames owned by institutions. BTW, when I was in sixth grade, the big debate at school was whether we would be allowed to use ball point pens instead of the steel-tipped pens that we dipped in the inkwells on our desks--the teachers argued that ball points would make us lazy.)

I have always wondered why a city the size of Denver seems to have so few escorts.

Notice Jeff's middle finger?

Humph! I just finished a bowl of raisin bran for breakfast.

"The grass is always greener somewhere else..." (well, sometimes it actually is)

Let's not overlook the effect of climate change on the price of food. The production of food depends much more on the natural environment than the production of manufactured items does. Fires and floods affect how much food get produced, and where. Rising temperatures affect what gets produced, and where. Drought affects what gets produced. The price of food is also affected by the cost of growing it and transporting it to buyers. Most of us shop at supermarkets because that's the only place where we can get fresh vegetables all year round where we live. The alternative is to live on your own farm and hope for a good year weatherwise.

Yes, I have spent time in the slums of Indian cities like Calcutta.

It sounds good, but I can't help hearing echoes of the claims ante-bellum slaveowners always made about what a benevolent institution slavery was for their beloved house slaves. What happens to those katulongs who don't have ideal employers like your family?

And what does a katulong do when he/she needs a fulltime caregiver?

Alas! I was very young then, and the Internet wouldn't be invented until several decades in the future, so I didn't have a community of tribal elders whom I could discreetly ask for advice.

When I was a graduate student, a friend of mine told me that a middle-aged doctor he knew was looking for an intelligent boytoy, and he had recommended me as a possibility. I was intrigued (at the time I was living on an $1800/yr stipend), so when the doctor called and invited me to join him for dinner at a restaurant that was much grander than any I had ever been to, I agreed to the date. I wore my one good suit, and met him at the restaurant. He turned out to be pretty good-looking--luckily, I was always attracted to older men--and we had an excellent meal with sparkling conversation. Then we went back to his condo. That was the point at which it began to feel awkward, because I understood how to behave as a social dinner guest, but I wasn't sure about how to be a kept boy. Was I going to be paid? Was there going to be sex? Was I supposed to initiate it? Was I required to do whatever he wanted sexually? Nothing had been discussed when making the date or while eating dinner. I became passive and waited nervously for the next move, and he made it. He was quite an aggressive sex partner, and I was OK with the result, but I wasn't really turned on. He asked me to spend the night, but I explained that I had an early class the next morning and couldn't stay. He didn't offer me any money. The next day he contacted our mutual friend and told him that he thought I would do, and asked him what he should do next; the friend said he would talk to me. By then I had already decided that it wasn't the right situation for me, and to please tell the doctor that although I had enjoyed our evening together, I didn't want to pursue the kind of relationship that he seemed to want. I didn't say that part of the problem for me was that nothing was really laid out clearly and directly. It sounds like you want to hire a dinner companion who is accustomed to be paid for companionship that is primarily sexual, so I think you should be very clear when hiring that dinner truly is all you want (and stick to that!), and explain how and when you want to pay him for that before you start.

How many people "choose" to be bedridden and helpless at any age?

Of course she was unhappy because "she had no choice" --how may people are happy with not having a choice of where to live or how to die? But I don't see how it was "partly her fault." It wasn't her fault that she lived so long that by the time she was 98 she was almost blind and physically unable to take care of herself, and the facility was no longer able to take care of her at the assisted living level and had to move her into their nursing care section. She was mentally prepared to die long before the end, and was disappointed that it just wouldn't happen.

My signature is legible, IMHO, but over the years it has become less neat that it was when I was young. When I look at my signature on things I signed in college days, its neatness looks rather juvenile to me. I hate trying to sign it on an iPad or other electronic device, because although it is probably still decipherable, it doesn't look anything like my regular script. I always use my full first and last name and middle initial on checks and legal documents, but not on more casual pieces of writing. I have a particular way of carrying the crossed "t" in my first name into my middle initial, which I never do in my normal cursive script, and I never use a period after the MI, so if I didn't see those peculiarities, I would know I hadn't signed the document. My spouse, on the other hand, decided at some time in the distant past to make his signature an indecipherable scrawl, because he thought it would be harder to forge. On the contrary, I can forge it on checks and other documents, because I know what the major elements are supposed to be, but the total signature is so irregular even from one sample to another, that I imagine someone else could, too, after carefully examining a few examples. When we did our mail-in ballots for the 2020 election, he wrote a carefully legible signature on it, and when I saw it, I said, "They will never accept that as your real signature, because that's not what it looks like on your voter registration." I don't know whether the officials tossed the ballot or not.

This is a very relevant topic for me, and none of the poll answers are appropriate. When my mother was widowed at 75, she realized that she couldn't continue to take care of a big house and live alone, so she moved to an "age restricted" development in Florida, in which both of her younger sisters lived. Although she had her own small home, as her eyesight failed, she needed more and more help from one of her sisters. Then she had a mastectomy at 88, and I suggested that it was time for her to move to Philadelphia to live with my partner and me. But we both worked fulltime, and she was bored living in our home, with no social life. So at 94, she announced that she wanted to move to a continuum of care community connected to her church. She moved into an assisted living apartment there, where she could take part in activities and make friends with her peers. Eventually she became so disabled that she had to be moved into the nursing care facility there, where she was not happy--but then who is happy slowly dying anywhere? My spouse and I have no children or family members who could take care of us if it became necessary, so when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's six years ago, we started looking at continuum of care communities for ourselves. We decided we really weren't ready to make that big a move yet, so we opted to move into an "active adult 55+" development instead. It has been a good choice for the past four years, but nothing stays the same permanently. We are both physically healthy now, but as his condition deteriorates, I am turning into pretty much a fulltime caregiver, and I am starting to think again about continuum of care communities, because at some time we will both need to be taken care of. I hope to God I don't live as long as my mother, but who knows? We all would like to be independent until the very end of our lives, but one of the consequences of modern medicine and healthy lifestyles is that it is not realistic for many of us to just drop dead quickly while playing tennis or preparing a dinner for guests in our lovely home (or while having sex with a gorgeous escort). Finding the right place to live in our final years is neither easy nor fool-proof (COVID certainly taught us that), but it doesn't do any good to ignore the issue.