Charlie

I don't think Shapovalov is ready yet for a Wimbledon title, or even a semi-final, although I enjoy watching him. I would like to see Federer win one more time, but he has been lucky to get this far, and I don't think he will go much farther, unless something surprising up-ends Djokovic. Medvedev impressed me with the way he turned around his match with Cilic, and I wouldn't be surprised to see him in the final, where I expect his opponent will be Djokovic, who I believe will join Federer and Nadal in the 20-slam club. My dark horse candidate for the final is Berretini.

I wonder how much business he got in Juneau?

Our small gym in the community building of our retirement community closed in March 2020, so my partner has been unable to work out there since then. The gym is important for his health, because he is 85 and has Alzheimer's, and all he has been able to do for the past 16 months is take vigorous walks when weather conditions allowed. When the gym re-opened this week, with no masking or capacity limits, we returned to find it spruced up with a better layout and some new equipment. Of course, he had forgotten how to do many of the things he used to do, so I had to coach him on what he should and shouldn't do (don't start with the same weights you use to use, spend more time on aerobic machines than upper body machines, forget about the free weights, etc.), and monitor him to make sure he was doing things correctly. Yesterday he went on his own for the first time, and I was hugely relieved to see the great improvement in his general sense of well-being just from being able to do a normal workout again.

A place that it was not a surprise that I wanted to see was the Taj Mahal, but the circumstances were unexpected. We were preparing to fly from Varanasi to Khajuraho, to see the famous temples, but the flight was delayed for several hours in Varanasi by weather. It wasn't until we were airborne that the pilot announced that we would not be able to land at Khajuraho because it was getting too dark and the airport there had no lighting for night landings; instead, we would be flying on to Agra, where Indian Airlines was making arrangements for the Khajuraho passengers to spend the night. (Indian Airlines was notorious for this kind of schedule unreliability, but in those days it was the only option for domestic air travel in India.) After we Khajuraho passengers had checked into the hotel in Agra and eaten a late dinner, several of us decided that we wanted to go to the Taj Mahal. The Taj was closed at night, and the whole Taj compound was surrounded by high fencing with locked gates, but it was a mild, clear night with a full moon, so we walked to the area. The compound was dark and empty, but through the gates we could see the silent, beautiful marble building bathed in moonlight. It was stunning. I did eventually get back at a later date to Agra to see the Taj in normal circumstances, but it was less impressive in bright daylight, filled with noisy tourists and souvenir hawkers.

$15 per head.

Locals sometimes do know routes to avoid complications like border control. When a friend and I were living and working in northern Czechoslovakia, one Sunday morning our landlady asked if we would like to accompany her husband and herself to an interesting old church in the countryside, and we agreed. When we got there, I said, "You know, our Czech isn't good enough to understand the service." She said, "That doesn't matter, it's in Polish." I looked confused, so she said, "Oh, we're in Poland now." We were on back roads and never crossed any obvious border going there or coming back.

A good friend of mine had planned an around-the-world trip, and he arrived in New Delhi from Tokyo, expecting to spend two weeks in India, only to discover that he needed a visa, a technicality he had somehow overlooked. After a few hours haggling with authorities, he was forced to fly on to London the same day. He never did get back to see India.

Correct on all points. Hope Cooke was an acquaintance of my first partner, and she had dinner at our home one night when she had come back to America during a rough patch in her marriage to the prince.

If I remember my visit correctly, the mall in the airport in Dubai had marble floors.

I came out at a very young age, so in the early years all my sexual activity--and gay social activity--was with men older than I was. One of my first regulars was in his 50s. My boyfriends and domestic partners were always older than I was. My close friends, gay and straight, have almost always been older than I was (Lucky is a rare exception). It wasn't until I started hiring escorts in my late 30s that my sex partners were likely to be younger than I, and even then I preferred to hire men closer to my own age, or older than I; the oldest escort I ever hired was 60. Like the OP, when I was in my teens, I thought that one's sex life probably stopped at 40, and mine certainly slowed down after that age. By the time I was in my late 60s, I could no longer fool myself into believing that the younger men I was attracted to found me sexually attractive as well, and that mutuality was important to my satisfaction with the sex, so I hired an escort for the last time ten years ago. Now I am happy enough to admire from a distance.

Marrakech. I went only because a friend was celebrating a milestone birthday there, and invited friends and family from around the world to join him for a long weekend party at his expense. He had rented three riads in the souk to house his guests, where we had communal meals and partied on the roofs. It was the only visit I had ever made to North Africa, and I found the old city fascinating to wander around in, but I have never been back.

Because every classically educated gentleman should be familiar with the most noted history of the Roman Empire.

I think many people in the PNW are so unaccustomed to that kind of heat that they don't understand how dangerous it is.

I don't know whether to feel flattered or insulted by that comment 🤔

I have tried more than once to get through Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but have never succeeded; even my abridged version is 900 pages of tight print. I keep telling myself that someday when I am recovering from some illness that keeps me in bed or in a rocking chair for weeks, I will finally read the whole thing.

I haven't visited the ATM in months. The only time I use cash now is to pay my barber and the dog groomer. However, when I signed up for a reservation for our HOA 4th of July barbecue yesterday, I was told I couldn't buy the ticket with cash or a credit card--they would only accept a check!

We invent new nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs all the time in English, but the short list of accepted pronouns has been pretty stable for centuries--in fact, it has shortened since we stopped using thee/thou/thine in most contexts. Good luck with that project.

I was not aware that la mano was virtually unique; thanks for the clarification. Although I had three years of Spanish in high school, I am far from fluent in the language.

I don't think that is the word "Small" at all, but a musical notation. The first symbol seems to be a strangely stylized treble clef, and "moll" is the German term for "minor."

In Romance languages, the pronoun assigned to to a noun which does not have gender in the real world e.g., el fuego (the fire), is usually determined solely by the ending of the noun (e.g., a singular noun ending in -o is considered masculine), though not always (e.g, la mano). In English, however, the pronoun assigned to a noun is usually determined by the real world gender of the object named, and since "fire" has no gender, the pronoun is the neuter it. The decision by non-binary persons to use plural forms (they, them, their) to refer to themselves as individuals is basically an end run around using the derogatory connotation of it, which turns a human being into an object. I haven't taught English in years, so I have no idea what the education system is teaching about the this subject now, but I suspect it is largely determined by who is teaching it and where it is being taught. "Proper English" has always been a fraught conception, as can be observed in something as simple as the conflicting views of "ain't."

That's Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis on the left.

Not really. Mike Marino was taller (6'4") and had a more handsome face; he also had a few tats, and this guy has none. If you are suggesting that this guy is Mike Marino, then he would have to be a lot older than 40, because I hired Mike 27 years ago.

I took my mother on her first trip to Europe for her 75th birthday. My father had a died a few months earlier, and I felt she needed something to take her mind off her new situation. She had never been out of the US, but I had lived in London and had friends there, so I thought it would be a good place to test her travel stamina. She stayed in a hotel across the court from the friend's flat in Covent Garden where I stayed, and my friend decided to host a few social gatherings while we were there. It was the first time my mother had ever been in a social setting with some fairly sophisticated (gay and straight) Londoners, and she was fascinated. We also walked all over the city, visiting the typical tourist sites. On the flight home, I asked what she thought about the trip; she hesitated a moment, then said, "When can we do it again?" Over the next dozen years I took her on seven more trips to Europe, including France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the Low Counties, all the Scandinavian countries, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Greece. We even went back to London a couple more times, but the first trip was the one she said was her favorite, because she said it made her realize how much she had missed by never venturing abroad before.

I'm surprised that they leased a car to you at your age in 1964.

I worked for 21 years to become a Regent, and overnight I became just a chess player!🤨