Charlie

I spoke last week with a friend in London who has had to go back and forth to Paris on family business a few times since January. He was about to go again this week, and he said that when he returns to London, he is required to quarantine for ten days at home, even though he is fully vaccinated. He also has to have a COVID test, which he must pay for. My spouse and I had planned to go to London this year, but we won't go until we can be sure that we won't have to quarantine in a hotel on arrival.

You beat me to Europe for the first time by exactly two weeks! But we had very different itineraries, because I flew Icelandic Airlines (RT $218), which flew only to Luxembourg. I never got to Britain on that trip. My route was Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp, Bruges, Zurich, Vienna, Copenhagen, Bremen, Amsterdam, and Paris, back to Luxembourg and then to Reykavik on the way back to NY, all in six weeks. I also spent my time a bit differently, since I met up in Brussels with a gay friend and traveled with him for the first 3 weeks, then stayed in Copenhagen for a week with another friend who was living there, and later met up with a third friend in Paris. During the day I saw the sights, but I had sex with local men almost every night, in bathhouses or with pick-ups from bars or the streets, in every one of the cities named above except Bremen (I needed a break). It was a wonderful experience, so I went back frequently, even lived there occasionally, but there is something specially memorable about the first trip to Europe.

Tilden publicly presented himself as a "mentor" to teenage boys, like Dennis Hastert, at a time when homosexual acts were illegal. Even today, when it is possible to announce that oneself is "gay," no adult male is going to hold a press conference to explain specifically to whom he is sexually attracted, especially not teenage boys. It's still only okay to claim to be gay, just as long as you let people assume it means that that you are only interested in having sex with consenting gay male peers while looking for the "right one" with whom to marry and settle down.

Tilden was outed against his will; he didn't come out. He was jailed for having sex with teenage boys.

Aha! Then you are probably a fellow admirer of Alexander Pope. (And yet another thread wanders off topic, from Dante to Kafka and Proust, to Vergil and Pope.😄)

However, the quote is from Dante, not Vergil, who didn't write in Italian. (Vergil is onlly leading Dante to the gate to Hell, over which Dante claims the quote is written.)

7th grade probably the first time I noticed that one of my classmates was starting to look like a man, and that interested me. Kevin Ryan was bigger than the other kids, had some body hair and muscle definition, and was kind of a "bad boy" in the eyes of our elderly women teachers, partly because he was starting to attract a coterie of others kids who wanted to be like him. I still didn't think about sexual orientation or my own identity--that wasn't a topic that most people talked about in the 1950s--but I was the youngest kid in our class, and I definitely kept an eye on him.

Frenchies used to be fairly rare, but when they suddenly became fashionable, overbreeding led to specimens with medical problems. I know of several cases of Frenchies with genetic hip and leg problems offered for sale by unethical breeders. I don't know if this dog is one of them, but her coat color and pattern is hard to produce and therefore brings big bucks, so it is possible medical problems in her parents were ignored. However, that resting position with the splayed back legs is not necessarily abnormal in the bulldog breeds. Does she have noticeable difficulty getting up from that position? I like the breed--they often have lovable temperaments--so someone offered to sell me a puppy once, but when I took her to be examined first by a veterinary surgeon I trusted, he said that surgery to correct an obvious hip problem would cost me at least $5000, and he couldn't guarantee it would be successful. Sudden popularity often ruins rare breeds.

I can't help being distracted by the chair, the wallpaper, the artwork...!!!

Oh, I'd definitely speak to Her Majesty about her Corgis.

If it hangs at least halfway to his knee, he is "hung."

I have never used one, I just depend on my own knowledge of breeds and their backgrounds. You might check with the AKC to see if they recommend anyone.

BINGO! Believe it or not, I never knew that I had a "delete" button on my keyboard🙄 Thanks!

I think you mean Newfoundlands, which are huge and friendly and love water. Newfies are a Canadian concoction.

I can't believe this genetic analysis. Several of these breeds are quite rare, and in this country they are mostly in the hands of exotic breed fanciers, who would not breed them together. In a natural setting they are also unlikely to meet to breed together, since they are found in different parts of the world. I have been going to dog shows for years (I used to own Westminster-show-quality Greyhounds), and I have never even seen a couple of these breeds in the flesh. It would be illogical for your dog to contain a higher percentage of the Dogue de Bordeaux than of the popular Rottweiler. She is supposed to be more than one-fifth German Shepherd, yet she shows none of the distinctive points--hair type, coloration, ear shape--of the GS. I don't see how one could create an animal that looks exactly like a Black Labrador Retriever by combining the breeds on this list.

I tried to quote a post in the reply form, but somehow got the wrong quote in. I can't figure out how to remove it from my reply. There doesn't seem to be any way to empty anything from the reply, and everything I have tried has only made it worse.

Tab Hunter?

Love Plitvice!

I don't know, but the tat on his left arm seems suspiciously faded.

I watched a nature documentary yesterday in which a sand crane shook a fish until he broke its back, in order to make it easier to swallow whole. This sorta reminds me...

Maybe he is just a typical New Hampshireman.

Nice Oldsmobile.

Except for roommates in college dorms, whom I could not choose, I have never lived with anyone I didn't know reasonably well beforehand. In your case, I would recommend setting an agreed upon time limit at the beginning, say at least a month, at the end of which the two of you would sit down and discuss what was working, what was not, whether you both wanted to continue, and if so, what changes you would both be willing to make in the arrangement. Even with someone you think you know, when you live together you will both find aspects of the other that you hadn't anticipated.

Not to be sacrilegious, but I believe that Roger, Rafa and Novak really are the Holy Trinity of tennis, and I hope that each of them ends his career with the same number of slam titles as they ascend to the Hall of Fame.

Can I ask just one question about your long conversation? Did he say he wanted to "bag" you or "bang" you for a long time? I would have reacted very differently to the implications of the terms.