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Now that's a 12-step program I could get into! Plus One!

Handsome boy, impressive arms. I can't, however, stop thinking of the last thing he must have heard before leaving the house that morning: "You're not wearing that, are you?"

In more out the way places, the Speed Museum in Louisville, Kentucky is wonderful and includes the reassembled great hall of a Tudor-era manor house deconstructed in England and brought to America. I remember being fascinated with that in high school. Also, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond is a world-class collection of art in a much less hectic locale than museums in larger cities. I particularly like the Antiquities galleries. And though not a museum, the architecture and embellishments of the main building of the Library of Congress in DC, is -for me- a transcendent experience, well worth my four visits. Particularly impressive is seeing the remnants of Jefferson's Library, sold to replenish Congress' Library following loss of the original Congressional collection in the War of 1812. To see, but please don't touch, books bought and used by Thomas Jefferson is a spine-tingling experience.

Tiger Woods. Tab? $55 million.

I have lived in Virginia near Washington, DC for almost 40 years, and frolicked in the bars and clubs of that city with much enthusiasm and great delight. Four of the most handsome and hunky -and hung- men I have ever met anywhere, including my years around San Diego, LA, San Francisco, and Houston, have come from Maryland, specifically Baltimore and its environs. There's just something about Maryland men. I fell in love with each, of course, one at a time. Maybe they put something in the water up there. If so, it worked.

I was originally going to say "oysters," but I can keep oysters down. Haggis, not so much.

I was once told by a boss, "I'm actually only interested in positive feedback." When he left the department some months later, I told him I was positively delighted.

Save for the scruff on so handsome a face -and truth be told, even with it- this is a man I could strive the rest of my life to make sure was happy to be alive. Just pleasing him would have the same effect on me. What a stunning specimen of a beautiful man.

I love this thread and the beautiful men it gives to behold and savor. But some depictions, in a perverse corner of my mind, sometimes makes me muse, "If you'd put on more clothes, maybe you wouldn't need the sweater." In the end, of course, I'm glad they can't hear me.

I once worked with a guy so contrary, that if the boss had gone around passing out $100 bills as a bonus, would complain because he didn't have change. It's impossible to please everybody, and some can't seem to be pleased at all. I am thankful this site, its offerings, and its community are here, and that I am able to visit and enjoy what it provides. Do I like everything I see or read? No, of course not. But if see Haggis on a menu, I don't leave the restaurant, I just order something else.

In some places, sex for money is condemned because it is sex outside marriage, and is therefore contrary to the laws of God, constituting fornication and promoting adultery. The money part is seen as unseemly, perhaps, but the moral defect lies in its extra-marital character. These views are obviously prevalent in societies with strong and extensive religious values and outlooks. European countries, in becoming becoming less religious in outlook and attitudes, have also become more accepting of, or at least more tolerant of, sexual practices previously frowned on. In the United States, however, which remains one of the most religious countries in the world, at least as far as most of its citizens self-identify, strongly puritanical sexual attitudes continue to dominate and determine public policy in this area. Sexual mores within Islam don't seem to go far beyond the male orgasm and leave little to be said of enlightened insights. The Christian view of sex is actually quite permissive within the bonds of marriage, but absolutely illicit outside those bonds. This goes back to conflicts between early Christian teachings as opposed to teachings of a competing Gnostic view of life. The Gnostics believed in a duality of creation consisting a good, spiritual dimension, created by a good god, and an evil, material world, created by an evil god. In the Gnostic view, procreation was evil because it perpetuated the evil material world, making sex an evil in itself. Christian teaching saw sex as a fulfillment of the "be fruitful and multiply" command in Genesis, and therefore a good and holy thing. But only within the bond of "the two shall become one," also a part of the Genesis legacy. I actually find Christian sexual morality a quite cohesive and developed system of thought, flawed only in that in rests on belief in God that doesn't exist. But I'm probably just being picky. We're not there yet, but in general I think we're inching toward a place where my sex is none of my neighbor's business. So long as we're not too loud.

Don't tell me! He works at the Community Chest.

Less filling, tastes great!

Cute couple. I just hope one of them doesn't start "whining".

I may have posted this elsewhere, but if so, I'll repeat it here. Ironically, memory fails. A man fresh out of the shower saw himself in the mirror as was appalled at his reflection. He told his wife that he stood there looking at an old, fat, bald man, way past his prime, and begged her to help him feel better about himself. She replied, "Well, on the bright side, your eyesight's damned near perfect."

Without much refresher research and relying on an increasingly suspect memory, Ancients in Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and Canaan, I think, probably among others, had temple prostitutes, which were exactly what it sounds like; you get screwed and the gods get your money. Pretty much the same as now, but minus the fun parts. When the people of the God of Abraham moved into Canaan, their one and only God told them not to mix with or be like the Canaanites, with their many gods and unclean ways, which presumably included the temple prostitutes. I'm not surprised that a religion centered around foreskins suffered from sexual hang-ups. But much of the initial antipathy toward sex workers arose among the children of Abraham, not so much because of the sex aspect, but because of their association with what were seen as false gods. It's almost undoubtedly more complex and nuanced than that, but it's at least part of the mix.

Touching on the religion connection to morality and the role and place of God in such matters, Christopher Hitchens, the sadly departed evangelical atheist, provided an enlightening perspective. Hitchens went through the history of mankind's explorations and discoveries about the cosmos, including the Big Bang, followed by the inflation and expansion of the newly minted universe, the vastness and scale of the cosmos (hundreds of billions of stars in hundreds of billions of galaxies), the birth and death of stars and their planets, and the possibilities and probabilities of widespread life throughout the universe. He then went on to describe the origins and evolution of life on earth, its long history and almost incomprehensible complexity and variety, it's vitality and its fragility, and the long ascent that produced the hominin species, culminating in modern Homo sapiens; that is, Us! And, he then said, all this so the Pope could tell us we can't jack-off. Draw you own conclusions.

Good heavens! and in the realm of each to his own - one's chest should not be busier than one's bedspread, especially in a case where both seem to scream, I've made some poor choices.

I began using the services of professionals when I was no longer attracted to men in my own age group. I knew what I wanted in a man's appearance and was willing to pay to get it. At least I'm deep enough to know I'm shallow, to paraphrase Niles to Fraser. The morality, or lack of it, lay in the way the partners treat and consider each other; as humans deserving of respect and consideration, or as pieces of meat or furniture, or as ATMs with feet. And as regards legality, why is it illegal to sell that which one can give away for free? It seems times are changing, but the gears grind slowly.

Their relationship, bad as it, and they, were and are, at least provided fodder for one of Joan Rivers' greatest lines. On Fashion Police, there had just been shown some female celebrity in a black neck-to-ankle dress, leather back and front, black lace on each side. Joan said, "The last time I saw something that long and black, it had had Kim Kardashian's teeth marks all over it." God, I miss that woman!

To each his own and I wish him luck. But I'd advise that he keep his day job for things like food and rent, and not depend on his high class exclusivity to bring home much bacon. I find his appearance -what I can see of it- at or slightly above average for one in his profession, but sense through his self-description and announced selectiveness, that his personality might be the biggest thing a partner would have to swallow.

You had me at Obey.

I have an odd brain at times, or maybe just a one-track mind. The first thing I thought of when I read the thread title was, Tarzan in a tree. We now return to our regular program, already in progress.

Which is the cuter critter? I like the puppy, but mostly envy where he's resting, between those wide open legs with boots ready to ride. Yippie io ki-yay.

Just don't get it stuck in your butt. I've read that's been going around.