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Showing content with the highest reputation on 10/12/2013 in all areas

  1. Resetting Your Password: "Sorry, your password has been in use for 30 days and has expired - you must register a new one." roses "Sorry, too few characters." pretty roses "Sorry, you must use at least one numerical character." 1 pretty rose "Sorry, you cannot use blank spaces." 1prettyrose "Sorry, you must use at least 10 different characters." 1fuckingprettyrose "Sorry, you must use at least one upper case character." 1FUCKINGprettyrose "Sorry, you cannot use more than one upper case character consecutively." 1FuckingPrettyRose "Sorry, you must use no fewer than 20 total characters." 1FuckingPrettyRoseShovedUpYourAssIfYouDon'tGiveMeAccessRightFuckingNow! "Sorry, you cannot use punctuation." 1FuckingPrettyRoseShovedUpYourAssIfYouDontGiveMeAccessRightFuckingNow "Sorry, that password is already in use."
    4 points
  2. And a joke: A lady walked into a drugstore and told the pharmacist she needed some cyanide right away. The pharmacist naturally was concerned by such a request and asked, “Why in the world do you need cyanide?” The lady then explained that she needed it to poison her husband. The pharmacist’s eyes got big and he said, “I can’t give you cyanide to kill your husband! That’s against the law! I’ll lose my license. They’ll throw both of us in jail and all kinds of bad things will happen! Absolutely not! You cannot have any cyanide!” The lady reached into her purse and pulled out a picture of her husband in bed with the pharmacist’s wife. The pharmacist looked at the picture and replied, “Well, now. You didn’t tell me you had a prescription.” One more joke? A man is walking in a graveyard when he hears the Third Symphony played backward. When it’s over, the Second Symphony starts playing, also backward, and then the First. “What’s going on?” he asks a cemetery worker. “It’s Beethoven,” says the worker. “He’s decomposing.” *** Since we're on a roll, here's my kind of toilet:
    3 points
  3. Back in the Pleistocene when one of my notions was to be a lit-crit-informed art critic, I looked forward to one day overturning the critical establishment's snootiness about Rockwell. A far darker, more multilayered imagination than usually acknowledged. Glad to see this news, even if (as Johns said) record prices say a lot, they just don't say a lot about the piece as art. The true value of Norman Rockwell, America's patriot painterRockwell is often called 'folksy', yet his art, which now fetches millions, was deeply engaged with the great issues of his day Nicolaus Mills theguardian.com, Saturday 12 October 2013 08.00 EDT Detail from Norman Rockwell's civil rights era cover painting for Look, the Problem We All Live With. Photograph: EPA Norman Rockwell, the artist-illustrator who gained a nationwide following for his many Saturday Evening Post covers, is back in the news 35 years after his death in 1978. Sotheby's in New York is planning to auction seven Rockwell paintings on 4 December, and the paintings are expected to sell for record prices. According to Sotheby's, one of the paintings, Saying Grace – showing an older woman and a boy saying grace in a crowded restaurant while two men seated at their table gawk at them – could bring in as much as $20m. The previous high for a Rockwell painting, $15.4m, was set in 2006 for Breaking Home Ties, a picture of a teenage boy going away to college. At a time when the art world is still feeling the effects of the recession, it's understandable why there should be such interest in the prices buyers are willing to pay for Rockwell's depiction of "homey, small-town America" – as one report on the Sotheby's auction put it. The problem with this focus on the dollar value of Rockwell's most nostalgic paintings, though, is that it undermines his greater importance and influence. We forget that, in the dark days of the second world war, Rockwell played a critical role in helping Americans on the home front understand what was at stake in the fighting going on in Europe and the Pacific. The British had Lawrence Olivier reminding them of their heroic past with his Henry V of 1944. Americans had Rockwell reminding them of their basic decency. Nowhere is Rockwell's achievement clearer than in the second world war era paintings marking their 70th anniversary this year – Rosie the Riveter and the Four Freedoms, the series Rockwell did illustrating the "four freedoms" that President Franklin Roosevelt declared were the bedrock of a democratic society. In Rockwell's hands, the Four Freedoms cease being merely abstract principles. They become a familiar way of life, ideals worth defending: Freedom from Want shows a family sharing a Thanksgiving meal; Freedom from Fear portrays parents tucking their children into bed; Freedom to Worship consists of close-ups of people of different faiths praying; and Freedom of Speech centers on a town meeting in which a man – who looks much like a beardless Abraham Lincoln – has his say while his neighbors respectfully listen. These paintings, done in a muted palette, reflect Rockwell at his most serious. Americans immediately took to the paintings, and in April 1943, the Four Freedoms began a nationwide tour in which over 1.2m people viewed them and also bought $132m-worth of war bonds. At a time when families planting victory gardens in their backyards accounted for 40% of the vegetables grown in the United States, the Four Freedoms confirmed how the decisions Americans made in their everyday lives mattered. When the paintings came to New York, they were not confined to a museum; they were put on display at Radio City Music Hall. With his painting of Rosie the Riveter – the 29 May 1943 cover of the Saturday Evening Post – Rockwell continued to emphasize the contribution everyone had to make as long as the war lasted. The replacement of men by women in the workforce began well before Rockwell ever produced his rendering of Rosie the Riveter. There was even a 1942 song that declared: She's making History Working for victory Rosie the Riveter. Rockwell's genius was to both make Rosie appealing and focus on women who were doing hard manual labor making the weapons of war, rather than just clerical work. In a period in which blonde Betty Grable in a bathing suit was the pinup ideal, Rosie was Betty's physical opposite. In Rockwell's painting, Rosie is wearing work clothes, her arms are muscular, and she is smudged with grease. Yet, Rockwell's Rosie is unburdened by her situation. We see her taking a lunch-time break, and she appears happy with the choice she has made to help the war effort. Her half-shut eyes give her a dreamy look. She holds a sandwich in her left hand, and she deftly balances a rivet gun on her lap. Any woman, the painting says, could follow in Rosie's footsteps and take pride in what she was doing. We can only guess at what Rockwell would say today about being pigeonholed as folksy, but we do know how anxious he was to do his part for the war effort. In an interview that he did for a 1945 profile in the New Yorker, he complained of initially being turned down by government officials when he went to Washington and tried to interest them in the charcoal sketches that became the basis for the Four Freedoms. It was the Saturday Evening Post that saved the day by commissioning the Four Freedoms paintings – and allowing Rockwell seven months to complete them, after he had promised to get them done in two. In the 1960s, when the civil rights movement was experiencing some of its worst violence, Rockwell refused to sit on the sidelines and watch. He directly engaged the conflict with his art, and completed one of his most poignant final works – the Problem We All Live With, a painting for Look magazine. The work depicts a young African-American girl, six-year-old Ruby Bridges, being escorted to a formerly all-white school in New Orleans by a cadre of US marshalls protecting her from an angry and violent mob. Rockwell never doubted that his depiction of the Four Freedoms would touch people, and in his work during his later years, he made a point of using his art to extend the values embodied by that piece. From the fight against fascism abroad to the fight for freedom at home, Norman Rockwell highlighted the brightness of the American spirit in the darkest of times. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/12/norman-rockwell-american-patriot
    2 points
  4. I am very much a dog lover. My last two were Min Pins. The boy had cancer and had a leg removed at about 5 year's old. He recovered from the operation and enjoyed the last months but there is not enough therapy available for dogs (or humans). He would have done better with radiation but it was not available. The girl was with me for 17 years and was an expert co-pilot. She always wanted to go and I took her on many, many trips. A lot of folks seem to think that dogs cannot be good travelers on aircraft but mine were well behaved and not fussy at all. At the moment I do not have any as I do not like to board them and I travel a lot when they cannot go with. Best regards, RA1
    2 points
  5. Lucky

    Two Brave Men

    In St. Petersburg, Russia: .
    2 points
  6. You should be here when my cable bill arrives.
    2 points
  7. I love dogs and have always wanted to have one but work always got in the way. When I retired a couple of years ago one of the first things I did was to get my first dog, a rescue beagle mix. It has been an awesome experience and I would love to have a second, but my girl is very jealous and wouldn't allow it. I truly know now what they mean by man's best friend and she brings joy to me every day.
    2 points
  8. Respectfully I disagree with Parisrio2000. That local forum is very good at alerting clients to escorts who are scammers or worse (in one case of a guy still advertising, a robber at knifepoint). I agree that the 'published' escort scene is not great in Argentina, but I have met handsome, muscled young men who worked below the radar and they were not expensive. In one case, I saw a very handsome man in the street and started talking to him; we ended up having a fun-time in a hotel and all it cost me was a drink afterwards. It developed into a brief romance on my next visit to Buenos Aires, and it was only then that I learned that the young man was a well-known local 'heart-throb'.
    2 points
  9. I have long been a fan of Norman Rockwell, and have been to Vermont where there is a gallery devoted to his paintings. I see him as a patriot in the meaning of the word as it was used when I grew up. It's been bastardized or something nowadays by the Tea Party or others who think that you are not a patriot if you don't agree with them.
    2 points
  10. Davey is cute but damn, those Czech boys make me want to relocate!
    2 points
  11. pauleiro

    Prague cutie

    Met this Gayromeo model this week end in Prague. Lovely lad. 19 years old. Always smiling. Recommended ! His sexy smile announces the whole program ...
    1 point
  12. Speaking of dogs loving someone, how about this: http://tammybruce.com/2013/07/possibly-the-best-soldier-dog-reunion-video-ever.html
    1 point
  13. lookin

    Two Brave Men

    Wonder what they'd do if boyish lesbians and girlish gay guys walked around kissing. Problem seems to be a serious shortage of progressives among the Russian population, though, and that's probably going to take a generation or more to fix. дерьмо!
    1 point
  14. Dogs often like to have a friend, so two dogs can be a good idea. We lost one of our two Scotties in July, so are looking to get a puppy around the first of the year. A Scotty of course.
    1 point
  15. Absolutely "fascinating"....I love this article and while I knew some of it there were quite a few that I wasn't aware of (i.e. transparent aluminium...how cool is that). You gotta love it and this is one part of the future that I would love to be able to experience. I can hardly wait for the transporter to be real
    1 point
  16. I was lucky enough to be asked to go to Stowe, VT in the '70's with a MEM aircraft dealer and friend to see NR's museum. My friend was a very good local artist. He very much enjoyed this trip and actually got to meet Mrs. Rockwell who was still alive at that time. I enjoyed the trip and my friend's excitement throughout. There is no doubt that NR is a monumental exponent for Americana. Best regards, RA1
    1 point
  17. Yes, everyone knew Osama Bin Laden too, but that doesnt mean its a Good thing !
    1 point
  18. ... and on their way to being unable to sign in their name apparently. Seems there is a move afoot to discontinue cursive writing in this computer age. Could evolution be reverting us to become little more than slugs will cellphones eventually? For those who are deniers there is still some sand left in between the birthers and climate cynics.
    1 point
  19. Apparently about 22% of the US population would not be able to read, never mind understand this report. Yet, "everyone" must go to college and get a degree. One thing that means is college graduates who can barely function because their literacy level is somewhere back in high school or junior high where they were passed on without passing the coursework. It isn't that a lot of these folks are stupid, they are either lazy or improperly motivated or both. The leadership of the US government is sorely lacking regarding education. Money and training to pass tests is not the same as learning the material. Local control should be much better. I fear we shall never know. I know plenty of folks who are very successful in every meaningful way who never progressed past a 6th grade education. They can barely read and write but have made money, reared a family, run a business and been above average in a technical field. We now have a very large service economy. Many more folks need to get a technical or hands on education. There is money to be made and a good life to live. I am sure there is plenty more to be said on this subject and I await other's input. Best regards, RA1
    1 point
  20. I suggest you do a search at the top of this site for Atlantico. There are 3 pages of threads about the hotel. They do have an easy visitation system from my understanding. I stayed there only one night about 12 years ago and I had to leave for the slow Internet was a major issue for me.
    1 point
  21. the last anwer was best. i was aware of soy tuyo and ratatones, however guapo and forum are new to me. forum has a lot of information. my spanish is lousy, so google translate will have a lot to do. can you elaborate on hotel faena ?
    1 point
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