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Sounds like a salacious bit of fluff to me-I will buy it when it gets marked down to $1 http://www.buzzfeed.com/timteeman/gore-vidal-iconic-american-author-had-way-more-sex-than-you

I'm heading back to Rio at the end of November after a break of a number of years. My Portuguese is 'pouco' at best, but I'm trying to brush up before my visit. I'm interested which translator app do you use on the iPhone? It sounds like a that would be a good additional tool for me. Thanks for your posts, I've been reading up on here and it is really getting me in the mood for my visit! Cheers, Swanny

Right up there with the best... http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T83W3rgQuXQ&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DT83W3rgQuXQ

Sadly it does. lookin's Shermanesque refusal to accept office has resulted in the still-birth of that germ of a proposal to realize a 'private' process for hearing comity complaints. It was sort of a package deal. Pitty too as I see you are ready with your scepter of justice to mete out discipline as needed to straying villagers. I must compliment you on your choice of a more practical wardrobe for the day-to-day exercise of the office. I am without doubt that you would have made a great Lord High Executioner.

I must say that I am a bit taken aback by your hasty eagerness to pose for your official office portrait. It does seem a bit unseemly for a Lord High Executioner to wrap himself so gleefully in such flamboyant trappings. No doubt you are looking forward to making your mark on the necks of many future transgressors.

Lotta tasty smoked meat in that photo. No reason to travel to Montreal from this hemisphere. So what does one call it? Hot spiced prosciubasa/kielsciutto ?

Yes! I like reading about TC's escapades, conquests, adventures, and experiences!!!

That is very very sad for me. I loved that place! I was just talking about it last week. But, it looks like you have found other things to occupy your time!

Is he really only 15??? I was going to say cute guy, but that would probably get me arrested. He really has great presence. He already has an agent.

First, thank you for your kind words. They are much appreciated. I liked your reference to yourself as a Pollyanna type. When I watched the latest episode of Glee, I thought about some of the people on this board. I like to think of myself as a GaGa but know in the end, I am very much more like Katie Perry. As far as options, remember there are actually 6: 1. If the admins feel someone is reeking havoc, we will take action. if no action is taken members can 2. Initiate the CCC and take matters into their own hands and leave the decision up to the members. A very fair option IMHO. 3. Leave - not something we want anyone to do. 4. Go to the "dark side." It didn't work for Darth Vader and it wont work any Pollyanna or most others. 5. Send a nasty email to Oz telling him what a prick he is and call him every name in the book and keep posting as I won't ban anyone for doing that to me in a PM. 6. Go to a local gay bar and tip a gogo boy and remember that many other members here are doing the same thing in another city and just having such frigging cool people to chat with who have like minded interests make stepping in a little shit every once in a while totally worth it.

All Marines think they are tops, don't they? Best regards, RA1

You're asking if he will accept clap from you?

Verve: the Sound of America by Richard Havers, review Mick Brown discovers how Verve records helped to bring jazz stars such as Ella Fitzgerald to a white audience Ella Fitzgerald: jazz star Photo: Library of Congress By Mick Brown 1:45PM GMT 08 Nov 2013 The Telegraph Commenting on the accusation that Louis Armstrong had “sold out” by playing an Uncle Tom figure to gain the approval of white audiences, Billie Holiday once remarked that “of course Pops toms, but he toms from the heart”. Two of the greatest figures in the history of jazz, Armstrong and Holiday both recorded for Verve, one of America’s premier jazz labels, quite late in their respective careers, at a time when jazz had long since left the ghetto of being “black” music to become justly recognised as “America’s music”. As this exhaustive, weighty and beautifully packaged history of the label demonstrates, Verve – and in particular its founder Norman Granz – was to play a significant role in this transformation. If we think of the Blue Note label as having the monopoly on modernist cool, embodied by such artists as Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Lee Morgan, then Verve, by contrast, oozed a more swell-egant sophistication, building its reputation on “heritage” artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson and Count Basie. If Blue Note was the music of the clubs, Verve was the music of the concert halls – which was precisely Granz’s intention. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Granz began his career in Los Angeles in the early Forties, promoting club dates with musicians such as Nat King Cole and Lester Young, challenging the colour bar by negotiating with the non-integrated white and black unions to have musicians from both sides working together. Granz’s dream was to take jazz out of the clubs, to a wider – which is to say white – audience, and in 1944 he staged a concert at the Philharmonic Auditorium, the traditional home in Los Angeles of symphony concerts, as a benefit for alleged gang members who had been arrested during the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots. It was the starting point for his Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) tours, which would eventually travel all over the world, providing a stage for virtually every major figure in jazz of the time, from Fitzgerald to Dizzy Gillespie. Granz released recordings of the JATP on his own labels, Clef and Norgran. But in 1956 he founded Verve, initially as a vehicle for Fitzgerald, whom he was also managing. She was already enjoying success singing bebop and scat; but Granz broadened her appeal by focusing her repertoire on work by popular songwriters. She would later describe her first Verve album, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook as “the turning point in my life”. Fitzgerald would go on to record seven more “songbook” albums, which established her as the pre-eminent interpreter of what became known as the Great American Songbook. Ira Gershwin noted of her readings of his and his brother George’s work that, “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.” The same formula would be applied to the Canadian pianist Peterson, who also recorded eight “songbooks”, including the music of Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern. Granz’s personal interest in Verve was to be short-lived. In 1960 he sold the label to MGM to concentrate on managing Fitzgerald and Peterson, promoting the JATP tours, and adding to his collection of Picasso paintings at his home in Switzerland. Under the direction of Creed Taylor, the label enjoyed enormous success with the organist Jimmy Smith, guitarist Wes Montgomery and pianist Bill Evans. In 1963 Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz’s milestone recording Jazz Samba went to the top of the American charts, launching the bossa nova craze, quickly followed by Getz/Gilberto, which launched “The Girl From Ipanema”, Astrud Gilberto. In more recent years, the label has existed largely through extensive repackagings of recordings from its golden period. Richard Havers does an excellent job of contextualising the story of Verve within the broader development of jazz, from its birthplace in the bordellos of New Orleans’s Storyville to its place on the world stage. The assemblage of glorious archive photographs, tour posters, album sleeves and ephemera is eye-poppingly beautiful, incidentally reminding you of two cardinal rules about jazz musicians in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties. Everybody looked ineffably cool, and everybody smoked. The plume of smoke curling up into the spotlight, as a symbol of the transporting evanescence of the music, is the great motif of the golden age of jazz. Verve: the Sound of America, by Richard Havers, 399pp, (Thames & Hudson, RRP £45), is available to order from Telegraph Books for £35 plus £1.35 p&p. Call 0844 871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10433312/Verve-the-Sound-of-America-by-Richard-Havers-review.html

Hasn't tomcal's return been a real boost to this forum? I am so glad that he is back to posting here.

I would rather you had won it.