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Saw this on the back of the Monty Python video, and laughed through the whole thing. Remembering just how funny and how brilliant he was.

I just want to give you guys a head's up about the scene in Havana. I got there on February 13. I had dinner with a young Cuban guy I met on Bearwww.com. He wasn't a rent boy. He turned out to be more feminine in person. He was very pretty, but not my type. Also it was difficult getting to know him because he had no English and I have very little knowledge of Spanish. I felt sorry about letting him down as he was very sweet, but I felt no chemistry there. Saturday night I went to Humboldt 52 with the owner of Casa Arian. It was fantastic. Great entertainment and cheap booze. There were plenty of boys/men to be had. Some were obviously gay, others were young macho guys. The majority were available for sex. I was forewarned to tuck my money away and to bring only enough for the evening. There I met the most gorgeous young twink ever. Sorry I have no contact information; he lives with his family. The prices range to 25CUC ($1.00CUC=$1.00USD) to 45CUC. I also gave him toothbrushes, hair products, and small bottles of cologne. Bring some extra toiletries along because they are hard to get in Cuba and very appreciated. The boys are very nice and not at all dangerous, but are not averse to lifting a few items when you're back is turned, so put all your valuables in the safe. Another caveat, do not buy food on the street. I bought a fruit juice from a street vendor and had 24-hour bug. So bring Immodium and any other over the counter meds you need. I drank the tap water and had no ill affects. However, there are no convenience stores there, so you have to buy bottles of water in restaurants. I ate several times at the Hotel Park Centrale which is very modern and has reasonable prices. The owner of Casa Arian also suggested some good Cuban restaurants. I met some guys from Amsterdam and after recuperating from my stomach ailment I went with one to Cabaret Las Vegas. There were about 50-75 rentboys there. The majority were black or mulatto and between 20-30 years old. I didn't see any twinks that night. The Dutchman and I proceeded to get inebriated and we left the bar with two guys. My guy was a black dude around 23 with a big pinga. Most of the boys are "activo" only. My last night I went back to Humboldt and once again the show was fabulous. One of the dancers was extremely handsome. I was mesmerized. As I had an early flight back to Toronto I left early with a tall handsome mulatto guy in tow. When I got to the airport I was still tipsy, but got a few winks in the waiting area. Some overall comments. It was my first time in a third world country and it took a bit to get used to the sadly run down buildings. However, I didn't see any panhandlers and the people were healthy and well-dressed. There were many many handsome Cuba men on the streets and sidewalks. Make sure to bring a Spanish phrase book because almost no one speaks English or any other European language. Beware to taxi drivers overcharging you. Negotiate your price before getting in the taxi because they are unregulated. I liked using the bicycle taxis for short rides. My ankle was still healing after a break in December. For souvenir shopping go to old Havana. I was told that the Malecon was dead because of the cold winds there at night so I didn't bother going there. The weather in February in Havana is not very hot and some nights I wore a jacket when I went out. The hottest day I was there it was about 29 Celsius and almost no humidity. Many of the Cuban guys want you to fall in love with them. I believe it's because they are desperate to get to a first world country. But there are some sincerely nice guys who are very romantic. I'm definitely going back, but I'm going to learn more Spanish before I do so. Being able to communicate with the locals really adds to the enjoyment of the holiday. I think the next time I go it will in March because the cool sea winds precluded going to the beach. My rating is 3 1/2 stars out of 5!

20 Facts About Monty Python and the Holy Grail That Might Make You Say, “Ni!” March 9, 2015 Sitting at or near the top of many “best” lists (including an Amazon UK/IMDB poll rating it Britain’s Best Comedy) is Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the bare bones little film that could. The oft quoted, silly and irreverent Pythons (John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam) share their take on King Arthur and the movie features each of the players in several roles. For my money, there are few funny movie scenes that hold as well as that of the Black Knight, it never fails to crack me up. And if any of you whippersnappers out there have yet to see this, then you must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest…WITH A HERRING. Black Knight Reliable Bridge Security T Shirt $24.99 Only $19.99 with Coupon Code: KNIGHT ________________________________________ 1. The opening credits are so plain because the sequence was done at the end of filming and there was no budget left. The “Swedish” subtitles were written by Michael Palin; he used it as an opportunity to entertain the “captive” audience. When the film opened at Cannes, the subtitles got huge laughs and right at the end of the credits, the film stopped and a bunch of firemen ran in to usher out the audience. Because of the perfect concurrence of events, filmgoers thought it was all part of the show, but they had been evacuated for a real bomb scare. After the theater was deemed clear, the audience went back in and resumed watching. According to John Cleese, “The Llama is funny, like moose and Nixon, and fish of any kind.” 2. The Monty Python group was formed (according to Gilliam) while he was working for David Frost. He met John Cleese (who was doing “The Frost Report” along with Chapman) and everyone was working in television–Mike Palin, Terry Jones and Eric Idle on “Do Not Adjust Your Set.” Gilliam was a cartoonist; John Cleese introduced him to the “Do Not Adjust Your Set” producer, who liked Gilliam’s work. Gilliam began doing caricatures of the weekly guests and did his first animation there. Cleese had a standing show invitation for the BBC, so the group did a show together. After their fourth outing, the BBC said they didn’t understand the show and were ready to pull them off air, but the public loved them and thus, Python was born. Other group names considered were: A Horse, a Spoon and a Basin, Owl Stretching Time, The Toad Elevating Moment, Bun Whacket Buzzard Stubble and Boot and Gwen Dibley’s Flying Circus (Gwen Dibley was the lady who played piano at Palin’s mother’s afternoon town guild meetings and Palin thought she’d be quite surprised to have a group named after her.) For a while they had a working title of Circus, then Cleese suggested “python” as something nasty and sneaky and Idle came up with a sneaky agent called Monty. Terry Jones remembered a “Do Not Adjust Your Set” animation called “Elephants” that inspired him to think of continuous sketches that flowed like animation and that idea became the format for their show. 3. Self-described by co-director Terry Gilliam (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Twelve Monkeys, The Fisher King, Brazil, Time Bandits) as “ambitious little shits who wanted to direct at all costs,” he and Terry Jones (Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, The Life of Brian, The Meaning of Life) decided to do a film and that anyone named Terry would get to direct it. 4. In the original script, half the film was set in the middle ages and the other half in the 20th century. The story flipped about between them; at end of the first draft, the Holy Grail was discovered at Harrods department store, at the Holy Grail counter…because Harrods has everything. At the time, Terry Jones was working on his (Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary) book and thought it would be nice to keep it in middle ages, so they figured why not do the King Arthur story? 5. The opening shot was actually completed at the end of filming, near Terry Gilliam’s house. They had a big problem with locations, which had been set up in Scotland ahead of time. A week before filming was to begin, they got word the Environmental Department had forbidden them to shoot at any castles. In a last minute panic they found the privately owned Doune Castle in Glencoe. So all location shots (of different castles) are Doune. 6. Gilliam said the only time he ever saw Michael Palin get really annoyed is when he had to spend all day crawling in the Plague Village mud. The mud was foul and “full of pig shit; people had to get tetanus shots.” Palin said he spoke to a prop man about how he’d know which mud to eat–the man said he’d put down chocolate–to Palin it all looked the same. After about 14 takes, Palin lost it and beat the ground, which according to Cleese was “hysterical.” After all that, most of Palin’s crawling and mud eating was cut. 7. When Patsy (GIlliam) and Arthur (Graham Chapman) are crossing the meadow, the castle in the background (and later, Camelot) is a plywood cutout. Shooting had to be stopped many times as the wind kept blowing it over. 8. The actual period of the film is the 1350s. Gilliam said they blackened and yellowed all the actors’ teeth “because people always think medieval means bad teeth, but it probably wasn’t that way.” Referencing the Mary Rose (a ship sunk in 1545 and salvaged in 1982), the director related that the mariners all had perfect teeth because they had no sugar in their diet. 9. The Black Knight scene was inspired by a story John Cleese heard at college: two Roman wrestlers were engaged in a long match and they became so entangled that one of them suffered a broken limb. He couldn’t take the pain any longer and submitted, so various attendants came over, untangled them and tapped the winner on the shoulder, saying “You won,” at which time they discovered he was dead. Cleese and Chapman did their own stunts, including the sword fighting, which was described as very difficult because of the tiny eye slits in the helmets. At the time of shooting, they had run out of budget and the producer was running the camera and lighting; they had about three other people and it took a week to shoot the scene. 10. Gilliam said that because the film came out during the time of the Vietnam War, all the liberals who came to the see it were very anti-violence and couldn’t handle it–people didn’t laugh until the Black Knight’s very last limb was cut off. He said they (Jones and Gilliam) enjoyed the audience coming to terms with the scene, realizing it wasn’t about violence, but rather attitude. No matter how much of the guy is removed, he’s still a belligerent, mad character who won’t give up. Part of the scene is done with Cleese holding his arms behind his back, part by a one-legged silversmith, named Richard Burton (which delighted Cleese because he could say “Richard Burton was my stunt double”) and part with a wired puppet. 11. John Cleese’s first wife and “Fawlty Towers” co-writer and star, Connie Booth played the witch. During the scene, Eric Idle came so close to laughing that he bit his blade (on film). 12. The book scene was done to save money; Gilliam’s wife turned the pages (shot in his living room) and Michael Palin’s son Tom is the little baby. 13. Animated God was a picture of one of Britain’s most famous cricketers, W.G. Grace. 14. Gilliam spoke of people trying to write papers about the left-brain/right-brain theory of Python, noting that the group is split down the middle. John, Eric and Graham were Cambridge educated, Mike and Terry Jones went to Oxford and Terry Gilliam was the token American. In addition to the different universities, were differing heights. The Cambridge group was the “Tall Group” and the “Normal Sized People” were Mike, Terry and Gilliam. According to Gilliam, Cambridge seems to produce the kind of person whose best defense is strong offense (more logical, precise, etc.) and their verbal skills are more obvious. Mike, Terry and Gilliam were more conceptual. Whenever Python had a disagreement, there was usually a split down the middle of these groups. 15. The film played steadily at a cinema in France until The Life of Brian came out (1974-1979). 16. The catapulted cow was a toy from a railway set. It was the directors’ first model shot; Gilliam said, “We dug the camera into the ground, threw the cow in Julian Doyle’s (Production Manager) back garden, put it all together and we had entered the world of Special Effects. Explaining the tactic, the director said flinging animals in battle was not unheard of. During the Battle of Corsica, there was a town under siege for years. Gilliam related a story: the woman in charge of the town was trying to convince the besiegers that they were fine and had enough food, so she took the town’s last remaining pigs, stuffed them with bits of grain and other things and fired them out. It worked and the besiegers went home. The Python group was also obsessed with animals at the time, thus the Trojan Rabbit. 17. The directors were surprised at the success of the film. When it opened at Cinema One in New York, before dawn, there was a queue around the block. They didn’t know how people had heard about it and they snuck into shows with audiences. Gilliam remembered two people coming to him from out of the crowd, it was John Belushi and Gilda Radner, both of whom were just starting out–trying to break into showbiz. 18. The movie was made at a time in England when the rich were paying “crazy” taxes, 80 to 90 percent. All the music stars had made lots of money and were looking for ways of creating tax losses to salvage their earnings, so Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Elton John and Chrysalis Records funded the film. The Python group didn’t have a lot of money to make it (most of the money went to costuming), thus the mimed horse riding with coconut banging (copied from BBC radio horse-clopping) sound effects. It is the film from which they made the most money because it cost the least to make and the group owns most of it. There is no ad-libbing; everything was scripted and rehearsed, which helped to keep down the cost. 19. Shooting inside Doune Castle led to Terry Jones writing Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary when it was learned the castle’s interior was sectioned in two (by walls). One section was for the lord and one for the soldiers, each defensible from the other because the soldiers were mercenaries and couldn’t be trusted. The lord had to defend himself against his own defenders. Jones set on path of reexamining Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale and the symbol of knights being chivalrous; “It may have been a totally ironic piece written about a mercenary.” 20. Gilliam said, “The most damage we did was to the killer rabbit.” The lady who owned the bunny didn’t want it to get dirty or messed up, so they tried to keep her distracted. The dye they used didn’t immediately come out and the lady was crazed. He wondered why they didn’t just go out and buy a bunny instead of using a “trained” rabbit. The director felt that animal wranglers are the maddest people you’ll find on film, saying “The animals not really trained, they’re just doing what animals do–most of training is in trainers’ minds.” http://se7ens.info/20-facts-about-monty-python-and-the-holy-grail/

Steve Wall 3y My parents first consummated their love affair with convertibles when they purchased a brand new 1964 Mercury Comet Caliente. They absolutly loved it and had a ball for many years tooling around town and across the country. Sometime later, the best man from their wedding and his wife bought the ’64 Ford T-Bird pictured above.They each enjoyed their vehicles, but my parents drove the wheels off theirs on many memorable trips and were finally forced to sell when the car was shelled. Their friends were transferred out of state in 1984, and decided to store their T-bird with only 60,000 miles on the odometer. And there it sat for 26 years. Last year a series of events finally combined to allow the car to once again see the light of day. The man who owned the car passed away and his wife was more than tired of paying the monthly storage fees. At the same time our family made rare return to our home town for the funeral of a great aunt. We were asked to stop by the storage facility while we were in town and see what was there and determine the condition of the T-Bird. At the storage facility we presented our letter of authorization for entry, and headed back to open the unit. The entire staff of the facility followed us, curious as to what was in the double storage container that had been unopened for 26 years, and paid for by a never-seen, out-of-state tenant. We pushed and pushed the rusty, creaky sliding door until it finally went up, and were quickly drenched in falling grime and dust. It took about 20 minutes of moving around old antiques and climbing over miscellaneous bags of stuff, but there she was. Flat tires, no brakes, old rotten gas in the tank and dust everywhere – but what a beauty! To make a long story short I ended up spending a week cleaning out the facility - part of a generous offer to purchase the ‘Bird. It took many months to get it purring like the original, but the interior was perfect and the progress of the rebuilding, detailing and replacing had me oooing and ahhhing like a kid. Now nobody loves a convertible as much as my folks – so the next step was to get it hauled down to Arizona where they reside. And after making connections with a transport truck the 'Bird is now a happy resident of Sun City Grand where the new owners know how to appreciate and treat a ’64 convertible! https://ec.yimg.com/ec?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffarm8.staticflickr.com%2F7199%2F6784679422_4252fdc1a1_z.jpg&t=1426804947&sig=UBdT9R0tc.FDQ3cQtXEnCQ--~B Click on the link to see the bird as she was discovered As a side note, I was watching Chip Foose on his auto show restore a 64 once as a surprise to a couple. She was a hard top, and Foose cut the top off making it a permanent convertible. I never watched that show again. --

INSIDE ARTHUR C. CLARKES MYSTERIOUS WORLD http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/14/inside-arthur-c-clarke-s-mysterious-world.html

What a heart warming article. Thanks for posting it. Best regards, RA1

Thanks axiom! Organized tours are difficult to negotiate free time. :/. I use Cuba junky website to book casa particulars. These are people renting our rooms for a fee of $30usd/cuc. Some advertise as gay as well, Also, planet romeo is used in Cuba as the main source of contact. Or it was a few years ago. Guys can be found at humbolt 52, on the malecon near humbolt, and in the park in old town Havana near the hotels. Also, micayito beach is full of available men. I've heard very mixed stories regarding yunior as a tour guide. I suggest going to humbolt 52 and making contacts there for tours and whatnot. As an American, I flew to Mexico city and bought a cash ticket with interjet and flew to Cuba that way. Take lots of euros or Canadian dollars if you are from the states. I feel that getting in trouble with U.S. authorities is very minimal these days. I asked for no stamps on my passport when I arrived in Havana and they obliged. Axiom, Cuba really is an island full of amazing men isn't it? Gorgeous faces and bodies everywhere. Such a warm friendly place. It's in my heart for sure. Thank you for your great post.

A lawyer opened the door of his BMW, when suddenly a car came along and hit the door, ripping it off completely. When the police arrived at the scene, the lawyer was complaining bitterly about the damage to his precious BMW. "Officer, look what they've done to my Beemer!" he whined. "You lawyers are so materialistic, you make me sick!" retorted the officer, "You're so worried about your stupid BMW, that you didn't even notice that your left arm was ripped off!" "Oh my god", replied the lawyer, finally noticing the bloody left shoulder where his arm once was, "Where's my Rolex!"

One of my all time favorites..."It's just a flesh wound" And to think that Radner and Belushi saw it when they were just starting out. Time does fly.