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I shared LurkerSpeaks penchant for Insomnia. So I was awake when I got a mysterious pm at 2 a.m. asking me if I knew of any family contacts for him. This was after telling him repeatedly to stop messing about with OCT meds and go to a clinic (and giving him the name of a recommended clinic) a few days ago. On Sunday he confirmed that he was at the clinic. And then no further communication from LurkerSpeaks. I asked a mutual friend to investigate and this morning I got confirmation of my fear. Much thanks to TotallyOz for doing this for our community. I have lost a dear personal friend as well a fellow Hoovillian. I have been trying to process this sad news all day The fact that he left this world on the eve of his birthday makes this all the more tragic. LurkerSpeaks died as I hope to die. On an adventure! May he now rest in peace.

This is terrible news. I only knew you through your posts but they did give me an sense that you were a good person. I hope you are not with 72 virgins, but with instead with 72 young but experienced hotties, as would be fitting for your status among us.

lurkerspeaks once put out a call in 2012 asking if any forum members wanted to join him on a trip to Rio....I bit and am so glad I did it .....we hung out for a week, doing all the things one does in Rio, and even got to hang out with tomcal.....both of them had been in Rio before and it made my trip, obviously, much easier...... he was one of the good guys......

RIP Lurkerspeaks. Your trip was to have concluded on your 57th birthday, and I know that you were looking forward to this for months. I am sorry to lose you and can only hope that you have found a Thai guy in the sky.

Larstrup, you are correct. I hadn't realized that by including that time marker that one could click on it to get to the Facebook page. So you have taught me something. Perhaps the moderator can delete that link. My apologies to all concerned.

I am very sad! Lurker was truly one of the nice guys! We met on the street in Montreal in 2010 and talked about Brazil and his next vacation he went there! I was with him on two of his trips there! He was a great guy! RIP my friend!

Nobody does it better...

http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/15/politics/trump-water-bottle/index.html I first saw it last night while watching Brian William's The 11th Hour, my new favorite news program. It was absolutely hilarious. You simply can't write this Karma. And now we have it on video for all to see over and over again. I'm not surprised it went viral, as it should. The asshole looks like the biggest confirmed asshole. I hope more is coming. Can't wait to see this asshole drown in his own shit.

Gotta love the roller skates.

Thank you...But for the record, I might on occasion violate the TOS of this forum.

Somebody had to pay someone for that decision. Kinda makes sense for Trump's first year. If that's how the People define sexy for a male, I'd rather be a lesbian.

Content may only originate from one or more of the following sources: Oh, and also, when Nature absolutely requires...

Exhibition Overview The first comprehensive survey of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings ever presented in America, this international loan exhibition brings together nearly 120 works of extraordinary beauty by one of the great masters of all time, surveying his staggering contribution as an artist, scientist, theorist, and teacher. Gathered from private and public collections in Europe and North America, the selection of drawings includes rarely exhibited works and illustrates a great variety of drawing types—from quickly sketched primi pensieri (first thoughts) to highly finished preparatory and presentation drawings—as well as landscape, botanical, anatomical, and military engineering drawings of monumental expression, reflecting virtually every aspect of the artist's artistic and intellectual achievement. Of special importance are the numerous studies for some of his most famous paintings—including the Virgin and Child with St. Anne, the Adoration of the Magi, The Last Supper, and the now-lost Battle of Anghiari—as well as the extraordinary loan of the Vatican Museum's St. Jerome Praying in the Wilderness, an unfinished painting that shows much of the artist's original underdrawing. Comprehensive in scope, the exhibition also features many of Leonardo's celebrated anatomical and plant studies and designs for machines. In addition, a selection of approximately twenty-five drawings by his teacher Andrea del Verrocchio and his circle, as well as by Leonardo's pupils and followers, provide a context for the great artist's legacy. The exhibition is made possible by Morgan Stanley. Additional support has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. An indemnity has been granted by the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. About the Exhibition Even in an age celebrated for its limitless scientific discovery, technological innovation, and sublime artistic achievement, the range of Leonardo's knowledge and accomplishments was recognized as extraodinary. As the Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote in his mid-sixteenth-century compendium of artists' lives: "Truly marvelous and celestial was Leonardo . . . so great was his genius, and such its growth, that to whatever difficulties he turned his mind, he solved them with ease." Leonardo's achievements are all the more extraordinary, given his fairly inauspicious beginnings. Born in the small Tuscan hilltown of Vinci, Leonardo was the illegitimate son of a notary and a local peasant girl. His early school education did not prepare him for his later career as author of treatises, and he seems to have attained only a cursory knowledge of Latin, the language of most scientific texts and the "lingua franca" among the Humanists who comprised the intellectual elite of his day. As Leonardo himself explained in the preface to his treatise On Painting, "Though I may not know . . . how to cite from authors, I will cite from something far more worthy, quoting experience, mistress of their masters." The full scope of his achievement—with its legendary emphasis on observation as the source of all knowledge—is best preserved in Leonardo's drawings and notes, for almost four thousand sheets survive. (Notwithstanding the iconic status of such works as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, the number of extant paintings by Leonardo is actually very small—at most fifteen, including both finished and unfinished works as well as autograph and collaborative works.) For Leonardo, the medium of drawing was of crucial significance—indeed, more so than for any other figure of his time, or since—as it offered him a highly ordered language for invention, exploration, evocation, and illustration in both an artistic and scientific sense. Installed chronologically, the exhibition enables visitors to trace Leonardo's artistic and intellectual development through each of the major phases of his career: his apprenticeship and early artistic maturity in Florence during the 1470s; the highly productive years at the Sforza court in Milan, from about 1481/3 to 1499, where he first emerged as a scientist and inventor; his return to Florence, about 1500 to 1506, where he was acclaimed and employed both as an artistic and engineering genius; the unsettled decade from about 1506 to 1516, when he moved between Florence, Milan, and Rome, seeking respite from political turmoil; and his final years in France, from 1516 until his death in 1519, where he lived as the honored guest of King François I. The chronological installation also enables visitors to appreciate Leonardo's astonishing ability to work on different—and often widely divergent—projects at almost the same moment. For example, on the reverse side of a compositional study for his famous fresco of the Last Supper, Leonardo has drawn a series of designs and mathematical calculations for a device for hoisting weights. Among the first highlights encountered in the exhibition is a comparative presentation of the large finished studies of young women's heads by Leonardo's teacher, the Florentine master Andrea del Verrocchio (ca. 1435–1488), whose style and techniques the young Leonardo closely imitated. These drawings—known since the sixteenth century as teste divine (divine heads) for their exquisite drawing technique and elegiac beauty of form—transcend their original function as exercises in draftsmanship. Drawings by the young Leonardo include several drapery studies, remarkable for their subtle explorations of light, shadow, and texture, and a group of charming silverpoint studies of cats, dogs, dogs' paws, and a bear. The exhibition brings together some twelve compositional and figure studies believed to be related to Leonardo's altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi (Uffizi, Florence), one of his first independent commissions, begun in 1481, and left unfinished when he departed for Milan, around 1482/83. Also from the artist's early maturity comes one of the exhibition's most important objects—the panel painting of St. Jerome Praying in the Wilderness (Vatican, Vatican City). Left unfinished, like the Uffizi Adoration, it provides visitors with an extraordinary glimpse into Leonardo's creative process, as he moved from underdrawing to the realization of forms in paint. (The painting also preserves, in the upper left, the imprint of the artist's fingers.) Works from the years Leonardo spent at the Sforza court in Milan (from ca. 1481/83 to 1499) include his design for a proposed colossal equestrian statue of the Duke Francesco Sforza. This wonderfully spirited study of a rearing horse (Royal Library, Windsor Castle) is exhibited together for the first time with Antonio del Pollaiuolo's working modello for the same project, probably prepared in competition. A luminous metalpoint drawing of the head of an elderly bearded man (Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna) has been identified as a study for figure of St. Peter in Leonardo's celebrated Last Supper, painted for Milan's Santa Maria delle Grazie. Leonardo's dramatic red chalk study of the head of a shouting soldier (Szépm¸vészeti Museum, Budapest), probably drawn from the life, is among the group of ten sheets related to his now-lost Battle of Anghiari, a monumental wall-painting commissioned in 1503 for the Great Council Hall of the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence. The original appearance of the mural—one of Leonardo's largest and most complex paintings—is best preserved in a large-scale drawing that was reworked by Peter Paul Rubens of the central section, on loan from the Louvre, showing a frenzied tangle of men and horses. Other drawings from Leonardo's second Florentine period include recently discovered sketches intended for an unexecuted sculpture of Hercules that may have been meant to compete with Michelangelo's David; studies for the lost Leda and the Swan; and a presentation drawing of Neptune with Seahorses (Royal Library, Windsor). The exhibition also brings together a group of drawings for the beloved painting Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Paris, Musée du Louvre), offering an opportunity to redefine the chronology and evolution of this complex late project. The magical study for the head of the Virgin also provides insight into the development of Leonardo's innovative graphic techniques—most particularly his use of sfumato, an art-historical term created to describe his seamless blending of tone in the manner of smoke. Also on view is a number of Leonardo's whimsical allegories, caricatures, and penetrating studies of grotesque physiognomies. Quite surprisingly, many of Leonardo's drawings for his nonartistic projects have often been viewed more as illustrations of intellectual content than as aesthetic objects in and of themselves. As the exhibition demonstrates, Leonardo brought the same clarity and elegance seen in his studies for paintings and sculpture to his scientific and technological drawings. In his Star-of-Bethlehem (Royal Library, Windsor Castle), one of Leonardo's most famous botanical illustrations, the ribbon-like leaves of the plant are rendered in flowing, rhythmic lines, beautifully evocative of vitality and growth. His pioneering anatomical researches are documented in a double-sided sheet of studies of the human skull (Royal Library, Windsor Castle), based on direct observation and rendered in exquisitely fine parallel hatchings, and a drawing, inscribed "Tree of Veins" (also from Windsor Castle), illustrating the main organs relating to the blood vessels. Although Leonardo abhorred war, he prided himself on his designs for weaponry ("I can make cannon, mortars, and light ordnance of very beautiful and useful shapes, quite different from those in common use," he once declared). The exhibition features a number of his ingenious drawings of various types of assault machines, crossbows, shields, and incendiary devices. The selection of folios from The Codex Leicester (Seattle, Washington, Private Collection), one of his latest extant notebooks, includes drawings, diagrams, sketches, and written observations (in the left-handed artist's distinctive mirror script) on subjects ranging from the reflective properties of celestial bodies, to the nature of gravity, to hydrodynamics. Leonardo's fascination with the properties and power of water is also revealed in the series of so-called Deluge drawings. Executed towards the end of his life, about 1515–17, these are terrifying apocalyptic visions in which giant waves furiously rebound over the diminutive forms of man and nature. Although classified as works of the poetic imagination, they are nevertheless realized with a keen understanding of the scientific principles governing the behavior of water. The exhibition concludes with a small selection of drawings by Leonardo's Milanese pupils—Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (his earliest pupil), Francesco Melzi (his companion and artistic heir), Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Agostino da Lodi, and others. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2003/leonardo-da-vinci

Art critical consensus is that this naively flat Greek Orthodox Christos-typos pastiche could not possibly have come from the hand of Leonardo. All of his known religious portraits have the human figure in twisted 3D, indeed '4D' (pictorially incorporating the time dimension of turning in space!) portrayal. And then the literal depiction of the hand holding, therefore underneath, the crystal globe is a scientific illiteracy that Leonardo would never have committed. He was the first modern European to derive the laws of optics of refractive materials, documented in detailed equations and hundreds of sketches in his Notebooks. He would never have painted that hand shown through the medium of the globe without noting in loving visual detail all of the distortions the crystal medium would have imposed. ...One of the most moving museum exhibits I've ever been privileged to view... Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2003/leonardo-da-vinci

So very sorry to hear of his passing. His posts were some of my favorites. When I travel outside the USA I make sure to have travel insurance. It usually covers much more than airline / hotel issues. The policies I get include emergency health care and bringing the remains back to the USA in the unfortunate event of my death.

Always brilliant!!! And just what the doctor ordered tonight...

Early days for this. He did have a friend who was very close to him who might be able to help. Unfortunately he did not seem to be close to his siblings so repatriation of remains might be difficult. This is an interesting subject for study and I am consulting with some travel industry friends to find out what happens in a case like this.

I did not know him but, from what all of you who knew him say about him, he much have been a great guy.

This is really sad news. My thoughts go out to all Lurker's family and friends. 57 is far too young to die. I hope that there are not difficulties in getting him or his ashes home. On my recent trip to Europe I had Travel Insurance (thankfully unused), but I have no idea if there were provisions for death abroad. We should all leave instructions on how to handle death abroad. I have no idea what I would if someone in my family died abroad or what my family would do if I passed. Thank you to those of you who knew him for telling us here as much as possible without infringing on his anonymity.

I didnt get to know him, but it sounds like a sad and tragic story. At least, he accomplished his dream even if he passed away in his dreamed trip. my thoughts are with his friends here. as a side note, I didn’t know Oz was in Thailand.

So it looks like Moore has been banned from his local mall for the past 25 years for pestering girls. Think about that - a high ranking law enforcement official where mall cops are like "this guy is a perve." What is the GOP thinking?

I get up in the morning and I worry about a lot of things. Pedophiles in Alabama, Collusion in the West Wing, Americans suffering in Puerto Rico, the White House turning into some autocratic banana republic, the debilitating pain in my shoulder that won't go away, property taxes that just went up again, the transmission in my car that's begun to shift too hard...and so it goes. Birds bringing me money would not be among my concerns. Feel free to forward any excess that you are uncomfortable keeping. Address available upon request.

I know, I know, I have worked and lived in 5 different countries and visited 44 countries in my life. I know how to use international phone numbers and how to use WhatsApp, but was failing because, as Wikipedia describes, Argentina is a special case and there are different numbers depending if you call from abroad, or text from abroad. I was trying to find them using the one for calls, but only some escorts use that on their WhatsApp, other use the number for texts to register their account. Anyway, I am done now, I have contacted everyone I wanted, and booked 3 people, with a possible 4th.

WHERE'S DETROIT ????

It is with deep regret that I tell you that Lurkerspeaks passed away yesterday. I don't have more information than that. I met up with him a few days back and he was not doing well. He was sick and went to a good hospital. I was supposed to meet him tonight. A few friends were worried they had not heard from him in a couple of days and I called the hotel. They said he passed away. RIP my friend