AdamSmith

Agree. But thought #10 was almost funny.

You have to apply at the Vatican to be an altar boy?

You'd just have to find a bootlegger of bathtub gin. As was done last time around.

LOL. Meaning: Over the past ten years, there have been many nights when I met a new person for the first time, and then rimmed him that same night. I did not mean an orgy of rimmimg many different people on the same night. Although a nice idea.

Years ago the local paper ran an editorial cartoon showing some poor rat with its snout tied around the spout of this huge tank of something or other, the rat swollen to the size of a watermelon (and hilariously bug-eyed), with a lab-coated scientist commanding, "More! More!" The article cited in the OP equivocates all over the place about whether the harm -- actually the likelihood of harm -- from moderate drinking is worth worrying about. As JKane notes is typical of such pieces.

Reminding of a squib I saw long ago (published as one of the little "humor" bits that ran, irrelevantly, at the end of Reader's Digest articles). To the effect of some LA-area college geology dept. discovering three such right under their own campus, and deciding to christen them Your Fault, My Fault, and The Dean's Fault. (not)

Could be. If so, then love has been present between me and quite a number of people I just met that night.

All this seems dead on. I've been a few times on business (never pleasure), and while they treat you with the forms of respect and hospitality, the substance of same is rare. In fact one trip when I was the only gaijin at a conference (which my own company organized, even), I finally had some hint of how a black man must feel in much of white American mainstream society. I did feel I became genuine friends with two business associates there, but both were as they say "wild ducks" who visibly didn't fit in and were subtly ostracized. I noticed both spent as much time outside Japan as possible.

HAH! I would say you more often get what you deserve. One way or the other.

Start of an article series on Guardian's choice of best Who episodes... http://m.guardiannews.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2013/feb/14/doctor-who-classic-episode-an-unearthly-child

Sorry to depart from the OP's focus for a moment, but just to note that the historical "fall of Rome" (not the OP event! ) has recently been pretty well concluded to been due to things like stretching itself too thinly to do much once the Germanic peoples who had been after all somewhat incorporated by Roman conquest, rebelled once the empire could no longer defend. Etc.This is one of the good newer histories along those lines: http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/fallofrome/gr/RomeBarbarians.htm Gibbon's old notions of moral decay and so on don't seem to have the credence that his fellow Victorians once gave them.

I am trying to find language in which to agree with you while saying I love every one of his words. You knew Burroughs, Ginsberg and Arthur Clarke were good friends at the Chelsea while ACC was writing 2001.

One's ex being from Lafayette, LA -- yeah.

One of the better commentaries on Stanislaw Lem's "GOLEM XIV" that I have ever seen: http://www.bohemiandrive.com/excritement/1/

That is fucking hilarious. Thank you!You know, it probably really could succeed on TV. We would just have to find the right balance of tone on the hazardous no-man's-land somewhere between "Bewitched" and "Lizard Lick." RA1 is of course also correct.

RA1, please dinna worry. Hitoall and I know each other way too well and can thus go way too far.All our stuff toward each other is from love, whatever it may look like. Why we play it out here in public is another question.

But wouldn't that also include the historical Jesus (not the constructed Christ)?

Well, one of them isn't.

And to boot, holding in his dead hands not Thomas a Kempis as reported by the Vatican, but instead Vatican Bank statements. He was not only going to challenge doctrine on abortion, priestly celibacy and so on, but also blow the lid on the church bank dirty business. THAT was the bridge too far.

P.S. Death in Venice was of course Visconti. Same criticisms apply.

Good enough.

Why give up half of all the opportunity? Yesterday morning I woke up to find this short fat but beautiful girl in bed with me, and all over me. Evidently not a hooker, even. Life is brief!

So you don't like slit and now this objection. Wherefore then your "Bi" moniker? (Not "Monica." )

Have you never even seen the thing? Go rent it! A fairly bad schmaltzing-up of the Bard's already fairly schmaltzy thing, but gorgeous to look at and listen to. Zeffirelli was superficial but with a sense of surface, light, sound to die for. I suppose you have not seen "Death in Venice" either. If not, go rent that one too. Post-haste!

This gives cause to think: Whatever one thought of John Paul II, and whatever one thinks of the Church, and churches in general, the dignity of his sitting in the Chair until the bitter end was a lesson in conviction.