AdamSmith

Ah, naive boy.

Surely your powers of persuasion by now are sufficient to manage the thoughts of the average 20 year old. If not, you are not throwing enough money on him at the front end.

When I find them, you'll be the first to know. You just blew another of my illusions. I was hoping they were all waiting for me in Phuket.

Ah. You have to take out life insurance on them. Immediately you meet, to allow for a plausibly deniable time interval. In any event... He: Do you smoke after sex? She: Don't know, I never looked.

Re-reading his life insurance policy.

Welcome back. You said the same thing after the previous time you left this scene for a while. So when are you going to find a bf who shares your interests in hiring guys, fondling female boobies, posting here, and doing other non-vanilla stuff?

Well, dunno about that. "Unrestrained ambition" fits Richard Nixon if it fits anyone in the last century. But would you really call him spoiled?

Rich, yes. Spoiled? Word does not really do justice to the almost (!) fatal levels of ambition that papa Joe instilled in his boys.

It was not a choice between, But of... W. Stevens

One is gratified to note the news reports that the film has put Mastering the Art... atop the best-seller lists, while doing next to nothing for Julie's blog-derived book. ...Following the judgment of Julia herself -- not at all a sour or possessive soul, I can report firsthand -- who dismissed Julie's project (to plow through the recipes in 365 days for her blog) as trivializing the subject.

So Michael Jackson is to be interred at Forest Lawn. Embedded in this news is a nice summary of how Forest Lawn came to reshape the American cemetery tradition: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32648572/ns/en...usic/?gt1=43001 ... not to overlook Evelyn Waugh's cutting view of same: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loved_One

Count me among the lab rats.

LOL. Progress Does Not Always Come Easy by Jimmy Carter As a legislator in my state I drew up my first law to say that citizens could never vote again after they had passed away. My fellow members faced the troubling issue bravely, locked in hard debate on whether, after someone's death had come, three years should be adequate to let the family, recollecting him, determine how a loved one may have cast a vote if he had only lived to see the later voting day. My own neighbors warned me I had gone too far in changing what we'd always done. I lost the next campaign, and failed to carry a single precinct with a cemetery. From Always a Reckoning, Jimmy Carter http://www.amazon.com/Always-Reckoning-Oth...r/dp/0812924347

Lessons for Obama from the master... Commentary: What LBJ would do By Tom Johnson Special to CNN Editor's note: President Lyndon B. Johnson secured passage of Medicare, the Voting Rights Act and other milestone legislation. Tom Johnson, who served as one of LBJ's White House press secretaries, is former chief executive of CNN News Group and former publisher of the Los Angeles Times. LBJ would: Have a list of every member of Congress on his desk. He would be on the telephone with members (and their key staffers) constantly: "Your president really needs your vote on this bill." He would have a list of every special request every member wanted -- from White House tours to appointments to federal jobs and commissions. He would make a phone call or have a personal visit with every member -- individually or in a group. Charts, graphs, coffee. They would get the "Johnson Treatment" as nobody else could give it. He would have a willingness to horse-trade with every member. He would keep a list of people who support each member financially. A call to each to tell them to get the vote of that representative. He would have Billy Graham calling Baptists, Cardinal Cushing calling Catholics, Dr. Martin Luther King calling blacks, Henry Gonzales calling Hispanics, Henry Ford and David Rockefeller calling Republicans. He would get Jack Valenti to call the Pope if it would help. He would have speeches written for members for the Congressional Record and hometown newspapers. He would use up White House liquor having nightcaps with the leaders and key members of BOTH parties. Each of them would take home cufflinks, watches, signed photos, and perhaps even a pledge to come raise money for their next election. He would be sending gifts to children and grandchildren of members. He would walk around the South Lawn with reporters telling them why this was important to their own families. He would send every aide in the White House to see every member of the House and Senate. He would send me to see Sen. Richard Russell and Rep. Carl Vinson because I am a Georgian. He would call media executives Kay Graham, Frank Stanton, Robert Kintner, and the heads of every network. He would go to pray at six different churches. He would do newspaper, radio and TV interviews -- especially with Merriman Smith, Hugh Sidey, Sid Davis, Forrest Boyd, Ray Scherer, Helen Thomas, Marianne Means, Walter Cronkite, Phil Potter, Bob Novak. He would threaten, cajole, flirt, flatter, hug -- and get the health care bill passed. http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/24/joh...care/index.html

I do owe you. Soon as I sell my business (or hear that my great-uncle willed me his tobacco farm which I will sell to a real estate developer), I will bring you my donation in person. See you in the Land of Smiles.

Stop! Too perfect. In fact this is mentioned briefly in the Wikipedia article referenced. Having sampled opium myself, I can easily believe that its influence gave rise to 'Kubla Khan' in STC's dreaming mind, then as readily hastened its leaking out of memory faster than he could write it down. That said, I recommend it. Opium, that is. Laudanum, not so much. http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/26751

The Person from Porlock at least ought to be disnenfranchised. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_from_Porlock

Yes! Now I remember. The cans came from the next-door neighbor, who drank pineapple juice. And dipped snuff. But who saw no need of those cans herself -- she just stepped to the door and spit into the yard. I can still see those brown streaks radiating in all directions from her back stoop. One never used the good anything, unless the preacher came to dinner. But as the preacher didn't dip or chew, that consigned those spittoons to eternal disuse. I think in the early 1970s, one of them suffered the ignominy of becoming a flowerpot for a bunch of dried eucalyptus. Courtesy of my aunt (granny's daughter), then much under the baleful influence of Better Homes & Gardens. Now I'm the one aching with laughter. Disgusting!

I say that more and more. Those get more and more frequent too. Merely a cheap irrelevant way, the locution borrowed from Prime Minister's question time, of introducing the old thread. This was the penultimate turn that the referenced 2007 thread itself took, after the Stevens petered out. Before ending up considering poor Fr Urbain Grandier. I must remember whatever I was on that summer, and get more of it.

Hate to speak ill of the dead but Novak was the prince of darkness if ever there was. I fully concur with this critic in the Baltimore Sun who lets fly with all guns: http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainm..._cnn_fired.html

I could struggle along with just the other 7. Agree completely. People can have Future Shock. For my money, the best futurological tome of them all (first read it age 14; fatally contaminated ever since): http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/profiles.htm

Swear to God. Dole pineapple juice. Odd, come to think of it, in that I never saw her serve pineapple juice. Yet there those cans always were. Despite there being two perfectly good spittoons in the house. Maybe they were for company. Yes, a layer of Kleenex was stuffed into the bottom, then successive layers were applied to cover up the mounting drool. Until the thing was, I suppose, emptied. Mercifully I never witnessed that operation. The anesthetic properties of tobacco I never experienced, except by inhalation in the dozen years I was a smoker. Gitanes and Rothmans. P.S. Re: knocking over the spit-can (as they called it), what was that movie where two old biddies are shopping for coffins, and one of them overturns her miniature in-purse spittoon onto the white pillow in one of the show models?

I refer the right honorable gentlemen to the remarks I made some moments ago: http://www.maleescortreview.com/forum/inde...?showtopic=1672

The article doesn't quite say he was "helped" by drinking. Rather, that he had a "regular dependence on drink to fight his demons." A bit different.

J.D. Salinger may have sucked all the oxygen out of the room, as far as misfit authors go. But not to forget the other one... Author William Golding tried to rape teenager, private papers show Lord of the Flies author's memoir describes how attempted attack happened while he was on holiday during studies at Oxford university The novelist William Golding and his wife, Ann, in their Wiltshire garden in 1983. Photograph: J Eggert/Bettmann/Corbis The Nobel laureate Sir William Golding, whose novel Lord of the Flies turned notions of childhood innocence on their head, admitted in private papers that he had tried to rape a 15-year-old girl during his teenage years, it emerged today. Golding's papers also described how he had experimented, while a teacher at a public school, with setting boys against one another in the manner of Lord of the Flies, which tells the story of young air crash survivors on a desert island during a nuclear war. The revelations will appear in a forthcoming biography of the writer, who died in 1993 at the age of 81. John Carey, the emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford university, was given access to a personal journal kept by Golding – who carefully guarded personal information during his life – for 20 years. The book also draws on an unpublished memoir written by Golding for his wife, Ann, who died in 1995 and is buried beside him at Salisbury, Wiltshire. The couple were married for 54 years, and Golding felt the honesty of his account would explain what he described as the "monstrous" side of his character. The memoir, entitled Men and Women Now, makes no attempt to hide the author's regular dependence on drink to fight his demons. He was also explicit about problems with his parents, and suggested that the girl he tried to rape had later plotted to get his father, a grammar school teacher in Marlborough, to watch them having sex in a field through binoculars. Carey outlined his findings in the Sunday Times, for which he is the chief reviewer, in advance of extracts from the biography which will be published next week. The attempted rape involved a Marlborough girl, named Dora, who had taken piano lessons with Golding. It happened when he was 18 and on holiday during his first year at Oxford. Carey quotes the memoir as partially excusing the attempted rape on the grounds that Dora was "depraved by nature" and, at 14, was "already sexy as an ape". It reveals that Golding told his wife he had been sure the girl "wanted heavy sex". She fought him off and ran away as he stood there shouting: "I'm not going to hurt you," the memoir said. Two years later, the pair met again and had sex in a field, with Golding again introducing crudity by quoting the girl's foreplay remark: "Should I have all that rammed up my guts?" The author was convinced her approach to his father was a deliberate attempt to discredit him and his older brother who, coincidentally, was having sex with his girlfriend in the same field. The literary archives opened to Carey also include a second autobiographical work and three unpublished novels. Golding's written estate has already been productive: his last novel, the Double Tongue, was published in 1995, two years after his death. The author's psychological experiments with his classes at Bishop Wordsworth's school, in Salisbury, caused his eyes "to come out like organ stops", according to his private journal. He divided pupils into gangs, with one attacking a prehistoric camp and the other defending it. In the process, Simon, Ralph, Piggy and the other characters in Lord of the Flies may have been born. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/1...-attempted-rape