Lucky

Jeremy Lin had 28 points and a career-high 14 assists as the Knicks registered their most significant win of the season, against the defending N.B.A. champions.

"I won't be attending, so you guys have fun?" Hmmm, how could it possible be fun without you there? Well, we will try our best. Oz, glad to hear that you like Palm Springs more the more that you visit. I have been up the tram and did think it is an interesting experience. A friend had a summer pass and went frequently, but avoided the weekend crowds. You can do that when you live here!

What irked me was the us of the word "yet." Are we tired of Linsanity yet? That implies that we will necessarily tire of it. It may flame out, he may flame out, but that is as of yet unknown. I still admire A-Rod long after his command of the media waned. I can agree with a different question, and that is media over drive. Are we tired of 24 hour cable repeating news over and over? They tend to grab onto one thing and not let go. So, to the extent that the media is over-hyping Lin, sure, we can tire of that. But not the individual.

And they got it, rightfully so. The headline editor was fired and the anchor suspended for 30 days. And to answer your rather rude question, absolutely not! Why do you think we would be tired of an amazing athlete who is stirring up the sports world and making Asian-Americans across the country proud? Is it his Harvard education we should be tired of hearing about? Is it that he is in the news, or is it that he is Asian and in the news that should have us tired? He's accomplished a lot for a young man, and rather than begrudge him his current popularity, I am joining in and celebrating his success. And I am not even a basket ball fan.

I think you are well-covered with Purple Dragon taking care of you.

Changes all that mother nature gave them in some cases. The pic is enticing, the reality not at all.

God forbid I should miss the party!

Good to see you signed in zipperzone. I hope this means that you are well and also, hopefully ready to return to the land of peace and friendship, MER!

Nice pic above of Ethan G. Click on it and see what he really looks like. Life is like that.

Pauleiro, your visit may be over by now. I have not heard anyone come back from Istanbul with a bad story. People seem to really like it there, so let us know what you thought.

This is especially interesting in light of the difficulty in getting a parking space in LA. First you have ll of the phony handicapped stickers, then these phony valet spots. I wouldn't want to end up in a fight over it though. The valets will be around your car all night, you won't! Thanks for bringing this up, JKane.

You want cute Russian boys? Go to Pattaya, Thailand. There are many Russians there, and some of the boys are superbly beautiful. Horrible dressers, though, but the idea would be to get them naked, wouldn't it? That said, I would love to see St. Petersburg, but I feel badly for gays who have to live in an oppressive society.

The Cuban missile crisis was apparently leading to the prospect of the world's first nuclear war. Then someone had the bright idea to focus on a letter that was sent back channel, and ignore the less conciliatory remarks being made for public consumption. My recent disagreement with Oz is, of course, nowhere of that magnitude. It is a spat over a thread, not missiles in Cuba. Many have written to me and suggested that I, too, focus on the positive. Remarks like these: From Totally Oz: "Let me be clear, TY had nothing to do with Lucky's post being merged. I take full responsibility for that. In hindsight, it may have been better to tell him not to do it when I saw it the first time. But, I didn't. That was my mistake which won't happen again with anyone." From Tampa Yankee: This whole episode has been very unfortunate. Lessons attempted to be taught, feelings hurt, charges hurled, out of what appears to be an unfortunate misstep by someone attempting to help Oz keep up with his sites. Lucky was due the courtesy of discussing his post before any action was taken. That did not happen. The reason is clear and Oz stated that action won't be repeated. I hope Lucky decides to return. I hope he understands that this was not a personal slight or attack but an unintended consequence of site oversight procedure aggravated by miscommunication. And maybe I should have taken to heart this earlier comment by Oz: Lucky, it is so good to see you are still with us and have not totally left us. We value you very much and want you to know you are always welcome here and are appreciated here. Your opinions are also very valuable to us and we appreciate the input. Thank you for trying to shape this forum into a more perfect form! Yes, I understand that more heated comments were made by me and others. But, if I can ignore the comments made by the others that I didn't like, and they return the same courtesy to me, we can move from a state of irritation to a state of friendliness, and friendliness is next to godliness. (Now don't tell me I have that quote wrong!) So, choosing to be next to godliness, and choosing not to keep MER in a state of discomfort, I accept the warm remarks quoted above, and declare my willingness to ignore all else said in what was essentially a spat about a thread, a thread that received a very high number of views at that! So, thanks to all who communicated with me, and now, I invite everyone to sit down for a special bowl of herbal peace soup:

I am loathe to reveal private emails, but Oz is not being honest here. At first Oz told me that he had nothing to do with my thread being censored: From OZ: You were not picked out of the crowd or given more leeway than anyone else. I have someone I have known for years that has been helping monitor the posting as we have had several problem posters who returned to cause havoc. I told him when he sees a pattern same as the above to merge the posts. He did that. I did not think anything about it until I got your email. I did not see your merged post till after it was done. There was no way for me to undo it. It is not in the board software capabilities. If I had seen all of it first, I would have made a snide comment on the thread that it was ridiculous. It was. But, I guess you don't understand when someone disagrees with you. If I had been the first one to see it, I would have commented on the tread. From Lucky: And, on the board, he said that he HAD to censor my post to "protect MER"S right." When, and how, did I become a threat to those "rights?" Note that he has said that he hadn't even seen my threads. And then came the phony rule, which he has yet to show us or tell us where it is: "We have done the same thing for years. Nothing is ambiguous or inconsistently applied. If you make 30 posts in the same thread in less than an hour, I'll combine those as well." When Charlie asked to see the rule, he said: "Really? Then, you haven't really kept up with this site." Not very nice, huh, since NONE of us had seen the rule. And now he said that it was a mistake for him not to tell me that he didn't like my multiple posts. Explain then, how you can set up a contest with a high number of posts being set to win, and then not expect people to make multiple posts. How is my teaching someone how to do so without monopolizing the forums a violation of any rule. Now you say that you like teaching, but somehow, not by me. You like it when EXPAT makes multiple posts, monopolizes the board to win the contest, and you ignore folks like AlanAlt who complained about it Oz, I like you, but you have handled this whole contest badly, just as you did at GayThailand when your contest became quite controversial, with people complaining about rule changes midstream, and arbitrary reduction of post counts. So, since you are unable to come clean on this, I now make my departure permanent. Well, I did promise someone I would post something for him in the pornification thread! So, once again, thanks for the opportunity to post here. It has been fun until now. But I have been made into a rule-breaking villain who threatens the rights of the site. Even if I do win the raffle, keep the change!

Thanks, guys, for saying that you want me to come back. I didn't see EXPAT, FourAces, Tampa Yankee, RA1 or eeyore joining in, but then you can't have everybody. Oz says he has nothing to apologize for. Had he not censored my thread, that might be true. Had he not carried on further, that might be true. Had he told the truth, that might be true. But presently, there is a contest underway at MER. One way to win is to post over 2190 times during the contest period. On February 9th and 10th, I created threads which, along with being entertaining and drawing one of the higher viewing counts this Forum has seen in a long while, pointed out the difficulty of reaching that posting goal. I would have to post a long thread like that EVERY day until the end of the contest.. Since I am, in fact, the leading poster on the site who is not an administrator, if it is difficult for me to reach, it is certainly out of reach for most other posters. Yet my thread was doctored to reduce my post count. On one hand, management is telling us to increase posting, on the other it is criticizing and violating the integrity of a poster who tries to win the contest, at least in theory. Not only was my thread doctored, but management started its own thread, explaining that it had to “Reserve Male Escort Review Rights.” Now I haven’t just posted too much, I am a threat to the website’s rights! And, as if that is not enough, a new rule was created after the fact, saying that posting over 30 times in an hour is a rule violation. I say after the fact because management cannot, or won’t, cite this rule anywhere in the site’’s rules. I sure had never heard of it. The first of my two long threads received no warning that I was a rule breaker, or on the threshold of it. A simple email, private message, or phone call- a warning of any kind-would have been enough to get me to stop posting another long thread. I didn’t get any of those. What kind of a contest is it that makes the site’s leading nonadmin poster a threat to the site’s rights? What kind of contest is it that allows one poster to dominate the forums, pushing other voices aside, however legitimate his posting is? This poster is commended by management, I am censored and labeled a rule breaker. I have enjoyed posting on the Male Escort Review and am truly grateful for the opportunity that Totally Oz has allowed me. I have tried to resolve this problem in private emails, but did not succeed. In my opinion, the contest has distorted the site’s values. If this post had a title, it would be “Protecting Male Escort Reviews Values”. I appreciate the calls to come back, but I think that cannot happen until the contest is over.

Since my thread for February 10th has been doctored to combine a number of posts into one, this is the last post that this site will see from Lucky. It's been a hoot, thanks to all, and good bye.

...but not from fine China and crystal goblets.

I am reading Edmund White's latest novel, Jack Holmes and His Friend. Before the friend gets greatly involved, Jack dates Peter, a ballet dancer. When Peter returns from 2 weeks of touring, he gets a massage by Jack, who uses patchouli-scented oil. So he massages Peter, and then this passage struck my attention: Then Jack's big, octave-and-a-half hands fanned out over Peter's high buttocks and molded them into Silly Putty shapes. But from time to time Jack was forced to stop and sit back and look at what God and the individual will and institutional discipline had wrought. He remembered that a philosophy professor in Ann Arbor had said that vision was the most spiritual sense and smelling the most animal; Jack went back and forth from gazing at Peter's ass with angelic indifference to spreading his cheeks and grazing his hole with his thumb and bringing it up to his nose with canine rapture. He thought that this blend of patchouli and boy mud was the most intoxicating scent, the true smell of modernity. Jack knew nothing about hippies,incense or drugs, but he suspected that dozens of skinny, bearded guys on the Lower East Side were stretching out their male friends at this very moment, burning doss sticks and working their thumbs into unwashed curry-chutes. He could picture the imprint of an oily body on the bedticking thrown unto the floor...the smell of the sixties: ass and incense. Jack told himself that he wasn't really gay.

Gosh! Hitoall, I posted some 40 or more pix and you only like Lookin's dog. geesh.

This Week: Two years ago: World reacts:

If his face looks like this, what does his anus look like?

Yesterday's thread had 38 more views. Has the novelty worn off so soon?

Okay, I have 52 posts in this one thread. Wasn't it nice of me not to make 52 posts as separate threads? But if I did that, maybe I would have received more views. So, it's tempting. What do my two readers think?

After all that, I still need 1644 more posts to get to 2190. I don't think I have the interest to do that, Trevor notwithstanding! That's 27.350 posts a day! For 80 days!

800 people joined in for a naked pillow fight. There are nine pictures of the event, so enjoy them all! Naked in the Feathers