lookin

I recall a classmate who said sitting down to pee got his dick all wet. He was very popular.

Honestly! Every time I start enjoying one of my little vices, somebody comes along and makes it legal. They did it with corn-holing, they did it with smut, and now they're doing it with weed. Having to sneak around a little has always been part of the thrill. Next they'll be telling us that indecent exposure isn't really so bad after all. Flash Travel™ - ride with us and leave your trench coat at home!

Compared with BoyToy, getting into NSA was a piece of cake!

I believe they refer to English muffins as 'footmen'.

According to this article, there are three primary reasons why it doesn't launch here in September as it does in the U. K. 1. It would be up against the major networks' Fall schedules and might get lost in the noise. 2. The cast would have a harder time with promotional appearances in two countries at once. (This is the only one of the reasons I guessed.) 3. The U. S. version is slightly different from the U. K. version and it would be more expensive to have two editing rooms going at once. Despite all that, the producers apparently would prefer a Fall launch in the U. S. but PBS and Masterpiece Theater execs call the shots. While they don't yet see any compelling reason to change, they are thinking about it.

I think you folks might be referring to mimeograph machines. They used a stencil to let ink through to the paper. A ditto machine transferred wax onto a master which was then pressed against a blank page onto which some of the wax was transferred. I think I remember seeing some of these and that the paper itself was sort of shiny. I'm not proud of this, but I actually looked up these early machines when this thread was first posted. It was a slow night. Also gave time to reflect on the effort necessary to reach other folks in those days. You really had to think about exactly what you wanted to say, and then hope your typing skills were up to getting it right the first time. On the other hand, it was a bunch easier than in the really old days.

Same here, and I've tried the cookie clearing routine. What's weird is that, even though some pages show me logged in, the main Forums page doesn't. Unless I really am. This seems to be one of those devilish login problems that often besets the site and I'm sure OZ will eventually move it to the front burner.

Thanks! Inspired me to find a favorite New Yorker cartoon.

Really! How about a few auditions?

Didn't mean to imply that all criminals are mentally ill. I was referring to those on death row. Although they've cleared the bar of legal insanity, I think there's got to be something unhealthy in the brains of these folks. If so, killing them for something they were possibly born with doesn't seem right, and I'll offer it up as one more argument against the death penalty. And thanks for starting this thread. Keeping the issue in play is very valuable.

As a learned man once observed: Quite the antithesis ! If you follow the link in my post above, you'll find it was MsGuy himself who self-deprecatingly observed, 'Being ill informed never stopped any of us from staking out a position before. Sure as hell never stopped me! Personally, I consider him one of the most informed posters on this, or any, message board I've been privileged to infest. When he opines, I pay close attention.

Glad to see the trend away from support for the death penalty. I've been against capital punishment since the first time I really thought about it. Even earlier, if you count those Sunday School lessons about 'Thou Shalt Not Kill'. I take it to heart - not just for others, but for myself. Whether the other person is a child in Afghanistan or an inmate on death row, I am not going to kill him, and I'm not going to ask my government to do it either. It doesn't have anything to do with who the other person is. It has to do with who I am. That gut reaction aside, further thought over the years has led to a bunch of other reasons why I believe capital punishment is wrong. Not least is a belief that most of those who land on death row are mentally ill. You don't have to be a shrink to suspect that Manson and Ramirez aren't playing with a full deck. . . . MsGuy has rubbed shoulders with others who should not be on the loose and I'll wager that they were likewise patently nuts. I suspect the mental illness that lands these folks on death row has to do with empathy, specifically a lack thereof. I believe some folks were just born without the cerebral wiring to ever feel concern for another living creature. They didn't ask to be born that way and we, as a society, were not able to identify them and prevent them from harming others. One might argue that they should have been locked away before they harmed others, rather than after, as it was only a matter of time before they caused misery and death. This is a tougher question than I can answer, but I am sure that killing a mental defective is not the way we want to go as a society. That said, until we can rewire the brains of these folks, it would be hard to justify ever letting them run loose among the general populace. Other folks had their ability to empathize damaged by drugs or by those around them - parents, maybe, fellow gang members, or perhaps a platoon leader who told them it was OK to kill any Afghani who looked at them funny. I believe we promote a significant amount of mental illness in the military and it can manifest itself later in civilian life with deadly results. If an ex-soldier with severe PTSD ends up on death row, shouldn't those who helped inculcate it share much of the responsibility? I believe that many of those who developed normal empathic responses as children, but were damaged later, do have the ability to be made whole and returned to society. Believe me, I don't have the answers to even these few questions and I know I don't have all the questions either. It does amaze me though that, with the billions of dollars we spend on death penalty cases each year, we spend so little time and money understanding the mental health part of the problem and which people we can help and how best to do it. It's pretty clear, though, that what we're doing now is more likely to exacerbate the problem than it is to solve it. PS: Many thanks to MsGuy who reminds us that we don't have to be well informed in order to stake out a position.

#1: Desperately wanting to believe, young Stanley starts wondering if this really is Dr. Livingstone. #2: Madeline entertains her first paying client. As he starts to tell her a little about himself, She's glad she asked for the money up front.

(I'll see if I can sneak this one in while Lucky's in Thailand.)

I'm with Charlie and EXPAT. A roller bag that fits in the overhead compartment will get me anywhere I need to go for as long as I like. It helps that I avoid cold places, as shorts, sandals and polo shirts take up very little room. And I like that my stuff stays with me at all times. A journey starts with just one step. It's nicer when I do not schlep.

It's not easy trusting the government when it's in the process of becoming more opaque. Fundamental decisions are being made behind closed doors. Could anyone have believed a dozen years ago that we'd have a federal court that did not publish its decisions and was not subject to oversight? Even Congress wasn't - and isn't - told the full truth. If the government thinks it needs secrecy in certain areas, it should lead the public debate about which areas and how much freedom citizens are willing to give up in return. Getting ratted out by a contractor is not a trust-building maneuver. In my opinion, it's not about trusting what goes on behind closed doors; it's about making sure the doors are rarely closed and don't stay shut for long. Once they're shut, how is anyone to know what's going on behind them? What if a war on terror becomes a war on gay porn? I don't especially need James Clapper checking into my browser history. While I don't expect that to happen any time soon, I also don't expect the government to rein in its new-found technical capabilities on its own. I think, without public input, expansion of targets is inevitable. Where has restraint been shown so far? I've linked to this article before about changes we asked the Germans to make after 9/11. It's a decade old, but still provides food for thought about how trust is built when a government is transparent to its citizens, and citizens are opaque to the government. I think we are moving in the opposite direction.

- Coming soon to a city near you!! AUNTIE MAME MEETS THE COLLIER BROTHERS When I say I want to get away from it all, Darling, I don't mean everything. - Directed and Redirected by OZ - A Major Production ®

Interesting point and one I hadn't thought of. It must have been hard for him, and not surprising if he felt his countrymen ought to have let one slide. Maybe the constable later wished he'd known about Turing's contributions to the nation and would have let him skate. From what I've read about Turing, he was richly blessed in the parts of his brain that could blaze mathematical trails that few others could follow, but not very advanced in the parts responsible for sensing trouble and staying out of it. He was certainly naive, as you say. For whatever reason, Turing admitted breaking the law to a sworn officer and stepped into a shit pile that most of his gay countrymen had figured out how to avoid. Reminds me of some friends of mine who had an intruder climb through their window while they were away and steal a couple of nice plants from their grow room. They thought it was their teenage neighbor and called the local Sheriff to check the windowsill for fingerprints. The snag was this was thirty years ago, long before Prop 215, and the Sheriff laid a passel of charges on my friends that required a high-priced lawyer to get pared down to something manageable. To this day, none of us knows what they were thinking, other than that they weren't doing anything terribly wrong as they saw it, and the law was the problem and not them. They were right, of course, but the law was still the law and sometimes the constabulary takes a rather dim view of those who break it. My friends could probably have stayed out of trouble by sucking up their property loss and so could Turing. Whether it was a sense of entitlement or plain old naivete, they got a little too close to the bear. What happened to Turing afterwards was awful. Though I wasn't an adult, I was fooling around with other guys in the U. S. just a few years after Turing did in England. Some of my older friends had gone through hell a decade earlier for getting caught having gay sex. Even as a fairly naive teenager, I knew the importance of carrying on below the radar. Still, I've done more than my share of stupid things, and know how lucky I've been. Wish Turing had also caught a break.

I tried finding a source for that and I can't. When Turing was arrested in 1952, almost no one would have known what he did during the war or would have given him an award for it. The codes he cracked were still in use by several countries long after the war was over and the British didn't want anyone to know they had broken them. Churchill knew of course and told the folks at Bletchley that they had shortened the war by two years, but they must never talk about it. It wasn't until 1970 that anyone who worked there said anything, and then it was one of the American code breakers who had been on assignment at Bletchley during the war. It took another decade or two for the story to get into the public domain. I think it would make a terrific movie. Not the fictionalized Enigma which didn't even mention Turing, but the real story. If the German U-boats had been able to operate without detection, the British would have had a much closer call than they did. After he found the British starting to show up wherever his subs were, Großadmiral Dönitz started to believe his unbreakable code had been broken, but the generals in Berlin assured him it was impossible. If I understand correctly, one of the keys to breaking the Enigma code was the realization that, because of the way the machine was designed, no plaintext letter could ever be encoded as itself. "Aha!", said Turing, and some other very smart folks, "let's see what we can do with that." A replica of the Turing Bombe - the originals were destroyed after the war

OK boys, bend your knees and touch your toes, and I'll show you where the red nose goes!

Thought-provoking indeed, MsGuy. But I have to remember that the folks who are dealing with these issues are already a couple of generations ahead of me. And who knows what's in the crib?

Mon Dieu! I must have left it in San Francisco!

Looks like a pillow muncher to me.

Reminds me of this old joke.

A guy gets his very first new Mercedes and decides he'd like to have a rabbi say a blessing. So he asks an Orthodox rabbi to say a bracha over it. 'Nothing doing.', says the rebbe. 'We don't trouble Adonai about a car!' Next he calls a Conservative rabbi who asks if he belongs to the congregation. When the guy tells him he doesn't, the rabbi says, 'Sorry, we can't do a bracha for a non-member.' Finally he asks a Reform rabbi, who is much more accommodating. 'Sure, why not?', says the rabbi. 'Um, tell me though, what's a bracha?'