AdamSmith

Your male is in the Czech.

Think I am with hitoall on this. I too no longer book for just an hour. But back when I did, had a couple of fortunate encounters where the hour turned out to start with intense conversation and discovery of simpatico sensibilities, and the BFE feel was there almost immediately. Uncommon, but wonderful when it presents. In both cases, we remain in touch today. One for 2.5 years now, the other for 6. And counting. Something real there, and it was evident right smack.

Maybe in the office of John Thain, when he was CEO of Merrill Lynch? Remember he spent $1,100 on a wastebasket, as part of a company-funded $1.22 million renovation of his office, a reception area and a couple of conference rooms. (Later paid it back out of his own pocket, when it came to light and caused a ruckus.) But at least his trash can was an antique, if memory serves.

OK, is this one of those silly... As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had seven sacks. Each sack had seven cats. Each cat had seven kits. Kits, cats, sacks, wives -- How many were going to St. Ives?

And the matching furniture was uncomfortable and the creek rose into the house every spring!

From The Guardian... Celebrity memorabilia: can you beat a doghouse from Frank Lloyd Wright? http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gnm/op/sMTBwVvM_vOb5iLRAfqL-dQ/view.m?id=15&gid=commentisfree/2012/mar/12/celebrity-memorabilia-frank-lloyd-wright&cat=usa

Exactly. If da Gama and Magellan had put their little jaunts on hold til all the problems at home were solved and paid for...

All too true. Even robotic probes, with their long history of doing great science for peanuts compared with costs of human spaceflight, are feeling the pinch. Recently saw a news item that one perfectly well functioning experiment platform (can't recall which one) will no longer be operated, simply for lack of funding to buy time on ground receiving stations. The idiocy. Even some of the most advanced and fruitful land-based astronomy is getting the ax: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/Closure-Looms-for-Kecks-Interferometer-139509093.html Few big things in life have disappointed me more than the species going to the moon, then retrenching to spend the next forty years fiddle-farting around in low earth orbit, wasting time and resources on the kluge called the Shuttle and the white elephant known as the Space Station. Now I will be extinct before we do anything notable in manned space exploration again. What does it mean when we lose the curiosity and drive to quest outward, mentally, spiritually and physically?

How could I have forgotten this site? Jonathan's own! http://www.jonathanfrid.com/

Thanks. Likely that's it. If I get motivated, maybe I will play with downloading it and monkeying around to shrink the file size.

JPEG stored on a public web site, a screen grab (I assume) of a scene from '2001.' As I said, you can see it on the 'full version' of this site when viewed on either PC or cell phone, just not on the 'mobile' version of the Forum, which is the (very convenient, easy-to-read-on-cellphone) default view for my iPhone. I ask because, again, many others' avatars do show up on the mobile version.

One structural problem for U.S. car biz is that Singaporean and Korean firms own most all the viable battery technology at present. For U.S. manufacturers, licensing it imposes extra cost layer on top of an already expensive product. Detroit is in a mad scramble to help U.S. universities and tech startups bring our lithium-ion and successor battery technologies up to scratch, but Motown's longtime blindness to much of anything but gas-guzzling trucks put it way behind Asia and Europe in this and so many other ways. I do think, with the winnowing of deadwood personnel during the industry rescue/downsizing, GM and Chrysler each have a decent chance now. Ford too, thanks to farsightedness of Bill Ford (notwithstanding his deficiencies as an operating executive) and the really extraordinary Alan Mulally.

Yes, there does look to be a Jade Ceiling, as it were, in American big business in general. Unless you were smart and lucky enough to be a founder. E.g., Yahoo's Jerry Yang. Though come to think, I can't come up with any others. The situation seems somewhat different in smaller companies, though, at least in newish tech companies I know of. Here, meritocracy of talent seems to count for more, and old-white-boy attitudes for less. Generational evolution. Thanks for that paper, Lucky. Skimmed the first 2 pages; now about to go through all of it. Looks fascinating.

One time I was stoned and ate the centers out of like half a bag of Double Stuffed ones. Shortly ( ) discovered that creamy center, in quantity, can act just like milk of magnesia!

Said she taught herself not to blink for her audition, if I remember right. Still beautiful and youthful looking today. P.S. By all means order the Blooper Reel CD. You know Dan Curtis was such a skinflint he would never shoot retakes -- just broadcast whatever they said wrong, sets falling apart, cameramen straying into the scene... Side-splitting!

If there is any $ available for it, you can buy a fair amount of stuff off http://www.darkshadowsfestival.com -- CDs of the music, memoirs by various cast members, maybe signed cast photos (not sure if those are still available), calendars I think, etc. You can't have my Angelique photo signed "To [my name] from Lara with love!"

In fairness to MS (and I am no particular fan), there have been a fair number of black and Hispanic VPs and just below over the years, going some ways back. Can't recall any women at that level, though.

Plus showing the world more or less how a forgery of Manning's signature should look. (irrelevant PS ... Angus Barn was the height of dining in Raleigh when it first opened decades ago. Today, although it still puts on airs, its only real value is as a guaranteed-not-to-be-too-bad place to stop on the way to the airport.)

You think it's something in the Apple culture, or just random? I don't know. Looking across Silicon Valley in general... ...Meg Whitman did well at eBay, tanked as a political contestant. Could not even buy the election! ...Carly Fiorina was a successful Lucent sales exec, then just about drove HP into the ditch. Forced error if ever there was one. ...Carol Bartz did brilliantly at Autodesk, then found herself at a total loss what on earth to do to revive Yahoo. Or even how to dismember it in any way that would maximize value. ...the no-third-chancers? (Not really any kind of answer to your question, I know; just musings.) I do know a fair number of women CEOs in tech who are half a generation younger than these three, and who are already successful serial entrepreneurs. It is a field where old-white-male vulture capitalists seem pretty gender-blind if they smell that you can make their money work for them.

Another nice Dark Shadows (old and new) info source: http://www.collinwood.net/

I think you have to win on your escort ad buys, not sidebar ads. (But on that note, rentboy really ought to give a special prize for "Banner Ad that Gives Our Shitty Under-Invested IT Infrastructure the Worst Coronary." Although in fairness, their site performance lately has not seemed as slow as often in past. Maybe they are on it.)

Any idea why my avatar doesn't display on the mobile version of the site? Most other posters' avatars show up when I view the forums on the mobile version of the site, but not mine. It does display if I toggle over to Full version of the site on my phone (iPhone). BTW, management's use of forum software that offers a mobile-display default is very nice. Quick to navigate, easy to read on a small screen. Maybe worth observing (no malice! Just fact) that the Other Forum does not, far as I can tell, have this option. Making it deucedly hard for these aging eyeballs to read on a phone.

Whuffo? The doodah around this contest can be fun, and the PR doubtless good for the nominees and winners. But the actual "voting" is pretty much done by the escorts themselves, consisting of their advertising volume with rentboy.com over the past year, plus their agreement in advance to participate in promotional events should they win (a precondition for being made a nominee). At least according to some who have been involved.

Acquaintance who is a network engineer with CenturyLink (formerly Embarq, formerly Sprint) did tell me this morning (personal convo, not business) that their system is sputtering a bit from the solar event. But that officially the carriers are not too keen to say much of anything that would acknowledge vulnerabilities in their networks, even to acts of nature.

Apocalypse begins. Well, not exactly, but I am having intermittent problems getting both cell and landlIne calls to go through. This should really excite the two nice Jehovah's Witness ladies who rang the doorbell the other day all eager to talk about Armageddon.