BSR

Maybe he's just a Saint-Exupéry fan.

From the Philippines, we first moved to Brandon, Manitoba. While my poor mother was absolutely traumatized by the cold, my brother & I had the time of our lives playing in the snow. There are tons of pictures of us in our little snowsuits, as if a Canadian prairie winter were heaven on earth. Alas, 16 years in Las Vegas has turned me into a hothouse flower.

Also Madrid? That looks like the Estanque Grande.

"Zombie kiss" is another sexy short, but sad, not cute/funny like the previous one. Still worth watching, though. Again, English subtitles are available in settings.

By "sexy," I don't mean porn (sorry if that disappoints, LOL). You can turn on English subtitles in the settings. The Spanish subtitles are fixed, probably because the two characters speak a couple of sentences in Catalan (I don't understand why). I've had a crush on the shirtless guy for years. It's a pleasant way to kill 6 minutes. By the way, "alirón" is just an interjection in Spanish, kind of like "yay" or "hurray."

Here's a story about a guy who took the stock: artist David Choe accepted Facebook stock instead of a fee of $60K for painting the offices of the then unknown startup. That stock is now worth $200 million.

@marylander1940 does that whenever he can't come up with an argument.

In the clip below, Antonio Banderas opens the 2021 Goyas, Spain's version of the Oscars. A few women at my old job were simply nutty over Banderas, and I never understood why. I never thought he was good-looking or sexy. That said, I gotta say he looks awfully good here, especially for a 59-year-old man. He might have had some work done, but he doesn't have that stretched-too-tight plastic surgery look or that escaped-from-Madame-Tussaud botox look. He just looks like a guy who's taken good care of himself and as a result has aged very well.

Hmm, I don't know if "surprised" is quite the right word. I think of my cousin who married an Army man. She knew what to expect as a military wife, but actually living through it -- the long deployments abroad, long stretches her husband was completely out of contact, his mood/personality changes after the deaths of friends -- was on a whole other level. I think Diana, as young & naive as she was, did have some idea of what royal life would be like, but living it was a completely different dimension.

¡Equilicuá! I knew "kinky" wasn't quite right, but I couldn't come up with the right word. "Piggy" is a better translation. I'm such a disaster at translation because even though I understand perfectly what the person is saying, I can't come up with how best to say it in English. And by the time I figure it out 5 minutes later, the guy has spat out five more paragraphs. That's why my jaw drops when I hear simultaneous translators in action. I remember hearing the two feeds of a Spanish speaker and the UN translator and marveling at how the translation was bullseye perfect, every word, every nuance. OK, I know they go to school for 6 years for oral translation, but still ... if I studied for decades, I could never master it. To me, it'd be like studying to walk on water. After 6 years of study, practice & training, I'd still sink like a rock.

On a bit of a tangent, early on in Rafa Nadal's career, I would sometimes listen to his English and be like, "huh wha??" I started translating his English word for word back into Spanish, and only then I could figure out what he was trying to say. That's kind of how I felt after reading this guy's ad. Certainly if you switch up the translations a bit -- instead of "educated but very morbid," try "well-mannered but very kinky" -- the ad makes more sense. I think it's his way of saying he's a gentleman on the streets but a wh**e in the sheets.

Morbo/morboso literally translate to morbidness/morbid but colloquially people use them to mean kink/kinky. Also, many native Spanish speakers translate "educado" to educated when a better translation would be well-mannered or polite (note: "educado" can also mean educated, but I don't think that's what this guy was trying to say).

While tennis players usually don't wear a watch during matches, Rafa Nadal wears Richard Mille timepieces, which run $725K-775K. The crazy thing is that he has lost one (did he have insurance?), one got stolen (later recovered), and almost lost a third (found by another player in the locker room. I guess if you're not paying for a watch that costs 3/4 of a $million, you don't have to be that careful with it.

Hmm, interesting, at the next conservative or Republican gathering I attend, I'll keep an eye out for the particularly handsome "assistant" in a bigwig's entourage.

Just google "foods poisonous to dogs" to get a surprisingly long list. The ones I was unaware of were macadamia nuts & caffeine. Not that I ever planned on having morning coffee with my dog, but at least I knew that if I ever spilled some, I had to wipe it up immediately & make sure the dog didn't get near it.

Hmm, he certainly has some interesting pronunciations. He pronounces the hard G, instead of Birming-ham (which is how we Yanks say it), he says Birming-Gam. And he pronounces "book" to rhyme with Luke. Those pronounciations are certainly different from what I'm used to, but I don't really struggle to understand him.

Thanks. Wow, the man was hella handsome. I just read Nader's Wiki entry. It sounds like he had a helluva life and despite the Hollywood closet, a happy one. Good for him.

Does anyone know who this is sitting next to Rock Hudson? He's quite the looker.

Forget any fictional series, just read the newspaper. Through the door, I would ask the man what he wanted and see if there were some way I could help him, but I wouldn't let him in. Maybe his phone died & he just needs to make a call, or maybe he's planning to kill whoever answers the door. The dog? Let him in, feed him, play for a good long stretch, set up a makeshift bed for him, then take him to the shelter in the morning.

I remember our first TV "remote" attached by a wire. You could turn the TV on/off & switch channels (all four of them, pre-cable). But because the wire was kinda short, you had to sit on the floor in front of the TV to use the remote. Still, we thought it was super-cool, LOL.

I remember ordering from mail order catalogs. I'd be so happy when LL Bean sent their really thick catalog with almost everything they sold. I also loved getting the International Male catalog, even though I never ordered anything from them. I know, I'm not really going back that many years, but ordering from catalogs, as opposed to online like we all do now, feels like it was ages ago.

Dang, naked swimming, makes me regret being born a few years too late. But maybe it's a blessing in disguise. Had I been surrounded by my entire high school gym class starkers, my head would have exploded. Or something would have exploded.

I just remembered another one: going to a TV store. Yeah, believe it or not, such a thing used to exist. Before Best Buy, Wal-Mart, etc., you used to go to a TV store, little boutique shops, to buy a TV. Then the big box stores negotiated such deep discounts from the manufacturers that they could sell retail for less than the wholesale price that mom & pop TV stores paid. Needless to say, that was the death of the mom & pops.

From imdb: Nicholas has long known he is different, that there is something shameful & unacceptable in him that must stay hidden, denied even. But South Africa's minority government is embroiled in conflict at the Angolan border, and all white young men over 16 must serve 2 years of compulsory military service to defend the apartheid regime and its culture of toxic racist machismo. The "black danger" is the real and present threat; what is wrong with Nicholas and others like him can be rooted out, treated and cured like cancer. But just when fear pushes Nicholas to accept unspeakable horrors in the hopes of staying invisible, a tender relationship with another recruit becomes as dangerous for them both as any enemy fire. By the way, "moffie" is a derogatory Afrikaans word for a gay man.

Yeah, the smallest euro bill is 5€, US$6.07 at today's exchange rate. If you get a bit inebriated & start lavishing the tips, yikes, it could make for a pricey evening without even getting a lap dance.