mike carey

The concert hall at Sydney Opera House has just finished a two-year refurbishment. To mark the occasion, and to celebrate its 90th anniversary, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra performed a gala concert. Last night the concert was broadcast on ABC TV (it's also the ABC's 90th). The concert opened with the premier of Of the Earth by indigenous composer (and didgeridoo player) William Barton. The balance of the concert consisted of an epic performance of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, Symphony No 2. The reviews have been very good.

He can call himself whatever he likes. We see pics of the man and can draw our own conclusions. I'd still line up if he said he was pink with polka dots. I wouldn't put much store on blonde/blond in the v7.0 version, that's a pick list not a spelling test.

There was but it has been disabled except for RM sending e-mails to us, and for any convos that were open when they restricted it. I can't speak to whether both had to be on line for chat to work in earlier iterations of the software.

My experience (and it's with rent.men not v7.0) is that it's set to your local time. That is clouded because (IIRC) it says n minutes/hours ago to start with. The time stamp in messenger is different to the one that shows the 'last on' time for escorts, which uses UTC. In V7.0 if you sort your buddy list by 'last time online' (not previously an option, as far as I could tell the default list from last you followed to first was all that was available) those who have chosen to display 'private' rather than the actual time will be listed at the place in the chronological order where they belong so you have some idea when they were last on line.

The AEC (the electoral commission) had one of the sharpest social media teams I have seen and kept many of us amused by its combination of pertinent and impertinent tweets during the course of the campaign and while the votes were being tallied. It appears they are still at it. Someone tweeted a photo and caption: Don’t remember exactly when/how I got this ruler, but it seems appropriate for reading election results. Who knows how they got it but it is a ruler supplied to election staff, clear so they can read text through it when they are using printed electoral roles, and purple because that is the colour the AEC uses in its signage. The AEC quote tweeted it with: Democracy means we all have a say in choosing our rulers. Because of course they would.

Hahahaha! I did not say which side of the discussion I was sitting. Let's just say you might, just might not have made an entirely accurate assumption!

What?? Praise the lord! Someone uses 'rein' when they mean 'restrain'. Everyone else seems to use 'reign'. Not everyone (and there may be transatlantic anglophone differences in perspective) has the same view on the vulgarity or otherwise of the sensibilities of the nouveaux riches.

Sorry, I wasn't implying that you were. The law often hasn't kept up. In Australia with a single federal family law system it has adapted reasonably well (by no means completely), but other jurisdictions vary. I was making the point that whatever it is, the law will have its say in the outcome. (As an aside, whatever is in a pre-nup, the child has rights that the courts will enforce [whether one likes how the court sees them is another question], and a pre-nup is generally about the rights of the two people in the couple.) Everything you say about the potential pitfalls resonates. I threw that extra line in to try to forestall any drift in a judgmental direction.

ATM it's a +62 number, which is Indonesia.

Hmmm ... Noted.

I meant to say don't wish their marriage away in a hypothetical like this.

I suspect normal custody rules would apply, but perhaps the decision process in the courts would vary. If the state recognises parental rights of a same-sex parents who had a donor biological father of a child, the couple's respective cases would be considered. If it were a more conservative state the biological father, especially in a case like this, would likely have standing. Messy and unfair though it may be.

With HIV/AIDS a lot of people protected themselves by abstinence AND safer sex but the pandemic didn't slow all that much until there were effective treatments. There was still a public health issue and is to this day. At a POPULATION level (which is where public health measures are aimed) monkey pox vaccination works by reducing the pool of people who are susceptible to the virus (or with Covid by reducing case severity in individuals) so it doesn't matter if every MSM is vaccinated, the pool is still reduced. So your assertion that vaccination is ineffective does not stand up. But it's not everything. My whole point is that abstinence is not THE answer. That doesn't mean it's not a valid INDIVIDUAL precaution.

It's pretty clear. Abstinence is not the answer to the overall public health threat. It is an answer to protecting yourself from contracting the disease through intimate contact, but that is not the same thing. Public health threats are mitigated by population level precautions not just individual precautions, although they are part of it. So individual abstinence plays a part but other measures, individual and collective are also necessary. Relying on every single MSM to abstain to stop the disease is fanciful.

I had to google what the cherry season is in the US. Turns out they are still in season, but this was a bad year for them, frosts in CA, too wet, too cold in OR. So in large part it could well be just that there aren't many of them available. (I seem to remember they were $10/kg here last summer (i.e. in January).)

I had an interesting experience checking on flights from Sydney to NY for later in the year (still scoping not ready to book). Still expensive in J some good prices in premium economy. I went to the Singapore Airlines site to recheck the J fares I'd seen on Amex. Yup, about the same although easier to quickly pick outbound and return flights from several available on a given day (c $AU10K). I then checked the PY fares, and surprise as well as that fare (similar to Amex) there were R/T J fares for about $6k. Seems not all fares get onto an aggregator site, they don't always even appear on the airline's site if you don't choose the correct search options. (SQ flights are almost invariably cheaper than Qantas even though they are via Singapore and QF are non-stop to the US (not to NYC), and are generally cheaper than US carriers.) Moral is check multiple sources if you're booking yourself. You would hope that a travel agent would find all the options but if you have time probably do some research there to! Another thought, about which airlines to look at, for which I have no proof but suspect is true, using AU-US travel as an example. AU and US carriers on the route are there to get people between those two countries and price fares accordingly. Asian carriers have the same reasons for flying from their home bases to AU and to the US. Flying people between AU and US via Asia is a bonus, so if they have surplus seats on either of the sectors, they would be prepared to sell connecting tickets at a discount to the prices they are selling the two sectors separately. Long story short, even on Amex I consistently see fares far lower than QF on SQ, Cathay, JAL and sometimes on Korean and Asiana (rarely on ANA). Not so much on the Middle East three, but their business models are geared to flying from everywhere to everywhere else and not flying to the UAE or Qatar as destinations. This applies more to premium cabins, the potential savings in economy far less. And to be fair, two long haul flights in Y would be quite a chore compared to one long haul followed by a shorter domestic flight (even if that involved connecting at LAX). I'm more than happy to contemplate doing the two long flights if it's SQ, CX or JL biz. I know not everyone would be. (I would guess that transatlantic competition is such that this is less of an issue there.)

The sense of dislocation with the other half of the world is profound for me, but I guess that feeling is the norm when we are at the heights of our respective summers and the depths of our winters. Australia corresponds with more southerly regions in the US and further south (and more to North Africa than any of Europe) so cold for us is mild for y'all. So, as I sit here at 3am (important cricket to watch from Durham) it's -2, and yesterday was a toasty 12 degrees (being inland and at moderate altitude does that). It will be summer soon enough, but I sympathise with those in an unaccustomed furnace today!

I looked at the search function (on the desk-top version) and it's still there. It's near the bottom of the page, after you've clicked the 'show more filters' button to reveal the full list of options.

When you start with it you know no better. The one thing where it was easy was buying fruit, which at the time you bought by the piece rather than by weight. If apples were 2d each, they were 2/- (two shillings) for a dozen. I guess that worked for bread rolls (or baked goods in general) as well. Of course back then 2d or after 14/2/66 2c was a useful amount of money (something else I remember!). Now the lowest value coin we have is 5c and 10c in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand respectively.

My current main bank account (HSBC) allows me to hold money in AUD and a number of other currencies in the one account (conversion close to interbank rate). I can use the debit card to withdraw cash or pay for things straight from those funds if I'm in the relevant country (or on-line). If you have something like that you could take a bet and convert some money into Euros now. If the Euro goes back up, good, if it keeps falling, bad luck! The only catch, apart from that, is no credit card rewards points.

Had to laugh at the incomprehension at a reference to the Kaiser. Young people these days. I remember when LSD wasn't a drug reference but that's meaningful in AU, NZ and UK not the US. (And by LSD I meant £.s.d)

I must find my copy and read it now I know it's a western! Yes, I do know what it is really about. An excellent Twitter thread, including tweeps earnestly saying 'This is not what it's about' and the OP making equally earnest dead-pan replies: https://twitter.com/dagger0621/status/1548007891373678593?s=20&t=e8TOa58E0l7pkpUnbu7L4Q

I could not possibly comment on which of these two important issues I was referring to!

One rather significant event seems to be missing from the headline historical events list.

It was, after Albania's departure from the pact in 1968. They broke with China when China abandoned Marxism-Leninism and was no longer communist. That says more about Albania at that time than it does about China! We should perhaps leave it at that and not continue this strand of conversation!