mike carey

Agree with other posters, I spent a very pleasant few hours wandering around the museum last time I was in Palm Springs.

A saucer of cream for the table in the corner.

My understanding is that the last case of smallpox in the wild was in 1977, and that the WHO determined that it had been eradicated by 1980. The virus still exists in labs. (Polio, on the other hand, exists only in a couple of places on the planet, but has been eliminated in the developed world.)

Moderator's Note Please stop personalising the discussion, and attack the issues not other posters. This is about what the current state of the Covid pandemic is, and that can include differing assessments of what the data mean. If you challenge what someone else has concluded, do that without challenging their professional competency or intellectual capacity to draw their conclusion.

No argument from me!

IIRC lead-up tournaments like Queen's have not been stripped. I smell a stunt in the decision to apply the rule selectively to Wimbledon and not others.

My only exposure has been to the US version and I enjoyed it. I agree that a new idea would be better. QAF was yet another example of the US entertainment industry's belief that foreign film and television doesn't work in the US. This may be true, but it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. So remaking someone else's narrative or an old one is what the US industry often does. There can still be good reasons for doing it. For example the political and cultural environment in which the gay community lives has changed, as have the prominence of 'other' strands of the LGBTIQ+ experience. If the propose of the remake is to include these things in the new version that's reasonable, if it's just to do it again it's not. What can loosely be called 'remakes' of Romeo and Juliet have been going for a little while now, usually under a different name and nobody complains about that. There has been a debate in these forums about a cinematic remake of one of them that has attracted more heat than its earlier version would have for appropriating the original story. Of course QAF is not a single story the way R&J is, so its new version relies on name recognition not a compelling story.

From Twitter: A week ago my MIL began reading "The Exorcist". She said it's the most evil book she had ever read, so evil in fact she couldn't finish it, took it to the beach & threw it from the rocks into the sea. I went & bought another copy, have soaked it & put it in her bedside drawer.

The lyin' Paraguayan? How could you forget?

We've now had the first cases in Australia, among people who have recently returned from the UK. I heard an infectious diseases academic on the radio this afternoon say that it's not as contagious as smallpox, and that transmission has historically been unusual but not unknown between humans, and more common as direct transmission from an infected animal. She said that smallpox vaccinations are protective, as previous posters have noted, and also that there are smallpox anti-virals that are protective. We never had community vaccination programs against it here so perhaps 10% of the population has been vaccinated, me amongst them for travel in the 1970s.

His last visit was on 21 Jul 2017. If you hold your cursor over his name (the blue link in your post) a small window opens with basic details about his profile, including that date.

I'm a little surprised (not in a bad way) that the story on it that you found was from the ABC here. And yes, it has featured on the news here all day, preceded by a spoiler alert for people who may want to watch it on the other public network. (From the short grabs of it, I quite like the Australian entry too.)

Goose, gander.

Seen in an Australia Post outlet.

Damn, I had to wipe the coffee off my computer screen. Again. https://twitter.com/JohnCleese/status/1524540861865897985?s=20&t=s_xns8lx5B60RpPfY1sB3g

They replace the display signs. That happened here when prices went above $1 a litre not that long ago. Or alternatively they decide to do away with the tenths of a cent. I mean, seriously? It's over $10 and you want to know that it's 5/10ths or 9/10ths? They only ever use that to make it look like it's one cent less than it is. 99.9 looks a whole lot less than 100.

It will be a JAL lounge at Haneda for the transit time, but at LAX which terminals do the flights depart from? If AA departs from 4 or 5 and JAL from Bradley, flying on JAL will give you access to the QF First lounge (assuming it's open) if you're OW Emerald (AA Exec Platinum or Platinum Pro). That's worth considering if you'll be there in enough time to take advantage of it.

Well, you're set up to be able to conduct your own experiment by flying AA for the first sector, although a shorter sector on JAL may not be strictly comparable to a relatively longer one on AA. That doesn't help you to decide now! I've read that commercial factors may figure in Skytrax ratings and I haven't flown on enough different airlines to judge their accuracy. That said, the ratings will give you some idea, and you've sought confirmation from someone in the industry. With the best of advice, preferences are in part subjective, so you might rate the two differently to someone else. @BenjaminNicholas may have flown both so he may be able to offer an opinion.

@Unicorn that looks good! I assume that the tour company is giving you advice about requirements for Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian visas.

Moderator's Note Please steer clear of political commentary in the thread, and stick to the health aspects, befitting this Forum.

Well that's a new twist on someone having a sharp tongue!

Happy to be of service!

I know this may sound like heresy, but I'm sure if the gentleman is not planning on a trip to the Centre of the Universe, there are reasonable Amtrak fares (or shudder bus fares) and hotels for a night in the Capital. You could even check out the latest exhibitions at the Smithsonian museums while you're there!

'Australia votes 12 points to Ukraine.' I heard a snippet of the song on the BBC this afternoon and quite liked it. I agree that Ukraine is likely to sweep the popular vote. (And yes, Australia does get to vote, we have become a regular non-EBU competitor in Eurovision.)

Yes, the key is recognising that the letters are the initials of the planets. The mathematical bit of it (which happens to coincide with the order of the first four in distance from the sun) is that it is in the order of their size. So the two after Venus are Mars and Mercury, and therefore the two letters are M & M.