-------- aren't for giving pleasure, they are for detecting infidelity.
Anyone giving a ------- is looking to see if you're a cheater.

#22 | Posted by oneironaut

I have to remember the benefits of logging into this site.

I had only a few times in Boston.

In 1967 my parents had just divorced. My father had spent a semester at BU in the early 50s, so he though it would be fun to put his two young sons and himself during the first Sunday visitation on a shuttle to Boston for the day. Took a plane, walked around, came home.

I was a Boston sports fan as a result until NYC's glory year of 1969/70. Mets, Jets, Knicks. Had a Bruins hockey puck and everything.

Returned a few time on business in my mid 20s. I stayed first at the Boston Park Plaza, a renovated old hotel in which I managed to score a single room that had been converted from two smaller rooms, so I had two full bathrooms, one on either side of the room. Told them to hold the service for awhile.

Legal Seafood was in the lobby, and Samuel Adams had just come out. Good time.

Went back again with my future wife, and we froze our asses off at Fenway in early April.

On the first trip, using my per diem, one night I went into the neighborhood to eat and landed in a gay restaurant, as I figured out after about 10 minutes. Food was good.

Another night, I went to a local place and had shark fin soup. When I returned to the hotel, the clerk asked where I went. When I told him, he said it was good I was in there before the Chinese gangs, who I think indeed had started to arrive when I was finishing.

It's the real deal. No hucksterism involved. Otherworldly.

For some folks, just the drive to Hiltons would do it. Then it's another 80 miles of VA to Cumberland Gap.

Lotsa nothing out there. Mostly federal prisons. Maybe some songwriting going on behind bars.

Boston is a notoriously racist city. Busing and housing threw the place into an uproar in the early 80s. A few years ago I worked on a book about how the Mayor Flynn administration addressed head-on a lot of lingering problems that were only a vague memory to me. I'd vacated the Northeast by then. But for anyone who was aware in the 70s and 80s, "busing" was a very dangerous word.

Early example of democratic socialism at work and working, actually. Didn't last long.

[I'd mention the book but I think my name is in it.]

Staten Island, I have knowledge as a resident. In the mid-70s, some of the toughs from my (private) high school would go to the Clove Lakes Park skating rink with the express purpose of violently harassing random Blacks.

To the extent my own father ever voted, it was probably for George Wallace.

Ah, Staten Island. From Dorothy Day to the Wu Tang Clan.

13. You're right about that as well.

Anyone who thinks the South has a tight grip on racism is nuts.

I've got everything from great-grandparents to a brother buried in that cemetery. Both sides of my family, including my brother a few years ago. It looks like a Jewish cemetery ought to look.

We were driving through the dense growth and broken gravestones on the way to my brother's gravesite, and I asked our son if he'd ever seen so many gravestones -- or anything -- with his first name on it. He was kind of shaken.

Then we arrived at the patriarchal family plot, where he saw his own name ... on my grandfather's tombstone.

You should see some of the monuments the Russians have built there in recent years. Not entirely out of place, but a big change.

---

Staten Island has always been the Mississippi of the Northeast. That's not changed.

Looks nice now for potential Trump retirement property. Easy installation.

Trump's lost his edge. "Lightly respected" might as well be rose blossoms.

Growing up in NYC's forgotten borough, I had no idea of the local Vanderbilt influence until I left. Like Catholicism, it was all over the place but I didn't recognize it. The Vanderbilts' old boneyard was right down the hill.

Ever been to Biltmore House outside Asheville, NC, one of America's most ridiculous former private residences?

First time I went, the whole area reminded me exactly, exactly, of Todt Hill, but without the mob chieftains. And now Russian oligarchs.

Photo is of a coder en route to the big horizontal career move.

"They are being forced to have quotas again. They are being pushed for numbers and quotas," the official said. "There is a demand for 2,000 a day. Leaders are being fired for bad numbers."

The insider described a workforce stretched past its limits. "They are canceling leave. Stretching the field thin. Pushing them to the extremes. It's a very bad, toxic environment. Morale is horrible."

It's the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

2. If you came here to improve your English, it's not helping yet.

3. He told me the story of the high school history teacher, Mr. M, who took a small group of 17-year-olds to Boston for three days ... and disappeared until it was time to return to Brooklyn.

The youths had fun.

I was disappointed with the fruits of my limited research here.

Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, did not actually dress as a woman. When captured by Union cavalry in Irwinville, Georgia, on May 10, 1865, he wore his regular clothes with his wife's black shawl over his shoulders and a waterproof overcoat for warmth.

Despite the truth, the Northern press and cartoonists exaggerated this detail, circulating stories and popular lithographs that depicted him in hoop skirts, petticoats, and bonnets. This widely publicized caricature, immortalized in songs like "Jeff in Petticoats," was meant to humiliate Davis and permanently damage his reputation.

121.

Get out a piece of paper. Draw a line down the middle. List all the ways the Republicans and Democrats are cultish.

When you're finished, fold the paper in half three times.

Bend over and insert.

Again, how can anything alarm his staff or anyone else at this point?

Which is why only death will bury Trump. Not anything in the Epstein Files. He's getting out of this life scot-free in his mind, as long as he's a free man when he dies, no matter how crazy he is.

Time for everyone to suck it up. Remember Rumsfeld: We're dealing with what we got, not what we wished we had.

My dear departed brother, in a high school international relations forum, drew Yemen to represent in 1973.

He promptly locked the Israeli delegate in a closet. True story.

I'd agree with him. Let investigative journalists track it down. The FBI's not doing much now.

Maybe they are human-shaped chalk outlines.

What I've wondered of late is: Who came here and established sock puppets almost immediately? And why?

90.

Oooh, Me, Mr. Kotter!!

Destroyed their brand, but people are still buying it.

81. I said here a few days ago that the South ended up winning the Civil War.

Dealing with the MAGAts and (religio)fascists hit home for us a few weeks ago when we returned to a big SE city to find our friends MAGAts and rabid Zionists.

Still love them, though. What can I say?

Back in 2021, guy showed up to our house to do some work after Biden won, wearing a Trump hat. I asked him to take it off. He said he wouldn't ask me to take off a Biden hat. I said my wife has dementia and we don't want her triggered.

Folded up the hat, put it away.

Easier to be human when one doesn't enter interactions with a poker up the ass.

In the desert? It's a desert. Plenty of dumb trumpers there who whine about california and cant afford to leave the desert, yet still don't want to move to the swampy southeast to be among more of their kind.

#70 | Posted by SpeakSoftly

Issue in this country isn't red/blue. It's urban/rural.

Speaks sounds more like Boaz, who presumes that drum-beating librulz in WNC got what was coming to them.

Yeah, Silicon Valley is nice work if you can get it. And Pacific Palisades, if you can get there.

What about the teachers who have to live in the desert just to get by?

By the way, my brother was an undergrad at Wash U in STL in the mid-70s. I felt right at home -- all the urban weirdness and decay of NYC, with back alleys.

And Cahokia Downs.

"If you don't care about outdoor recreation, the south is just fine."

The Great Smoky Mountains (TN) and the Outer Banks (NC) beckon. If you've never been to either, I'd highly recommend. You'll forget a lot of what you knew about southern climate.