Phaedrus

Three things to say on this. First up, if you're going to BCC everyone by hand... really, --really-- don't screw this up and put everyone in the To: or CC: field by accident. I'm sure Cat isn't the only one of us who's done this - all of us have done similar things at one time or another (if nothing else, hitting reply-all when we only wanted to reply to one person, which is a similarly embarrassing beast) Secondly, as with any mailing list: make sure it's easy for people to --unsubscribe-- too. If there's one thing I hate, its spammy mails that don't have an easy way to stop them coming. Finally, there are paid-for mailing-list services that exist to handle all this sort of stuff for you - I can think of at least one lady here that does this. It's something that your web-hosting company might well provide. It'll cost $$$, but probably not that much and it'll save you headaches.

I'd just like to say that that was a really unfortunate place for a line-break :)

Or, possibly, that some people just can't follow instructions :) +1. It works the other way, too, of course. I've been to see people on the strength of liking their posts here and thinking I'd like to meet them.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18495102 Turtles killed as they were having sex and then fossilised in position have been described by scientists. The remains of the 47-million-year old animals were unearthed in the famous Messel Pit near Darmstadt, Germany. They were found as male-female pairs. In two cases, the males even had their tails tucked under their partners' as would be expected from the coital position. Details are carried in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. Researchers think the turtles had initiated sex in the surface waters of the lake that once existed on the site, and were then overcome as they sank through deeper layers made toxic by the release of volcanic gases. The animals, still in embrace, were then buried in the lakebed sediments and locked away in geological time. "We see this in some volcanic lakes in East African today," explained Dr Walter Joyce of the University of Tübingen. "Every few hundred years, these lakes can have a sudden outburst of carbon dioxide, like the opening of a champagne bottle, and it will poison everything around them." The turtles described in Biology Letters are of the extinct species Allaeochelys crassesculpta. They are about 20cm in length; the females are slightly bigger than the males. Their nearest living relatives are probably the pig-nosed turtle (Carettochelys insculpta), a much bigger species that swims in waters around Australia and Papua New Guinea. A. crassesculpta is just one of thousands of exquisitely preserved fossil creatures pulled from Messel Pit, which has Unesco World Heritage status because of its palaeontological significance. Nine pairs of turtles have been unearthed at the site over the past 30 years. In most of the couples, the individuals were discovered in contact with each other. For the pairs that were not, the individuals were no more than 30cm apart. "People had long speculated they might have died while mating, but that's quite different from actually showing it," said Dr Joyce. "We've demonstrated quite clearly that each pair is a male and a female, and not, for example, just two males that might have died in combat. "This fact combined with the observation that their back ends are always orientated toward one another, and the two pairs with tails in the position of mating - that's a smoking gun in our view." It is said to be the only example in the fossil record of vertebrates being preserved in the act of having sex. For invertebrates, there are numerous examples in the scientific literature of copulating insects being caught in amber, or fossilised tree resin.

Somewhere I've always wanted to go... the Serengeti

Wow. Congratulations, Angela! Now, who wants to run a sweepstake on when the big 10k will be hit? :)

Google will tell you that the wettest place in Canada is Prince Rupert, BC. That's no longer true. The record has been taken by the queue for "Fifty Shades of Grey" at Chapters.

Sorry to hear about that, Madmaili. Yes, it sucks. All I can suggest is that you explicitly ask, when you book, whether the SP sees black people. An agency damn well ought to know this, and steer you towards someone else if appropriate - after all, its in their interests for you to go away as a happy customer. And if you see an independent SP, then you cut out the middleman entirely. Hopefully no-one will mind a blunt question, especially if you explain that you've been burned by not asking it in the past.

What I've usually done in the past is: contact the reference SP to check that she's OK with providing one, and to tell her who the reference would be for wait for her to reply (this has never taken very long) then contact the new SP and provide the reference. So you don't contact the new SP at all until the reference is already sorted out, and you can put it in your initial PM/email/whatever and make yourself look like the kind of guy who can follow instructions. Also, the reference SP doesn't get anything coming out of the blue. The downside to this is that it takes time, and it probably wouldn't work that well if you were desperate to see the new SP *right now*. However, I generally don't have an issue with getting organized a bit in advance if needs be... and this is only for the first time you see someone. I've always found the CERB ladies to be very good with references - whenever I've asked for one I've always had a reply within 24 hours or so, and frequently a lot faster than that. Yes, this may be a concern. I always try to use someone I've seen relatively recently as a reference. All the CERB ladies I've asked have been awesome with this.

Ellesmere Island. There may be a lake under there somewhere. Or possibly sea. It's hard to tell.

I've met both Nathalie and Megan before, separately, so when they recently started offering massage duos... well, there was only one sensible thing to do. Sign up! And so I did. Making arrangements was quite ridiculously easy. And so I arrived at Megan's incall already breathless with anticipation... which meant that I had precious little breath to spare when this happened. And then this happened. Okay, that's not quite how it was - you'll have to imagine less underwear. You're OK with that? Thought so :) Well, the ladies didn't take long getting each other naked... and me too :) Off for a shower with Nathalie, and then back for a massage, which was awesome (I'm sure Nathalie and Megan had their hands on each other as much as they were on me, but I got to watch, so I wasn't complaining)... and then bodyslides. Lots and lots of bodyslides. And then an interlude so that Megan and Nathalie could give each other bodyslides. Which was... well... I'd say it was incredibly sexy, but it was so far beyond sexy that we're going to have to invent entirely new words for it. Hell, we're going to have to invent an entirely new language, 'cos the incoherent noises I was making at the time just won't cut it. There will now be a short pause for... recollections. Okay, thanks for waiting :) So... where was I? Yes, what happened after that... suffice to say it was the stuff dreams are made of. I know this with absolute confidence, because my dreams have been made of it ever since. Time for another shower to clean up (with Megan this time) and then, alas, time to go. But there will still be happy memories... lots of them.

I know we already have a "would you or wouldn't you" thread, but I think this one is worth a thread of its own. The linked post is about a now-closed brothel in Prague. The deal for clients is... you can pay, and it's just a normal brothel. Or you can play for free, and everything you do will be streamed online for paying viewers. So... what would you do? It's an interesting idea, at any rate...

Well, the only possible follow up to that is... Lake Erie. Yeah, I know. Wrong lake.

Quite apart from that, quite a few companies keep track of what sites their employees visit, and how often and for how long. They're allowed to, since you're using their network and probably a computer they own. There are some things that my employer simply does not need to know :)

Have an awesome trip, Cato!

This ruling isn't about government intervention, or not. It's about rights. Does the child's right to bodily integrity outweigh the parents' right to exercise their religious beliefs, or not? The German court has simply ruled in favor of the child. Personally, I think it's a fantastic decision. I don't see how mutilating children is justifiable. Any child that grows up wanting to be circumcised for religious or cultural reasons or simply for shits 'n giggles is entirely at liberty to do so; the point is that it's *their* decision, not anyone else's. What I find odd is that a decision like this relating to female circumcision would be entirely uncontroversial. Granted, the female variety involves rather more cutting... but the difference is one of degree, rather than anything fundamental. It's all about hacking off bits of a child's genitalia in both cases.

Time for another goddess, I think. This time, someone I was lucky enough to meet last time she was in this neck of the woods... Katherine! Katherine is great fun to be around... lots of energy, sparkling conversation - and that come though in her posts here too! And also she's verrry sexy. But don't take my word for it:

Well, this looks promising.... :)

Not that I'm aware of. It's up to the ladies to post as many or as few details about themselves as they like, but there's nothing wrong with us providing a pointer to the information they've made available :)

Okay... who wants to place bets on how many offers Katrine's going to get from random guys with cameras?

And now for something a little less high-minded... :) I spent 90% of my money on women, drink and fast cars. The rest I wasted. -- George Best

Dropkick Murphys - Kiss Me, I'm Shitfaced