Phaedrus

I have iTunes throwing random stuff at me, and it just hit me with "Killing In The Name Of", which I haven't heard for far too long. Awesome.

I don't, but I know a guy who does (on the off-chance that you hadn't seen this already :) )

I would have thought that most SPs would do a pretty good job with this. I should just find someone who appeals to your tastes and desires, and go from there. If you let her know you're a first-timer, I'm sure she'll play nice :) The only solid recommendation I'd make is to stick with someone who's well-recommended... you're probably better off doing that than striking out into the complete unknown.

Well, since Angela's started on the English language nits... "Disinterested" and "uninterested" do NOT mean the same thing!

Ya... what you really want is a SP who offers CIM/COF/whatever and who does massage too. Cleo might be a good bet - she was a MA for a while, and I think she advertizes the other things you're looking for... there may be others also, although I can't think of anyone else off the top of my head...

And just to add to this: there are probably other folks around who'd like to know the answers to the same questions, so if the Q&A is done in public then it'll benefit them, too!

Watch this. Okay, it's an ad, but... I'll forgive it.

Well, I'm late to the party again. Congratulations, Meg! And please keep 'em coming!

Thanks for doing the work to collect this stuff together, cyclo - much appreciated! I know that digging all this stuff up takes significant effort. One thing I do want to address, though, is the relative reliability of the science here. There's a huge problem with this kind of thing is that the relative risk of particular acts is almost impossible to establish. Many people who have acquired HIV probably can't tell you with any certainty who they got it from, never mind shed any light on what they may have been doing at the time, and discounting for the moment that most of us probably don't limit our sexual interactions to just one way of having fun. And that's before you have to account for the fact that people may indeed lie, or simply misremember things without any actual attempt at malice. Unfortunately, you can't actually do proper, scientific experiments on this stuff; you just can't take a thousand HIV+ guys, and have a thousand uninfected people give them one BBBJ each, and then see how many are infected in turn. And so we have to make the best of what we have available, and study the ferociously complex mess that is real life for real people and make the most sense of it that we can. And so, yes, there will always be a margin of error; frequently it'll be a very large margin for lots of different errors. What's as important as anything else is for studies to be honest about the assumptions they've made, about the flaws in their methodology, and the limitations of the available data sets.

Well, I'm not qualified to comment on legal issues. However, Samantha did ask us to do something about the food around here, and I think that if she's gong to be running the show we'd better get the catering up to standard pretty quickly. Regrettably, it's true that although we're world experts on bacon sandwiches, my research indicates that there are some misguided individuals who do not consider fried pig and some bread to be the epitome of haute cuisine. Gentlemen... we're going to have to get some outside help here. So, I have conducted exhaustive research (I wasn't just going out for lunch all the time, okay? Well, maybe I was, but it was for a good cause, dammit!), and I think I've found a suitable candidate. I only tried the soup, but I think we can safely trust these guys with the responsibility of cooking for us and our visitors.

Okay, now for something a bit more serious than the usual flippancy. She's a member of Femen, protesting against Salafists outside the Grand Mosque in Paris. I have no idea who he is, but if that's the most eloquent counter-argument he can muster then I think we can safely say he's on the losing side of the debate. Story here.

The first one is - I think - the number of individual "doses" of rep points you've received. Not everyone gives out the same number of rep points, so this will vary somewhat depending on who you've got it from and how they gave it to you. Full disclosure: I'm not actually sure about this. The second number is the number of rep points you've actually got. The third is your own "rep point power", which is how many you give out to someone else when you use the button; see Mod's earlier post in this thread for where that comes from.

That's an awful lot of silliness, Lee! We love it...

Hope you had an awesome day, Serena!

Realizing that I have never, ever had a dream about Lee Richards.

Hope you had an awesome day!

Say nothing. If you make eye contact, that's enough, but in the name of all that's sacred DON'T DO ANY MORE! Don't even smile, or wink, or anything. You don't know who she's with, or whether they know of her occupation. She doesn't know whether or not you're here with your wife. There are far too many risks involved for any overt contact to be worthwhile. By all means drop her a PM later to say, "Hi, nice to see you earlier". But NEVER. EVER. do anything in public. Ignore her. She'll understand. So should you. If you don't, you'll understand the day you meet an unprofessional SP while you're out with your wife :)

I've never heard of them.... but I now plan on hearing more. They sound like Against Me!...

Yeah, right. So next time I leave a bacon sandwich unattended, you'll leave it alone? Sorry, OD, but I wasn't born yesterday.

Spring? Yes, it's almost time for the FB-BBM beach outing. We can go early and beat the crowds, because we have insulation :) Here's a photo of Andy from last year...