Phaedrus

I'm afraid I completely fail to see why "GFE" must always mean the same thing regardless of context. Is it really so hard to deal with if MAs and SPs use it in slightly different (but related) ways? Are we not intelligent enough to get our heads around that? Since I mentioned FS... although we may all have a definite understanding of what full service is when we're discussing things here, I'm pretty sure it's not the same as what the mechanic does to my car when it's getting a full service in the garage. Although in the interests of full disclosure, I should probably add that I've never actually hung around the garage to find out.

Awesome job, Cometman!

On browser history, caches, etc: browsers can be set up to automatically delete these things when they're closed. This has two advantages: you don't have to remember to do it (and therefore can't forget); and since it happens all the time, it's not suspicious.

I have to say, I think people get much too worked up over this stuff. There's only really a couple of things to say. First: we (almost) all have to get used to the fact that there are some things in life we want, but can't afford. Anyone who's even remotely considering spending hundreds of dollars on seeing a SP, no matter how many hundreds of dollars, isn't that badly off and shouldn't have too much to complain about in the grand scheme of things. There's no point being bitter about the fact that someone you really want to see is a bit out of your price range; ultimately, it hurts no-one save yourself. Second, and similarly, there's little to be gained by being bitter if you feel an encounter wasn't worth what you paid for it. Given the highly personal nature of what we're discussing here, we all have slightly different ideas of what "good" or "better" or "worth the $$$" actually involve, and that's before you get into completely intangible things like "chemistry". It's simply not reasonable to expect to hit the bullseye every time. Third: I know I'm going to sound like some sort of ultra-capitalist zealot by saying this, but... trust the market. SPs scamming people or delivering crappy service at top-end rates exist, and will always exist, and there isn't a lot we can do about it except avoiding them... but once everyone avoids them, they'll swiftly be gone. Similarly, SPs will adjust their rates until their income and number of clients they're seeing get to where they want them to be, or they realize that their goals are unachievable (not everyone is capable of meeting the expectations of clients paying top-end rates) and adjust accordingly. One thing that I have to note here is the essential role that CERB and other boards play in this: for markets to work efficiently, there has to be a free exchange of information. This is why recos here, reviews elsewhere and resources like CK's diary are so critical; they allow us guys to make informed decisions about who to see, and who's better avoided. If you had a great time, give that information to everyone else; if it was bad... well, you can't say so here, but bear in mind that although silence can speak volumes, it doesn't if you never say anything at all.

Alas, neither can anyone else, because YouTube has taken it down for nudity/sexual content. Dammit, YouPrudes - not fair!

Congratulations, Vanessa!

Nekkid! Although if I'm crashing at someone else's place, underwear, 'cos they probably don't want to even think about me with no clothes on, never mind see it.

Other drivers in general. I think I need my own private road system :) The problem is that for every government worker who's working incredibly hard, there's another one who's working equally hard on something that's diametrically opposed...

Not really much to add to what others have said. I generally consider spas to be better for the spur-of-the-moment oh-god-i-need-a-massage occasions (yes, they happen :) ), whereas I tend to be more organized and book in advance with the independent ladies. Some locations are more convenient for me than others. But if I really want to see someone, I'll go to wherever she happens to be, and wanting to see her is really the only thing that matters.

Congratulations!

I've always liked this one: Bobby McFerrin - Don't Worry, Be Happy

All good advice. Except... Never mind turning off the app... when you're going to spend time with someone, turn off your whole damn phone!

Um.... how the hell am I supposed to pick just one thing? I'm going to have to think about this....

Yep, they do. I saw someone roll a bill up and put it up his nose once. I laughed. The dancer that was on stage at the time looked quite amused, too :)

Please, nobody tell Meg that jellybeans exist. We'll never see her again...

Um... exactly how did you phrase the question? She might give him a pass for the night where strippers are concerned, but the idea of her soon-to-be-husband fucking someone else may be an entirely different kettle of fish. Or maybe not... but if you don't know, I'd advise checking :) And check with him, too. As far as getting dancers is concerned - you may be better to get in touch with the local SCs and see what they can do for you; they may well have packages available. Quite apart from anything else, it saves worrying about whether your bachelor is going to like the one person you choose, as he'll have plenty of hot ladies to choose from. If you're in Ottawa, ask them what their policy is on very drunk people showing up - I know BareFax got screwed over a while back for serving alcohol to an intoxicated person (as if that doesn't happen everywhere, all the time) and they were pretty strict on letting drunk people in for a while, although so were quite a few other places in the Market. Finally: you may struggle to get SPs to come out to bachelor parties. Lots of drunk guys, plus a girl or two who some may consider to be "up for it" on the basis of her profession... well, you can see how things could get bad, no? AFAIK many SPs completely refuse to do bachelor parties for precisely this reason; safety is a huge concern. I'm sure you and your friends are great people - but do you personally know everyone who's going to be there and how they'll behave?

I suspect that nobody who's ever been through a divorce, especially one where kids were involved, would question this :)

One thing that does strike me from reading this thread: I think it might be an idea if ladies who don't give out references, for whatever reason, were to say so on their ads/websites, wherever. My reason for saying htis is tht if I were to ask a lady for a reference and she were to refuse - even if she never gives them for anyone - my first thought would still be, "Oh, shit! What did I do???" There's no harm in us knowing it exists. Anyone looking at the front page of the site after logging in can see that much. Nobody's asking to know anything that's said there.

[URL="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20544095"][B]Christine Jorgensen: 60 years of sex change ops[/B][/URL] News of a pioneering sex change operation, one of the first involving both surgery and hormone therapy, was announced in 1952 - exactly 60 years ago this weekend. "Ex-GI becomes blonde beauty!" screamed one headline as newspapers in the United States broke the news. George Jorgensen, a quiet New Yorker, shocked a nation by returning from a trip to Denmark transformed into the glamorous Christine. As the slender, blonde 27-year-old woman wrapped in a fur coat stepped out of the plane on to the tarmac in New York, her long eyelashes, high cheekbones and full red lips betrayed little of the shy man she had once been. Jorgensen grew up in the Bronx, a happy child in a large close-knit family. As a teenager he became convinced he was trapped in the wrong body. "In photographs from the time Jorgensen looks like a very gay man, which would have been a problem," says Teit Ritzau, a Danish doctor and documentary maker who got to know Christine Jorgensen when he made a film about her in the 1980s. "The young Jorgensen never identified himself with homosexuality but rather as a woman who happened to be in a man's body," he says. In her autobiography Jorgensen says that, while she was still living as George, despite being attracted to men she felt physically sick when a man propositioned her. But in the late 1940s, during a short stint in the US military, Jorgensen came across an article about a Danish doctor, Christian Hamburger, who was experimenting with gender therapy by testing hormones on animals. She began to hope Hamburger would provide the solution to her problem. Jorgensen's parents were both Danish-born so with family connections making it an easy trip to justify, in 1950 she headed to Copenhagen without telling anyone about her real intentions. "I was a bit nervous because there were too many people at that period who insisted I was crazy," Jorgensen recalled in an interview years after her transformation. Jorgensen explains her difficulty finding a man in a BBC interview in 1970 "But Dr Hamburger didn't feel there was anything particularly strange about it." Hamburger was the first physician to diagnose Jorgensen as transsexual. The first step towards becoming a woman was a long course of female hormones. Hamburger encouraged Jorgensen, for the first time, to take on a female identity and begin dressing as a woman in public. As the hormones began to take effect, Hamburger noted the changes in his patient . "The first sign was an increase in size of the mammary glands and then hair began to grow where the patient had a bald patch on the temple," he later said. "Finally the whole body changed from a male to a female shape." Jorgensen was also assessed by a psychologist, Dr Georg Sturup, who accepted the strength of her conviction that she wanted to proceed with sex reassignment surgery. As a result, Sturup successfully petitioned the Danish government to change the law to allow castration for the purposes of the operation. Finally, after more than a year of hormone therapy, Jorgensen went under the knife for the first of a series of operations that would attempt to change her genital organs from male to female. Exactly what was done during these operations is unclear, but it is likely that Hamburger and his team followed the lead set by a group of surgeons several decades earlier. The first attempt at a modern sex change operation most likely took place in Berlin in the 1930s on a patient known as Lili Elbe. The surgery failed and Elbe died as a result of the last of her operations, but the medical notes from the experiment served as a starting point for the Danish team. Today sexual reassignment surgery involves making an incision in the scrotum and pulling nerve endings from the penis inside the body to design a vagina but this form of penile-inversion surgery was not invented until several years after Jorgensen's operation. "Apparently the surgery was successful enough for Jorgensen to feel satisfied," says documentary maker Teit Ritzau. "There seemed to be no complications and no side-effects from the treatment, which is quite amazing when you think about how primitive things were at the time." Christine Jorgensen refused to be drawn on the details of her new anatomy, or how closely it resembled that of a naturally born woman, but in interviews she did touch on the subject in general terms. "Everyone is both sexes in varying degrees. I am more of a woman than a manâ?¦ Of course I can never have children but this does not mean that I cannot have natural sexual intercourse - I am very much in the position right now of a woman who has a hysterectomy," she said in 1958. After the procedure, Christine wrote to her parents back in New York: "Nature made a mistake which I have had corrected, and now I am your daughter." Her family seemed to be very supportive of her decision and she later said her mother had always known her son had been different. On her return to the US, Jorgensen was greeted with curiosity, fascination and respect by both the media and the public. There was relatively little hostility. Hollywood embraced her. Theatre and film contracts began to roll in, she was invited to all the most glamorous parties and even crowned Woman of the Year by the Scandinavian Society in New York. "I guess they all want to take a peek," Jorgensen once said. Throughout the 1960s and 70s she made a comfortable living, touring the country singing and doing impressions in her own show. She was less successful in her personal life. Her first serious relationship broke down soon after their engagement. The next went as far as the register office, only for Jorgensen to be refused a marriage licence when she pulled out a man's birth certificate. "I haven't found the right fella yet," she told ever-curious reporters. Ritzau believes that, overall, she was a very contented person, despite her apparent loneliness. "There had been ups and downs and I think she had a little problem with alcohol, but in the end she was very straightforward, and she told me that the best company she had was herself," he recalls. Jorgensen died of cancer at the age of 62, in 1989. Just a few years before her death, she travelled back to Denmark for a reunion with the doctors who had helped her through her transformation. Speaking to the media, she acknowledged the milestone her case represented. "We didn't start the sexual revolution but I think we gave it a good kick in the pants!"

Well, I'm glad yesterday's minor dose of snark was popular :) On a rather more constructive note: it may be that Mod can't do anything much about this, in the short term. If it's simply just a bug in the software that CERB runs on then it's likely that all Mod can do is report it to whoever maintains the software, and they'll fix it... as and when they get around to it. Unless there's a patch or something like that already available...