green

As I have said in an earlier post, where I live (Ontario, Canada) does not allow smoking indoors in any public building anymore. Those restaurants and bars which did once have the option of choosing to be either family/smokeless establishments or smoking establishments no longer have that option. For a smoker like myself this is annoying but I have learned to deal with this. The one place where I still bitterly regret being unable to smoke is on aircraft. In those good old days the smokers were sent to the rear of the plane and this area usually ended up being an adults-only zone. This was an added benefit for us for we were not subjected to screaming babies nor tiny children who persisted in kicking the back of our seats during the entire duration of a transatlantic flight. The other advantage was the cabin air had to be flushed much more frequently with fresh air. This is expensive fuel-wise but I did not crawl home in those days, as I inevitably do now, with a wicked foreign cold or flu.

Thanks for posting this, airwaydude. I've got to admit that I do find these stories fascinating. Maybe this is because I've worked around men for so long and I now know when I should feel threatened and when men have gotta do what they have gotta do....hardwiring and all. Anyhow, my husband used to occasionally walk (no fossil fuels wasted, eh) over to our local strip club of a Sunday afternoon. A male friend of ours calls this worshipping at the Temple of Venus and says that it is a guy-thang. As for that, I laugh and grunt "more like worshipping at the Temple of Penis!" But I don't pay it no never mind. Anyhow, and this is the funny part, two doors up from us is this weird guy who won an Oscar for animation a few years back and who has always refused to have anything to do with anyone on the street but he is someone who my husband invariably finds loitering in the Temple of P/Venus. The dude is obviously there without his wife's blessing for he always has his shopping bags planted around his feet. And he gets really edgy when he sees my better half wander in for a beer and an hour of worship, um, er, whatever..........:rolleyes Of course, what happens in the Temple stays in the Temple - unless it involves my mate. Then a different set of rules applies.

I would be inclined to second Sunta's assessment of this situation. Paedophilia cannot be considered to be in the same category as drug dealing, prostitution, assault, aggravated assault or indeed murder unless the pattern of murder happens to pivot upon a sexual compulsion or fixation. Paedophiles, like others who are owned by a sexual compulsion or fetish, are, unlike homosexuals, made that way; they are not born that way and that is the difference. This is where the argument of nature vs nurture does come into play. In simple-minded terms this can be explained as follows: little Green is a heterosexual kid who likes boys. She loves and admires her father. The men to which she will be attracted will incorporate aspects of her own father. Another child might feel differently about his opposite sex parent or may feel the incest taboo so strongly that he will be repulsed by any woman who in any way resembles his mother. Anyone who is homosexual or who has gay friends or who, for that matter, has kept up with the latest scientific research on homosexuality is aware that homosexuality is not a question of lifestyle choice but is the luck of the genetic deck. On the other hand, research into paedophilia indicates that these individuals suffer from an array of psycho-social maladjustments dating from their own tragic early years and more often than not these creatures had suffered from childhood sexual abuse themselves.

The lack of access to all the icons/smilies - which do reside on the right hand side of the page - is causing me grief. It is leaving me kind of emotionless or, in psychiatric terms, with a lack of affect! Ugh!

I find that I am continually having use my scroll bar in order to centre the page on my screen and when I want to post I no longer have access to all the icons/smilies.:cry A solution to this might be to put the ad space back to the right hand side of the page.

It sounds like you were done at the hospital, not the TLBC clinic, eh? What kind of pain meds did they send you home with? Demerol or Tylenol 3s? How are you feeling post-op? Lots of questions, eh? And lots of congratulations to you from Green!!!! :waytogo:

Good luck to Shar and Crabcake!!

Yah, I am not exactly sure what PCOS is except that it screws up the metabolism and interferes with losing weight. I just read on another thread that the band works best for people who don't have a sweet tooth. People who have a sweet tooth tend to eat around it. The band works well for a bulk eater, and I was one of those. Good luck on your visit!

What a drag. Ladies of the knight would have been so much fun!

I am a long time smoker and when I first started smoking smokers could smoke everywhere: stores, restaurants, cabs, movie houses, planes.... It was a wonderful time for folks like me. Now my province has become completely smoke-free and one can only smoke outdoors. There had been a period of time when restaurants and bars had the choice; they could decide whether they wanted to be family or smoking establishments but that choice was finally taken away from them. All public establishments within the Province of Ontario were ordered to be smoke-free. From what I understand this law has hurt the hospitality business badly. Those restaurants and bars which do have outdoor patios - where smoking is allowed - do well during the warm months of the year. At first I was very offended by these changes. It had, afterall, been a smoker's world and cigarettes are a legal drug. Now I find myself accepting these changes and toeing the line. I have become accustomed to excusing myself from a social gathering and going outside in order to top up my nicotine levels. What I don't like is being treated to lengthy lectures concerning my nasty habit and why it is so bad for my health by well-meaning bystanders. Every smoker is fully aware that smoking is a dirty and destructive habit. It is also highly addictive and quitting is difficult for everyone and hellishly difficult for some! Hearing some do-gooder chirp that "smoking is bad for the health, you know," is both useless and wildly irritating to the smoker for, afterall, we all know that!

Yah, grrl! That's what all my GFs want to know. Sadly for us, he is one of a kind. *sniff*

I think that it is splendid that you have read this article. Now that you have done so you are able to critique and comment on those aspects of it which you view as being valuable and true and those which you feel should be discounted. You have also been able to advise us of what you identify as discrepencies in the information which he provides concerning some of the church practices as well as provide us with your point of view. This is always a good thing.

Haha:nervous Good point! I forgot about that. I'm an atheist, you see....:tired

LOL You certainly are! :Banane43: And my husband is the answer to every woman's dream. He loves to shop, finds watching sports on TV boring, folds laundry, repairs stuff (if you wait long enough:rolleyes) and he does all the vaccuuming. And he is straight!:thumbs_up:

This paper wasn't intended to critique or even comment on church doctrine except as to its impact on women who have certain personality types. The author was born and raised and still is a practising member of his church. He clearly states that he himself has found his own life within the church to be a very satisfying one. He also states that the Mormon environment is an enviroment in which many women find great moral and emotional satisfaction. Indeed he has a daughter who is happy in her faith. He has chosen to examine through professional optics - he is a psychiatrist - the situation of those Mormon women who do run into psychological difficulties and he figures that their relationship with the teachings of the church and the role assigned to them through this belief system does play a role in their unhappiness. Why these women are unhappy, how significant the role of the church plays in this unhappiness, and how this distress manifests itself are issues which the author of this paper discusses. He himself is still engaged in his church. He is merely, as a medical man, describing a problem. By choosing not to read this paper you are choosing to close your mind, I think, and that may be a loss to you.

What if every lapbander who shops at LaneBryant writes in to management in order to complain about their marketing policies? There are a lot of us out here.

I had a similar experience in Florence. A magnificient transvestite wearing nothing other than a pair of hip high pair of suede leather boots with stilleto heels and a hip-length fur coat flashed me and this other foreign girl late one night. We had just finished eating a splendid dinner in a local trattoria, one where tourists never went when this happened. She saw us admiring her, paused, then flashed us, and giggled. We giggled back. It was a magical evening.

Only T-3s!:tired I got demerol, too, Yoda. Boy, I really enjoyed them! :faint: Congratulations to you, SusanS. :) (Too bad about the demerol, though.:cry )

The French love organ meats. The more expensive the restaurant in France the fewer the choices available to the squeamish Green! They love brains, kidneys and liver. Those meats are expensive over there and you have to become friends with your butcher before you can buy them. I don't like organ meats, nor fish, and I am quite grossed out by rabbit because the carcass looks like that of a dead cat.:tired These will all be on the menu at a very chic French restaurant. Happily they always serve steak, too, and that was what I always ordered.

Oh Yah! I am a fool for Bela Fleck and his Flecktones.

Wow! This is required reading IMHO. Thanks, Sunta.

Aren't you thinking of the late Don Ho???

Yah, Wheets, it sounds like you are kind of like me. I am totally out of the loop. I don't like diva-style pop music. It all sounds the same and it all sounds sentimental to me. I have never watched any of the Idols and I have never understood C&W or new country. I totally fail to get rap. :tired Within the framework of Jazz I have to admit that I can't stand ragtime although I recognise that this music is challenging for the musicians to play. I love Soul, R 'n B, the Blues, BeBop, and most of the conventional forms of jazz including Latin jazz. This being said, I can also say that I don't have much knowledge about music. Like a cow, I know what I like and that's about it.:phanvan

Thank you for saying this, Butt.

This is in the way of a P.S. about my mother and her beliefs. She did become in the way of a scavenger or a kind of collector crab when it came to religions. She liked to sort through them and would only agree to believe in the most positive aspects of their belief systems. She was, for instance, fond of the Hindu approach to animal life, the respect which this religion grants other living creatures. She would also try to argue herself out of colds and other viruses using the logic, as she saw it, inherent in Christian Science. She did not like the exclusionary aspects, the mean-spirited aspects which can and do grow around belief systems.