BigusDicus

Go go's, bars, what are the typical venues for ladies? What about hotel and other associated costs? Internet access, legal and safety issues? Currency exchange, sounds as if US is accepted by the ladies, perhaps preferred?

How were the babes?

A novel I enjoyed immensely decades ago, Water Music by T Coraghessan Boyle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Music_(novel) Water Music is the first novel by T. C. Boyle, first published in 1982. It is a semi-fictional historical adventure novel that is set in the late 18th and early 19th century. It follows the parallel adventures and intertwining fates of its protagonists Ned Rise, a luckless petty criminal, and the famous explorer Mungo Park - the first a purely fictional character, the latter based on a historical person. The book takes place in various locales in Scotland, England and Western Africa. It revolves around two Imperial Britishexpeditions into the interior of Western Africa in an effort to find and explore the Niger River.[1] The novel is loosely based on historical sources, including Mungo Park's 1816 book, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. However, as Boyle admits in his foreword to Water Music, he does not claim historical accuracy or even faithfulness to the contemporary accounts, whose reliability is doubtful anyway.

A man is driving down the road and breaks down near a monastery.... He goes to the monastery, knocks on the door, and says, "My car broke down. Do you think I could stay the night?" The monks graciously accept him, feed him dinner, and even fix his car. As the man tries to fall asleep, he hears a strange sound; a sound like no other that he has ever heard. The next morning, he asks the monks what the sound was, but they say, "We can't tell you because you're not a monk." The man is disappointed but thanks them anyway and goes about his merry way. Some years later, the same man breaks down in front of the same monastery. The monks again accept him, feed him, and even fix his car.. That night, he hears the same strange mesmerizing sound that he had heard years earlier. The next morning, he asks what the sound was, but the monks reply, "We can't tell you because you're not a monk." The man says, "All right, all right. I'm dying to know. If the only way I can find out what that sound was is to become a monk, how do I become a monk?" The monks reply, "You must travel the Earth and tell us how many blades of grass there are and the exact number of sand pebbles. When you find these numbers, you will become a monk." The man sets about his task. Some forty-five years later, he returns and knocks on the door of the monastery. He says, "I have travelled the Earth and devoted my life to the task demanded and have found what you had asked for. There are 371,145,236,284,232 blades of grass and 231,281,219,999,129,382 sand pebbles on the earth. The monks reply, "Congratulations, you are correct, and you are now considered a monk. We shall now show you the way to the sound." The monks lead the man to a wooden door, where the head monk says, the sound is behind that door. The man reaches for the knob, but the door is locked. He asks, "May I have the key?" The monks give him the key, and he opens the door. Behind the wooden door is another door made of stone.... The man requests the key to the stone door. The monks give him the key, and he opens it, only to find a door made of ruby.. He demands another key from the monks, who provide it. Behind that door is another door, this one made of sapphire. And so it went on until the man had gone through doors of emerald,silver, topaz, and amethyst. Finally, the monks say, "This is the key to the last door." The man is relieved to be at the end. He unlocks the door, turns the knob, and behind that door he is astonished to find the source of that strange sound. It is truly an amazing and unbelievable sight .......... ..... But wait, I can't tell you what it is because you're not a monk.

Close to 40 years ago I made my first trip to Hong Kong. I was working for a British company at the time. Some of the "local" Brits took me out for a night on the town. At some point we were at a hotel or something watching a comedy show. A British comedian telling jokes, seemingly half of them putting down the Irish the way we Americans were at the time were beginning to tell "Polock jokes". One commented "Why would anyone put down Polocks when you can deride the Irish? You have just stoned two birds with one stone! Great joke.

Excellent!!!

A woman runs a red traffic light and crashes into a man's car. Both of their cars are demolished, but amazingly, neither of them is hurt. After they crawl out of their cars, the woman says; "Wow, just look at our cars! There's nothing left, but fortunately we are unhurt. This must be a sign from God that we should meet and be friends and live together in peace for the rest of our days." The man replies, "I agree with you completely. This must be a sign from God!" The woman continues, "And look at this, here's another miracle. My car is completely demolished, but my bottle of wine didn't break. Surely God wants us to drink this wine and celebrate our good fortune." She then hands the bottle to the man. The man nods his head in agreement, opens it, drinks half the bottle and then hands it back to the woman. The woman takes the bottle, immediately puts the cap back on, and hands it back to the man. The man asks, "Aren't you having any?" The woman replies, "Nah. I think I'll just wait for the police." Adam ate the apple, too. Men will never learn...

Gary, this is posted in the wrong forum. Should be in the "Painfully sad and pathetic" Forum. It is so true.

I would like to see Miss Anticipation's breasts..... Ps. Nice review.

Tim decided to tie the knot with his longtime girlfriend. One evening, after the honeymoon, he was assembling some loads for an upcoming hunt. His wife was standing there at the bench watching him. After a long period of silence she finally speaks. "Honey, I've been thinking, now that we are married I think it's time you quit hunting, shooting, hand loading, and fishing. Maybe you should sell your guns and boat." Tim gets this horrified look on his face. She says, "Darling, what's wrong?" "There for a minute you were sounding like my ex-wife." "Ex-wife?" she screams, "I didn't know you were married before!" "I wasn't."

Excellent!

Science Findings Soccer, a Beautiful Game of Chance Anthony Freda By JOHN TIERNEY The New York Times July 7, 2014 I’ve been watching the World Cup with some frustrated American social scientists. When they see an underdog team triumph with a miraculous rebound or an undeserved penalty kick, they don’t jump up and scream “Goooaaalll!” They just shake their heads and mutter, “Measurement error.” If you regard a soccer match as an experiment to determine which team is better, then it’s not much of an experiment. It involves hundreds of skillful moves and stratagems, yet each team averages only a dozen shots, and the outcome is decided by several quick and often random events. In most games, no more than three goals are scored, and the typical margin of victory is a single goal. To a scientist, the measurements are too few to draw a statistically reliable conclusion about which team is more skilled. The score may instead be the result of measurement error, a.k.a. luck. That can make soccer seem terribly unfair, at least to many Americans accustomed to higher-scoring sports. We don’t understand why the rest of the world isn’t clamoring for a wider goal or looser offside rules or something to encourage more scoring. But if the rest of the world took our helpful advice, would soccer really be any fairer? Not necessarily, say the economists and statisticians who have been analyzing the balance between skill and luck in sports and in the rest of life. Because of fluke goals, low scores and the many matches that end in ties, soccer is less predictable than other major sports, as Chris Anderson and David Sally explain in their soccer book, “The Numbers Game.” The authors, who are professors at Cornell and Dartmouth, as well as consultants to soccer teams, found that the team favored by bettors won just half the time in soccer, whereas the favorite won three-fifths of the time in baseball and two-thirds of the time in football and in basketball. After surveying the research literature, they concluded that a soccer match’s outcome was about half skill and half luck. But just because an individual soccer game can be decided by a lucky bounce doesn’t mean that the game is less fair than other sports. There’s another factor to consider: the paradox of skill, as it’s termed by Michael Mauboussin, an investment strategist and professor at Columbia, in “The Success Equation.” Suppose the world’s best Scrabble player, which would be a computer, competes against a novice. The computer’s skill will routinely ensure victory even if the novice draws better tiles. But if that computer plays an equally skilled opponent, an identical computer running the same program, then the outcome will be determined entirely by the luck of the draw. That’s the paradox of skill in sports, business and most other competitions: As the overall level of skill rises and becomes more uniform, luck becomes more important. Mr. Mauboussin has calculated that luck matters less in English soccer’s Premier League than in the N.F.L. and in Major League Baseball, because the American leagues have evened the level of skill among teams by sharing revenue, imposing salary caps and giving better draft choices to the weaker teams. Soccer in the rest of the world doesn’t have these constraints, so there are much bigger disparities in teams’ skills. In league play, rich clubs like Manchester United, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich buy the best talent. In the World Cup, the larger, more affluent countries can lure the best coaches and draw from a bigger pool of talent. “Of all the major team sports, soccer is the most unequal in the sense that teams with vastly different resources regularly compete against each other at the highest level,” says Stefan Szymanski, an economist at the University of Michigan and a co-author of “Soccernomics.” If matches were purely contests of skill, the many David-and-Goliath games in soccer would be boring — and seem unfair in another way. “If you doubled the size of the goal, then soccer would become like basketball, and in a high-scoring game, the rich teams would almost always win,” Dr. Szymanski says. “Randomness favors the underdog. Would we ever want to reduce the role of luck in soccer? No way.” Still, some forms of soccer luck just seem dumb, like the flip of a coin before a penalty shootout that determines which team goes first in each round. The first kicker makes the shot about three-quarters of the time, which puts pressure on the other team’s kicker to even the score. That added pressure is presumably why the team going second wins the shootout only 39 percent of the time, according to Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, a game theorist at the London School of Economics and the author of “Beautiful Game Theory: How Soccer Can Help Economics.” In experiments with professional soccer players, Dr. Palacios-Huerta found that the odds became more even in a penalty shootout if one team led off in the first and fourth rounds, and its opponent led off in the other three. Dr. Szymanski prefers a different shootout modification to further help the underdog: Let the lower-seeded team go first in all the rounds. Either change sounds like a good idea. So does an innovation from American sports: peer review. It could reduce the most maddening form of soccer luck, which occurs when a penalty kick is wrongly awarded after a player pretends to be fouled near the goal. No other sport gives players such an incentive to scam the referee. Before awarding a penalty kick that may well decide the match, officials could at least review video replays to make sure the referee saw a foul instead of a flop. Over the long haul, with enough measurements over the duration of a season or a World Cup, skill does prevail in soccer. The law of large numbers limits the underdogs’ lucky streaks. League championships and the World Cup are repeatedly won by the same few powerhouses, because it takes skill to endure. But the outcome of any one match is unpredictable enough to confound the most sophisticated computer modelers, as Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado has demonstrated in his evaluation of a dozen forecasts for this World Cup. He found that the “stochastic model” of Goldman Sachs economists and the elaborate Soccer Power Index developed by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight made fewer correct predictions for games in the group stage than did much simpler systems based only on the monetary value of the players or on the teams’ ranking by FIFA, soccer’s world governing body. The best forecasters turned out to be a team at Danske Bank in Copenhagen and a software engineer named Andrew Yuan. But they were still wrong about 16 of the 48 games, and they identified only 11 of the 16 teams to advance past the group stage. No matter how much number crunching the quants do, no matter how skilled a team is, there’s just no way to anticipate the measurement errors in each match. The forecasters, like the players, may complain about their bad luck, but it’s a fortunate state of affairs for the fans, especially those who root for underdogs like the United States. © 2014 The New York Times Company JOHN TIERNEY: Soccer: A Beautiful Game Of Chance.

wonderful letter sent back to a listener !!!!!!! Mr James Smith 206 Andover Road Salisbury, Wiltshire. Dear Mr. Smith, Many thanks for your letter suggesting your ex-wife as an ideal candidate for our new quiz show. I have reviewed the attributes you describe, and whilst she may well possess the criteria we are looking for in the show's contestants, before we take this any further, I must point out that the name of the show is actually 'Fact Hunt'. In light of this, please let me know if you still feel she would be a suitable contestant. Yours sincerely, Charles Knight, Light Entertainment, BBC Television Centre, London.

Really nice pics. Thank You!

A man with a positive attitude Saturday night a friend of mine gradually woke up stiff as a plank in the hospital ICU, tubes up his nose & down his throat, wires monitoring every function, a hell of a pain over his left ear, and a gorgeous nurse hovering over him. It was obvious he'd been in a serious accident. She looked at him deep & steady and he heard her slowly say, You may not feel anything from the waist down.' He managed to mumble in reply, 'Can I just feel your tits, then?' NOW THAT'S A POSITIVE ATTITUDE!

They are all getting bad. My wife has been reading everywhere that experts are recommending using up you miles ASAP. It is only going to get worse....

Have been in a handful of times over the last couple of decades. Old school Japanese. Have not been disappointed.

Been there, done that!

Girl, knife and fork!

Very clever! Are you the author Martin?

Enjoyed it, thank you!