bpm32

I’d be interested in hearing how the general mood is in Australia as well. It’s being reported here in the States that 90% of Australians over 16 are vaccinated, but as I understand it there are still a fair number of strict measures?

US states differ on minimum wage for tipped employees. For instance in Idaho, minimum wage is $7.25/hr, but tip-elegible employees only get $3.35/hr. In that case it would be very unfair not to tip. I might be off on this, but I believe the California minimum wage is $14 across the board, going up to $15 soon…..and yet tips are generally still expected. Standard minimum seems to have gone up from 10% when I was a kid, to at least 20-25%. Now that paying with card machines are the standard you often can’t complete a transaction without choosing a tip amount on a screen, or hitting several buttons to opt out of tipping, even for a cup of coffee or takeaway food. There is a large percentage of Americans in love with tipping and will defend it no matter what. I think it probably comes down to personality type.

Papo is awesome and his Behikes are pretty much my favorite cigar. No idea about websites, but a visit to his place is very much a highlight of any trip, especially if you can understand a little Spanish and hear him discuss some of the aspect about how he blends.

They should have made more Aubrey/Maturin movies like they’d planned. “Master and Commander” has slowly risen as a beloved classic over the years.

Other than airport lounge closures, Switzerland last week seemed more or less normal other than vaccination green pass checks. I don’t doubt anyone else’s experiences, but I’ve been flying domestically within the US nonstop the last year and everyone has been perfectly lovely to me, passengers and staff.

So wait, BigGuns is NOT invited then?

I have one that I picked up from Estanco de la Catedral in Barcelona a couple years ago. Can’t remember the exact price, but I think it came out to be about $400 US? I remember the girl at the register was horrified at that price when she asked another guy there. edit to add—$425.22 edit to add again—I believe they are regular production with five years on them, aren’t they? I’ve had a few and they are really good, but basically nice rested P2s, which is what they are.

So what you’re saying is a bunch of London fatcats can’t figure out how to serve the needs of people who live further afield? Then boy, have I got a life hack for you! For it to work, you will need the services of the French Navy though.....

Interesting....

It says “Product of Cuba” on it though, so English is a bit weird for evaporated milk meant for the domestic market.

Beyond the obvious reasons, some legitimate, I think there’s still special enmity amongst Americans for Cuba and Iran because of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Iran hostage affair. It’s like if your buddy’s girlfriend cheated on him and he still gets riled up about it years later. Well, the rest of you gotta hear about it.

The early part of 2015, although it feels like it’s been longer.

View from La Flauta Mágica

Either that or the new writers forgot he was dead. Wish it worked that way in real life....

Killed by eco-feminists?

You turned this into a Vietnam thread, but you forgot to invite President Nixon’s Head? Shame!

Maybe a bit off topic, but I find 65 °F to be particularly irritating because it’s so close to ambient temperature. The heater and chiller of my humidor are constantly turning on and off. Compounding that is that unlike most places, the coast of California is routinely cool, but much higher than 65% RH. Well, the way to dry the air is to cool it, but it’s already too cold. I used to work in a building where, to get around this issue, all air coming in was chilled to 50 °F to dry it, then reheated to room temp. Then if the RH was too low, there were spritzers in the ceiling to bring it back up. Obviously the energy costs were ridiculous, but it felt exactly the same year round.

You guys are costing me some money—can’t resist cigar books. It’s a sickness. One time I carried around 30 pounds of books from Estanc Duaso for 10 hours through half of Barcelona.

The (probably apocryphal) claim is that the Redskins were the last to allow black players and Dallas had integrated early on, but who knows what the real reason is. In any event it’s something I wondered about for years and years living there. All the black dudes I asked about it said they were Cowboys fans because their older relatives were Cowboys fans. Never met a white Cowboys fan there that wasn’t from Texas though. Now to be fair, it’s hard to find a Redskins fan these days who isn’t beat down, so it’s possible a lot of fans jumped ship over to Dallas since you lived there.

A lot of football fans in DC actually root for the Dallas Cowboys. Been that way for decades.

Damn dude, all this lecturing about our supposed failures is why we left in the first place.

I’m over it too. It’s an absurdly emotional time and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we all had to spend a lot of time alone with our own thoughts and some of us cracked. I can hear it when I talk to a few of my own family members on the phone—saying loopy, generally paranoid things that aren’t true. Heck, I don’t even look at the news anymore—just a bunch of people saying wacky stuff like it’s self-evident.

These are certainly interesting times we’re living in. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen the Overton Window shift so radically so quickly in my lifetime. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

That’s the 2018 Falcon Heavy Demo, isn’t it?