Does dating on the web observe the same rules as whatever the real world is called these days?

In wetspace - have I invented that, or remembered it? - if I see a girl I like it is up to me to approach her. In most situations, there would be some kind of derogatory tag attached to her if she took the initiative.

Well, I was reading some guy's journal in which he asked why stalkers don't write, and I'm curious to know whether it is accepted / understood that if a girl stalks a guy's profile then not writing is somehow more okay than if a guy stalked her profile and didn't write.

I'm not being judgemental here, I'm just curious to know what other folks think.

Okay, I give up.

How do I post a comment in the forum?

I searched the FAQ and all it says is that if you have any further questions, post them in the forum. (I wish)

Here's what I've tried:

At the bottom of each thread there is a box with "Add Comment:" immediately above it. Clicking on either "Add Comment:" or on the box does nothing. Clicking on the text editing buttons at the bottom of the box does nothing because there is no text to edit.

Clicking on the POST button at the bottom of the box just returns the error, "You cannot post an empty comment".

The icons at the bottom of a post:
The little red flag thing presents a tiny box asking me to explain why the comment is inappropriate.
The little black squiggle that just might be a printer icon presents me with the option to email the thread to my friends.
Clicking any of the other icons does nothing at all. I've tried clicking on the icons and then clicking in the Add Comment: box, but that does nothing.

It occurred to me that maybe O/P can designate who can reply to their thread, so I have tried this in a number of different threads, always with the same result.

I tried starting my own thread.
After clicking on the name of the forum in which I want to post, I am presented with two boxes at the top of the screen. The one on the right is for searching, the one on the left has an ADD NEW TOPIC button next to it. Typing the name of my thread in this box and clicking ADD NEW TOPIC conducts a search of the forum for the words in the title of my new thread.
Near the top of this search results screen is a line that asks me if I am sure I want to add a new thread. Scrolling all the way to the bottom I see another text box labeled FIRST COMMENT: which again I cannot type in.

I contacted the guys on the "Contact Us" button, twice, and got the "we will read this immediately" comment, but no answer.

Then I got a message from Chris Coyne asking me for feedback so I specifically asked him this question in my reply. No answer.

So I give up.

Can someone please tell me how do you post in the forum?

If you were told right at the beginning how a film was going to end, would that make it less enjoyable for you?

Would it make any difference if you knew none of the story in between, so that all you know is the ending. Would that still make it less enjoyable for you?

I suspect that for most people the answer is yes, it would make it less enjoyable to know the ending at the beginning.

Well, your life is the film with the known ending. You die.

Is it therefore any surprise that most of us seem to think our life is less interesting than it could be?

Where she is now, I cannot say -
The world has many a place of light;
Perhaps the sun's eyelashes dance
On hers, to give them both delight;
Or does she sit in some green shade,
And then the air, that lies above,
Can with a hundred pale blue eyes
Look through the leaves and find my Love?

Perhaps she dreams of life with me,
Her cheek upon her finger-tips;
O that I could leap forward now,
Behind her back, and with my lips
Break through those curls above her nape,
That hover close and lightly there-
To prove if they are substance, or
But shadows of her lovely hair.


One not very well-known fact about the one-legged Welsh poet William Davies is that his first book of poems, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp was the inspiration for the name of 1970's pop group Supertramp.

So now you know.

Huddling together and glancing out from behind one another, the hills merged into rising ground extending to the very horizon on the right of the road, and disappearing into the lilac-hued distance... Far ahead, where the sky met the earth - near some ancient burial mounds and a windmill resembling from afar a tiny man waving his arms - a broad, bright yellow band crept over the ground until suddenly the whole wide prairie flung off the penumbra of dawn, smiled and sparkled with dew...

Arctic petrels swooped over the road with happy cries, gophers called to each other in the grass, and from somewhere far to the left came the plaint of Lapwings, grasshoppers, cicadas, field crickets and mole crickets fiddled their squeaking monotonous tunes in the grass.

But time passed, the dew evaporated, the air grew still and the disillusioned steppe assumed its jaded July aspect. The grass drooped, the life went out of everything. The sunburnt hills, brown-green and - in the distance - mauvish, with their calm pastel shades, the plain, the misty horizon, the sky arching overhead and appearing so awesomely deep and transparent here in the steppe, where there are no woods or high hills - it all seemed so boundless, now, and numb with misery.


Excerpt from Ronald Hingley's translation of Chekov's "The Steppe"


Doesn't that just make you want to get up in the morning and watch the dawn?

I am an artist; I draw stuff, and sometimes if it goes well I draw several versions, pick one and paint a picture.

Sometimes, I spend a long time thinking about how to draw something, which features to leave out because they just confuse the image, which ones to accentuate because they help define the mood. This thinking phase is critical for me, and fun.

I was in the launderette, sitting by the window watching the world go by, waiting for the cycle to finish. Outside, a light rain is falling and people are wearing headscarves and overcoats, mothers are hurrying with their prams, hoping to get home before the deluge starts and umbrellas have magically appeared along the street.

Someone walks past my window, their back to me, and waits on the corner for a break in the traffic. Boots, jeans, a sheepskin coat, neat blond hair. An umbrella rolled in the left hand, ready for use.

The traffic breaks and she - I am convinced it is a woman - crosses the street and disappears round the corner.

This happened months ago, and I am still struggling to draw this simple scene in such a way that everyone else will know that the person waiting to cross the road is a woman. Without the coat it's easy, just nip in the waist a bit, give her some hips and somehow the eye just does the rest for you. But the coat confuses things since all I have to work with is the slope of her shoulder and her hair, and a tiny shadow at the base of her back.

Why do I mention this? Because I have been thinking a lot recently about what it is we notice first; another user called it in her journal, The Laws of Attraction. If my experience with the girl in the sheepskin coat is anything to go by, what we notice is not their eyes, their hands, how fat their wallet is, it is some intangible quality that defines them, an aura that contains their essential essence and conveys it to anyone prepared to look.

I find the idea that someone might be able to see my essential essence, to know me in a glance, both frightening and exhilarating.

I am asleep. In my sleep I dream that I am lying awake on my bed thinking of something. In the morning, how do I know whether I was actually asleep dreaming this, or lying on my bed thinking about it?

Simon, a friend of mine, suggested that I should get up and move something in my room. In the morning, if the object I moved is in the new position, then it wasn’t a dream because I really moved it.

Consider this:
I am lying in bed, asleep. I am dreaming. In my dream there is a glass on my dresser. Later on I wake up. I get up, take the glass from my bedside table and go to the bathroom where I drink a glass of water. Returning to my bedroom I put the glass on the dresser. Going back to bed I fall asleep. In the morning, how does the fact that the glass has moved prove that I did not dream about it?

Or consider this:
I am lying on my bed thinking about something. To take my mind off it so that I can go back to sleep, I get up, take the glass from my bedside table and go to the bathroom where I drink a glass of water. Returning to my bedroom I put the glass on the dresser. Going back to bed I fall asleep and dream about moving the glass. In the morning, how does the fact that the glass has moved prove that I did not dream about it?

In the first scenario I dreamed about something, then woke up and subconsciously made the dream come true. In the second scenario I dreamed about something I had already done. The two scenarios differ in that in the first I had what we might call a real dream, whilst in the second I had what would more commonly be called a memory. But the two scenarios agree in that they both show that the position of the glass is not determined by whether or not I dream about it. I cannot move the glass by dreaming about it, and I cannot make myself dream about it by moving the glass.

The position of the glass is ultimately determined only by the space it occupies relative to the other objects in the room. If it occupies a space on top of my bedside table, then it is on my bedside table for that reason alone and this cannot be influenced by whether or not I dream about it. This shows that Simon’s suggestion, whilst being a nice try, actually has very little to do with the original question.

Another friend said: You already know the answer, for some definition of “know”.


Hmmm.

After all the expectations of Friday morning, lunch on Saturday turned out to be something of a mystery after all. I had particularly chosen this weekend as being the closest to the full moon, as that is when mysterious happenings happen. And I was not to be disappointed. To start with, despite leaving my map at home I didn’t get lost once on the way there, so arrived about three hours earlier than intended and mysteriously found that the pub was not open.

I went for a walk in the nearby forest. Surprisingly, the weather was perfectly normal. There was no fog or mist to speak of and there were absolutely no wolves howling nearby. The sun was shining down between the trees like little searchlights, warming the almost Spring-like air so much that there were other people out walking their dogs. This was a constant reminder that I was never more than a mile from the road and I was mysteriously unable to wonder whether I might be lost in the forest forever.

It was also full daylight so there were obviously no Vampires or Werewolves about, and the fresh garlic and Wolfbane I had taken with me were thrown away unused. As I did this, I prepared for a Hobbit-like creature to emerge from a hollow tree and punish me for littering the forest, but he must have been in the village getting his paper.

I was getting rather hungry by now and found my way back to the road with absolutely no trouble at all, and mysteriously, my car started first time. I drove back to the village which, surprisingly, hadn’t moved since the morning, and found the pub was still called the Royal Sun, exactly as it had been the last time I was here. As I opened the door, which mysteriously didn’t creak, the locals didn’t turn to stare in stony silence, but just continued their conversations and completely ignored me as I took my place at the bar. But I knew it was only an act.

Just as the barmaid greeted me with a mysteriously cheery “Good morning, Sir,” something truly mysterious happened; the liver was not on the menu. That was when I knew I was on to something.

To allay suspicion, I nonchalantly ordered a Steak and Oyster Pie with Guinness gravy and a pint of Bombardier to wash it down. My food was served mysteriously quickly, so I foiled their plans by waving my solid silver paper clip over it and said incantations to ward off the evil eye. The waitress was not a hideous crone with a wart on her nose, or a ginger moustache. She was a mysteriously normal village lass wearing Levi’s and a Manchester United top. I knew she was really the sacrificial virgin due to be led to the altar in the local church at midnight on mid-Winter’s eve, and that the baby in a pushchair by the bar wasn’t really hers. I was on to them now.

After lunch I went for another long walk in the forest. Mysteriously, I wasn’t followed by a tall, dark stranger from the pub and I didn’t get myself lost just as it was getting dark and I could hear the bats fluttering in the trees. Instead, I kept running into young girls riding ponies and loving couples arm in arm. It was all so horribly normal that I was determined to get to the heart of the matter. My hopes were raised when I spotted a mysterious figure in a dark cloak with a wolf-like creature trotting by his side. On closer inspection he pretended to be a retired Colonel in his old cavalry cloak with a perfectly normal Alsatian dog. But I knew it was something they had put in my food and remained on my guard.

Despite wandering in increasingly erratic patterns through the woods I mysteriously found myself back at my car. Taking this to be an evil omen I mysteriously decided it was time to leave. The drive home was completely uneventful and I arrived home shortly after eight O’clock without having got lost on a dark, lonely moor once all day.

They think their secret’s safe, but it takes a bit more than mysterious normality to baffle a great detective like me!

I just came across a really weird question.

Which is more important in determining whether someone should be your friend?
1) Their religious beliefs.
2) Their political beliefs.
3) Neither is important.
4) Both are equally important.

I personally believe that there is no such thing as God. This means that to me all religions are patent nonsense. I would therefore find it quite difficult to be close friends with someone whose core beliefs include that mumbling under her breath to an invisible sky fairy is going to change the destination her body goes to when she dies.

So my answer to the question is obviously that religious beliefs are quite important. But I mean this in the sense that I would prefer my perfect match not have any religious beliefs.

A fervent Methodist, however, might also say that she thinks religious beliefs are important to her ability to make friends, so she and I would, in the weird logic of OkCupid, compute as a perfect match even though we actually have diametrically opposed views on the subject.

Ain't life bizarre?

I live in a university town, and one of the things I like about that is the way that it attracts people from all over the world. We have students here from Latvia and Peru, Lithuania and Vietnam, New Zealand and quite possibly New Guinea. This diversity is echoed in our culture with impromptu parties with street theatre, in public barbeques to which each nation is invited to bring their own contribution, in our economy with a diversity of restaurants and specialist food shops selling weird and wonderful things to try.

I appreciate this and like meeting the foreign students to talk to them about their homeland and the things they find interesting or surprising about us. The world really is getting smaller and this is for the most part a heart-warming and welcome development.

But embracing other people’s cultures has its downsides too.

We do not really go in for barter in Britain; the price in the shop is the price you pay and if you can't afford it you wait for the New Year sales or save up or something, but bartering is not an option most of us would consider.

In some countries it is considered almost an insult not to barter with the shopkeeper before buying. I bought a ring in a Turkish bazaar that I spent two days bartering for, and both the shopkeeper and I had a wonderful time and drank much coffee haggling light heartedly over the pittance I was going to spend. In the film The English Patient, Ralph Fiennes tells Kristin Scott Thomas that the rug she bought was not worth eight pounds and she should have bartered for it. "It is to me," she says, as though that settled it.

Near me there is a Pakistani grocers that sells a wide and rotating selection of speciality beers, the sort of thing not normally found in Tesco's or Sainsburys. Each beer is usually only there for a couple of weeks to be replaced by something else. I enjoy popping in there a couple of times a week and buying a bottle or two of something new. Most of them are pretty samey, with nothing to distinguish them from any other beer I might have tried, but occasionally there is one with a new or interesting flavour. Three weeks ago I found one of those. Two bottles at £1.09 each.

They were so nice that the next day I went back to get a couple more. This time I was served by the shopkeeper himself (it had been the wife the first time) and he charged me £1.69 for them. I pointed out that they had been only £1.09 the previous day but he stuck to his guns, they are £1.69 each. I decided that they weren't that nice and went to leave. He rushed around the counter and intercepted me at the door, and grabbing my arm he pulled me (good naturedly) back into the shop.

So we stood there in the doorway, with the fans blowing cool air through my hair, which was a blessed relief from the heatwave we've been having recently, and we haggled over the price of a beer. He eventually accepted that his wife had charged me £1.09 the previous day and agreed to sell them to me at that price.

A couple of days later I was back in the beer shop, but the previous choice was no longer available and I had to choose something else. It didn't occur to me right away as being anything more than a coincidence that it was £1.09 a bottle.

Since then I have been back several times and chosen three or four different beers, and each time, no matter who serves me, the price is exactly £1.09 per bottle. The shopkeeper is obviously under the illusion that I have bartered with him that beer is £1.09 a bottle, whereas I only ever meant it to apply to the original brand.

This presents me with something of a problem. My basic honesty suggests that I should try to explain to the shopkeeper that he has misunderstood the situation. This does obviously run the risk that he will only imperfectly understand my explanation so making the situation potentially worse rather than better.

On the other hand, my predilection for embracing the rich diversity of other cultures in our community should empower me to accept the consequences, whether they be good or bad, and the fact that on this occasion they just happen to be good for me is nothing more than one of life's intriguing coincidences.