PrivateTim

Gunn is good for a public school, but still doesn't have the kind of programs and achievements that a school like The Menlo School does. The world and the circumstances of the Schluter/Crampton families have changed since Brad, Claire & Jack were in school. Kids from families with that kind of wealth just do not go to public schools in CA.

I can see John Sr. and Claire not letting Darius slide like he did in Malibu, but I've always thought of Claire as also very level headed and I don't see her being stressed over pre-school. I don't see her and John sending their kids to public school though; not with as bad as CA schools have become the last 20 years, I definitely see them sending John Jr to The Menlo School to give their kids the best possible education and a place where he would be challenged and pushed. I see Claire more like the Tiger Mom, Amy Chua, strict, but not obsessive.

Hippo Birdie Two Ewes!!

I dunno, Will seems to be doing okay so far andas to the rape of Will, if that is what you can call it when you are the inserter and not the insertee, he seems to have not minded his attacker all that much. I get it is a fine line to walk and Mark is walking it carefully, but Will did have an attraction to his captor. Will thought him "handsome", had a "shockwave" go through his body, his appearance was "engaging", his kisses "intoxicating" and Will "began to trust him." So I suspect Will will not be overly scarred, or at least not by the sexual encounter, and I think the handsome, engaging young man with the intoxicating kisses will turn out to be more good than bad.

And of course you forgot Thomas Magnum..... He had two "buddies", a porn star mustache if ever there was one, he lived with an older man, got to drive the older man's expensive sports car around and he was in the US Navy.

Umm, couldn't he have been so normal you didn't know he was gay? Like Dumbledore?

Did you miss the other thread James? It is already an ongoing topic.

Not sure that 4th grade soccer is the same as Division 1 in Germany, England, Spain, etc. Basketball is pushing, like girls do. An elbow swung and connected is usually an ejection or a fight starter, you don't see them very often. Soccer has much more severe physical contact because it usually happens at top speeds with lots of room to run. Every corner kick. even at lower levels like a top high school or college game, is closer to a wrestling match than 'futbol'. A clean violent collision in soccer is just that, a clean violent collision. Every clean violent collision in basketball is a foul, usually flagrant or intentional, drawing a stiffer penalty. You can compare the low post in basketball to soccer, it isn't even a close call.

Soccer is much more physical than basketball.

Indoor football plays an intense bone crushing game in a small space. Football, indoor and out is often about man on man play as is soccer. Tripping is soccer can draw you a yellow or red card very easily and it is a big focus for the officials. Ditto for football, lots of blocks have been removed from the sport and were removed in one season. Gone are crack-back blocks, hi-lo blocks, rolling blocks, trips and many other behaviors. Football is certainly every bit as physical ice hockey, but fights are rare because they are not tolerated. No one makes excuses for them. "Nuts" are certainly not fair game in water polo and can draw a brutality ejection that will leave your team a man down for the entire game if the official deems it bad enough. Ditto for a punch thrown in water polo, if it lands you are almost certain to draw a major brutality and have your team play a man down the rest of the game so no one does it, or seldom does it. They are plenty of other ways for payback so you don't punch or kick in retaliation as a reaction, you mark it down mentally and wait until you are swimming back down the pool and the refs attention is someplace else. Maybe you didn't pay attention to the NFL last season and see all the fines and players set down for the high hits and unnecessary hits. You probably won't see any this coming season because coaches won't tolerate an individual hurting the team through stupidity. The other difference is that clips are seldom an intentional act, they happen through poor timing and techique, if the official thought the clip was deliberate and otherwise vicious, they can eject the player and you can be sure the league would further fine or suspend the player. Fighting is always a choice and intentional. No one throws a punch accidentially. To say "Fighting is part of the game" followed immediately by. "It is not condoned" is contratictory. As long as people say "it is part of the game" it is being condoned. Other sports have cleaned up their acts, I still think it is time the NHL did likewise.

Can't believe there were two guys in a bar smoking......

If that were true, they would allow fighting at all levels and it seems to me it really only proliferates at the NHL level.

Cams were around but they were not ubiquitous because so few households had high speed Internet, you needed a minimum of a 128k connection and 256k was better. At a dial-up modem you didn't see motion per se but snapshots. As bandwidth cost dropped and cable companies upped their speed, the cams became very common to the point now I would say everyone below 30 has a cam. Oh please HS gay boys and HS girls experience heart break every 24 seconds. It is a proven scientific fact.....

I can't think of any other sport that at its highest levels tolerates fighting. Guys hit just as had in the NFL yet fights are rare. Baseball is famous for its brawls but you only have a few of those every season and lots of players get suspended and fined when they do. So why does the NHL tolerate it? I can't imagine they allow fighting in high school hockey. Throwing a punch in high school water polo or wrestling would get you banned for the season in CA. Two red cards in water polo and you are done for the season. p.s. and when a ref steps in, if you didn't back off in baseball, football, etc, if you touched the ref, you'd be done for the season with huge fines.

But of course in private chats in 1994 you had no way of knowing if that other "15 year old with a swimmer's build and the 8 incher" was 15 or 50, swimmer's build or building build and 8 or 4 1/2. Not until the Internet got fast enough for cam to cam chats could you be sure who you were talking to. That wasn't until maybe 2004 or so at the earliest. I know it seems like high speed Internet has been around for ever now, but it wasn't ubiquitous until just recently.

I think the big difference in the older generation of gays and the newer generation is that when I was 14 in 1991 you had very limited places and ways to meet guys. You couldn't cam, a simple pic took 3 minutes to download and you really didn't have cheap digital cams yet so you had to take a pic, get it developed and then scanned so the opportunity for "those" kind of pics was limited..... that started to change pretty rapidly, but even so QuickCams weren't practical until 1999 when the prices dropped and Internet speeds became faster so you could use a cam and then there were the gay sites or gay chat rooms like AOL, and gay.com, PlanetOut, etc... Okay, the point is, when I was 14, it was hard to find random hook-ups even if you wanted them, guys who are that age now have never known a time when they couldn't explore their sexuality online. Will & John are on the cusp of that wave. Hooking up when you could has always been high in the gay community, but it my day it was limited by how to meet guys. That limitation no longer exists for a lot of gay boys.

Amongst our criticisms are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms...... No? Okay, seriously I usually go the "really loved the story, but here are parts that didn't work work for me."

I dunno, that room in Malibu scares the poop outta me.... I think I will keep my hands off Mark's Pensive.

Only Authors ought to have ratings, or at least visible ratings and you should only rate stories, not chapters and you only get to rate a story once. I've been doing all I can to get Dom's numbers up because he isn't active right now and hasn't been active since the switchover to the new system. Because there isn't a lot of activity on the Dom Forums a newbie might not consider the Dom stories unless he sees the stories liked a lot or authors rating high. We actually have three rating systems here, the "like", the stars and the + and - and I still don't understand which is the most important or which matters if someone looks for the "most popular" stories on GA.

Uh, I was 12 in 1989, 14 in 1991. I didn't start going to clubs until the summer of '95 and the hot songs were Gangsta Paradise, Total Eclipse of the Heart, Waterfalls, Another Night. Ultra Nate and Black Box were hot, I think Cher had a big hit that summer or the next. That was also about when I started raving, although I did go to one or two after water polo ended my senior year. I didn't really care about swimming that much. When I was younger I loved everything Disney, country, beach stuff (Beach Boys, Dick Dale), my parents stuff like James Taylor, Billy Joel etc. Also because of my families long association with Hawaii I had a lot of Hawaiian artists. About once a month two to four families from our church with kids my age would come over for a pot luck and music night. Two of the guys played guitar and we had percussion instruments and we'd sing a mix of Cat Stevens, Simon and Garfunkle, Billy Joel, etc.

Danny Pintauro when I was 8 or 9. And then Leo Dicaprio when I was in jr high.

Yeah I am thinking the kid that was playing Pokemon winds up being a jihadist and comes face to face with Will in Afghanistan.......

Mmmm, a lot of the guys we've seen get ruined by California had big plans and dreams to be lawyers or doctors or other professional choices and they lost their way. I wouldn't call Gathan "street smart", he is from Claremont, a city not unlike Youngstown, or maybe not even that big, maybe Upper Arlington, not Cleveland or Columbus. He may not be a farm boy, but neither is he big city boy. It is easy to be seduced by power and wealth. The point we are making is how many "squared away" kids we've seen get messed up by influences in CA. L.A. has movie stars and rock stars, Palo Alto, Mountain View, etc have Internet and technology stars whose power and wealth is every bit as seductive as any Hollywood producer.

But I guess it is.