I don’t know if this is a universal white/middle class thing, but my mother, who was not a good cook anyway, would reach whole new heights of vileness with her pork chops. To be fair to her, the regular grocery-store chops were cut way too thin to really do anything with. But it didn’t help that she made them the same…

Right? I LIVED in Prague for nine months, and have gone back several times since, and the only proof I’ve ever been there is the Visa Applied For stamp I got when I applied for a long-term visa (which I never got). If I’d never put in that application, there would be no proof I’d ever been there.

From this episode of Dr. Nerdlove, I learned that nobody on earth has actual nice friends and SO’s except me.

Heads up, the letter writer IS a cis male (and it doesn’t have to be all-caps - it’s not an acronym). He’s also straight - his experience with trans women does not change that. S (and you) may have to adjust your internal definitions of “straight” in light of this information, but that doesn’t making him not a cis…

Funny you mention the machine being broken. At one point, there were only three green card printing machines in my region, and two of them broke, so the regional backlog went from a few months to more than a year before a technician could come in to fix the damn things.

Not that that doesn’t also happen. I work in immigration and we get people in our office all the time who have been approved but have been awaiting their green cards and/or green card renewals for so long that their employment is in jeopardy.

Sorry, I’m not accepting serious immigration insight from anybody who can’t figure out how to use a possessive apostrophe.

I read something today that said that there are now enough jobs going in America for every unemployed person to have one. That statement was unclarified, but assuming it means “every unemployed person who is otherwise able to work and looking to do so,” it leads to the question of who is going to FILL all these jobs…

That’s the thing that gets me every time I read about Trump’s immigration “policies,” (more like whims, shower thoughts, ideas had while squeezing one out on the can). He says he wants to limit immigration to exemplary, qualified professional people. But he also wants to limit “chain” migration. What professional…

The Democratic party isn’t responsible for the state having an economy built on a single nonrenewable resource, nor for the advancements made in natural gas extraction, nor the resulting worldwide decline in coal prices.

This is the part that so frustrating. It’s not the impoverished women with no education who make the best decisions they can with only bad choices to choose from - it’s the people who definitely have the wherewithal to know better (politicians, doctors, administrators, etc.) who stubbornly stick to their principles…

Exactly. The only person this hirer is going to be hiring this way is the person who can think quickly on their feet, specifically who can spin a lie that the hirer wants to hear in a millisecond. Tailoring one’s resume to the job being offered is standard stuff - and usually involves a hefty dose of spin to make the…

When I was in Czech Republic I was confronted with raw pork products for the first time. I ate it, of course - it’s not my favorite, it didn’t seem to have any flavor. The fact is that almost anything most people eat cooked, someone, somewhere, is eating it raw, and mostly it’s fine.

I believe I heard once that the royals do this so no one will be able to flog a toilet seat they’ve used, which frankly makes some sense to me. Yes, it’s tawdry and a bit gross when someone could try to get £20 for a used napkin with your lipstick stain on it, but there’s something particularly unsettling about…

Cyborgs don’t exist.

It might- it was a relatively untested construction method. But it’s more likely that there were multiple points of failure to make this happen.

Time is just the hardest thing in the universe to wrap your head around. I mean, if you think about it, it’s weird that a single human being who made butter by hand and traveled across the country in an ox-drawn wagon also saw us drop an atomic bomb. But then, at the same time Ma was getting a log dropped on her leg…

Yeah, I didn’t mention it before, but the power to be able to prepare and eat a meal that someone who isn’t desperately sick might be willing to eat even when you are desperately sick is a really valuable feeling.

I’ve come up with a few depression-meals that are tasty, really quick and easy, and don’t take many tools or dishes to prepare.