You can get a sprayer hose, like you find in some kitchen sinks, attached to your toilet’s water supply and use that as a bidet instead. This is pretty common in most of the Middle East, and honestly once I lived with one I could never go back. They’re even better in America, because unlike the Middle East, most of…

The only time this happened to me, I was actually grateful. I had lured a bunch of friends to a restaurant lunch by promising that I would pay the tip for everybody. Of course, and hour later and with 4 different split checks on the table, I’d forgotten my promise, and nobody else had. So I put down 20% for my tab,…

No one cares about your thoughts about the movie, Cynthia.

My mother still tells me about all the times she didn’t get to eat a restaurant meal because I started acting up and she had to take me to sit in the car until I shut up. Clearly I wasn’t a perfect angel at all times. However, my parents actually parented me so that the impact of my shittiness wasn’t felt by every…

You make an interesting, and I think true, point. I feel like the days of large numbers of really ill-behaved kids are behind us, not because parents have gotten any better at doing their jobs, but because now they can just whip out an iphone and render their kids comatose when they get restless.

Right? The fact that farmers have one of the highest suicide rates of any profession in America isn’t a coincidence. It’s a really hard life, and it’s disrespectful to ignore that.

He’s making hay from the fact that Blagojevich is a Democrat. Since he sees the world as only us-vs.-them, he assumes that we won’t be mad about the corruption as long as the benefits of the corruption are distributed “fairly.”

I got to the part where you claimed that Democrats “sold women down the river this year,” meaning THIS year, the year with more women running for elected office than ever before, most of whom are Democrats, before I could go no further.

Elections have consequences, and when an engaged electorate brings high turnout, those consequences can be great.

I’m just wondering how many of his own fans he’s going to have to make really uncomfortable in a face-to-face situation before choosing to recognize that it’s ill-advised and barely qualifies as a joke. On the one hand, it’s not his job to make anyone particularly comfortable, but it’s definitely not his job to be…

In all seriousness, before the invention of the first plastics, a lot of things that we now make out of plastic were made of ivory - not in the sense that these things were single-use or disposable, but that they could be dyed a lot of bright colors and the material was malleable enough to be made into almost any…

Has anyone checked to make sure that sinkhole on the White House lawn isn’t just a shoddily-dug shallow grave? I’m just spitballing, but that’s my first bet.

I mean, it seems to me that it presents a perfect teachable moment to talk to your child about washing your hands thoroughly at regular intervals and especially before meals (do you make her eat pizza with a knife and fork, too, to avoid getting “a day’s worth of accumulated grunge” on it?), but you do you.

Getting your clothes from the mall like every other 99%-er American is bad, but the way to absolve that sin is by stealing a designer’s intellectual property? No “skilled craftsman” worth the name would participate in that nonsense, and your moral compass is broken.

A villanelle is a poetic form, philistine.

Not only Meaghan - surely Kate is going to cut ties now, too.

Apparently she was very involved!

While, as the article notes, there ARE jobs available for people with poor work history, there probably aren’t that many jobs for people whose first result on a quick Googling of their name by, say, a hiring manager, turns up this little story.

Protecting oneself from obviously unsatisfactory situations doesn’t make one shallow, Catherine.

Right? And it’s so casually insidious. I found this at issue in a recent Dr. Nerdlove article, of all things: He was counselling a late-20's guy who is a virgin and freaking out about it. “You being a virgin is one data point about you,” the Dr. said. “Any girl who can’t handle that you’re still a virgin? That tells…