Except it’s not illegal to travel with kids not your own, so they can’t require proof that you are before you can travel. If they are so concerned about abduction, they should require passports, which can be matched to the child, instead of birth certificates, which can’t be matched to the child, just the parents. But…

A) They clearly state that it’s about making sure they’re young enough to ride free, not abduction, and a passport is sufficient to establish age.

Because pretty much everyone has birth certificates for their children under two, but not many people have passports for them. Since a birth certificate is required to get a passport, the person with the passport is effectively providing a birth certificate.

I used to vacuum my cat Pixel. That was not the most eccentric thing about him. It’s really hard to say what was, but I’d say that his habit of running up the stairs ahead of guests when they went to use the bathroom so that he could leap onto the toilet and use it first while they watched ranked near the top. If our…

I hear you, and I think online anonymity has emboldened a lot of terrible people to be more open about how terrible they are. However, a lot of people who aren’t straight white men really value the ability to participate in public forums without being identified as female, queer, or dark-skinned, precisely because…

https://www.amazon.com/Its-Little-Things-Everyday-Interactions/dp/0156013487 turns up a lot at the used bookstore across the street where I organize the shelves a couple of hours a week in exchange for a stack of books. I usually grab it and throw it on the stack of random free box books that I’m constantly picking…

I can still remember the first time I saw an ad before a movie in a theater, which was after I drove for an hour at 20 miles an hour over ice to see Brazil at the one theater in the DC area where it was playing for one week. It was a prettily animated Snickers ad that you could not identify as an ad until right at…

So in other words, you deliberately provoked them into falsely accusing you so that you could get them fired. Very classy.

Having to scan 10 identical yogurts or cans of cat food one at a time, putting each one down before scanning the next, is incredibly fucking annoying.

I explicitly asked the manager where I go, and she said, “yep.”

The shittier people’s labor rights, wages, and infrastructure are, they more easily they can rationalize criminal behavior against the institutions that they perceive as oppressing them. That is why Trump’s supporters wouldn’t care if he shot someone on 5th Avenue.

Oh, it’s not my theory. Political scientists have been writing about how the right’s been working the refs ever since the rise of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. By constantly screaming about liberal bias, they’ve gotten the so-called media to treat Republicans with kid gloves. The things the media report about Trump are…

So does working for minimum wage in any job.

A barista who refused to serve a police officer would not be doing their job, and therefore would deserve to be fired. A barista who silently served police officers coffee while wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt would not deserve to get fired if the officers were offended by it.

What is the right place and time, exactly?

I think approximately half of the tweets I wrote during the campaign that were not about cats were some variant on “the Tea Party didn’t turn the GOP towards fascism by turning up their noses and refusing to engage with it.”

Every #notallmen guy who gets indignant about women feeling like they need to protect themselves from all men until they actually get to know them needs to pay attention to just how common it is for women to be sexually harassed and abused by men who they actually know quite well.

The Republicans have put more effort into working the refs than developing their game ever since Newt Gingrich became Speaker, which doesn’t require them to actually play the game, but merely prevent the other team from playing. Because they do not need to govern, because they do not have any principles beyond …

The Republicans have put more effort into working the refs than developing their game ever since Newt Gingrich became Speaker. Because they have never had any principles beyond a single-minded devotion to totally unregulated capitalism, which doesn’t require them to actually play the game, but merely prevent the other…