Best summary I’ve read all day.

And in small quantities, it plays a mysterious and crucial role in recipes for weird not-even-spicy things like creamed spinach and slaw dressing. Maybe it’s because it’s what I grew up on, but even if it’s not the only game in town Tabasco still has a place in my heart.

The Gospel According to St. Alton Brown: “Imagine a flower. A climbing orchid, to be exact; the one of some twenty thousand varieties that produces something edible. Now imagine that its blooms must be pollinated either by hand or a small variety of Mexican bee, and that each bloom only opens for one day a year. Now…

Until then, we wear it like a badge of ... oh, who am I kidding?

It always is a puzzle to me how right-wingers give a pass to flag bikinis.

I feel your pain! But at least for me the weird thing is I never feel quite at home in a blue state. We must be destined to be members of the opposition—at least until the pendulum swings back, godspeed the day.

This is so accurate it made my skin crawl remembering my own grad school days, in the mid-80s, sadly, since that means nothing has really changed. And the whole thing has (or had) such a creepy veneer of gentility about it. It was enough to send me fleeing far from that corner of academia.

Ugh, I know! And they kept insisting that Christians were being oppressed even though the campus pastors all got together and wrote a letter saying no, the administration was totally supportive and appropriate. STUPID LEGISLATURE.

One of the high-end department stores where I live has them in a separate building, along with children’s and men’s clothes. I’ve complained bitterly about it and boycott them (with occasional desperate exceptions).

The most effective PSA on this I’ve seen yet.

East Tennessean here too, and when the legislature is in session my blood pressure probably stays about 30 points up. I’ve honestly never seen a bigger bunch of idiots in my life. My nominee for stupidest bill of the current bunch is one that would defund UT’s diversity office and redirect the money to print stickers…

From what I’ve seen it’s the people who live extravagantly, not the ones who are wildly generous, who end up wanting.

Yeah, his plan is absolutely a flat-tax variant. The postcard thing really is odd—they’re usually so dead literal about stuff, and “index card” just adds a single syllable. Maybe they see index cards as the province of their enemy the lefty intelligentsia.

Thanks for this report, scary as it is. The postcard thing is especially mystifying. For starters, are we seriously supposed to put our social security number on a postcard and put it in the mail?

Yeah, I’ve never forgiven her for that either.

I agree—and I once rushed a suddenly-screaming-in-agony preverbal toddler to the ER for what turned out to be a pair of tight shoes. I laugh about it now (hell, I laughed about it then) but I’ve never been more thankful to be wrong, and I would do the same thing again in a heartbeat.

I have a twisted friend who at hotels or Airbnb places always steams up the bathroom mirror and writes HELP ME or REDRUM or something in hopes it will show up for someone later and creep them out. So maybe it was just him.

This cat fails on all levels.

I know I am replying to this post far after the fact, but after my Mini Cooper S incurred about $4k in repairs with fewer than 80,000 miles, I sent emails to a bunch of BMW North America execs, and after some phone calls and correspondence, got a refund of $2,500. So maybe take another route than the usual customer…

Dammit, where is a video of Marshall Chapman singing “Turn the Page” when you need one?