No problem, though I can't be of much use.

Definitely a big issue. Plus, even if you could conceivably save the amount up and plan to recoup on future pads not bought, you can't tell if they will work for you until after you have tried them. So you could be out the money and still need to buy pads.

Ouch! Good luck to you fingers.

We are!

Ultimately, that's my motivation too. I don't particularly like my name (associated with lovely people, but ugly-sounding), but it's my name, people have been calling me by it for a long time, and using someone else's would feel like participating in an elaborate and ongoing masquerade.

I'm not morally opposed to all name changes, although I would never change my own name (more on this below). Still there is a good case to be made against current naming norms, for several reasons:

Very well said - people who do terrible things can also go on to do good things; he is in prison and can't hurt anyone now (which is a good thing) but that doesn't mean that his entire existence should be reduced until he is nothing more than a cautionary tale.

At the time when they made the transition to disgusting perfumed plastic (why? why?), pads were the only menstrual product that I could use. I tried every brand on the market and never bought anouther Always pad, but never found anything that worked as well as the old design.

"Terrorist sends small-pox instead of chicken-pox, disease spreads among pox-party attendees, doctors confounded by unfamiliar new disease and miss their chance to contain the epidemic" was my first thought as well. Issues!

I'm actually pretty ambivalent about the vaccine, and would seriously consider exposing children of mine to the virus.

You are correct, only people who have had chicken pox get shingles (the virus stays latent in your cells, it's a close relative of herpes). However, not all people who have had chicken pox go on to get shingles, and there is a lot to suggest that people who are continually exposed to the virus after the first…

The chicken pox vaccine is one of the few vaccines that I would consider not giving my (still hypothetical) children. Chicken pox can be a very serious disease, and shingles is a real risk for people who have had chicken pox. I would jump on any vaccine that could actually prevent these diseases. But since you can't…

I want to move to this utopia.

I wouldn't call this bad science (if anything, it's bad reporting). Bodies are complicated, alcoholic beverages are complicated, the interaction between the two is bound to be more-so. It's entirely conceivable that drinking should be beneficial in some ways and harmful in others.

I think that studies like this one are useful - they aren't trying to pinpoint a cause (there isn't one!) as much as they are trying to understand how different factors come together, and interact, to foster cancer/cause it/affect people's ability to heal/etc.

It seems that we've come full circle....

Yeah - I love community gardens and urban agriculture, and think that it's important for schools to provide healthy lunches and that it would be great if these could be made with local foods where possible... but school gardens just seem like a ridiculously implausible idea. No one is there to eat half of the crops…

Yes - you would think that most people in the US were white with pale blue or pale green eyes. Which are lovely combinations, but it quickly becomes weird when it's so over-represented.

Yes - I've seen this a few times and it really perplexes me. My brown-eyed brother is married to a blue-eyed woman, and people at their wedding (from both her side and his) were calculating the odds that they would have blue-eyed children. With hope! Because they might! My brown-eyed ex's family also tried to explain…

I think that it's possible depending on personality (avoiding conflict at all cost? me? never!) and why you split. I recently broke up after a long (but unmarried) relationship, and it was amicable. I also know a few couples who divorced on friendly terms. In all of those cases, it's definitely not a happy affair -…