I love how the awfulness is accentuated by the bad writing. "Significant female other" is a rather telling turn of phrase.

Danger! danger! [en.wikipedia.org]

Yeah, NAFTA solves that problem neatly. Free trade: obviating the need for official invasions since the East India Company's heyday.

I think that most scientists exploring current and potential future impacts of climate change are keenly aware that that many of the world's major population centres are in areas particularly vulnerable to the ill-imacts of climate change, and that in most of those centres, the majority are people who, being already…

Probably. I'm in Canada and there are huge stretches of the country where abortion isn't available (PEI, most of the norther territories, almost any rural area), so it's the same sort of dynamic - people who live in well-served areas or who can afford to drive/fly down for a long weekend are fine; people who can't…

I think that part of the idea would be to have young people have their children when they have the most support (lots of peers in similar situations, parents who live in the same city, parenting classes throughout high-school). Many wouldn't be great parents, but at least they wouldn't be expected to be. People…

Exactly. I don't think that most people discuss the matter directly (and now, I will try to conceive!), so we only ever hear of people's attempts once they have successfully conceived, or, if they are very close friends, once they become alarmed after more than a year of trying. Why would anyone know the monthly odds?…

Yeah - I get that it's an important option to promote, but there are lots of potential problems with it. Proselytizers seem not to realize that women don't all have the exact same life-style, the exact same values, or the exact same vagina.

Agreed! Pizza is a dish, It's only unhealthy in the sense that soup is healthy.

The thing about the "vague, subjective, slippery" words that she complains about, though, is that they are trying to pin down a phenomenon that is often terrifying *because* it is are vague, subjective, and slippery.

Pretty much this.

As much as I think that Q'orianka Kilcher should be cast in just about everything because she is an awesome actor (and activist!) (seriously Hollywood, get to it!), she doesn't seem right for the part to me. She has a very particular kind of beauty (ethereal is a cheesy word, but probably apt) that just doesn't fit…

I find menstrual cups very painful to use. It was a huge relief to officially give up trying and go back to tampons and cloth pads.

I will have to look into that; ob redesigned their tampons to include crap plastic lining.

Awesome fun fact: some Russian fairy-tales actually have the step-mother as the good one, helping the daughter outwit curses left on them by their mothers before dying in childbirth, or curses indirectly related to their birth mothers.

And this is why I sleep with the lights on.

So agreed. I have been fat and skinny (and fat, and skinny, and fat, etc. and anything in between too) and obviously it's not as if thinness made everything easier or canceled any of my serious problems out. Depression, illness, grief, all sucked at both ends. But when I was fat, I had the added bonus of having people…

Agreed. While I would rather see all kinds of real bodies being modelled, at least this photo is of the model's actual body, not of some smoothed out, impossible, boneless + even skinned dream.

Same thing here. I have rolls of fat on my hips and thighs, but you can still count the ribs. I would have to become very, very overweight for them to (possibly?) disappear. It runs in the family - my grandfather had a huge beer-gut, and ribs. I think that it's just a skelleton-shape thing.

Same thing here. My weight has gone up and down over my life, from unhealthily skinny when I was a teenager with disordered eating to having fat rolls on my hips and thighs... and I've always had ribs that you could count. It's weird that ribs (rather than any of the other things that go first) are seen as the sign of…