Yup. For one student, images of rape might trigger PTSD, but for another, it might be war, and for a third, car accidents. And besides PTSD, there are people who have severe phobias. There's a huge spectrum of possible triggers out there.

What part of "47" do they not understand?

Mr. Sububi once pulled off an extremely nerdy prank in a former workplace. I was actually the one who came up with the idea, but was astounded when he actually went ahead and did it.

Anyone who pays $100,000 for a purse is clearly too stupid to live. And should probably be fed to an alligator.

I received one of these messages. I do not have, nor have I ever had, a baby. But the biggest shock was that I don't remember ever registering as a user of Shutterfly.

I don't like s'mores either. I thought they were okay when I was a kid, but I've completely lost my already-minimal taste for marshmallow anything. The last time I took a bite of a s'more, about 20 years ago, it pretty much refused to go down. I somehow managed to swallow it without throwing up, and then gave the rest…

It could have been worse. Paula Prentiss's less famous (but also an actress) sister Ann tried to hire someone to bump off Paula's husband, the actor-director Richard Benjamin. Ann Prentiss died in prison some years later. Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin have remained married, apparently happily, for over 50 years.

There are ghouls who troll funeral announcements. Usually it's to find out when the family will be at the funeral, so that they can burglarize their homes with relative impunity. It's possible some equally loathsome idiot just decided it would be a load of laughs to harass a newly widowed foreigner.

I once ate part of a scorpion embedded in a sugar-free candy lollipop. The scorpion was the tastiest part of the whole thing, and that's really not saying much.

I've met plenty of the Brother Dean Lite ilk. They are only convinced of their own righteousness when they are mocked and subjected to abuse for their faith. In order to ensure that they are mocked and subjected to abuse, they compete to see who can exploit their faith to offend and annoy the largest number of people…

A 7-year-old Ruby would be very surprised that I didn't have a whole bunch of kids. (I wasn't especially interested in babies, EVER, but when I was little I thought that's what most grownups did.)

WTF would have happened if someone else was carrying a concealed and loaded firearm in the restaurant, mistook these "protesters" for armed robbers, and decided to be the good guy with a gun? At which point, of course, the idiots outside the restaurant would assume that THEY were the good guys with guns. Presto: A…

I would have guessed 6 or 7, not 11.

I've got an idea for a sandwich. It's peanut butter, mild salsa, and chocolate syrup on a fried fish fillet stuffed with ground beef, capers, and marshmallows. Then you top it off with one of those little strawberry candies with the squishy stuff inside, and serve it with a little cup of lukewarm boxed Merlot for…

Connecticut has had tremendous problems with inequality since long before everyone else started to worry about it. If you combine the suburban residents who want to leave because they're sick of upperclass one-upmanship and the urban residents who want to leave because their neighborhoods look like burned-out war…

In the first two programming classes I took (obviously some years back) we used Pascal, which was a popular first language at the time. We were taught to make our code as self-documenting as possible; for example, if your variable represented interest, you called it "interest". I then took an introductory course in C,…

I agree that locusts would probably taste weird with honey, but fried grasshoppers (chapulines) with hot sauce are pretty amazing. I was lucky enough to be in Mexico City during chapulin season, in the company of some people who knew a restaurant that did a good job with them. I think the hoppers had been fried in…

I am SO over this species.

I'm really glad I don't watch this show. My uterus and ovaries had to be removed because of intractable endo. It wasn't a huge emotional deal to lose those organs — I wasn't actually using them for anything — but it was a truly unpleasant and sometimes debilitating disease that slowed me down at a point in my life…

Seriously. People were complaining about the book being read by 15-year-olds because it mentioned masturbation?