John Oliver is one of my own age-inappropriate crushes. He's exactly my type — snarky, nerd-cute, and intolerant of bullshit. The British accent is just frosting!

Holy shit. The ice-bucket promotion was meant to raise funding for research on a terrible, disabling, deadly disease. It was not meant to trigger terrible, disabling, deadly accidents.

That might explain it. I last flew Air NZ in 2011.

Some of these guys must have been John Cleese fans.

Add some mustard. It works!

Could be counterintuitive, but once you reach your destination, you might not want to rush out. I live about two hours from the nearest reasonably functional airport, and take shuttles between my small city and the airport. Last time I deplaned there, I would have (a) had to run like hell to make my 7 pm shuttle, (b)…

Wow, I've flown AirNZ several times, and they've probably provided my best flying experiences ever. And, not being rich, I fly coach.

Makes me glad that I'm too short to recline. A reclined airline seat fits my 5'2" frame very badly, so that position really hurts my back. I'm much more comfortable with the seat completely up. Plus, for a bonus, someone reclining in front of me usually has room to do so without smacking me with the seat.

They might be seasoned with meat products, which would explain their unsuitability for vegetarians. Wasn't there an issue of meat-derived seasonings on fast food fries a few years back? As I recall, most or all fast food places stopped using any form of meat on their fries, but maybe not on everything.

I don't understand what "Abe" was getting at. First he implied that the restaurant had vegan options and that they sounded good to him. Then he seems to complain that they only wanted to serve him meat. Did he leave out something important?

A former co-worker of Mr. Sububi grew up in Delhi and is a vegetarian, and she showed me how to make a similar "gravy" by finely chopping or partially pureeing spiced cooked greens and other vegetables. I'm an utter pushover for saag dishes, whether or not they also contain meat, so I was in total sauce heaven after…

I really hate baked beans, but I can choke them down if they're doused with mustard. I learned that trick from my uncle. How and why he came up with it, I have no idea.

We had a friend from India who liked to put salt and pepper on plums. My mother always sprinkled a little salt on her plums, so only the pepper was a novelty for me. I thought it was pretty good, actually.

Despite my overwrought love of ranch dressing as a dip, I actually never bother putting it on salads. A few years back, Mr. Sububi and I traveled in Italy for a few weeks, and I had the best salads of my life there — usually just two or three different vegetables, but very fresh, and always served only with oil,…

My dad used to like ketchup in his CHICKEN SOUP. I think I tried it once. Absolutely horrifying.

I had some hormonal/metabolic problems in my early 40s that caused me to get really cold easily, especially at night, so my husband used to warm up my side of the bed with a hair dryer just before I got into it. The thing is, every hair dryer I've ever had would switch itself off upon overheating. How did those people…

I'd love to pile on to both Pepper Guy and the Ranch People, but I have to admit that I could probably eat a floor mop if it were soaked in ranch dressing and encrusted with black pepper. (Only a clean floor mop, though. A dirty one would be gross.)

I've only eaten rabbit once, in an Italian restaurant in Boston some years back. It was okay, although I found it much less interesting than most of the other dishes I'd eaten in the same place.

In my mid-twenties, I worked for a small independent engineering lab that had lots of both short-term and long-term clients. I was a specialty technician, and got to know a lot of our repeat clients well because they would work side-by-side with me in the lab to get their projects done.

I have to admit to occasionally stirring my coffee with inappropriate instruments, both in public and in private. Addiction is like that. :-)