I think NZ has one venomous animal — a spider in the widow family — and one venomous plant, which is a kind of tree nettle. But as I recall, neither is likely to actually kill you. Can any actual Kiwis here confirm or deny?

Nothing wrong with enjoying both the taste and the alcohol buzz of your favorite beer. Caffeine sort of works the same way. It’s possible to get a better-than-passable decaf in some places, but some large percentage of us coffee drinkers want our brew to both taste good and wake us up.

Where did he get Quaaludes in 2001? He must have had them smuggled in from overseas, because otherwise they’d have been a couple of decades past expiration date.

I have some difficulty with high impact, which is a problem with prolonged jogging or running. One of my favorite workouts is to get on a treadmill and walk briskly at an extreme incline. I start flat and work up to the maximum incline possible.

Plus, she has a medical condition that would be dangerous if not disclosed before any kind of surgery. Also, it doesn’t look like anyone (family, law enforcement, etc.) is terribly concerned at this point about any harm befalling a baby. I think the most likely scenario is that she was never pregnant in the first…

They may have changed some of their policies; we cancelled our subscription some months ago. We definitely had Prime, but there were two tiers of video; one covered by Prime, and one subject to additional charges.

There were two deal breakers that led us to cancel our Amazon Prime membership. One, a lot of their streaming content had surcharges, so you had to look closely to figure out whether you’d already paid to access it. Two, the lending library would have been of great interest to us, and possibly the feature we’d…

Oh, he is, but he has his bad points, too! :-)

I love sitting under a rose of Sharon in the summer, watching and listening to the bees flying into and out of the flowers.

Actually, a lot of bees can sting repeatedly. H0ney bees have a barbed sting, so it sticks in your skin and rips out along with the venom sac. Bumble bees and others have a smooth sting and can stick you with it more than once.

I’ve seen this one go around. (People tend to send me things like this, since I’ve done research on stinging Hymenoptera and still have a strange fondness for them.)

I have an extreme fear of medical exams and tests, probably because of some unnecessarily scary experiences with doctors when I was a small child. I still get these things done on schedule, but they cause me unbelievable anxiety. I also have generalized anxiety disorder, so the combination is no fun at all.

Some vegetables don’t take well to this unless briefly blanched first. I once tried to saute raw green beans, and thought I’d have to attach my jaw to a steamshovel in order to chew them afterwards.

There’s another kind of scam that doesn’t necessarily cost money, unless one counts donations to sleazy organizations that use political or religious fearmongering to spread rumors. An older member of my family, who is religious and somewhat conservative but not what you’d call an extremist, has still fallen for some…

Blatter probably wouldn’t hug his own mother without first being paid a bribe.

Also, sometimes one partner in a lesbian relationship will arrange with a male relative to be the sperm donor for the other partner, so that the non-birth mother will still have a biological relationship to the child.

I’d be happier for them if they’d first announced that they were getting counseling to deal with the domestic violence issue. Whether the violence was one-sided or mutual, it seems scary for a couple to be having a baby so soon afterwards.

Or that a 7-year-old is not a 14-year-old. When I was about 6, a neighbor boy (same age as me) and I showed each other what we had. Then we both cracked up laughing, zipped up our pants, and played something age-appropriate that did not involve revealing or touching any genitalia whatsoever.

Everything gets worse once Stephen Harper gets involved.

“I’m sorry that for some reason you decided not to invite me, despite us spending so many good times together. Sad face.”