When The Almighty Johnsons was in its initial run, an American viewer (not me) started a fan blog and kept it running through the entire three seasons. It wound up getting readers from all over the planet. After the series finale, James Griffin agreed to do a Q&A thread on the blog, and he was truly gracious and…

I’m descended from two different immigrant groups (both European and predominantly Catholic), and I knew “mammoni” from both of them plus a few others. Oddly, though, I never heard the word from my Italian American relatives. Live and learn!

SparklyTempest: We could have lived the same life as TAs, although I was there a few years before the cell phone age.

Got utterly hooked on The Almighty Johnsons on an Air NZ flight in 2011. Joined the select group of North American fans who managed to get hold of the series by any means necessary. I now have all three seasons on DVD, and I hooked a number of American friends on it when it officially came here. I’ve seen about half…

Preach it. We finally got as close as we’ll probably get in my lifetime to a functional health insurance system (and that’s not saying much) — and the idiots are still trying to gut it in court, just because they can.

I always felt the same way about the Southern Hemisphere! Finally made it to NZ in 1997, and to Australia in 2004 and again in 2011. I have informed Mr. Sububi that if we go back to either place, they’ll have to deport me to get me out, but NZ has the advantage because you have TV writers like James Griffin and Rachel…

Thanks! I just looked it up and it’s indeed in the genus Latrodectus, just like the North American black widow. (Which, despite its reputation, is also unlikely to kill people, although its bite can be nasty.)

I’m white, and when I participated in the Genographic Project, I found out that I have a mitochondrial DNA type that’s extremely rare among white Europeans. Mitochondrial DNA is inherited through the maternal line, and the most likely place in Europe to find my type is in exactly the region where my maternal…

Most of our going-out occasions involve restaurants. The biggest factor in keeping those expenses down: We try to go out for meals only when we really, really want to eat in a restaurant, and not just because we don’t feel like loading the dishwasher. And we also realized that we enjoy a few glasses of wine with…

For those who are getting married soon and believe that it’s a good idea to freeze the top layer of your wedding cake and dig into it on your first anniversary: Seriously, don’t, unless you like the taste of vaguely sugary library paste smeared on grass clippings and cardboard.

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.