It sounds like Harper had a legitimate genetic issue that led him to have a massive heart attack. A good clue for most is if you have family that had a heart attack at a young age, but a medical test can also detect it ahead of time, it seems.

Oh, rest assured, it’s always China. “Black Panther” is, so far, the top worldwide grossing film of 2018 with $738 million, but #2? A Chinese film that made $435 million, with virtually all that from domestic Chinese tickets.

Pardon me for interjecting here, since I really wouldn’t know what’s going on, but if you don’t feel your doctors are taking your health seriously, this is when you start looking for new ones. Patient self-advocacy is important.

Heh...he’s spent a lot of time in the gym since that very old photo, so I imagine he’d put up a really good fight if you tried.

Honestly, if you step away from these things for a while, junk foods stop tasting all that good. They’re suddenly very overpowering in taste (i.e., too salty, too sugary, too much butter, etc.), and, quite often, seem to taste “artificial” in some difficult-to-describe way.

In Canada, NFC terminals are basically everywhere, as Canada’s debit card system uses the same technology, but they only work with transactions less than $100—and since Canada is expensive, you’ll bump past that limit fairly commonly, not to mention that if you do too many NFC transactions in a row, it’ll start…

Riverdale is a “Netflix original” internationally, airing about a day after the U.S. broadcast, so the CW and Netflix might be on good enough terms to allow crossovers like this to happen.

An analogy I’d make is that it is probably similar to how the Ottoman Turks referred to all Orthodox Christians in their empire as “Rum” (Roman) despite there being different ethnicities and languages under the same umbrella—incidentally, this included the actual Bulgarians.

I mean, there is a racist origin inasmuch as the word’s etymology is an intentional slur against Bulgarians, but the heresy of Bogomilism out of Bulgaria that preoccupied Europe from the 10th to 15th centuries has become so obscure as to be virtually forgotten. Its later incarnation as a manifestation of homophobia…

Fortunately for Marvel/Disney, Sony is also known for making bad decisions.

IMO, it’s more homophobia in British slang. In the 19th century, “buggery” was frequently used in official contexts to gay sex acts which they had criminalized.

Honestly, this is like my dream house (can’t stand all these grotesque McMansions and minimalist “Ikea showrooms” built in North America), but alas, I’m neither rich nor Italian. For another lifetime, perhaps...

Like a lot of otherwise inane religious traditions, this one made sense when it was created during the highly class stratified Roman Empire. The intention was to have a bit of humility—meat was a luxury, while seafood was cheap, plentiful and thus the food of commoners. Obviously, though, if you’re a medieval monk…

It’s worth noting that the traditional Ash Wednesday and Good Friday fasts in Catholicism are separate from “giving up something” for Lent, and even then, these fasts are rather minor in nature compared to the highly ritual 40 days of fasting during Eastern Orthodox “Great Lent.”

My thought is that if you’re a devout Catholic and this genuinely bothers you, then just postpone your Valentine’s Day celebrations for another day. Does it really matter if you celebrate it on the 14th versus the 15th—or, really, any day, since it’s not as if we have a shortage of chocolate or restaurants?

Well, I can’t comment on what she should have expected—to a great extent, she should have known, but American Catholics, in particular, have a long history of being more liberal than the Vatican itself; but as the culture wars have ramped up, so has the conservatism within Catholicism.

I have to admit, I find myself liking “Coca-Cola Life.” Instead of the standard HFCS, it’s part cane sugar and part stevia with about 40% fewer calories overall.

It’s “rational” inasmuch as human behavior is “predictable,” and so professional investors and economists make an awful lot of money exploiting these observable patterns.

They are equipped with lights, designed exactly for apartment dwellers with no sunlight.

They are equipped with lights, designed exactly for apartment dwellers with no sunlight.

I had some relatively minor IRS issues a couple of years back. They send letters, and while you can call the official IRS number in response, they will only send more letters if they’ve decided that your issue is still an issue—usually weeks later, all done at the most glacial pace possible.