Well, if that isn’t about the worst-phrased homework sheet I’ve seen this year, it’ll do until a worse one comes along. Crikey, that was inutterably stupid.

Look, your whole problem is that you seem to think that the purpose of research is to learn new facts, when, *clearly,* it has no purpose beyond confirming what we already want to believe is true.

Happened at my school, too. Black History Week was celebrated with a special dinner that included fried chicken and sweet potato pie, among other things I’ve forgotten. I’ll admit I enjoyed that dinner. It was freaking delicious, and it was one of the few times we were served anything even remotely close to edible.…

There is a song about a very similar situation- ‘The Band Played Appropriate Music’- that will now be stuck in my head for the rest of the day.

Sorry to disappoint, but you can *never* get consent from a horse; the horse always says ‘Nay.’ :P

And there’s that delightful bit of apocrypha that posits that the reason Cain killed Abel in the first place was because he wanted the twin who’d been earmarked for his brother, not the less beautiful one that he was supposed to marry.

I know for sure that it happened with Mary Tudor. Her husband, Prince Philip of Spain, threw the mother of all hissy fits when he wasn’t crowned King of England. Despite the fact that the marriage treaty had explicitly said he wouldn’t be. After a year or so, he had a temper tantrum, flounced off back to Spain and…

I was the weird kid who was actually far more interested in learning how to knap flint than I was in the oral sex... but I loved these books. The later ones, though, devolved into minute descriptions of each sexual encounter, and Jondalar’s overarching jealousy, to the point where I hoped Ayla would get the hell out…

He knows exactly what his hands are for. All sorts of terrible things. We just all live in hope that he never uses them on *us.*

Well, the Joker has a winning personality, a sense of justice and fair play, a belief in the inherent worth of human life, and internal logic that makes actual sense... when compared to Bannon, anyhow. At least he’s *honest and straightforward* about wanting to destroy everything good and civilized in the world.

Well, thank God that they don’t have anything more important to worry about! Now that we live in a bloody utopia, we can get down to the serious business of making sure that sinful shoulders are hidden from lustful eyes at all times.

I know you’re not asking me, but I suspect that yes, it can be. Religion, I think, is a Rorschach blot, in a lot of ways— what you see, and what you get out of it, depends in a lot of ways on who you are and what you’re willing to put in.

I haven’t seen this anime, and, frankly, don’t intend to. But this does underscore a tendency I’ve noticed in fandom as a whole— people read a lot more into their material than I think was ever, (in some cases at least) intended by the writers to be in there. I’ve seen Gilligan’s Island fanfic that discusses the inner…

Wait a minute. She says that ‘anyone who tells you to ‘deny yourself’ is from Satan’? Am I misreading that quote? Because there’s a direct quote from Jesus himself, saying ‘Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.’

Yes; it’s the old ‘he made the trains run on time’ argument. And for a lot of people, it’s a compelling one. The vague understanding that suffering is being inflicted elsewhere— out of sight, out of mind, and please note my use of the passive voice— is completely subordinate to the fact that the speaker and those in…

I’d imagine that they’d be *more* dangerous if they were driven underground. Leaving all the ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘anti-censorship’ elements completely out of it, I think I’d rather be able to see where the cockroaches are, so I can break out the Raid as and when necessary. As opposed to not realizing they’re there…

In their defense, that wasn’t supposed to be the finale. They got canned in the middle of a cliffhanger.

I used to work as a bookseller, and we got people asking for it on a semi-regular basis; almost always students needing it for classwork, and almost always looking awkward about it, too. I had no problem with it; while I’ve not read more than excerpts myself, I think that having access to our shared history is…

In other words, the foxes aren’t even going to pretend to be guarding the henhouse anymore. Is this the part where I’m supposed to look shocked?

Yes, most of the accusers were women— several of them were servants, and Tituba’s husband, John Indian, did some accusing of his own. A lot of powerless people were suddenly supremely important, and powerful, and fearsome. I suspect that most of them did actually believe that they were being bewitched; it’s just too…