This, I think, is a better point: Not “this is fiction so they can do whatever they like” but, rather “nobody was forcing them to tell this particular fictional story”.

If you’re going to tell this particular story, maybe this is the best possible way to do it. But these are people who can pick pretty much any story…

Maybe it’s just the editing, but to me it read like Swapnil was OBVIOUSLY sabotaging himself. Probably it would take a psychiatrist to figure out why (but I can totally make stuff up).

I don’t know if that’s what’s actually going on, but people do subconsciously sabotage themselves (for any number of reasons), and…

At least they appear to have caught on that they can’t be blaming their failures on their clients/models’ bodies. (“I got the client with the worst body! It’s not my fault!” never goes over well, ever.) There seems to be a lot less of that actually being said right out loud.

In last night’s episode it seemed like they…

FYI, the People article has a video.

Unsurprisingly, there are no photos at all for the counties where I live and work—or for several counties in any direction.

Which demonstrates one of the problems with the perpetual myth of rural decline: we haven’t so much declined as never really grown in the first place. Nobody wanted to take our pictures in the…

I can’t tell from the article if it was a co-ed dorm. Did women receive this email? Maybe I’m just misunderstanding the idiom, but as a woman I would interpret that article, with that subject line, as a direct threat: “You’re going to learn about this today [whether you want to or not, because you’re going to get…

It DOES seem maybe a TINY bit irresponsible to say “we think some of these products might cause cancer, but we’re not saying which ones”. Ooooh. Scary. Maybe they’re trying for a spooooooky Halloween tie-in?

If you have actual evidence that the actual products included are actually harmful, then you have a…

I read the original Zahn trilogy in about fifth grade. (I remember having The Last Command—in hardcover—along with me on my first trip to camp. I do not remember watching the movies for the first time.) The very best of the EU is so interconnected with the movies in my imagination that it’s hard for me to imagine a…

You sound like a pretty amazing parent. Hang in there!

I have a red boring car. I can attest that having it in red does not make it noticeably less boring. (It gets great gas mileage, though.)

I’m not an expert on how our eyes have evolved to see particular colors. But people who decide what color to paint fire trucks are not just making stuff up. There is research showing that bright yellow fire trucks get in fewer accidents than bright red fire trucks. Since the only relevant difference is how it is…

But if that were REALLY the driving factor behind which cars get pulled over, you’d expect a similar effect with bright fluorescent yellow cars. (There is a reason that fire trucks, if not red, are usually bright fluorescent yellow.)

Red cars ARE statistically more likely to be awesome*.

Otherwise, these kinds of things are always based more on “it stands to reason” than actual reasons.

*If your favorite color is red.

This is kind of like saying that the variant of modern English spoken in England is closer to Old English than the variant of modern English spoken in, say, South Carolina. It may or may not be the most authentic modern English. But it isn’t automatically closer to Old English. (In fact, Southern dialects sometimes…

How did I miss that they repealed limbo? Limbo was always my favorite. :(

Basically every church* thinks that it is the church closest to what was around when Jesus was around. (MY church, of course, is the only one that is right.)

*Except the Mormons, probably. You’d have to ask them.

Since you seem to genuinely be interested in this: technically the Great Schism refers to the split between the Eastern and Western parts of the church that happened 1054. Both Catholics and Protestants are from the Western branch. Orthodox Christians are part of the Eastern branch.

Martin Luther started the Protestant…

Actually that’s pretty accurate, as far as it goes. I teach this stuff. If I were your Confirmation teacher, I’d be happy that you remembered so much.

Catholics and Protestants are different kinds of Christians. But for extra fun, not all of them recognize that. (I think it’s because the protesting gets to be a habit.)

Getting your period is really not any weirder or grosser than, say, urinating—and there are baby dolls that “wet” themselves and have to have their diapers changed.

I actually kind of like the idea of a girl’s period being just as normal as changing a baby’s diaper. (Because it IS.) By comparison it isn’t at all…

I remember as a teenager discovering that we girls could always, always, always get the boys to leave us alone by mentioning that we were on our periods. It was like a super power then. (Now, it’s just kind of sad.)