Only when our grandparents bought the clothes! Practically speaking, twins aren’t that different from any other siblings who are about the same age. The physical similarity causes people to way overthink this. (I suppose you can mess up any kids if you try hard enough. At a certain point, the problem is that the…

The longest they’ve been apart was three days during their teens

Identical twin here! You really can’t force twins to develop separate identities. It mostly just happens automatically (because it’s kind of obvious to us that we are two separate people).

It seems that Paula and Helen are who they are because they’re Paula and Helen, and that’s how Paula and Helen roll. They seem…

That sounds miserable! Poor little guy! Maybe someone in the family had strep throat, but never had any symptoms? (Scarlet fever is caused by the same bacteria.)

Asymptomatic! That’s the word I was just looking for!

I had scarlet fever of that variety. At the time it was more entertaining than scary (“I can’t come to school because I have scarlet fever!”), because other than the rash I really didn’t have any symptoms.

For extra fun, it’s possible to have strep throat without showing the symptoms of strep throat, which means that from your perspective, you skip the strep throat and go straight to scarlet fever.

There are fundamentalist Lutherans. Like all fundamentalists, they have a lot more in common with other kinds of fundamentalists than with other kinds of Lutherans. They represent a pretty small minority of Lutherans, but they do exist.

It’s even worse than that. Chi-Rho is an anagram for Jesus Christ.

Whether they realize it or not, the original reference is almost certainly Chi-Rho, the ancient (Greek) anagram for Jesus Christ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_Rho

The people who get away with crazy stuff like this are generally making waaaaaaaay more money than your average pastor. They are privileged because they are wealthy, not because they are churches.

For the vast majority of churches, a substantial portion of their (not very big) income goes to paying the pastor (not very…

It seems like it would make more sense and more money if the airline issued a policy that the only way you get to control who sits next to you is if you pay for that seat, too.

Oh, and the last time I flew into the country, which was like ten days ago in Atlanta, the use of this system was non-optional. It’s for everyone. I guess you could probably avoid it if you asked, but you would have to ask.

This works unless you have a common name, in which case you get a print-out with an X through it and you have to answer a bunch of questions while they look you up to see why you got flagged.

Since common names are, by definition, common, you would think this would happen often enough that it would be in somebody’s…

They are expensive. That is a large part of the point. You are not wrong.

That’s because you’re a young whipper-snapper who doesn’t appreciate the hardships of previous generations. The whole “girl of today” line is like New Coke to me. (I also had to walk to school in the snow, uphill both ways.)

This has kind of always been the American Girl thing. They are actually quite well-made dolls (you get what you pay for in terms of quality), but they’re also a little-girl status symbol.

I was just the right age when these were first big, and none of us even aspired to ever own more than one of these dolls. You…

I was just at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, which is incredibly well done (and therefore incredibly disturbing, as it should be). No punches are pulled.

I actually looked this up and apparently it’s a legit thing to refer to the cheapest section as “tourist class”. It isn’t derogatory, it’s just another term for “coach”. It may possibly be a British thing (I suppose actors are allowed to pick up weird expressions from books or TV or something, just like the rest of…

When it’s that cold (and it was definitely that cold last weekend), what you really need is not so much to be wearing warmer clothes as to not be outside.

This happens every year. They’re always drunk. It’s very, very sad. :(