When the old priest at my church got a German Shepherd, he asked the kids at the Catholic school for names, and one boy suggested "Jesus." The priest vetoed that one but admitted it would have been pretty funny when he inevitably ended up yelling, "JESUS, GET IN HERE RIGHT NOW. BAD JESUS. BAD!"

Could you imagine when the oldest was like, 20 or 21 and maybe still lived at home and had EIGHT kids plus a husband living with you in house house? Trying to get ready in the morning for school had to have been a nightmare.

Maybe it was a "clever" trap? If they were convinced the cat was stolen, then whoever showed up with the cat would obviously be the thief and could be pummeled with impunity. #albertalogic

Sounds more like a way to inform certain minorities they aren't welcome with out having to put a sign up that says "No blacks" which could violate certain anti-discrimination laws.

my roommate's parakeet was named grandma, and we'd frequently hear "grandma get back in your fucking cage!" in an amazing Philly accent. That doesn't contribute to the convo, but you reminded me of some fun times.

All good points that I didn't really think of. Wow, weird, you are right.

I'm 24, and I have two brothers that are 43 and 40. It's not quite the same gap, but they're half siblings, so my dad started quite young, and finished quite late.

I just did the math. Mrs Moss could have been 18 and 42 for each of the girls. And clearly insane. After the child is potty trained, I can't imaging doing it again.

When McDonalds started started in Mainland China in the early 90s, I think a Big Mac combo was like 27 Yuan. If a family of three's eating, that's good chunk of change when you only make 400 Yuan a month. But the kids like it so it's somewhere you can take them for a treat if they got an 100 on a test or something.…

You know what's not remotely as prevalent in the west? The fucked up idea of raping someone to get revenge on the person's brother.

Ohhh you mean those gay loved ones of mine, one of whom needed a blood transfusion after getting in a car accident?

It makes me really sad to see the posters who say they refuse to donate until the ban is lifted, even though the ban doesn't apply to them. Good job being an ally and everything but please remember that in the end, it's not really the Red Cross you're hurting... when it comes down to it, your refusal to donate is…

(It is not discrimination based on sexual orientation, insists the FDA. Ooooooookay.)

The test gives a false negative 0.3% of the time. That's a pretty small number, but not small enough: you're going to be rolling the dice many hundreds of thousands of times, and even one HIV transmission would be very bad.

For established HIV, the sensitivity rate of the test is only 99.7%, which isn't great with the volumes we're talking about. It's also not very effective for new infections, which is why the Red Cross advocates for an at least one year ban and five is standard.

Of course not. That's why it's not a ban on gay men, but a ban on men who have had M.M sexual intercourse.

I think it's just intellectually dishonest to think the reason MSM blood is presently banned has to do with idiotic fears of "catching the gay." The longer we keep framing the conversation this way, the easier it is for people to respond with what I say in the next paragraph:

Yeah so...there's a reason that MSM's are prohibited from donating, and it's because HIV is 7000 times more likely in that population. You can contest those numbers if you want, many just dismiss them as biased research. That might be true, but it's what's currently out there, and asking for a change in practices…

Uh, they don't think 'homosexual blood' is tainted. They KNOW that homosexual men have the highest rates of HIV infection in the country, so they are a risky donor population because of the possibility of type II errors in the screening process. Homosexual women are allowed to donate because they have very low rates…

From an epidemiological perspective, it is a pretty close relationship, with MSM having an at least order of magnitude higher prevalence than the rest of the population (I think I read somewhere that they even make up a majority of carriers, but my memory isn't the best). Cutting out the MSM population reduces the…