No matter how many examples you give them of regulation that they like and/or take for granted, like FDA nutritional labeling or national highway systems or public education, if you point out a new domain that needs some oversight they lose their shit.

I was cleaning out some of my stuff from my parents' house a few weeks ago and found my old DARE certificate, signed by the town prosecutor who later that year was caught embezzling a ton of money and ran off to Vegas with his mistress. But, I'm sure he didn't do drugs!

While I agree that NYC has a lot of great food, I live way out in the suburbs, and I can get good soup dumplings from at least 3 nearby restaurants. That sort of thing is a lot easier to find outside of the city these days.

Whether it goes really well or really badly, you probably want other people there.

Do we have confirmation that he does know how to read, at least? Being able to do security briefings with words, not pictures, would be an improvement.

I totally agree, although now it makes me curious why they'd have the puppeteer for Pepe the king prawn in Frank Oz's Muppet Guys Talking doc, but not Steve - you'd think he'd be able to bring a really interesting perspective to that conversation.

That was one of the biggest pet peeves of the muppeteers in the Frank Oz documentary I saw. They all hated not getting credit for the other performative aspects of puppeteering.

I remember reading a post a while back about "tv hair" - the default hairstyle that you never see in real life, but that on tv is meant to be the casual, "just woke up this way" look.

Paolo Bacigalupi's short story collection does a good job of showing a plethora of different, plausible post-apocalyptic futures. That's what this most reminded me of - he's an excellent writer, but that short story collection was a tough read.

When she picked "menswear" as the nursery theme I knew what we were in for, so it's not terribly surprising, but I find myself wondering about it and trying to make sense of her after every family event - sort of like a loose tooth you can't stop poking.

I always thought all the grandparent nicknames were strange, but now my toddler calls her grandpa "popoc", because at first all she could say was the "pa" part, and somehow "papa" -> "popop" -> "popoc". The funny thing is, she now says "grandma" perfectly clearly, but the other nickname appears to be set in stone.

One of my cousins named both of her kids with cutesie nicknames. Like, it says "Charlie" on the birth certificate, not "Charles". Which is fine when he's a kid, but doesn't give him as many options later on. My cousin and her husband both have names that end in "ie", so she just wanted her kids to be on-theme. …

Yeah, DARPA can't resist a good acronym. A few years back, someone's proposed project name got rejected because there was already another active project named PANDAS.

I love the fact that Galaxy Quest is a parody that has been so completely embraced by fans of its main target, to the point that they include it in their rankings of Star Trek movies, and whatnot.

Life of Brian probably works better there, in terms of actually having a beginning, middle, and end :)

I think (D) in particular is the big point here. Just like with breastfeeding, these things happening in slightly more public spaces is a part of women being out and about more, and not by default staying home all day with the baby.

Yeah, that's where the part about varying with babies comes in. My friend who had a baby a few months after me had a one who was more "fire truck siren", so she didn't get to go out quite so much (also he didn't start sleeping well until he was almost a year old…shudder).

That's interesting about the gluten allergy and lupus being tied together. My mom's lupus doesn't have that allergy component, but I'll have to mention that to them. These autoimmune issues don't seem to be very well understood as of yet (at least, from what I've seen with my family). My sister got some tips from…

I'm not hurting anyone, and I'm being sanitary while still making sure that my child is properly cared for. I don't get what bothers you about this so much. When people become parents they don't agree to hide away from the world for the next few years - in fact, socializing your kid and taking them out in public to…

I'm relieved to hear that in this case "lost" mostly actually means "lost", not "a rough draft that the author decided wasn't publishable, but that might still be worth some cash".