It was unclear to me if Daniel really changed history the first time. His panics about fish and chips and tea seemed meant to obviously appear foolish. Chris still referred to John Hancock as a signer of the Declaration in his lecture and in general seemed to treat the standard timeline as still valid in his…

You should have worked "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?" into your comment. I don't believe you're really Dr. Samuel Johnson after all.

Long ago, in the pre-registration days, some weirdo used to post this repeatedly. It was so obviously headed in a highly obscene/bizarre direction that I never read it to to the end, and I intend to continue that tradition today.

Interesting. That confirms my suspicion that it is a West Coast term. It might also be a class issue - in both West and East, the people who use it are probably those who actually do fly regularly.

Not that long ago. January 23 according to J-Archive.

I agree with all except the unlikely last sentence. I would think that suburbs have the highest voter turnout of the three.

It seems as if 90% of the times I hear someone use the term Flyover Country, it is someone from the interior of the country complaining about the term. Rarely, in my experience, does an actual East Coaster use it in earnest. (A true East Coast snob, of course, disdains California at least as much as he disdains any…

Our old friend Todd VanDerWerff made this the centerpiece of his article on the subject.

I thought this tournament went quite well. Alex seemed genuinely and infectiously enthusiastic at the end.

I don't really object - no one would hesitate to call Dante, Michelangelo, etc. Italians, even though Italy was similarly non-unified. Not to mention the ancient Greeks.

Sometimes one just has to accept the conventions of TV comedy.

I actually think you are being unfair to Charlie Brown. He may express existential angst in a way that Rudy never does, but he is usually just as game for new experiences.

Murphy was not always in the main cast. Teddy and Mort started off roughly as equals, but Teddy became a main character and Mort has faded away.

My strategy would have been to leave a space, write Return of the King first in the hope that it would be acceptable, and then go back and write Lord of the Rings in the space. If I could not finish in time and ended up with Lord of the Return of the King or similar, maybe I would have had enough time to quickly cross…

I liked all three stories today. The island story from Kirstin was the best. The band story from Kate was the ultimate humblebrag - "We played this ridiculous style of music. P.S. We were all Yale Ph.D. students." But as for the West Virginia story from Megan - I could have sworn we had a very similar story a few…

I wonder if it was originally coined as a noun. It sort of makes sense there - you can't say "a Latin." As an adjective it does seem unnecessary.

"Boards on boards" could be enforced very arbitrarily, but I always did like the mandate for proper grammar.

I have run into those people elsewhere on the Internet, so they will still be around.

As much I like seeing BC get taken down from a peg from their "Jesuit Ivy" delusions, their academic reputation is far above that of UMass-Boston or Suffolk. Suffolk has an 82% acceptance rate.

The latest update appears to be that the club never really existed at all and that the joke apparently originated not from Gorsuch himself but from liberal members of the yearbook staff. (But not meant seriously - he was class president, so he was not any kind of school pariah.)