I love reading Miss Manners on the subject. "Should I tell my friend she's fat?" "Why? Do you think she hasn't noticed?" If you see something wrong with someone's appearance, the rule is that you can mention it only if the person can immediately fix the problem. Since no one is going to step into another room and…

Once upon a time, some 25 years ago, I was arguing in a forum that "no means no" and if a woman said no, you should stop having sex. Someone replied, "You know that there are a few seconds when a man *can't* stop, right?" Oh, well, then, that whole "no" thing just won't work.

The theory is that kids are going to drink, so let them do it "safely" with an adult present (for just such emergencies) and without needing to drive anywhere. The problem is that this doesn't actually produce children who have a responsible attitude toward alcohol.

I prefer "quit while you're behind."

King Arthur's Round Table in the 12th century? Laughable indeed...

Tom & Lorenzo suggested that she was trolling the paparazzi with that appearance. And considering it was right after The Wedding... My opinion of Jennifer Aniston is that she seems nice enough and I really don't understand why everyone is so fascinated with her personal life — but if this were true and she was…

The G is hard in front of an R but soft in front of an I. So, are you pronouncing the first letter of "graphics" or the first letter of "gif"?

A car in direct sunlight with the windows cracked gets dangerously hot. Children have died in similar circumstances. Her poverty doesn't make the situation any less dangerous. Does she deserve to have her children taken away? Probably not. Did she face some difficult choices? No doubt. But what she did is…

"Lazy"? Have you tried carrying a mattress around? That's hard work.

I went to high school in Texas umpteen years ago. There was a fuss about some school requiring boys to have hair above the collar and no facial hair. The local newspaper did a story about some of our students with beards and longer hair — all looking perfectly respectable and accomplished. So Texas is not uniformly…

Tom & Lorenzo already won this game: http://tomandlorenzo.com/2014/08/the-bo…

History nitpick: Jackson's legacy is not entirely sucktastic. He did campaign for universal manhood suffrage, which expanded voting rights to include all male citizens rather than just the property holders. So that was a step in the right direction.

Also, what if I'm shopping for other people whose interests don't match my own? Better to ask what product categories I'd like information about.

I have to watch Purple Rain every time I come across it on cable. The acting, to be clear, is terrible, but the musical performances are stellar.

And how do you determine what their home countries are? There's always some amount of process to follow, and if demand for that process exceeds available resources, there's lag time while people are processed.

"the children arriving should be deported immediately upon being found" — Deported to where? And by what means? Unless you mean the border guards should just tell them to turn around, there's going to be some amount of processing.

A friend on Facebook frequently links to Charles Pierce on esquire.com ranting about "Tiger Beat on the Potomac" (otherwise known as Politico). Good stuff.

There are many arbitrary conventions which have a real impact on people's lives. Social conventions are attempts to normalize a wide range of personal responses to various stimuli; considerations of logic and/or function are rarely the constraining factors. There's no logical or functional reason why I should chew…

The complaining woman behaved badly, but she's entitled to feel what she feels. The acceptability of breastfeeding in public is a matter of social convention, which is purely arbitrary and changes over time. Expecting everyone to have exactly the same reaction to it is silly.

The story isn't really about the Humane Society, because I didn't even remember that part of it. But I do remember that I'm not sure I could bear to read it again.