Good luck with the Spanish! I found Spanish a lot easier to learn than French or Italian, which I’ve also learned to varying degrees of success, but I speak a very formal version of Spanish that’s fluent and intelligible but more deferential than the situation would normally call for. No native speaker would ever…

It is kind of surprising though because in Lincolnshire and Suffolk and Norfolk you find many names that migrated over to Massachusetts. The Massachusetts county that Boston’s in is named Suffolk County, the one to the south is named Norfolk County (which a little confusing) and in that part of England you find the…

I’m as white and WASPy as “Hilaria” Baldwin and if I knew nothing about this story, only that patient X was described as “complex” and “intimidating” even I would have immediately guessed “Black woman as described by a white man.”

In my case it took a while (May 6, according to my records) and Codename says the bill was passed March 27th. Which wasn’t bad, but I learned that since I owed (I owe every year, by design; I don’t understand why people overpay and seem to use the IRS as an interest-free Christmas Club account) and used a third-party…

I don’t think the family will be happy when they have to assume his posthumous hundreds of millions of dollars (or more) of bad debt. Beavis and Butthead probably don’t have any real tangible assets, I assume Mel (and via her Barron) have all sorts of ironclad agreements and indemnities enforceable on all seven…

I’ve been having great luck recently with tarts, which is a simple version of your focaccia and more like a flat bread pizza. You roll out a sheet of store-bought pastry dough, put it on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, and then top with whatever you want. This astonishes me because I can’t make a pizza to…

You’re doing the Feast of the Seven Fishes? You have to post photos and describe how it’s made for a small group. I’ve only had it maybe four times in my life, and always in very large settings. I was going to make a parody version of it for the two of us this year. My recipe: 1 can each of tuna, lump crab, smoked…

Back in Jezebel’s heyday when posts garnered hundreds and hundreds of comments there was a very amusing Pissing Contest about Things Your Parents Did to Embarrass You When you Introduced a Date. One I remember went something like, the Dad pulls the guy dating his daughter aside and says, “I’ve been to prison and I’m…

Dolly Parton’s angelic nature has been known for decades. There’s an old episode of “Designing Women” (ca. 1990) where Dolly Parton comes to Charlene in a dream as her guardian angel.

I bring this up ad nauseum. Diana, as a Spencer, is a member of a family that has been floating around the English monarchy for centuries. They predate the union of England and Scotland so when James I showed up as the first Stuart monarch of this new Union they predated him. They certainly predate the Germans. There…

Or set up a shrine dedicated to a late hockey player named Howe. Or pretend one of them is Gotham’s Police Commissioner. Really, the possibilities are endless.

This happened to me once when I tried to make something Tex-Mex, I forget what, and the what was supposed to be solid came out liquid. I am completely baffled as to why. It was like I was supposed to add two tablespoons of water and accidentally added two cups but I didn’t. It was so rich otherwise I just served it as…

Are you Tiffany Trump?

This is the peril that Trump finds himself in with all the “luxury golf resorts”. NY State gets all the attention but NJ is also interested in his business dealings. Florida will no doubt leave him alone but Virginia might want to wade in. Not to mention Scotland, where 99% of the population absolutely loathes him. If…

A little closer to home/Bedminster, they’re in NJ’s 7th Congressional District. It went blue in 2018 for Tom Malinoski and he won re=election this month. Here’s an interesting pice from his biogragraphy:

God has a perverse sense of humor?

I think she lost a bet and the rule was she had to wear this publicly for a week.

I think many a mid-life crisis can be attributed to something similar. I know a few men and women who got married early, had kids early, and once the kids got out of the house they divorced and started acting like 20-somethings, to experience everything they missed out on. Problem is it’s 20 years later and most…

I will respond privately but no, tomorrow’s not good. Now I have to figure out where your contact info is on my crappy phone, which is my arch-nemesis. You’ll be getting a communiqué from me soon(-ish).

This is tangential but I enjoy Mel’s former-Soviet-bloc take on “Christmas.” Every year she manages to transform the White House into something you’d find in the grand lobby/reception area of a 5-star hotel popular with Russian and Kazakh oligarchs in the Crimea or in one of the former Yugoslav republics, like…