I’ve been a patient in the Mt. Sinai E.R. on multiple occasions (unfortunately!) and I also remember it as being a very open, busy place with very few curtains drawn. But there are beds all over the place, including in alcoves and corners, and if a doctor closed the curtains? Anything’s possible. Because one of the…

That’s been my experience as a patient — morphine and demerol always being administered by I.V., not by injection — but perhaps she didn’t have an I.V. in yet?

RPDR Season 1 was an ANTM parody in many ways. So that would be really meta!

As an example, try reading the following about the notorious Mr. Berman:

I was at Horace Mann back then, back when I was theoretically a boy. I knew just about every one of those teachers and administrators — Inky Clark, Tek Lin, others. Mark Wright was my classmate. My God is right. I don’t have the slightest doubt that it’s all true, every bit of it and worse.

I know; he is adorable. It kind of reminds of how my son looked when he was a little less than two years old and (of course!) the cutest baby ever. Here he is sitting on a swing in Brookdale Park in Bloomfield, NJ:

Exactly. I wonder at exactly what point in my hormonal transition it would have become illegal for me to be topless in public in States like this. Never, I suppose, in places where trans women are still considered men no matter what. Although it’s really kind of a Catch-22: there’s at least one case of a trans woman…

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep is definitely the creepiest of them!

Not really. The King of Spain went into exile in 1931, and even Franco, when he came to power, didn’t restore the King to the throne, so there was no actual King of Spain from 1931 until after Franco’s death in 1975. Regardless of any technical claims to the throne that anyone still had during that time.

This is potentially offensive. What if some of those dogs are Jewish?

Pregnant by a Christmas tree? You mean the tree is the father? I can only imagine what the baby is going to look like.

I feel exactly the same way, because my mother died when I was 20. We were always close, but I’ve often wondered what it would have been like to get to know her as one adult to another. Especially in retrospect, I was still very much a child at 20. Perhaps I can have that from the other side with my son.

Jonathan Swift made fun of men who think that women don’t have bodily functions in his (truly disgusting!) poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” almost 300 years ago, with the most famous line being the revelation that “Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” See

Unless they’re outside the U.S.A. when signing, which she clearly wasn’t. (See the recent amendment to CPLR 2106(b).)

It’s really quite strange, because although CPLR 2106 was recently amended to permit declarations/affirmations under penalty of perjury to be submitted in lieu of sworn affidavits not only by attorneys, physicians, osteopaths(!), and dentists (as used to be the case) but by non-attorneys as well, that applies only…

Well, obviously some trans women like it — particularly, it seems, some younger trans women such as the author of this article on Autostraddle, who spent a day on the set talking with all the trans people who work on the show:

Transparent is a show about trans people that cis people love. Almost every trans woman I know of who’s actually watched it dislikes it.

You didn’t figure that out already?

First cousin marriages were common in Europe in the 19th century, and not only among royal families. In one part of my (Jewish) family, there were about six or seven of them (a few were “double first cousin” marriages) in
just three or four generations — so many that one cousin of my grandfather’s had only six…

Thank you. There are contemporary diaries by people who went to see his plays, and no shortage of other contemporary references. Nobody alive back then had the slightest doubt that he wrote his plays. Bill Bryson’s short book deals with the issue quite well.