Yeah, she's full of crap. The debate about the validity of being "trans-racial" or whatever you care to call it is more interesting in general terms than in this specific case.

Your X and Y chromosomes are also just what they are. There are problems with that formulation, but the problems with any supposedly straightforward formulation of race are worse and more common.

A creep and a slut are when a man tries to pick up a woman but the woman goes home with someone else. I'm not sure what you call the someone else.

Wait, what's the horrible part?

Sure, there are inefficiencies to bundling that explain why a la carte isn't all bad. But if the channels are priced fairly, there is a glaringly huge inefficiency on the a la carte side. Everyone together pay to have the programming produced no matter whether the channels are bundled or a la carte. All else being…

The effectiveness of the largely free whiskey marketing is astounding. I like drinking peat perfume sometimes, but there are a billion other strange things I can't imagine now that I could probably also like doing sometimes that could be enabled for a moderate fee, but I don't because nobody's going around suggesting…

People do get that the "If I only paid the fraction of my cable bill that goes towards the stations I watch, I'd pay far less" logic is nonsense, right? Some of those stations that your neighbors don't watch but are subsidizing anyway are the ones you do watch. The idea that a la carte cable would be some fantastic…

Hello, friend, I never thought I'd hear from you in person! Do you also live in Canada and have an American boyfriend? Do you often make pronouncements in the official capacity of a third-person plural pronoun? Do you tell many extraordinary stories about yourself, but people can never remember your name when they…

"Walk on the Wild Side" is more hip hop than "West End Girls," but some people don't like where that logic leads (though Lou Reed must have, hence "Original Wrapper"). The "went-to-the-A-po-llo" part and other parts like it fit squarely in that genre — semi-staccato, more rhythmic than melodic, stress on every…

There were kids up in Toronto who hung out wearing black all the time circa 1980. A Canadian kid told me about them on vacation — I forget what they were called. Then the fad died out forever and everywhere in 1981, which is why you probably never met people like that.

It makes it especially easy to believe that Jon was intended to be wet behind the ears in the first couple seasons, since it's apparently not the only note Harrington can hit.

A meteorite crashed in his back yard.

I don't care about money, but I will if you pay me enough.

I haven't played any Bethesda games. I won't say they're bad, because I don't know. They could be good. Also, I didn't watch the press conference. Further updates as events warrant. I love being part of a community!

I liked Little Nicky. I don't know whether the breathtakingly obsequious product placements for Taco Bell or Little Caesar's or whoever it was were intended as parody or not, and I'm not sure if Sandler made up his own mind on that point either, but they were hilarious.

Yes, Grima is clearly a distant third there, leeching off Saruman and Sauron. But if not actually charming, and not too slick for some people to see through him and call him "Wormtongue," he ought to be a better liar than that until Gandalf casts Dispel Bullshit on him, since that's his whole game.

Random aside — despite Lee's performance, Saruman and Wormtongue in the Rings trilogy bug me. Sauron, Saruman, and Wormtongue were supernaturally ingratiating and charming bastards. The gods took away Sauron's nice face, so no problem there, but Saruman and Wormtongue just looked too evil in the movies from the start.…

In the US at least, one clearly does have the right to say any word one likes, except in specific circumstances or orders, so the use of the word "supposed" in "supposed right to use the n-word" is ill-advised. You can burn a flag, you can dunk a crucifix in piss, you can draw Mohammed, you can say atheists will go to…

By the spiking concentration of opiates in your blood, if it's in drug-o-vision.

Tell yourself, "I am not some kind of animal that can be conditioned by bad luck to hate myself and fear each attempt." It's not true, but saying it might help pass the time. Remember that the key to success is to believe in yourself first, except when it happens the other way around.