Oh, but they did. Miniskirts were so normal after a certain point that, unless they were "microminis" that was what you wore. Pants came as kind of a pushback against having to wear a short skirt, which a lot of women didn't want to do.

No, you couldn't. A lot of workplaces (and schools) didn't allow women to wear pants.

Well, a lot of us parents just hide the eggs in the yard, so there’s a self-selection thing going on here. If I lived in a shoebox, I think I’d hide the eggs in there before dealing with a park mob.

Nice tradition. In my family, there were baskets hidden at night (the older I got, the more useful the baskets became—I still have a former Easter basket waste-basket) and then we did the Easter hunt in the morning. Since we were massively into decorating eggs, there’d be about 50 HB eggs, which took a while to use…

Yeah, I was wondering about this. If you don’t want to dye eggs (which is, personally, my favorite part of Easter, but whatever), buy a bag of plastic ones, put some candy or something healthier in them and hide a dozen. Kid has a guaranteed great time. Collaborate with one or two families for my excitement. add a few…

Oh, I like that one better. I vote for that version of reality—GRRM really is working to get Winds of Winter done and he's actually close to doing so.

Awww, thank you—appreciate having the symbolism cleared up a bit. So she loses her wolf self, but she's helped out by a hound. She's more dependent on others to find her way than the other Starks. The advantage of that is that, unlike Ned and Robb, she's gotten pretty good at reading other people—having learned the…

I always worry a bit about Sansa though—I mean she lost her direwolf in the first book—that can't be good. Just sort of hope that all it means is that she won't become a warg and that she's more Catelyn than Stark, which has always seemed the case anyway. Hope she keeps some kindness and compassion in her and doesn't…

I came into this post via i09—I generally find my best conversations are via that blog. But housing, construction, tourism/hospitality—just not a lot else, particularly on the outer islands. Then you top that with really high housing prices (thanks in large part to Silicon Valley multimillionaire buying up bits of…

The one person I know who’s successfully moved to Kauai (it’s been 20 years) is a surfer (makes boards, has a couple of rentals and a dog-grooming business.) So surfing will do it—the Hawaiians invented it, after all. (The higher your rank, the bigger your board.)

I've read his Soldier of the Mist books—like so much of Wolfe, fascinating and a bit confusing. It was actually a scene in one of the Soldier books that made me think of Wolfe for this—when the hero sees Kore (Persephone) and she's a beautiful young maiden from the front, then she turns and he sees all this death and…

Oh, that they don’t allow anybody to move there. I would like to visit there, just because there aren’t that many isolated places left and it’s interesting to me how well they’ve managed compared to Pitcairn.

Gene Wolfe? Anyone who features a torturer as his hero isn't precisely light and fluffy. I suppose it can be considered SF instead of fantasy, but there's not a lot of science anywhere—the Urth of the New Sun is all pretty fantastic. Soldier in the Mist is definitely fantasy and, again, dark.

Yep. That’s why they’re interesting to geneticists. They’re one of the smallest groups of founder stock leading to a viable population that’s known. There was some diversity in the original group, which helped—English, Scot, Italian, Irish, Dutch, American.

Which also isn’t true. They hold the land in common, so they have people who stay there for long periods all the time, but the land’s not for sale. You can, however, marry an islander and become part of the in-common group. It’s not so much they don’t want anyone to move there as much as there are limited resources.…

Basically. The founder population was reasonably diverse and the one genetic disease was asthma.

You don’t know much about them. They’re not cranks, they’re the descendants of people who settled there in the 19th Century. They have visitors, send people off the island for various things (though it takes a week to get anywhere.), have a school, a Web site and seem to welcome the information and education they get…

Well, they do get visitors—research vessels to Antarctica and such, so who knows how they’ve widened the gene pool . . .

Yeah, I know. It's only because I didn't start the series until the five current books were out.

It’s interesting—it’s supposed to be one of the examples of the smallest viable founding stocks—8 men, 7 women. However, there was a reasonable amount of diversity within that pool—English, Scottish, American, Italian (couple of castaways) and, I think, maybe Dutch? They have both a Protestant and a Catholic church.…