Could be lunch and also a snack break or two.

As a Jennifer (born right amist the Jennifer glut that ran from the 60s to the 80s) I feel you. It seemed like a third of the girls in my high school were named either Jennifer or Amy, and I found myself trained out of reacting to my own given name because everyone just used my last name. I once spent about 20 minutes…

Considering how many Californians are moving here to escape their state turning into an apocalypse theme park, it’s just a matter of time before we shift to a purple state. We just gotta hang in there... (Seriously, the county in the entire US with the biggest population jump last year was just east of Dallas.) The…

Having gone through high school in Texas in the early 90s, our abstinence-only sex ed included an emphasis on the fragile unreliability of condoms (one assembly showed off latex gloves supposedly fresh out of the box with holes in them and told us to expect condoms to be similarly flawed) and no information whatsoever…

My aunt likes to tell the story of getting Mom to let her take me home for an overnight visit when I was tiny. She didn’t say how old I was, but old enough to say, “Mama, I want my mama,” when I woke in the middle of the night, and Mom had to come over in the wee hours and collect me. (I can’t have been older than two…

Stepmother #3 had one of those. Large as life, and hanging up in the living room. In full view every time I went to visit Dad.

I’m guessing he already knew about the pregnancy before the breakup and she was telling him so he’d know there wasn’t going to be a kid tying them together after all.

She just lost her bid for Arizona governor on a pro-Trump stop-the-steal campaign.

A significant portion of the school experience is actually preparing kids for a future in the workforce: Turn up on time, every day, do boring things you have no personal interest in, get along with others, participate in obligatory “fun” activities, and wear clothing that fits within guidelines for “appropriateness”…

My local theater serves alcohol, no age restriction that I’ve noticed. I haven’t actually tried ordering a drink (been a few years since I’ve been in a theater), but I would expect to be asked for my driver’s license as well as my debit card for proof of age on ordering, the same way a restaurant handles drink orders).

Flip-top mittens. The fingertips can be exposed to handle keys or cards or phones, then the top can be pulled back in place to let fingers warm back up. And not only do you not have to risk losing them by taking them off completely every time you need fingers, but the lower portion is keeping your palms and lower…

That was probably part of her point - they were visibly marked with those stars because otherwise a lot of them would pass unnoticed.

In the early 2000s I worked at a medical testing lab where my shift was offered a choice of wearing scrubs or office wear - scrubs because we were handling medical specimens soaking in formalin (and sometimes awash in blood or fecal matter), but office wear because we were coming in starting around 6pm when the staff…

A few weeks ago I read The Facemaker, about the doc who pioneered a lot of modern reconstructive surgery working on soldiers who’d gotten their faces blown off in WWI, and after the war when their group of facial specialists were disbanded he was seriously worried about the level of institutional knowledge they had…

If he’d been going after nice middle-class white girls, damn right the prosecutors would be aiming for death row. But his victims were A) sex workers and B) Hispanic (judging by the surnames) - two strikes against each of them. (First rule of getting away with murder as a hobby:  Pick victims the cops don’t care…

Van Helsing. The movie made a whole big thing about how Dracula couldn’t be killed any other way but by a werewolf’s claws, so of course Hugh Jackman as Van Helsing becomes a werewolf just in time for the final battle.

Republicans have been claiming to be the strong-on-economy party for so many decades they’ve got all the regular apolitical non-policy-wonk voters convinced it’s the truth. Mind you, if you define economy as what the stock market’s doing, it’s almost true. Not so much if you care about employment and affordable…

Someone tried the argument that discriminating against LGBT+ clients is a matter of religious freedom, and it’s given conservatives a lot of traction.

I wish we’d been getting more media coverage on how many federal judges Biden has been appointing. I hear it’s a lot of them - but how many compared to during Trump’s term? Especially coming after the Republicans put the brakes on court nominations during the Obama years to hold lots of vacancies open - how many seats…

Always maddening when the coda to the ghost story is the parents telling the child years later or the man telling the woman after the fact that, “I knew the house was haunted, I just didn’t want to scare you!” because of course there’s nothing scary AT ALL about being disbelieved when you say you’re having a problem.…