At least you went back to the rest of the museum. Apparently (I can't find a source for this, but I didn't look that hard), the great majority of tourists go to the Louvre, look at the Gioconda for under a minute, and, one more thing ticked off their to-do list, leave. They probably go to the gift shop on the way out,…

English does that sort of thing all the time, too, you know. We call Firenze Florence, we pronounce Edvard Munch's name as if it were English, we can't even get simple French place names like Paris right.

I spent way too much time pondering that question until I decided that he grew a wee patch of hair on that part of his skull and then affixed the hat with a tiny Victorian hatpin. It's the only explanation that makes any sense.

It took her five tries but she finally got it right. I like that dedication to her craft.

People don't, though, because it's rude or intimate to do that: you have be kind of awful or very close to someone to correct their pronunciation. I didn't correct the friend who said "sequented gown" and I didn't correct the co-worker who said "pacific" for "specific" because I didn't think it was my place and I…

Didn't Windows 10 do that, too, though?

It's a pretty boring season and the voting-off-the-island thing is a huge mistake, because about a third of each episode is the contestants agonizing over who should be eliminated and then conducting a post-mortem. It's so tedious that I just fast-forward through those parts. I'd much rather have the judges deliberate…

No, it makes perfect sense if you don't read. I have known people who pronounce the word "specific" as "pacific": if they had seen the word in print they'd instantly understand how it was meant to be pronounced, but they get it in their head that it's "pacific" and when someone says "specific", they either hear…

Either Phi Phi doesn't understand that the "rules" were completely made up by the contestants and therefore non-binding, or she's determined to twist them to suit her own needs every step of the way. Either way, it's not doing anything for her redemption arc: she's just as unpleasant as she was in her own season.

Alyssa's outfit was an inelegant reveal, but it showed something that most of the other contestants can only hope for: actual wit. "You think I look like garbage? I'm a superstar and all the cameras are on me!" It was brilliant.

I loathed her and Roxxxy on their seasons, I was willing to give them both the benefit of the doubt this season, and I see I was wrong. They're both unpleasant people and I wish they were gone.

She probably heard "sequins" as the singular noun "sequence." I knew a drag queen who thought the singular was pronounced "sequent" and so the adjective would be "sequented". That's how she ALWAYS pronounced it. "Sequented gown." So Roxxxy thinking it's "sequenced gown" makes perfect sense. She doesn't strike me as…

Ah. That would be maddening. I've never had that problem but it doesn't surprise me — not because Macs do that sort of thing on a whim but because computers do.

If you say that often enough, then eventually you will be right. But you'll have been wrong an awful lot of times.

Don't cave. I'm very glad I swapped my stupidphone (a dreadful Nokia) for my smartphone (iPhone 5, still going strong) three years ago, but if you don't think you need one, you don't need one.

Is your co-worker not that bright? Because I just googled "mac scrolling" and the third link explained what natural scrolling was and how to turn it off, which was what I did as soon as they introduced it.

You might want to consider the second season, then, which makes no sense as it lurches from genre to genre, and has more plots than any three Dickens novels: it's completely bugfuck crazy and not particularly horrifying, but never boring.

The original John Waters Hairspray is pretty PG, and a lot better than the musical version, because the casting is unimprovable (Debbie Harry! Ric Ocasek! Divine in two roles!) and instead of original, frankly not-that-great songs it has early-sixties music like "I'm Blue" by the Ikettes (heaven) and "Town Without…

I'm late to the game but I just discovered the podcast Superego a month or so ago: it's extremely variable (pretty much the definition of improv comedy) but their take on H.R. Giger is invariably hilarious. I was listening to episode 4.3 yesterday and the opening scene is Giger (in a ludicrous fey Germanic accent)…

While you're in there you should also add "spleeny", which means exactly the same thing and is even more fun to say.