A newish friend asked if I wanted to take part in her pregnancy-themed photography project, and sent me some examples of her work to review. They're beautiful photos, but I think I feel too weird to be photographed like this (currently: 33 weeks pregnant). I know it's all natural, a beautiful thing, the circle of…

Ugh, I was so dearly hoping that the sentence "Orlando Bloom Throws a Punch at Justin Bieber" would end with "... prompting Bieber to reexamine his life, decide to retreat from public life, and donate 99% of his assets to reputable charities serving disadvantaged children and baby animals." Sadly, this appears not to…

I particularly love this story on how they were basically turned in by the chef at the executive mansion after they tried to blame him for their grift: http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/peopl…

Well, there's probably some diagnosis bias here — people are more aware of skin cancer now, so they're going to the doctor to get things checked out that they might otherwise have ignored (and that probably wouldn't have killed them). But in the 20s, when Coco Chanel first popularized tanning, people were also more…

Meh, I didn't learn to eat fish until I was in my mid-20s because a) I grew up in a land-locked state and b) both of my parents loathed all kinds of fish. Apparently their parents made them eat it, so they never ate it as adults. We never had it in the house, and neither of them ever ordered fish when we were at a…

There are a bunch of online tutorials, but I'm kind of making this one up as I go along. My mom made me one in high school by cutting the designs off each shirt, sewing them onto a sheet, then sewing ribbon around each square. With this one, I cut along the side and shoulder seams of each t-shirt, then laid them out…

Up?

I tackled a craft project this weekend that I'd been dreading - a quilt made out of my husband's old t-shirts. I'd been putting it off, thinking "there's no way a bunch of old cut-up concert and Threadless.com tees are going to look good together," but yesterday I got bored, started sewing them into strips and piecing…

Total non-sequitur, but I always hear the Alicia Keys lyric as "I've become a wintry tomato" — which makes about as much sense, really.

Yeah, I was initially excited to trace my dad's family tree back into the 1600s, but then I found some of the wills of his ancestors, in which they describe the disposition of their land, furniture, and slaves. Usually in that order. It was definitely an uncomfortable moment, even if I'm 12 generations and 400 years…

I'm descended from Dutch slaveholders in New Amsterdam, if it makes you feel any better :(

OMG, I know! I think they should do a spin-off where Eric and Pam run a high-end hair salon. The potential for highjinks is endless.

Gah, at this point I just want to fast forward to the parts with Eric and Pam, watch those, then fast forward through the rest. I would be okay with literally everyone else on the show being eaten by vampire fairy werewolves.

Yeah, my friend's son figured out that if you bash the top of the knob cover hard enough, it falls off of the doorknob. I had more trouble with it than he did.

Ah, I went to an old-fogey college on the East Coast. It's also possible that the wig thing was invented by members of our team, though I seem to remember other area teams doing it as well.

"The "style spy" page declares: "Crotch Is The New Cleavage!""

Thanks, I mean parliamentary debate — and no imaginary wig? That was the best part! Perhaps it was a quirk of my team?

I was on the constitutional debate team in college. One of the quirks of that style of debate is that when you stand to argue a point, you have to pretend to hold on to your imaginary wig. If only we'd had the real thing!

I am weirdly pleased that Mila Kunis' Mom is named Elvira. Elvira Kunis! It's like meeting someone whose parents unironically named him Elvis.

Ha, thank you! He would have been flattered to hear himself described as such. I come from a family of weirdo academics, but he was definitely the most intellectually curious of the lot. I have many fond memories of him buying ten or twenty books at a time because they looked interesting — never mind the dozens of…