For what it's worth, Coates flipped me from "I suppose reparations maybe make sense" to "holy heck reparations are the right thing beyond a shadow of a doubt". Perhaps Coates is positioning himself so as to communicate to whites in tones that don't make them feel all defensive? Not that whites should require being…

I don't know basketball and I don't know baseball either. Can anyone who knows both, say whether this is anything like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig? The impression I always got from my baseball-loving mom was that Babe Ruth was a showy a-hole while Lou Gehrig was probably as good but was humble and decent about it.

To be sure, if someone is cutting, they're going through something that is very real. That may or may not mean self-destructive tendencies, but at a minimum they're in an unenviable place.

I can get that. Ima smack myself for saying this in about a minute, but: everyone has their emotional scars, it's just that yours left a visible mark.

Also, not real important to the discussion at hand, but here's another "7th Heaven" clip (the neighbor girl is in a gang!) and a lot of good commentary:

True story: before I posted that, I ran it past a cutter because I wanted to make sure I got it right. She advised me to add the "not necessarily anyway" phrase because cutting and self-destructiveness are independent variables.

Ah, so you owned one of those things that kids these days believe is a "whha-whha-whha" noise maker. They would be astonished to learn you can get actual music out of them. It's like cavemen with a television, they don't know what it does so they throw rocks at it.

Can we do a season of "The X-Files" with Fox Mulder and Moe Dammik?

You ever hear that Scott McKenzie "San Francisco" song from 50 years ago? Man, it's been getting to me lately. I never really went for the song because I never quite bought the notion that hippies were harbingers of a better world; but at least a better world (including at least a few hippie ideals) seemed possible…

I can see that — he likes to believe he's on top of things so much, he's more invested in having a simple, familiar, and comfortable explanation than in having the RIGHT explanation.

Can I share something I have learned? People who cut, are not self-destructive, not necessarily anyway. They are dealing with stress / panic that is out of control, and cutting is trading that out-of-control terror for a level of pain that is 1) manageable and 2) under their direct control. It is effective in…

Another Norm MacDonald bit from the same album, thought you might like it. Norm muses on the news, missing people, and how he would personally go about abducting and murdering someone:

"Me Doing Standup" is pretty good start to finish.

So, covfefe:

Tiger Woods is a guy who golfs well and is famous for it. It's like being really good at flipping pizza dough except people generally don't get famous for that. I try to not hold Tiger Woods to too many standards, because he's a golfer, not a role model.

Brandenburg v. Ohio seems to be the constitutional balancing test.

Oh! I just Googled before typing and it said Chinese ancestry. Jesus, if you can't trust the Internet, whom CAN you trust?

… Granddad is only volunteering because he's sweet on a woman there, and those wake-up calls are actually nudging him towards being more the sort of man the woman approves of. But he's also losing himself in the process.

Oooh! Granddad has started volunteering somewhere that he has to be up at 7am every day, so he's hired a service to call him, but every time they call they end with an unflattering observation about how granddad conducts himself.

The thing that always got me was the "his father would be ashamed of him" message. Was that because he is of Chinese ancestry and we know that samurais are all "YOU HAVE INSULTED OUR FAMILY HONOR!" Or is it about reducing a black man to a child? Perhaps a convenient mix of the two?