Not at all surprising to me. My brother works with east Africans (mostly Ethiopian and Somalian) and in Ethiopia and the shit questions I get asked about what he does astound me. 1st, lots of conflating Ethiopians with Somalians and thinking they're all pirate terrorists or thinking that they all live like the…

I think Edger Allan Poe goes on this list. Married his 13 year old cousin. Even though he's long dead, it's still hard to not notice that bit of blerg.

Gorillas in captivity live about 50 years, in general, but one of the gorillas at the Columbus Zoo is almost 58 and is the oldest known gorilla. She was also the first gorilla born in captivity, so she's probably not totally representative of the general population. The Columbus Zoo also has one of the most successful…

Sex and gender are different, first and foremost. Gender is a social construct that varies from society to society and there is a lot of grey zone between male and female in that area. There are societies that didn't just name male and female, they gave names to third genders and trans people too. India's 3rd gender…

You only need to read the first 2 paragraphs to get an idea of who she is. If that's too long, I can't help you.

Oh my god the shiny pants. I'm so so glad that trend is gone.

OMG those duos. The Fashion Rebel? Never would have thought about wearing yellow until the nice guy at Nordstrom put it on me. Fantastic.

No, my H&M clothes last for ages. Like, no, not as long as a higher quality item of clothing, but I know how to not destroy things in the wash, so never have the same problems other people complain about with their quality. I'm currently wearing an H&M shirt I bout 8 years ago.

This always surprises me too. I hate ironing and most of my clothes don't require it as long as I'm good about hanging them immediately after they're dried, but my mother bought me an adorable ironing board and iron when I went off to college, just in case. I used it as a table. It was cute though.

Really? Too busy is not a reasonable excuse to hire someone to do something? My entire career is based off of people paying me to do something that they COULD do themselves, but are generally too busy to do, between the research and actual work. There's only so much time in the day, people prioritize. No one said they…

It doesn't take me 5 minutes to hem. I'm short, there's a lot of fabric to come off, so even for pants with an even line- more than 5 minutes. Forget about dresses, I have had dresses that to hem, took a skilled seamstress 6-7 hours because of the cut, number of layers, fabric, and amount that needed to come off (my…

I have a fairly privileged background where yes, I can pay people to do certain simple things for me. There are plenty of seamstresses and tailors who do a better job sewing and repairing things than me because that's what they do for a living. I also don't repair my own car or computer. I could also cook every single…

I have a bunch of siblings and we started doing our own laundry when no one could figure out whose underwear was whose if they got mixed up. There was a period where my mom, brother, sister, and I were all the exact same size, and the other brother was damned close. Our own laundry was a necessity.

Or people whose DNA providers said "hey, I don't have time to do this, we'll hire someone to hem all the crap we have to hem." That was my mother's logic. She did a cost analysis of what her time was worth to hem something compared to what it was worth to have someone else do it and came down firmly on the side of her…

I dunno, I don't know many people who can't sew a button. My dad, I guess, but he was the product of Emily and Richard Gilmore mixed with Don and Betty Draper, so he also didn't know how to live without a mother/wife around the house and I had to sew his buttons when my parents split.

I pinned her into her underwear. It kinda helped. To be fair, my best friend has never given a rat's ass about clothing and was pretty much forced into the dress by her mom.

My best friend is just the right height that she didn't need to hem her petite sized dress (a novelty for us, as we're both short). She didn't bother trying on her dress before the wedding and I ended up spending half the night making sure she didn't literally fall out of the dress, it was too big in the bust. It…

I think they can look great on a range of body types as long as they're fit properly, but 9 times out of 10, they are not. So, you spend all evening doing what my high school boyfriend called "the strapless dress dance," (which, he would imitate AT dances, it was good entertainment, as I always wore a strapless dress)…

Weren't strapless dresses on their way out? Just wishful thinking on my part?

What? Why? What? This is the worst. It's the combination of like, 5 of my least favorite trends of the past several years.