No, no, and no. :)

If it is Stephen King it will break my heart.

My parents were mouth kissers, and my grandpa kissed my dad on the mouth as well. It weirded my husband out to see it, so for his comfort I just started turning my head to offer a cheek instead. I don't think anybody's feelings got hurt.

Oh, I never do Black Friday. That is my laying around time. Commerce cannot have that. Glad to know that the CEO is gone.

Maybe you are a secret Black Pennsylvania Dutch.

I've gotten to the point where I actually kind of hate Target. They started out as a way for me to go to Wal-Mart without actually going to Wal-Mart, but now they fail both at being a reasonable approximation of Wal-Mart's convenience (they never seem to have anything), and they fail at being better than Wal-Mart at…

Oh it's definitely not guaranteed, you are right there. :)

Based on my time in Missouri, where large numbers of people have German ancestry, I would say yes.

What a jerk!

I've always thought that college graduation would be a great time for a gift registry, especially when lots of people opt out of marriage and babies, and 22 is a time when you might legitimately need to set up your apartment and have very little money to do so. Do your friends normally get you a birthday present? If…

Meh, I can cook all day. The cleaning is the hard part of a dinner party.

I think the LW was just grasping at straws because she REALLY doesn't want to use the registry.

My only problem with registries is that every time I have used one for a baby shower, someone else who went to the shower bought the same item (but not through the registry), and it got opened before my gift was. But that is certainly not the fault of the registry. It is in fact explicitly what the registry is meant…

I sometimes enjoy potlucks, but your comment reminded that the one and only time I've been to a barbecue like that, it was my husband's friends, and I was miserably hungover, and my husband and I got into a fight about it at the grocery store on the way there.

When is Susanna Clarke going to have another book? I loved Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell!

I love that book. I also went to a talk by Neil Gaiman once, where he told the story of why there is no sequel, and why he no longer tells people the titles of the books he is working on. Apparently Gaiman was at a talk once and was delighted by the title he had come up with for the sequel to Good Omens, so he…

I'm reading a collection of H.P. Lovecraft's short stories. I've never read him before, and I had not been aware of his racism, so that came as quite a shock. I think I'm going to finish The Call of Cthulu and then put it down in favor of Frankenstein for a bit.

My favorite thing about this article is that it made me look up Scholomance, a word I must have just skipped over when I was reading the novel. Very cool legend.

I agree he is an amalgam, but I think you have to include Dracula's backstory of fighting against the Turks: "He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. If it be so, then was he no common man; for in that time, and for…

For what it's worth, I lived with my husband before marriage (about a year and a half), and the first year of marriage was not hard at all.