I taught high school for 7 years. I swear like a sailor. Not ONCE did I swear in front of my students, even the time that I slipped on a wet floor and landed flat on my back, cracking my head on the tile (I was not seriously injured, but it hurt a lot at the time). You can do it!

Yeah, that's already a common enough argument.

He has done brilliant work in biology. That does not mean that he is brilliant at all things.

Oh, yes, and you should have that level. I was talking more about the lack of knowing what something IS.

Well, for a while we were people who lived in a studio apartment, for one thing... for another, you don't always plan to have sex. We have a very emotionally needy cat, who was used to sleeping with MrsPye because for the first six years of her life she was in that studio apartment, so she couldn't really be shut out.…

At one point MrsPye and I were having sex. I turned my head to find one of our cats on the other pillow, scrupulously cleaning her ass. Talk about a mood-killer.

Rastafari. I just heard that one on Saturday when I was doing the shopping. "Do you want some of this rastafari chicken?"

I've had that come up, and said, "Have you ever had ginger ale?" Because apparently a lot of people have, and have never connected it to actual ginger. (And yeah, the popular brands don't have a STRONG ginger flavor, but still, it gives them the idea. )

I worked in a grocery store for a while. I had to pass a computerized vegetable recognition test (and one for fruits). Apparently I was the first person the personnel manager had ever had to pass the thing on the first try. (In all fairness, an awful lot of the employees were 15/16/17 year old kids. And I'd been…

Hey, I buy premade pie crusts — mostly because there is nowhere in my kitchen that I can roll out a piecrust, but partly because I hate making pie crust — and I still consider myself pretty adventurous. (I can make pie crust. I just don't want to.)

Also Southerner (displaced) here and I've had fried grits. When I was a kid, people's moms would do that with leftover grits if they made too much—chilling, slicing, and frying the way you would polenta or cornmeal mush. (Keep in mind that when I was a kid I didn't know anyone with a microwave, so "keeping leftovers…

Oh yeah. I mean, at least potatoes are technically vegetables, even if nutritionally they're more of a starch. But when I was a kid, the only sit-down restaurants in my hometown were the southern ones that tended to serve lots of "meat and three veg" plates, and I used to argue with my mother that okay, maybe at home…

I was going to repeat, yet again, that sometimes picking up an extra UNSCHEDULED shift would cause more problems than it would solve. (I mean, I did just repeat it, but I was going to go into detail.)

Those are the AAP recommendations, not the law for whatever state they were driving in.

That looks helpful. I really love the SAQ "taste tags" here in Quebec, especially since they appear on some restaurant menus too. I don't know anything about wine, but I can usually find something I like. (And I will stare down any server who tells me red wine is usually paired with meat. I don't like red wine,…

Maybe he thought it was smoked *and* cooked? Like, I go out and get smoked meat sandwiches here, and the meat isn't raw. (And yes, it's just "smoked meat." It took me forever to convince my Quebecois in-laws that I really did want to know WHAT FREAKING ANIMAL IT CAME FROM. That would be because I grew up going to…

Actually, once you reach "I just don't care about knowing this," in my mind, it's indistinguishable from "dumb/stupid."

And not even the difference between "avocado" and "artichoke" — just being able to recognize that THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.

Makes sense. I mean, for us, even without the fact that immigration is easier with a marriage license, there was an obvious benefit: we were married. And that was meaningful to us in a way that it isn't to a lot of people (and neither group is wrong, in my opinion), so that wasn't a reason I thought of right off the…

I know people who have philosophical objections to marriage. And then there are those people who can't legally get married. There are presumably other reasons, too, but those are the ones right off the top of my head.