This wasn’t a parent but a somewhat parental figure.

I have a similar story, kind of. This is paraphrased from a very old memory but its substance is true.

That’s actually a very common one. Have you never met someone else who believed this?

Or a shart.

An office I go into has “pizza Fridays.” Yay, the weekend is here! Long about 2:30 PM the guy in the stall next to me in the men’s room was doing so much POOSHing and so noisily I seriously tried to remember where the wall-mounted defibrillator was.

I read about something just today that is equally unappealing. Graydon Carter (former head of “Vanity Fair”) has a new project: Air Mail, a weekly newsletter.

I’m not a particularly sensitive person, and I am a man, but I think gendered occupational names have been being phased out for at least a couple of decades now. People on a police force are police officers. People in fire departments are firefighters. People who collect garbage are sanitation workers. When these…

“Talk” folded in 2002 and if I had to date the sounding of the death knell for print magazines I’d pick 2002. That’s when AOL really started cratering and around the time dialup was being replaced by cable-provided access.

I used to babysit my older siblings’ kids for free! But I liked it, it got me out of my parents’ house and I’d stay overnight. They all had dogs so I was also pet-sitting. They were all very well-behaved creatures so I’d feed the kids and let them stay up with me in the darkened house, lit only by the glow of a TV, wit…

I think you’re aboslutely right about the decline and fall of the general interest magazine at the tail end of the 20th century.

In the original incarnation of the Pissing Contest I made a comment like this in a midweek thread and it was the following Friday’s topic! 

Careening over the off-topic cliff as I so often do:

Why can’t Randy Rainbow host “Meet The Press”? Or become a “60 Minutes” correspondent?

You’ll get no argument from me on either count.

Apparently he had been drinking a lot, as usual, and his housekeeper called, not the cops, but his psychiatrist, because he was going through some kind of episode. The psychiatrist came right on over and gave him a shot of something, it’s in the wiki article, and it had a bad interaction with all the alcohol in his…

I just watched “Jane Austen Book Club” for the first time last night. I am a sucker for rom-coms (or maybe this was a rom-dram? Although there were funny parts) and loved every minute of it, but I was thinking, “I bet not many men have ever seen this and I bet many women who have seen this really hate it.” Especially…

Never heard of the “The Clock” either so I looked it up. I must find it if only for its back story, which I have now extensively researched.

I think “A Clockwork Orange” is one of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen BUT do you remember when they break into the home of the couple pretty early on and torture them? The furniture in that apartment was breathtaking.

Oh I’m with you there about the pasta morning, noon and night.

What a strange thing for your sister to bring up in front of friends. Even the friends must have thought it was kind of weird.