I used to have a regular D&D group. We invited a new player in, and he asked if his wife could play as well. Of course, we were very welcoming of new players, we were happy to welcome her.

I actually found one V.C. Andrews novel while I was staying at my aunt’s house when I was about eleven (If There Be Thorns, I think) and boy was that an eye opener....

....okay so men’s slacks often come with the pockets basted, so I’ll give you a little credit for that. But in my nearly forty years of life I have owned exactly ONE pair of pants that came with the pockets basted, and it sure wasn’t a pair of jeans.

I had not! I’ll look into that one, thanks!

I hated Sebell because he was such a bland nonentity of a character who existed only to be Masterharper in Menolly’s place. I mean, her whole first story arc was about how women could be Harpers, and then once she married and had kids all of her ambition fell out of her.

Yeah, as I recall she said something along the lines of, if a guy ever has sex with another man he’s instantly gay forever after, or something like that. So any man who Impresses a green dragon will “become gay” even if he started out completely heterosexual.

Don’t forget the fact that they’re never really fulfilled unless they have children.

McCaffrey isn’t NEARLY as bad as Anthony, but the whole “it’s not really rape if you’re linked to your dragon and THEY like it” bit is skeevy as hell. And then there’s her perspectives on gay men, which she was expressing in the 90s, not the 60s, so she doesn’t really have an excuse there.

Eeeeeexactly. I finally got disgusted with Xanth and dropped it (good job, fifteen-year-old me) and wow do some of the relationships in the books I loved as a teenager scare me now. Like, say, David Eddings and his really weird views of married life - not quite scary rapey McCaffrey but, uh.

• The Toys That Made Us: Season 2

I grew up in a very conservative household and my parents were very against having any sex ed taught in schools - but they never taught me anything at home, either, other than “don’t have sex until you’re married” (at which point I guess they expected the Magical Sex Fairy would show up and tell me all about how it…

About ten years ago they used to have a cookie that was, as I recall, a cinnamon shortbread-ish sandwich cookie with lemon filling, and that would take the #2 spot for me if it still existed. Lemonades are sort of kind of reminiscent of it, but just not good enough. :(

There really is something police can do about it, or at least try to do about it - it would probably take going above the heads of patrol officers to police administration, though, and showing just how many times police have been called. Of course, that depends on how sympathetic the adminstration of that particular…

The “defensiveness” is because I’ve had a lot of concern trolls responding to me, so.

By law? Not that I’m aware of, which is why I never used the phrase “by law” in my comment.

If I had ever refused to send on a call I would’ve been fired immediately - we’d had a big lawsuit only a couple years before I was hired where a dispatcher didn’t think a call was an emergency and the caller died, so we HAD to send on everything, no matter how stupid we personally thought it was.

Calls are dispatched according to urgency. “Suspicious black man standing at bus stop” might very well sit for two hours before an officer is available to go, but we still had to send someone. Accordingly, your local police force might have been busy with life-or-death calls, which always take priority over property…

Oh wow I feel your pain. :/ We had a couple of Hispanic, a Polynesian, and a Native American officer and people would flat out refuse to talk to them (or call us to complain that we’d sent “one of those damn Mexicans” to their house).

....why do I need this?

Well, as I said in the original comment, 99.999999% of the calls were nothing. Which implies that .000001% were something.