She does call them all trollops. That's a pretty mild as sexual insults go, but combined with the other stuff about her friends not having fathers who live with/are known to them, it's pretty clear what she's saying.

I mentioned it somewhere else... my theory is they were buying expensive steak and leaving it in each others beds. Because it was that kind of summer?

Maybe they were buying steaks and leaving them in each others beds? Rotten meat would also explain the insects and I dunno, buying expensive steak and wasting it on an immature prank seems like the kind of jollies these kids would be into.

I love love love the second half of your comment. It's exactly what I'm aiming at when I talk to my students about privileged. Being "privileged" doesn't mean you're not a nice person, or that you don't work hard, or that you don't deserve what you have (which seems to be what people are reacting to when they get…

I was a bit turned off by her snooty attitude toward the lamp, myself. But regardless of how unpleasant a correspondent she seems to be (whether they were drunk or not when they ruined her house is irrelevant, really), she's also absolutely right. I'm just astonished at how oblivious these people seemed to be to the…

I don't actually think that many atheists do accept Dawkins as a representative. I think it's more that he has a certain genius for making controversial statements that sound good in a soundbite. I think it was Dawkins who, after the child abuse scandals in the Catholic church became apparent, said he thought it was…

I think it's a mistake to ascribe this as a uniquely British phenomenon...not least because if we're discussing private boy's schools we're right away talking about a very small, typically wealthy, in other words non-representative slice of the population. Moreover, the denial that Dawkins seems to be expressing seems…

It's altogether too reminiscent of the qualifiers people put on rape..."legitimate" rape, "violent" rape, "grey" rape. And frankly, I agree with you that there's some denial going on there. What happened to Dawkins was straight-up assault and abuse.

Yep. My flatmate hates working out alone, so she does fitness classes. I'm perfectly content to pound a treadmill or whatever for as long as it takes, but I need an initial push to actually get on there. So I ride to the gym with my flatmate, she does spinning and I run on the treadmill. We're both accountable to each…

It depends on the gym. There are still local community gyms in the UK that work on a monthly payment system (though they're getting rarer, I think), but private gyms are a whole other bucket of fish, and those fish are sharks in disguise.

My old gym in the UK used to be perfect. It was this tiny, local community gym housed in an extension to the pool, had about two of every basic machine and some weights, and that was pretty much it. If you could come in the middle of the day the only competition for machines came in the form of a very spry, very hairy…

To be fair, when I first moved to the US I was completely bamboozled with everyone boiling water in saucepans, because I'd only ever seen water boiled in a kettle and couldn't understand why they're not such a big thing here. I was all "you people have drive-through ATMs and pay-at-the-pump gas stations but you're…

This is what I thought. If someone were to ask me what qualities I was looking for in a partner, I'm sure my reply would sound pretty entitled too. People generally don't date to a list IRL (although those peeps with the exhaustive Craigslist adds prove they do exist!) but most people also have an idea of what suits…

Honestly, that was my first thought too. I mean, my parents are on FB. My parents are even my FB friends. I would not consider sitting down at the dining room table and going through my FB feed over desserts an appropriate social OR familial activity (not to mention the risk of gunning the keyboard up with syrup and…

The problem is that while she's managed to outrage a good proportion of the world, she's also simultaneously managed to up her appeal among her intended audiences- other spoiled white teenagers and young adults who are blind to their own privilege and think shocking people is the same as being "real." That was my…

I think it's really important to remember that the wage earned by minimum-wage workers in the UK would not be enough to live on if we didn't have free healthcare and easily accessible housing benefits and fairly good public transport and the like. Having grown up in a fairly poor part of the UK I would say that while…

"...and who does not like bacon?"

I think that depends on the individual school- I remember doing three terms in a row of WWII. I agree there's a lot to go through there, but three terms? And while Tudor history is fascinating there's no particular reason it should be featured so prominently instead of say, the Plantagenets. I don't remember doing…

Yeah, I was speaking to my sister recently (we're both British) and realized she'd somehow reached the conclusion that Americans Indians "just weren't around anymore"...and I mean, my sister is a smart woman. She has multiple science degrees. But people don't learn much outside the mainstream unless they're motivated,…

The French were pretty major in the colonization period, you can still see a lot of French influence in places like Illinois and in many of the Southern states. The Dutch were here for a bit I believe and Spain was a serious power until at least the mid 1700s. I'm not an expert but it's a good deal more complicated…