Anyways, in Canada business does not pay for mat leave unless they want to top up. We all pay into EI (UI there I think) and that's where mat leave comes from. It's no big deal at all. Why do people think this will kill business?

A wild rabbit made 5 smaller rabbits in my backyard today!

yeah, we can agree to disagree. I do agree she was fragile, but I also think he knew that and did the emotional equivalent of repeatedly smashing a light bulb against the wall and then wrapping it up in sellotape just to throw it at the wall again.

Purely from the press, I thought Blake was an idiot that Amy was wasting her precious time with/got her into drugs and therefore was the devil. I saw him a year or so ago on the Jeremy Kyle show no less, talking to addicts about rehab and how to overcome denial within addiction and work towards recovery. He was living…

It seemed to me that she was surrounded by people who were interested in keeping her as drunk and crazy as possible, for their own gain, and she died because no one was really that interested in getting her real help. Withdrawing from alcohol is extremely dangerous, and trying it the way she did obviously can have…

This is the photo of Amy that makes me cry. It’s from Amy’s last performance, which was a huge disaster. She was incoherent and mumbling and staggering and tried to leave the stage a few times, only to be pushed back out by her bodyguards.

Yeah, the doc gets into allegations that Mitch Winehouse has profited from the foundation set up in his daughter’s name. Also, it gets into the enabling her family engaged in. That on its own probably wouldn’t be a big deal - most addicts’ families engage in enabling in one way or another. The implication is that many…

No matter how many times I watch it, this version of Love is A Losing Game always makes me cry.

Hm. I saw Asif’s documentary on Ayrton Senna and I thought it was incredibly well-made and accurate (and I say this as someone who followed Formula 1 and Senna’s career, and also watched him crash on that fateful May 1st, 1994). I have no reason to believe he’s got an angle that would portray Amy in an untruthful way.…

She nearly bled to death having me.

My mom is a transplanted Midwestern lady living in a small island town in south Texas. There are a lot of great stories I could tell about her (she was briefly Mormon because the only church within walking distance of her family’s farm was a Mormon temple and then she got a scholarship to BYU and, as she likes to tell…

After a particularly horrific breakup my mother was my rock. We were very close. One afternoon my emotionally abusive ex was a lunch with a date. I wasn’t at the restaurant but my mother and her friends were.

So my stepfather had just died, and my mother was alone in the house. Some really dodgy-looking Travellers (that we didn’t know) came to the door and said “Your husband hired us to clean your furniture, can you help us get it into our van?”

Thank you for not posting my email address

I have a few funny ones:

Shit in the sink. It’s the right thing to do.

Clearly, we did not attend the same high school. The one where I was beat up on the regular, spit on while people cheered, had “faggot” chanted at me by a hundred kids when I entered the auditorium for a lecture class, endured taunts of “name your gender,” and spent hours under overturned garbage cans, while people…

I wholeheartedly agree. I have said this before too, my son is 11th grade this year and all his friends (and he) are awesome. My daughter graduated 5 years ago and that bunch of kids was pretty awful. I’ve been a teacher for 20 years, seen a lot of great kids, seen a lot of not so great but the bunch that is…

Yeah. They are the littluns who are gay. They’re in a gloriously nascent period of not having to be closeted or out, just...them, proudly. It’s fucking awesome.

I teach high school and I can vouch for one thing: this new batch of kids are fucking awesome about a lot of things. They can be crappy towards each other sometimes, oblivious and callous at other times, but all in all, I would have had a MUCH better high school experience with this generation of kids than the ones I…