That would be heavy-handed symbolism in a book; exhausting in real life. :(

For those old enough: remember how *awful* pads were in the 1980s and earlier? How thick and yet un-absorbent? The weak elastic waistband, the clips that failed to hold the pad on, the way it could twist upside down at the wrong moment? Or out of place entirely, if you tried being active? And I must have thought…

Wow. Mine were floods for a while — not that bad, but they added that final difficulty to fieldwork, yanno? The Mirena fixed me RIGHT up and I am SO grateful. Glad you're OK too.

The other nice thing about last period's flagship is that the early adopters have found any really dire quirks.

Still, automaker-owned businesses would likely need to set up a local holding company to run things, so maybe some of that tax revenue would stay in the area. Still, local ownership and operation of businesses is generally a good thing for a community.

But that's not the change being agitated for: we don't want Ford to be the only Ford-seller, we want the dealer system not to be the only system. Maybe Ford will open sales points, maybe not. Let them all compete on the merits, yanno?

Sounds like capital! (Jeez, dude. Dealerships take $$ and sometimes connections to start up. Labor is the repair shop on the shabbier side of town. Unions are back in the factories.)

Also, think of all the useful randomness one could extract.

The trick is to save the probable blackmail payments for three months to see if you can really afford it.

If sabbaticals are too expensive, maybe rotations through something less exhausting? Some low-key part of public health? Although while we underfund that, it will all be crisis care and exhausting. Argh.

Nicely put. Also, no wonder the contradictions between Branding the Unique You! and Tradition! drive people extra-crazy.

I get the same around (a significant proportion of) good sweet Southern women. "They're just big whiny babies and we have to fool them for their own good, bless their hearts!"

I had a Chinese-Thai housemate who was pretty convincing with the argument that a lot of Western sadness/quirks were from our being trained to sleep alone. When she had relatives or friends from her country over (all female) they all slept in her bed and she was clearly better rested. One of the Western quirks, IIRC,…

Does move, or doesn't move?

Well, there are people for whom that might be true, and IIRC it's at least mildly heritable. And given the modern/USian/SWPL/paranoiac (??) all-or-nothing thinking, one gets from there to NOT ONE DRINK!

This is my summary from — ha! Western Civ class in college, but the Greeks and Romans and Jews didn't, in the classical era, believe in a powerful Devil or even a Hell of punishment. Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism did (do), both as philosophies and as religions. Manichaeism, IIRC, particularly divides everything into…

Well, they have Lifehacker. (Not kidding — I bet it and similar sites help. Very fond of Unfuck Your Habitat, myself.)

To be precise, *Christian* culture — the classical Greeks and Romans are a root of Western culture. (Oddly, I think we got a lot of Christian body-shame through Persian dualism.)

I know more about Emma Kirkby, actually. (And have seen her in Fortuny-style gowns which were, though opaque, elegantly form-revealing.)

I'm begrodened by all those things, but since places that enforce female cover-ups have a lot of selling children and raping servants (see Vic London, recent Irish burial horror, etc etc etc) I don't think less modesty explains more sexuality. More public, maybe, though everyone used to know where to find prostituted…