I think there are good arguments for the value of horror. In fact, I was expecting one in this article:

I suspect there are as many reasons for enlisting as there are enlistees. This is the current oath of enlistment, but of course one swears/affirms it after deciding to enlist. (I’m a civilian in the U.S. Army, for which the required oath was comparable. It may be a surprise that the oath isn’t about fighting or…

I’ve always felt that if you’re going to be wearing a T-Shirt with anything on it at all, by far the best variety is the one that was clearly free.

He’s apparently part Filipino but not Native American.

Nice! And I see you’ve corrected the mixed case as well as the infix notation. (Not that modern Lisps don’t support mixed case, but all uppercase means OLD.)

Creatures that should not be romanticized but rather staked on sight.

The measure BMI was originally developed for population studies. That is, it’s a measure that’s relatively inexpensive to collect for comparisons between, say, different countries. But for individuals? No. Here’s the CDC (my emphasis):

“I feel sorry for his son, his ex-wife and family. It bothers me,” Bates said in the interview that aired Thursday.

• You know what, give it a whole start-up procedure 

Or you might have to go off-road, to park on the grass at the kids’ soccer practice.

Disney World.

the elephant in the room

“Law Enforcement Knife”. Sure...

“Law Enforcement Knife”. Sure...

This was a wonderful article! Like a few other commenters, I do this too—just today I looked up the latest release in the Halloween series, to read reviews and synopses and find out what happens.

Ok that ended up being longer than expected....

At least you can look forward to when your kids are old enough to go to school... Wait, I mean teenagers... Oh, hell, when they move out.

“Games” is a good way to describe the activities. I tend to think of professional sports as being practiced by athletes, and that depends on more than strategic thinking (chess isn’t a sport) or reaction time in pressing buttons. Not everyone who plays a sport will be an athlete, but I think that with “real” sports…

Bush was a really important figure in U.S. history—he was one of the forces behind the establishment of the National Science Foundation.

Heinlein’s pneumatic tubes are quite a weak-ass prediction. The history of fax machines goes back to the 1800s, based on telegraph technology.

On the other hand, motor “sport”. :-)