Thanks! This is good. For the past couple of months I’ve been exercising out of the trunk of my car, which holds adjustable dumbbells, mats, and soon (I hope) a folding weight bench.

ABD. As you suggest, though, grad students can sometimes be the best researchers on a given topic.

Hence the eye roll.

I don’t see how you can deny that

...what the Playboy channel would look like if you didn’t have a subscription in 1982.

Last year I did a fair amount of business travel, which included renting cars. I would have liked a good phone mount, but all I had was little cubbyholes and drink openings. Mostly the cars didn’t have screens, but even for the ones that did, I couldn’t pair my work phone (my phone is locked down pretty tightly for…

In 1931, a smaller successor car was developed, the “son of DAT,”

This positively porcine first-generation Ford Transit...

Include yourself.

I had to look that up, but then I laughed.

Thank you for the work you do, Brittany. I cared for my wife for some years at home, until her dementia became too severe; I know how difficult it can be. I depended on outside help when I was at work. Our lives would have been much the worse without home caregivers like you.

Æ, my elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence)

Agreed. It’s also not surprising that context plays a role, as Beth’s last example of crystals suggests. If I say that there’s no evidence of X, it matters whether people have tried and failed to find such evidence, in contrast to the territory being yet unexplored. Prior beliefs are part of the picture.

Rick Moranis, no!

X, the unknown variable - X can be an unknown variable but its not required to be.

I think the last driving book I read was Road Fever, by Tim Cahill, an account of a drive from Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, the northern terminus of the Pan-American Highway. Entertaining enough, but we’re talking mid-1980s, so things may have changed. :-)

One might also look at past Carnival advertising, because it certainly sounds as though they were guaranteeing that passengers would have fun. There’s a sense in which Bradley is just taking the opposite point of view.

Thanks—your description sounded sooo familiar; the same thing happened in Raleigh (obviously), where I lived until just recently.

Raleigh, NC?