I’m with you. It’s nothing as serious, but whenever there’s a major clash between a high-profile TV lead and the showrunner, for example, the showrunner is as good as dead. Because very few people tune in for the exec producer, lots of people tune in for the star.

My mother is 100% convinced that a relative is gay because “something happened to him in a public restroom as a child” (I’ve never asked for detail because frankly I think she’s telling me too much of my relative’s private history already, but the implication is definitely “some guy fiddled with him and made him gay.”

A tangent, but... people are dumb. Two of my cousins (actually three, but only two figure in this story, plus two makes me feel less comparatively inadequate) are doctors. We all went on a family reunion overseas a couple of years ago and we young uns’ (30s but hey!) ended up at a bar. When a random woman we were…

We had two deaths in my family within a week a few years ago (one expected, of very old age after illness, the other SIDS and a complete shock.) Around that time a bird started appearing on our balcony. It’s a willy wagtail, which the aboriginal tribe native to where we live has always seen as a messenger of death…

“Huts and stuff” is going to be taking me on a tangent here, but I like tangents!

I think they just surround themselves with similarly horrible people so they’re constantly affirmed. In this case, his current wife (#5, or is it 6? At that point why keep count, I guess) was previously married - a looong time ago - to a naval officer, and despite now being married to Mr crazy money, and knowing that…

“Comedian and science fiction writer,” apparently, which sounds like an interesting life! (He actually has some good points about the framing of other debates like “taking a knee” and the Weinstein thing in this interview, plus the hypocrisy of pro-lifers sending him death threats after his hypothetical blew up on…

Australian Becky here. I moved home a year ago after 10 years in the US and the lack of everyday casual racism here (which I definitely experienced in Los Angeles) has been genuinely heart-warming... and I can assure you we have nothing resembling “gated suburbs with private security firms,” anywhere.

Yep. My favorite is a man that the google just told me is worth $250 million (I suspect it’s even more than that) who plans all his dental work and diagnostic stuff (he’s old, so we’re talking MRIs and such, serious $$$) around his annual trip to enjoy the warm November/December weather and New Years Eve fireworks in…

I know this for a fact. How? Because multiple upper-middle-class Americans have told me (Aussie-American) that they went to Australia to get medical or dental treatment free rather than pay for it in the US.

I’m Australian/US and the differences are huge. Abortion is basically a settled issue in Australia, politically-speaking - there are no groups with any serious clout, and certainly none with any real popular support, agitating to change our laws. Because we have mandatory, fact-based sex education in all schools and…

I like the comedian who asks forced-birthers “if there was a burning building and you could only save one, would you save a living five-year-old or 100,000 frozen embryos?” He claims he either doesn’t get an answer at all (which proves these people don’t *really* believe life begins at conception) or gets “well that’s…

I can’t recommend enough “The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrended Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe vs. Wade” by Ann Fessler. It should be on every feminist’s reading list (in fact it’s the book that made me a card-carrying, unapologetic feminist.) People who think that teens…

The comment about obesity and heart disease is sadly true, but I highly doubt most Samoans would trade their lives for that of the average American. My family has a long history in the islands (I’m white or at least appear so and mostly descended from the first European settlers in Fiji and Tonga, but my extended…

Literally my #1 criterion for quickly assessing a person’s character... being rude to the people serving you is a deal-breaker for me.

When I got engaged to my now ex-husband and moved to the US, multiple Americans told me “you must feel so lucky,” “I bet your friends are all jealous you’re marrying an American” and (my favorite) “it must feel like you’ve won a golden ticket to freedom!”

Oh shit! I guess me and my son (both natural blondes) should be hiding in an underground bunker somewhere!

My entire 10 years in Los Angeles was a racist meet-up masquerading as “everyday life.” Australians seem to have a rap in the US for being racist, but for the life of me... maybe I was just around particularly shit people, but I was around a lot of people, and they were all shit. I especially liked the ones who talked…

It is a weird thing. I associate regular horse racing with down-and-out old dudes betting $5 and losing in an empty stand but... the Melbourne Cup?!!! Let’s all pretend horse racing is really glamorous for one day!

More than once I’ve been stopped at the lights and realized the guy in the car next to me is laughing at my singing.