More of a con than a lie, but when they were about 3 and 4, and didn’t want to do something like go to bed, I’d say, “Well, let’s just flip a coin. Heads I win, tails you lose.” That worked for a few months. Then they were very, very angry.

One thing we never lied to our children about was sex. Ignorance about sex can…

If I were the manager of that pizza place, and my staff screwed up like that, I’d give the guy a substantial gift certificate to make amends. Most restaurants will take the cost of a poorly prepared dish off your bill or re-do it. So some sort of compensation is surely do in this case. Just make sure you tip the…

Coming from the perspective of someone who has pretty much tried everything, I’ll give some counter intuitive advice. Along with “spicing things up” I’d advocate creating a ritual for sex that is mutually satisfying both physically and emotionally. My life partner and I are 75, and have been together since 1961. We…

This observation and advice may be true for people want to practice monogamy, but for polyamorous people, rekindling an old flame can be quite wonderful. Since polyamorous people have several relationships at once, having someone return to one’s “polycule” can be welcome if there were no negative reasons for the…

There is only one health care term you need to know: single payer.

Oh, and did anyone mention Reed College? It might be worth looking for public events there. Over the years I’ve seen a variety of interesting and entertaining lectures and shows there, from Aldous and Julian Huxley to alums Gary Snyder and Barry “Dr. Demento” Hansen. The campus is lovely, the student body somewhat…

I must admit some emotional attachment to Ladd’s Addition, having lived across from it, in the large Victorian at 17th and Division, for 12 years. But if you are in the area and want a lovely, peaceful break, it is a great place to walk around. There are four diamond shaped rose gardens, a large central circular park,…

Voodoo Doughnuts isn’t so much about the doughnuts themselves as about the theater of the people congregating there, the decorative absurdity of the doughnuts, and the marketing panache of the company. I love Voodoo, and I can take or leave doughnuts.

The Portland Japanese Garden is incredible. Really five gardens in one place, it is considered to be the finest Japanese garden outside of Japan.

They should be making license plates, not credit cards.

Certainly this riffs on the shandy. Maybe “beermosa” should be added to the Shandy article in Wikipedia? I was introduced to the shandy decades ago as a Canadian drink mix of beer and either lemonade or ginger beer. That lead me to try a beer raspberry sherbert float. Weird looking, but good, though.

I will give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume you are trying to do a service to people. But the HSA is the icon of everything wrong with the absolutely worst health care delivery system in the world. It is a cynical fraud to milk more money out of people least able to afford it. In all civilized nations,…

Why did it leave off sunscreen, not smoking, living in an unpolluted area?

We like walking around Waikiki in the early evening after snorkeling at Hanauma Bay all day. We always go to the patio at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and although we aren’t drinkers, we have a fruity drink with a paper parasol. We eat in Chinatown, Wo Fat is a favorite. Hawaii Five O used its name for the show’s arch…

I never go to the meme page and actually participate in it. Usually they are uninteresting. But if they do seem fun, I just make up my own answer and post it along with everyone else’s replies.

A major fault with this article is that it doesn’t direct people to appropriate educational resources. Most cities of any size have bdsm groups that do workshops and a community that new people can and should learn from. Fetlife is a good place to look for bdsm organizations in your area.

Whichever of us is well goes down to Tai Tung and gets an order of two of their seaweed soup. Tai Tung is in Seattle and has been our goto Cantonese comfort food restaurant for over 50 years.

This is pretty much what a lot of people who are polyamorous do. When my life partner and I were raising our kids, one of might go off with another lover for a night or a weekend to the beach, while the other stayed home with the kids, maybe with one of their lovers. Worked great for us. And we saved on the divorce…

One irony here is that South American nutria, released into the wild by the elder McIlhenny, cause huge damage to the very marshes that could have protected Avery Island.

Coyotes howl as a means of communication. So the best way to quiet them down would be to teach them to use Facebook. I mean, if the Russians can learn to use Facebook, certainly coyotes can.