I always figured that like everything else English, it had to do with wartime rationing.

It's pretty common. There's something a little bit depressing about it that I can't quite put my finger on.

When I was 14 I got whisked away to an alternate universe where the Pointer Sisters were the warmup band for Lionel Richie.

Might want to toss in a -2 Expectations for good measure.

If you don't know a lot of people here and you're over 30 it is more reliable, but apparently younger English people do it as well so it must have other merits. I never thought to ask my spouse how much weed actually costs these days, and the last time I bought any was '91.

Almost makes me want to take up smoking weed again. However I live in the UK now, where they are more likely to keep looking the other way while people take day trips to Amsterdam and come back walking funny than to just legalize it.

There are a bunch of medications that seem to interfere with it as well, as several surprised new parents have informed me, and doctors can be pretty forgetful about telling you when they prescribe it.

I think the quantities required to be effective are greater than can realistically be used, hence the misleading pointlessness of factory-coated condoms for example. Also, most people seemed to think it was magic and they could just do whatever and then "mop up" with a little spermicide.

Anything by the Lunachicks. If I had heard their albums first I would never have bothered to see them live, but the live performances I saw were aggressive, unrestrained asskicking.

The full-tone key rise. Probably the single laziest songwriting trick in music history.

They should just nuke us from orbit.

Our copy of Bane of the Cosmic Forge had a locked door that we finally unlocked only to find an identical door behind it that no key existed for. I don't know how many tens of hours we had put in already, and it took probably another two hours of revisiting every place we'd ever been to confirm that this door had no…

To be fair, I listened to the Haydn Variations pretty much all other times as well in those days because it blew my mind.

I wrote my college thesis to Brahms' Haydn Variations. Never tried with Vivaldi, but I had a couple of friends who used it that way.

I hope young Blob isn't as moody and petulant as young Batman.

Is it a radical conclusion because she's a math teacher?

With a coat hanger you're usually better off going for the opposite door's lock.

If the string is a bit stiff you can make the loop stick out to one side or the other. That trick would have worked on my old VW Fox, though the curve of the door would have made it much fussier than Mike made it look.

What, no Quicksilver?

I think he was just commenting on the fashion at the time.