Counterpoint: Skiing is great, but your take is bad and you should feel bad. (Also, skiing in North Carolina is the gas station sushi of skiing.)

Ray Ratto is the best kind of old-school columnist. I hope he appears regularly here. 

Gu gels taste okay, although I would never have one for taste. For me, the real benefit to these gels (in terms of athletic pursuits) is the caffeine, which I’ve found to be the one supplement that really helps endurance-oriented performance. If I don’t need the caffeine, I’ll just have dried mango or a Payday bar for…

Meh. The Weezer album is okay. It’s definitely not “unlistenable” mainly because the tracks they cover are great (at least for some Gen X elders like me).

We didn’t know the gender of our first child until she was born, which was fun. I liked the surprise at the end, and it’s not like we were committing buying pink or blue stuff in advance.

Your poor mom! I can quasi-relate. When I was 9, I accidentally swallowed a penny. I was swimming with it in my mouth because I was a dumb kid who did dumb kid things. I didn’t tell anybody. So, unlike you, I avoided the ER. On the other hand, I can’t say with certainty that the penny “passed” because I was unwilling…

I think you missed the “Alright, Alright, Alright” reference. (Dazed and Confused was filmed in Austin.)

Minor clarification: It’s not fun to literally watch Harden win games for the Rockets. But it’s fun in the general sense of following the results and watching compressed highlights.

If you are somewhere tropical, fresh pineapple and mango blow every other fruit out of the water.

Congratulations!

As someone with a large thigh-to-waist-size ratio, I found the article kind of interesting. I have not enjoyed the skinny-jean trend at all. Shopping for jeans is the goddamn worst.

It’s explained in Article II, “. . . . If said President was the victor in the greatest election of all time, Impeachment must be determined as stated previously except that, if impeached, Congress shall construct mankind’s greatest Catapult from whence said President shall be ceremoniously launched in the direction…

Exactly. I like the concept, but I’m not into doilies, cats, and German muffins. Also, I’m probably gonna want to have sex with my spouse, and the musty atmosphere you mention makes that . . . awkward.

It sounds like a cool place, so I looked the B&B up. It costs $315-425 a night and includes, “champagne & hors d’oeuvres upon arrival, a multi-course dinner with wind a a full gourmet breakfast the next morning.“ That isn’t bad for San Francisco. The rooms, like most B&Bs, are a little too doily & grandma for my…

I nominate the hackneyed “open letter.” Aside from being trite, very few people write open letters to people they know personally. So, more often than not, the author is pretending that the letter’s recipient is actually going to read the letter (when that person certainly will not) and that there is an actual kind of…

I couldn’t find much after googling this, but it seems like Arthur was a bit of a crank and didn’t take to White’s sunny disposition, kind of like their characters on the show. This makes me like both even more. There is also this gem of a passage:

I never realized it until now, but Wolf Blitzer is an insanely cool name. 

Liking Tim Burton movies: Cool. Liking Wes Anderson movies: Not Cool.

It’s funny that people keep describing their relationship as “toxic.” While it certainly isn’t always healthy, I think it’s so much more than just toxic. But I’ll leave it at that as I don’t want to give away any spoilers. 

I’ve read the entire series but haven’t seen the HBO show yet. In the books, I didn’t see much in the way of sexual tension between Elena and Lila. Honestly, their relationship is complicated enough that adding romance between them would oddly seem to dumb down their relationship to a sex thing. Personally, I think…