Don’t know if anyone else has mentioned it already, but it seems to me worth noting that Russell Tovey, who played the Ray, is also an openly gay actor. I can’t personally recall any other instances on network television of two openly gay actors both playing gay characters and clearly showing affection. Too often it…

Yeah, but Tracy Bonham is really good, especially once you get past the grrl stuff and into her later works. Can’t speak to the other two.

Do they not use salutatorian? The girl with a technical 4.0 but fewer AP courses should have gotten the lesser title. And in that case, yes Jasmine should speak after, because you always run the lesser speakers first, your main speaker goes last. But walking second? Bullshit.

Simple solution, actually—just stand. Not even kidding here, the positioning of male genitalia is such that two legs-entirely-closed positions work well: 1) legs folded slightly closer to the chest than standard seated position (aka fruit basket, picture from below); and 2) standing upright so everything is…

Probably for the best. Aringarosa is what passes for clever in those books—“red herring”. I feel like there’s another one that sounds like Omarosa, maybe something in scifi—I had the same feeling upon hearing that name, and still haven’t been able to place an exact match.

Do you get the impression that Melania cares? I imagine she’s perfectly happy to stay away from him whenever possible—wouldn’t you be?

Bishop Aringarosa from DaVinci Code?

Also strippers can be very good parents—getting a paycheck from getting other people off does not make one a bad person. I mean, does it make the rest of us bad people? We do it for free.

Must take issue with one little thing: she has *absolutely* changed who she is, regularly, for almost 40 years. That’s been part of her lasting appeal as an artist, that she reflects the culture, changes with it, brings parts of it to a wider audience, etc. I think a lot of the criticism she gets now is from people…

Have always smelled it, didn’t know it was a thing people couldn’t smell... not pregnant, never pregnant, don’t have the equipment to become pregnant.

I don’t know, I feel like hipsters are primarily defined by their tendency to denigrate others for enjoying things that they think are too mainstream or not enjoying things that they think are brilliant... and also by their insistence that they aren’t hipsters, because they were into/not into those things before…

It’s both. I’ve followed it awhile, and the merger added some iffy elements, but it really got bad when Gawker shuttered.

As a United Statesian, I find it strange too (as I also find it arrogant that we co-opted “American”—you reminded me of that when you referred to yourself with continental rather than national identity). Normalization of extreme violence is so much more damaging to children than a little nudity, which I’d say isn’t…

Pretty sure that is—I may have seen the original video inspiration of this piece of art.

I think it’s the violence that keeps people watching—we Americans are a disturbing mixture of prudish about sex and casual about violence. (I say this as one who is the reverse; I’m a lover, not a fighter.)

Yeah, I feel like we’re getting dumber over here, honestly (and have been for some time now). A total crapfest will get high ratings, but something with interesting plot lines and well-developed characters that you have to (gasp!) actually pay attention to in order to catch all the subtleties will tank.

Well, it’s complicated. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_ethnic_divisions)

That’s an interesting question. There may be an element of “oh, they’re calling themselves Nazis, obviously they’re going to say hateful things about Jews”—which kinda makes it worse, that it would be treated as *expected* or somehow more acceptable because we feel slightly more removed from highly visible…

Well, “Jewish” is a term for ethnicity as well as a term for adherents of Judaism, so there’s that.

In positive news, that’s actually not “split down the middle”—that’s a pretty wide gap for popular vote. Obama in 2008 won by a 7.2% difference (Obama 52.9%, McCain 45.7%), and that was a landslide—translated into 365 v. 173 electoral votes. What makes it look different in terms of percentage of popular vote is the…