The song that really stuck with me was “Me and the Sky” (the song sung by the pilot as she recounts her journey to become a captain). It’s really beautiful. 

There have been subtle hints that there’s something more going on with Ted’s dad and how he died. But mostly I’ve been fascinated by the way the show has deftly sort of exposed the fragility of Ted’s positivity and the ways that it is a shield to deflect a certain kind of probing into his actual mental state. The…

Jesus. My eyes.

Heck, in my neck of the woods, doing your own pickup is likely to be much, much faster than getting delivery. Most of the time, I can pick up takeout in 30 minutes and delivery takes an hour. 

I have a couple of friends who use UberEats for everything, despite living less than two miles from most restaurants they frequently get delivery from. Every time we’re together, I offer to run out and pick up our order and they pooh-pooh the idea. Just let it get delivered, they say. For smart people, they are…

Also, if your kid is accusing you of favoritism, take the time to really, honestly consider if they might be speaking the truth. No amount of explaining age/responsibilities or dedicated personal time is going to eliminate an actual imbalance if you’re living that every day in your words and actions, however…

If you really, truly appreciate your local restaurants and you want to save money, the best thing you can do is avoid third-party apps like UberEats and Doordash altogether. That’s the truth. If it is at all possible for you to order directly from the restaurant and pick up your own food, please do that. I’m not sure…

“Chuffed” is slang for to be pleased/delighted. So the Brits will say, “I’m chuffed to bits about that” and it is roughly the equivalent to an American saying something like, “I’m tickled pink by that.”

I teach information literacy at the college level. This is the pull quote on my syllabus and the springboard into my day 1 mini-lecture and discussion. 

I should add that my favorite job I’ve ever had has been a combination of both retail and food service. I worked at a golf course, mostly driving the beverage cart while occasionally picking up a shift in the pro shop. That job was amazing. People are happy because they’re playing a round or having an outing. Most…

Yeah, my retail experience was at smaller boutiques rather than big box stores, and I thought that was OK but boring. But one of my siblings and several of my friends worked at Target and they all say it was a special level of hell. And it’s not like these are flaky people with bad work ethics. They’re some of the…

Tactical urbanism FTW. Create your own chicanes and bollards. I’m all for it.

I have a strangely hard time with this one. My gut reaction was that food service FOH was worse than customer-facing retail (I never worked non-sales retail). But there’s a catch. I found customer-facing retail to be really, really boring, whereas food service was not, mostly because of the different way you interact…

Brett Goldstein picked himself, essentially. He was writing on the show and the more he wrote, the more he thought he could play Roy. He waited until the writing was done before suggesting it to Sudeikis and Co., who thought he was great for it. 

Two completely insignificant points in the grand scheme of things, given the far more interesting implications of Gaetz’s marriage:

My totally unfounded hunch is that the good ship G/O Media is finally about to run aground, thanks to Spanfeller and Co. But that’s just a hunch. Regardless, this was some really weak sauce. How to give your bedroom a makeover? Paint the walls, swap out the fabrics, and bring in new accent pieces. Duh. 

Another good example! The original scripted ending of Shawshank had Red’s monologue followed by this bit of conversation between Andy and Red:

Either The Takeout or Lifehacker started a series last year I think on meal assembly or something like that, but it didn’t really take off. They made a couple of posts then I never saw it again. I thought it was a great idea, so I don’t know what happened there. Anyway, the whole premise was that the series would…

Seconding the good rice cooker suggestion. If you eat rice regularly, you owe it to yourself to have an appliance that takes this off your plate. I’m pretty competent in the kitchen, but for the life of me I cannot figure out the trick to making good rice in a pot on our glass cooktop. At previous apartments with gas…

I’ve never had good success with using bags of frozen vegetables for stir fry. Yes, they’re easy, but they’ve got so much moisture on them that they get soggy. They almost always introduce too much water into the wok, making it harder to get crispy browning on the meat and making it easier to steam the dish rather…