0-0 when I woke up (I’m in Shanghai.) I was more than a little late to work today for “personal reasons” that my boss immediately understood to be baseball reasons. Champ that he is, he told me not to come in early on Weds or Thurs (local dates) because he was “more likely to need you for some stuff after work than in…

Harsh but fair.

This Mets/Burnley fan feels no pity for you. None.

IKB art student solidarity star.

Oh, God. I guess this makes me a character witness for the defense? 30 years of Crohn’s, six major operations, about 15 stricturoplasties (operations to separate stuck bits where the raw exterior of the gut had glued itself to either the abdominal wall or another bit of the gut - think sticky spaghetti). I’ve taken…

It’s more of a suburban castle, really, with bus routes running past on three sides. Full credit to her father, to be fair, who bought it when it was a rotting deathtrap. It’s now a weddings-and-retirement-parties type of hotel, with an extremely aggressive discount coupon program. You could think of it as the Olive…

Too soon, man... Can you maybe give it another 18 years or so before pressing that nerve? 

So here’s what waiting in the ER looks like to the guy who is almost always put at the front of the line... I’ve had Crohn’s for a little more than 30 years, had five major surgeries (three of them within a couple of hours of an ER admission) and another half-dozen minor ones, and spent something between 400-600…

Try spending 30 years abroad and see how your opinion changes. My first instructions to any airport cabbie at YYZ/YUL/YVR are: “Find me a Tim’s, then the hotel, please.”

In addition to Shawn Lister’s excellent reply, I’d say that in some Tier 1 cities - Shanghai especially - you often see both knock-off and original imports covered in comedy wraps/decor/glitter: an F150 covered in Hello Kitty characters with eyelashes over the headlights, a 1L Kia knockoff done stem-to-stern in Repsol…

There’s another dimension to this not yet explored in the articles have come out this week: http://www.chinalawblog.com/2016/03/getting-money-out-of-china-the-reality-has-changed.html

Hating myself for delivering that +1. Superb work that made me question if, like math, shitty puns are created or discovered.

Amen. During the first two years after diagnosis, when the docs were trying to find the right combination of drugs for me, blind people would have mistaken me for Ras Trent. Second-best treatment the world has ever known, right behind Humira.

Your point about European attitudes is entirely fair and I have no doubt I’ve said some of the same things reflexively, despite the USMNT delivering evidence to the contrary. The USMNT is absolutely better than it was in 1992. So is almost everyone else’s though, and that’s part of the problem. (Not sure if it helps,…

I’ve never wanted to comment on USMNT stories here because I would really like football to develop a broader, better-informed fanbase in the US and most of the Americans who already love it seem certain that a strong national squad is key to that growth. And then I read something like this piece...

Dear price-sensitive American editor,

I go from right hand drive a few times a year and, for me at least, the problems run:

English to English translation: if you find yourself in need of the BFH while in Scotland, the home counties or London (the only places I’ve tried it), ask for the “Fine Adjustment Tool.” You’ll be handed either the mini-sledge or a jolly bar that could take down Goliath.

Generational solidarity star. I should have realised I was over my head when the salesman was clearly torn between selling the car and warning me off. I should have realised it when the head mechanic needed 40 minutes to walk me through the “potential areas of concern” that he was in no way willing to warrant or touch…

Thanks for saving me hours of trying this one character at a time! My much more fluent colleague points out that it takes four characters to write turbocharged and only two to write supercharged, so that may be helpful to me and others in future. Also, RMB100 says I see one of these stuck in Shanghai traffic, covered…