But the difference is that it happens very occasionally for straight couples in stories - most couples either have long relationships or else have long will-they-won’t-theys that end with them ‘living happily ever after’ after the final episode. When there is a tragic loss, it’s against a background, not just in TV as…

Yeah, I’m not an aerodynamicist, but my conclusion from watching a few decades of people talking about F1 aerodynamics is that, from the outside, you really can’t tell by looking just how the aero is going to work. Even expert aerodynamicists sometimes get things completely wrong (case in point: every F1 team, having…

That was my thought process too. Hearing about it, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt - put enough people on elevated podiums and have them make gestures of victory and acknowledgement of the crowd, eventually they’ll do something that, in a snapshot looks like a Nazi salute. Finding pictures of…

On the other hand, there were no dancing robots, so...

I agree that ‘bury your gays’ shouldn’t be an excuse to avoid giving gay characters life and death stakes, and that sometimes people complain when it’s not really merited... but at the same time, the specific subtrope of “maintain a will-they-won’t-they for ages to bring in lesbian viewers, allow the couple to finally…

FWIW, it’s incredibly unlikely that she’ll only serve a year or so. Sentencing guidelines call for 9-11 years even without any enhancements - so that’s if she’s NOT considered to have been a leader in the fraud (i.e. the judge accepts that she was just Balwani’s pawn), if she’s NOT found to have obstructed the…

It’s also always been used for specified persons of unknown gender, and of specified persons of known gender where the speaker simply doesn’t see their gender as relevant (or wishes to conceal it). As in “A friend of mine went to Belgium for their holiday, and they had to queue for the train for three hours”.

Hands up who seriously thought that a magazine, collectively, had stolen Ezra Miller’s crossbow, refused to hand it back, and then written about their theft and claimed that this was an odd moment in Miller’s career?

But by the time of Middle English we also already had ‘they’ being used for singular referents. So if ‘they’ is seem as inescapably plural, the same would seem to be true of ‘you’...

Most languages do just fine with no gender distinction in third-person pronouns, so I can’t see this as a major problem. After all, the same ambiguities can arise almost as often with ‘he’ with two or more possible male referents, yet we make do in English without distinguishing obviate/proximate, older/younger,…

It’s not that clear. Legally, a contact doesn’t require a ‘legally binding document’ - oral contracts are just as binding as written ones. [indeed, there don’t even have to be words at all - courts can infer the existence of a implicit contract from the actions of the parties]. If Ecclestone made a deal, he made a…

Well, sort of. He no longer owns the jet he flies on, but after a few photo-ops on commercial planes he’s gone back to flying on a private jet that someone else owns for him...

If you had $100m in the right bank, you wouldn’t HAVE to work to become a billionaire - it would just happen automatically. The richer you are, the richer you get, and the faster you get richer. The really rich can sometimes double their wealth overnight...

Although, to be fair, the budge of Red Bull was around $180m in 2010 (and even that was a big increase from previous years), while by 2020 it was around $350m. I assume all that money didn’t go on private jets, but there may have been a little bit more money there to have a whip around to buy a jet or two. [of course,…

I think it depends on the owners. There are many rich people for whom a private jet - or in some cases another private jet - is absolutely an ostentatious trophy, which they rarely if ever use (if you rarely use it you may as well hire a plane on a case-by-case basis). But there are some people for whom it’s actually…

Exactly - people are acting as though being a bit slow around the set was the end of the world. “Oh, if he has a medical excuse for it I guess I can put up with him if I have to but otherwise he’s a motherfucker who should never work again”. Well yeah, or we could give workers a little bit of breathing space to be…

Paint ALL the cars silver!

It’s kind of weird either way. If they just want their name on the car, they could do an Alfa Romeo and just buy naming rights. So presumably they want to buy it for investment purposes, but then why is it ‘Audi’ involved at all and not just VW? So maybe VW wants it as an asset, and is willing to put Audi’s name on it…

Agreed on the sentiment. Some quibbles on the details - Williams have won more WCC titles than McLaren, although McLaren have won more GPs (Mercedes have won more points than either, but that’s fairly worthless thanks to inflation). And if we’re being really technical about the renaming of things, McLaren haven’t won…

But what’s in it for them? Dorilton bought it, invested in it, but haven’t seen any return on their investment yet - the price presumably won’t be much higher than last year. Whereas if they keep it a few years they could see a serious return. Unless they’ve taken a second look at it and immediately decided it’s a…