A friend of mine once claimed that a small plaster on your hand or face makes you more attractive because it suggests a little bit of vulnerability (but not too much). I'm not entirely convinced, myself, but maybe Gosling is working that band aid magic here.

Fingers crossed that it somehow ends up not being as awful as you fear.

Ouch!

And mom's invited herself to stay overnight with me the night everyone was supposed to have left me to my blissful peace and quiet.

Really.

Dae Kim is also (I think) easily the biggest name of the four

I've used babbel.com and found it pretty good, with a reasonable mix of grammar and vocabulary, but a) it's not free and b) it doesn't have Japanese, so not much help to you right now. There are other, similar sites that do offer Japanese, e.g. busuu, but I can't tell you how well they work.

Dark Matter: I agree with you about crazy sword lady and disappointed ex-teacher, they're both great, but I have never, ever found Four an even remotely interesting character, and making him the emperor of Planet Cringe has done nothing to alleviate that. I don't mind Adrian, I feel he brings something refreshingly…

To me it sounds more like trying to speak German very lazily. But yeah, there is also some gargling involved.

The "magic money tree" thing was in response to a question about low pay for nurses, who sometimes apparently end up going to foodbanks.

I always read those as scare quotes, which rather undermines the promotional message.

I learnt a little Dutch a while back. In Dutch, using an apostrophe to denote the plural is sometimes correct. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to forgive the Dutch for this.

Happy Birthday to Iffy!

… "no magic money tree" …

Ooh, that would be great, thank you!

Yeah, I suspected it might be a ProBoards thing.

I have considered registering on the TI Forum in the past, but it insists I tell it whether I'm male or female (there are no other options). I don't suppose there's anything you can do about that? No big deal if not, I'm a happy (if rarely posting) Avocado member.

I've seen a lot of posts on Twitter basically saying "you never paid any attention to NI's awful politicians and backwards laws before the DUP became Treeza's last hope". And all I can say is "guilty as charged", and I feel terrible about it.

Same. Are you getting old? I seem to be getting old.

Ah well, I suppose I can't blame you for trying to cheer us all up by pretending the person running the country actually knows what she's doing.