Recent Comments

1. about 5 years ago on Monty

   Hermit crabs.

   But I agree, there’s no reason to assume wearing clothes comes with advancement. I think wearing clothes when it isn’t cold is pretty unenlightened, in fact.

2. about 5 years ago on Doonesbury

   That’s one of the greatest quotes out of context of all time. When Nixon said, “If the president does it, that means it isn’t illegal,” he wasn’t saying whatever the president does, it’s legal. "It"was particular powers that Nixon believed the president has, to address major threats to national security or internal peace. He was correcting the interviewer’s semantics when the interviewer asked if Nixon thought the president was allowed to do illegal things in certain circumstances. Nixon just clarified that his claim is that those things aren’t illegal.

   And besides, Nixon wasn’t talking about whether his own actions were illegal, he was talking about whether the actions of his employees, such as burglarizing an office under the president’s direction to protect national security, were illegal.

   Now, one can certainly argue that the powers Nixon was talking about were far beyond any power a president actually has, but you have to quote more than that one sentence to argue about that.

3. about 5 years ago on Doonesbury

   Yes, a very dated joke; there was only about a year there when the experts couldn’t figure out where AIDS was coming from; all they knew was you tended to get it if you were a gay man, an IV drug user, a hemophiliac, or Haitian.

   There’s another equally funny version of the joke: The hardest part of having AIDS is you have to tell your parents you’re Haitian.

4. about 5 years ago on Doonesbury

   One way we deduce how things were pronounced before sound recording existed is by looking at misspellings. Another is texts that try to correct lower class pronunciations of things. Those tell us both how the upper class pronounced it and how the lower class did.

5. about 5 years ago on For Better or For Worse

   There are lots of kinds of contraceptive effectiveness numbers, but usually when they say a certain method is 99% effective, what they mean is that 99 out of 100 women who rely on the method don’t get pregnant in a given year. Note that it doesn’t even presume the couple actually uses the method. Condoms have a low stated effectiveness because couples who rely on that as their method often neglect to actually use one. Vasectomies and birth control pills don’t have that problem.

6. over 5 years ago on Doonesbury

   Lead plumbing doesn’t poison people. There are lead pipes supplying drinking water all over the world today. The lead does not enter the water.

   If the system is properly operated, that is. We learned all about lead pipes a few years ago when Flint, Michigan put some incompetent people in charge of the water supply and they ran corrosive water without anticorrosive additives through the lead pipes and they did dissolve into the drinking water.

   The resulting sickness was conspicuous enough that if that were the normal result of lead plumbing, it wouldn’t have remained the standard way to deliver drinking water for centuries.

7. over 5 years ago on Doonesbury

   @gorillazilla The difference is that while Democrats might be doing things that will end SS, it’s not their goal – they would like the payments to continue. Republicans don’t think pensions are any of the government’s business and actually want SS to end.

8. over 5 years ago on Overboard

   How do those poor sharks survive? The pirates never let them eat anybody.

9. over 5 years ago on Doonesbury

   I think I got mine when I opened a credit union account at age 14 in 1977. My mother applied for it (and also cosigned the credit union account)

10. over 6 years ago on Monty

    The traditional publisher also does all the marketing. This is at least as important as the financing of the writing and printing.

    So a successful publisher knows what people will buy and what they won’t, and if you think people will love your book and the publishers do not, the publishers are probably right.

    Amazon and the vanity presses don’t give you that kind of advice.