I’m not sure how someone could live in a big city without learning to just walk past beggars without making eye contact. I know I sound like a terrible person when I say that explicitly, but it’s what almost everyone actually does. Most other people just don’t want to admit it (to others, and maybe to themselves).

I feel classy using it

I have one of those long shoehorns that let me put my shoes on without even leaning down. It makes me feel downright aristocratic. (And it’s metal too, no plastic for me!)

A shoehorn. It makes putting shoes on so much easier, and for just a couple of dollars. I’m perfectly capable of putting my shoes on without it, but I enjoy not having to.

My non-joke answer is apprenticeship. Kids could actually learn how to do a valuable job rather than graduating from high school with almost no useful skills.

Strong black tea with a wedge of lemon (but I messed up my teeth so now lemon would make them very sensitive).

Did you know that turtles scream when they, uh, copulate? Imagine how loud a dinosaur would have been.

Getting an industry job rather than a postdoc after I finished my PhD.

Well, yes - George W. Bush appears in retrospect to have been sincere. Some of the other powerful supporters of the war did profit from it, but at the expense of American taxpayers rather than Iraqis.

This meme contains a common accusation from 20 years ago, but I think it’s odd that it is being posted in 2024, long after it became clear that whatever the purpose of the invasion of Iraq actually was, it wasn’t to obtain oil wealth.

Nobody really knows why that’s supposed to attract a potential dating partner, but it’s really common

Back when I did online dating I wrote about playing computer games, not because I expected that to be attractive to the average woman (of course it isn’t) but because I was hoping to meet one of the rare women who shared my interest.

A friend of mine managed to marry a woman who agreed to have their honeymoon be a week-long canoe trip through the wilderness in Maine, complete with living off of the fish they caught. It can happen!

hāt tomāt

Tomatoes were one of the few things my dog wouldn’t eat.

I don’t like being physically close to almost anyone, and especially not to strangers. It’s ok when each person has his own assigned space and everything is orderly and quiet, like on a plane or in a movie theater, but being in a crowd is both kind of disgusting and also upsetting in some other way which I don’t know how to put into words - I just want to leave and I can’t really express why. I can go into crowded places if I need to without freaking out, but afterwards I’m going to be in a bad mood for a while both because of the experience of being in a crowd and because of anger at the unfairness of the fact that for various reasons I live in a big city and I have to deal with all these… humans whenever I need to go outdoors.

So yeah, I guess you can say that I don’t like people.

There was the same nonstop excitement there would be during an actual soccer match.

No. No. That’s not true. That’s impossible!

But I want to pretend none of this ever happened.

The Selfish Gene (Dawkins): a very readable explanation of evolution that covers some key principles which even college-level classes tend to miss. Don’t let the author’s later, unsophisticated books about religion scare you away; this book is good.

Black Holes and Time Warps (Thorne): a bit dated now, but still a fun journey through what we know about black holes and how it was discovered. Almost as much a history book as a physics book, written by someone who was personally involved in the process of discovery.

1. git pull
2. git reset --hard HEAD
3. try not to cry
4. cry a lot

I’m not talking about getting them jammed in the zipper, I’m talking about getting them pinched between my leg and my torso.

I have no clue how people would do it, since I don’t even understand how other men can wear boxers without accidentally giving their nuts a good squeeze sometimes. Tight briefs keep those out of harm’s way.

That’s not an unreasonable reading of the text, but if you’re going to look at the Constitution that way, you’ll see that it doesn’t talk about abortion or gay marriage either. I’m in favor of abortion rights and gay marriage, and that’s why I don’t start “but the Constitution doesn’t literally say…” arguments with conservatives.