It happens in every family. One cousin in the stepfamily and one in my father's family, both found a high number of six- and seven-month pregnancies recorded for first babies.

It's been like this since the beginning; it will be like this to the end. It's just getting harder to hide it.

If you thought the idea of women as chattel was past, obviously, you were wrong.

As a child, I once stepped on a snail in a shell while barefoot. [Insert picture of Calvin freaking out.] I can never forget that sensation.

The nuclear family is a recent development, due to the changing structure of businesses and life. When people spent their entire lives in the same town or area, the extended family was there for support. It isn't normal for the family to consist only of the parents and their children. Grandparents were there to help with work and childcare, while the parents worked. The children helped as they got older, including caring for grandparents in return.

The nuclear family has no safety net. If either parent becomes ill, dies or abandons the family, the remaining parent is pushed into multiple roles that would normally have been filled by members of an extended family.

Renting a family member actually makes a kind of sense. It's sad, but when a family has grandparents living in two different parts of the country (up to four if they're divorced), one parent with the children in another, and the other divorced parent into a fourth location, what are you going to do?

Repaints, ack. My younger son wants every Transformer out there, and, yes, if the colors are different and the name is different, he has to have it. He pays for most of them out of his allowance, because I refuse to pay for repaints.

The bombings of the London Underground was on July 7, 2005, and the British refer to it as 7/7.

Here's the wikipedia link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings

JoeD, thanks for the extra info.

Before I even read the article, I figured the poor kid had no other way to get breakfast, and probably the only happy times he has are at school, especially in PE, where he can play with other kids.

I just hope the foster care parents actually give a damn about these poor kids.

93%. I missed the water one, too. But I agree with canvai that if water is defined as two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, then if you observe a liquid that is said to be water but does not have that molecular makeup, then it is not water.

xtivo, the murder one is invalid because while you have a number of facts, facts which together would probably be accepted in a court of law as beyond a reasonable doubt, it does not logically follow that it is true. It's a logic test, and I had to remind myself of that when I read the question.

Ben B., you said exactly what I was thinking. I started Neuromancer and read the next two books as fast as I could get them. The ones since then by Gibson I haven't cared for as much, but I still enjoyed Idoru and Virtual Light.

UPS has a lousy union. FedEx has a great union. UPS treats their drivers like crap, overloads them, then tells them they can't come back without delivering everything. Now, my UPS guy at home is great. So is the FedEx guy. The current USPS woman is good. But we hate dealing with UPS at work because we never know when they'll show up or even if they'll show during office hours.

Over a week before Christmas, I ordered an item. It was shipped on time. I knew it could arrive after Christmas, but I still don't have it. Why? Because UPS decided that shipping an item from Kansas City to California could best be done by shipping it into Portland, Oregon, during one of the worst snowstorms in history. It arrived in Portland on the 23rd. It was not unloaded from the plane until the 29th. At this point, not even God knows where my package is.

I remember candy cigarettes. Loved 'em, and bubble gum cigars. Yeah, candy cigarettes are basically chalk and sugar, although they must contain some addictive substance, because I will eat boxes of them.

100%. That's kind of depressing.

I use my bluetooth while driving. It's the law here. But it's more of a just in case. I normally do NOT phone out when driving, unless I pull over, and I keep any received calls short.

My bluetooth is used the most when I'm shopping or in a noisy situation and I know I won't be able to hear my phone ring.

However, the people with bluetooths who just talk and talk and talk about nothing drive me nuts. If someone is talking to me and I get a call, normally, I ignore the call. I can call whoever it was back. Not these jerkoffs. Their chat about what they had for dinner is SO important that they can't possibly hang up the call for one minute, long enough to pay at the store and get out of the way!

Vagina: Not a clown car.

They work to have this many children. They plan around Michelle's fertility. They could not financially support these children without the television shows and charitable donations. The parents don't manage the children, they manage a schedule that requires the older children to care for the younger children.

The girls are taught that they're only function is to marry and bear children for their church. The boys do not plan to go to college, but instead take jobs and start businesses that will not support their future large families.

Considering the over-population of Earth, these people's selfishness should find them paying the rest of us for each child they bear.

My first husband told me what the ingredients were over twenty years ago. He regularly had to travel to Taiwan, and said that in Taipei there is a street called Snake Alley where they have speciality restaurants and snakes for sale.

It's true that meat, to an extent, is meat. However, certain curbs have been placed on us socially about eating certain types of meat as opposed to others, often based on diseases that can be acquired. Many of these curbs became religious tenets, as a way to make people follow them more closely. Additionally, many cultures have avoided eating cats, not only because they are pets, but because they curb the population of various vermin, protecting us from diseases passed by these vermin, especially the Plague. People have avoided eating dogs because dogs are not only pets, but provide protection and companionship, and assisted in the acquisition of food by hunting and became trained to herd other animals that provided food and clothing.

While to many people cats and dogs are simply pets, they still do have important roles as working animals, making human life safer and happier.

Most human societies do not eat other humans for important social reasons. Also, eating humans is an excellent way to spread diseases through populations. Eating carnivorous and omnivorous animals is a serious disease risk, one of the reasons many societies do not eat pigs or rodents or shellfish.

If you are uncomfortable eating meat, fine. However, don't try to pass off vegetarianism as some higher, enlightened form of existence. It's not. You're denying millions of years of evolution as a personal choice. Again, that's fine. It's your personal choice, and I will respect it as your choice, but show some respect in return, if you expect to get any.