I think the subtext is, “it doesn’t matter, because they were Asians”.

I was married already when I met my now wife. My first wife lived overseas and we hadn’t been together for about 8 years.

Our two children lived with me, but we didn’t have a separation or legal custody agreement. Doing all of that internationally, getting all the documents professionally translated, court dates, etc. was extremely challenging.

So we waited several years until both kids were legally adults and we just had to deal with the divorce (which itself took almost 3 years) before making things official.

That said, my case is much less typical than a guy just lying about his domestic circumstances.

My mistake was only watching the final game live. Turned out to be a real snoozefest, with very, very few even mildly exciting moments.

How bad was it? Spain had 12 shots on net. Argentina had 0. Zero.

I think that any other game in the tournament would have been better to watch.

Well you should check out Kaos, a dark comedy on net6 featuring Jeff Goldblum as Zeus. Definitely flawed Gods there!

Brooks Moore, one of the senior technical managers for U.S. space programs, including Mercury and Apollo.

That makes me think of Peter Sellers’ in-movie scene at the beginning of The Party. I love this movie when I was a kid, but I suspect that an English comedian in brownface playing an Indian would not go over so well these days.

I can’t believe I’m reading this. Obviously universal healthcare is not without flaws, and there are many variations on the theme. Some work better than others.

But for a developed, “rich” country not to provide it to their citizens is a crime. Of course, the people most affected by the lack of healthcare are they working poor, while middle class people are generally insulated by employer-provided insurance, and the rich naturally have the best health care on the planet.

I think that this is another case of the majority of Americans not being able to conceive what life outside the greatest country in the world^TM is like. Ask anyone from another country if they would prefer us-style healthcare, and you will get a resounding “NO!”

One of my kids started to play the piano at about 13. By the age of 18, he was playing pieces that were Royal Conservatory grade 10 level, and he was accepted into several universities.

He only had one hour of lessons a week during those 4 years of high school, but usually practiced 2 to 3 hours a day, without any pushing on my part. In some of his lessons he wouldn’t even touch the keyboard, they would just analyze a piece of music or discuss the theory behind it.

In university, the professors sometimes told other students to watch him play. His technique, they said, was not great (he himself admits that playing scales early on would have helped), but his feeling was superb.

Why don’t Mennonites have sex standing up?

Because it could lead to dancing.

(Explanation: some Mennonite sects believe that dancing is inappropriate. Sex is not considered dirty, as long as it is within a marriage.)

Come to Quebec, where electricity is about USD $0.05/kWh. And over 99% of that is renewable (hydroelectric)!

It’s even more of a no-brainer in Quebec, where gasoline is almost $2/litre (USD $5.50 per US gallon), but electricity is only about $0.07/kWh.

Streaming radio from around the world: Radio Garden

Best language lessons short of full immersion: Language Transfer

It seems like an eternity ego that someone (Colbert?) coined the phrase, “reality has a distinctly liberal bias”.

The whole picture looks bad, like an AI rendering from several years ago.

500mg of salt is about 1/10 of a teaspoon, not very much.

Was that guy named Emmanuel Macron? He met his wife when he was 15 and she was 39. He was in a class with her daughter.

I can’t remember when a premonition saved me, but I certainly can remember dozens or hundreds of times when I had an irrational fear that something would go badly but it didn’t.

They just got hoodwinked a couple of times.

I think that’s being unreasonably generous to the French. Their military was staffed with elderly officers, and they had very poor communications. They didn’t use radio very much and telephones were often cut, so they had to rely on motorcycle riders.

Also, for some reason they refuse to believe that the Germans would advance through the Ardennes, as they had the previous two times they invaded France.

Their army then essentially gave up, and they agreed to set up Vichy France, a collaborationist state that was very efficient at rounding up and deporting Jews to the gas chambers.

The French also refused to hand their Mediterranean fleet over to the British at Mers-el-Kébir, so the British sunk it rather than risk allowing the ships to be used by the Germans.

I also have RockSmith and a bass guitar. However, for 3 years I have been playing in local groups (the last year has been a community open mic where up to a dozen musicians sit around and strum together) and having a lot of fun. The thing is that these are almost all elderly people, self-taught, so they are not trying to become rock stars, just to enjoy playing music together. Playing music I have never heard before has been very good for developing my ear.

I go through periods of playing RockSmith a lot, and then not playing it at all for several months. Discovering user-created tracks that can be added as DLC has been fantastic.

Well, not terribly subtle, but if you are fighting with your spouse and they complain that you never say anything nice about their family, you can respond with:

“Well, I have to say that your in-laws are better than my in-laws”