Is this like a sex thing for you? Do you get off from being a contrary jackass?

In some small number of cases you may die in a house fire, and I’ll bet you have smoke detectors and fire extinguishers around just in case

If your grandmom cheated on your grandad, your aunts and uncles may not be his kids.

It’s absolutely an edge case, but there are still a lot of wonky family situations out there, people who are estranged from their family for any number of reasons, adoption, people raised by their grandparents under the impression that they were their parents to hide the fact that their sister is really their mom and they were hiding a teen pregnancy, your mom cheated and your dad isn’t actually your father, etc.

And sometimes that all stays under wraps until someone in the family takes a DNA test.

I have a friend with a big family who just recently discovered that most of her aunts and uncles aren’t actually her grandfather’s biological children. She and her siblings haven’t done a test themselves and her father’s dead so the jury is still out on whether she’s blood related to him or not.

But if she’s not, and she finds out who her actual biological grandfather is, it’s not impossible that that may open up a new pathway to citizenship through him.

And laws change, as a hypothetical, let’s say Poland starts getting antsy (well, antsyer) about Russia doing Russia stuff and really wants more people to feed the war machine in case of WWII breaking out, they already have a citizenship by descent option but the proper documentation to qualify can be tricky, but if they decide they really want to increase immigration I don’t think it would be out of the question for them to open up a pathway for someone who can show a DNA test with X% polish ancestry. In that hypothetical it might be kind of an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire situation, but maybe it would still be preferable to the situation in someone’s home country.

It’s just one more tool in the box that can open up new avenues for people to explore. It may not pan out for everyone or even most people who look into it, but in some small handful of cases it may save their lives.

Kind of funny you specifically call out Irish-Americans, because Ireland does actually have some options for citizenship-by-descent. It’s not quite as simple as anyone with Irish ancestry can become a citizen, but it is a thing.

If you have a grandparent who was born in Ireland you’re eligible

Or if your parent was an Irish citizen at the time of your birth

So hypothetically if you have a great grandparent born in Ireland, your parent could apply for Irish citizenship, even though their parents (your grandparents) weren’t citizens and had never set foot in Ireland

And if they did that before you were born you would also be eligible

And so on down the line to your children, and their children, etc. if everyone keeps on top of it.

There’s actually a decent handful of countries with some sort of citizenship-by-descent, not a majority by a longshot, and of course every country that does offer it has different requirements and restrictions, but for some people it can potentially be a viable pathway to another citizenship.

Going against the grain here a little, I don’t like required reading in schools.

I really loved reading growing up, always had a book (sometimes more than one) that I was reading, read well above my grade level, chose books that challenged myself, etc.

My high school really pushed reading, lots of classes assigned books for us to read, I think even some of the math classes had novels they were supposed to read. For our homeroom period once a week we had to do mandatory SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) where we had to be reading something, we couldn’t do homework or go see our teachers for help, or anything of the sort, we had to be seated at our desks reading silently. I often was juggling 2 or 3 assigned books along with my other school work, activities, and hobbies, which didn’t really leave me much time for the books that I chose to read for myself.

And the pacing was terrible, we’d often spend weeks on a book, analyzing it to death, doing packets of worksheets, writing reports, doing that accursed “popcorn reading” in class, etc. for books that I could have read in a matter of days if not hours.

I think we spent nearly a month on Of Mice and Men, it’s only around 100 pages, it can be read in an afternoon.

The whole experience really killed my love of reading. I resented a lot of the books I was made to read, and now almost 2 decades later I’ve never quite been able to get back into the same kind of reading habit I used to have.

I’ve made an effort since then to go back and reread some of those assigned books I hated back in school, and the wild thing is that, overall, they were really good books, strong stories, well-written, solid lessons to teach, different points of view to consider, etc. I totally understand why they were assigned reading.

But when I first read them I was just going through the motions, I just wanted to get the damn books out of the way so that I could read what I wanted to read.

And I think the key is to make kids want to seek out those books. Don’t assign them 1984 (for example,) make them want to go out and read 1984 for themselves.

I don’t know what the best way to do that is, but it’s not just telling them to read those books. If anything, it might be telling them not to read them. I can only speak for myself, but I know that personally seeing a display on “banned books” at a book store or library always made me way more interested in those books than any amount of recommendations from friends or reviews online or any other form of marketing.

They never went snooping, my mom occasionally would occasionally come into my room to put clothes away or pick stuff up off the floor or whatever but that was pretty much the extent of it.

She did occasionally do the fairly odd parents “I’m respecting your privacy by knocking but asserting my authority as your parent by coming in anyway” thing, where she’d knock but didn’t really wait for a reply before opening the door or just took any sort of “what?” reply she got as an invitation to continue in, but I think that was more of her being on autopilot than any real intention to barge in on me.

I was, by most measures, a pretty good kid and didn’t really have anything to hide anyway. I think my parents knew that so they never really bothered to snoop.

And on top of that, my grandmother was the queen of all snoop, and my mom hated that when she was growing up so she didn’t want to do that to her own kids.

My grandmother was always the type to just come over uninvited, let herself into the house, and just kind of do whatever the hell she wanted, look at whatever mail we had sitting out on the counter (didn’t open it, but if it was already open it I don’t think she was above reading it) move stuff around, etc.

I remember one time when I was still living at home I was the only one home, it was the middle of the day and I worked nights so I was asleep. She let herself in and was doing who knows what downstairs, and she accidentally bumped the power button on my Xbox, and couldn’t figure out how to turn it back off, so she came into my room and woke me up over it.

No it’s at least 2 chemicals- acetic acid and water.

And quite a few others if we’re talking about something besides distilled white vinegar.

chemical free

Literally a chemical.

It’s a common one found in lots of natural foods and such, nothing particularly scary or unusual, but you are presumably buying a purified, concentrated chemical and not just squeezing a lemon into your washing machine as a natural source of that chemical.

If I were not Diogenes, I would also wish to be Diogenes

-Diogenes

Harmony remotes, IMO, were actually pretty good.

But sadly they killed them off just before I got a home theater setup that I’m actually pretty happy with.

I had a small novelty Twitter account that Andrew WK followed at one point.

Without pay? No. But I do fortunately have some pretty generous PTO at my work, and a bit of a weird work schedule that helps me stretch it even firther if I plan my vacations right.

My wife and I manage to get a bigger trip in every couple years. We’re not staying at fancy hotels or anything, but we can go somewhere cool and do some cool stuff, splurge on a couple nice meals, etc.

And usually one or two smaller trips a year, a couple camping trips, or a weekend away or something.

Would like to travel a lot more, but the travel expenses are what prevent it- food, lodging, plane tickets/gas/etc.

Well now there’s one more thing I can’t unsee

My wife has this big painting that hangs above our fireplace. It’s abstract, just some colored squares and rectangles, kind of blotchy.

One of those blotches looks a hell of a lot like a frog though. Almost like a frog hopped onto the canvas while the paint was still wet.

Can you find the frog?

Or “His Dudeness” or “Duder” or “El Duderino” if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.

He did eventually sober up, I think he did a little bit of time in jail or prison along the way. As far as I know he is generally doing pretty well now, is married, has a kid.

But he’s still an idiot. I remember seeing I’m parroting some bullshit about Trump being better for the middle class maybe about a year ago.

He did message me a bit after the election saying something about how he felt bad, but I was still pissed off myself and in no mood to hear him out and blocked him. I was within days of deleting my Facebook anyway so I was about to lose contact with him anyway since I’ve never had his phone number.

It wasn’t much, but back in high school I basically worked as sort of a personal savings account for a couple weeks.

There was one dude I wasn’t exactly friends with but we were friendly, never hung out or really talked outside of school, but otherwise were on pretty good terms. We often sat at the same lunch tables, had some mutual friends and such, talked and joked around between classes, etc.

He was also kind of an irresponsible druggie. Nice guy, wasn’t out committing crimes or anything besides drug possession, just made a lot of dumb choices, came to school drunk, high or tripping balls a lot.

I kind of looked the part of a stoner back in high school- long hair, sort of a grungy style, listened to a lot of classic rock and metal, etc. so I was in a lot of the same circles as him, but I didn’t drink or do drugs and it was also pretty well known that I was a reasonably smart, responsible, and honest dude.

So a few weeks out from senior prom, he realizes that he’s going to need some money for whatever his post-prom plans were (I didn’t ask, I figured it was probably better that I didn’t know.) He also knew that he couldn’t be trusted with his own money, he’d blow it on drugs or something else stupid.

So he asks if he can just give me money to hold onto, and I agreed. He’d hand me a few bucks here or there over the next couple weeks, whatever he didn’t use from his lunch money or allowance or whatever, and I just held onto it.

But at the end of it, it added up to a pretty decent bit of money (by “high school kids 20 years ago” standards anyway, it was maybe around $100)

And the day before prom I gave it back to him and he let me keep I think $10 or $20 for my troubles.

Richard Attenborough

Is it actually a dedicated gay nudist beach, or is it a nude beach that the gay community frequents?

There’s a nude beach not too far from me, and it’s pretty well-known that the one end of the beach is the “gay” end. There’s no official demarcation, it’s just a regular public beach where nudity happens to be allowed, and the one end of it is where the gay people tend to congregate, if you’re not already in the loop about the local nudist community, you’d have no real way of knowing that until you found yourself there and maybe noticed a lot of rainbow flags and same-sex couples holding hands or something.

But that end of the beach does also sometimes get a bit raunchy, which isn’t really legal though usually police turn a blind eye to it as long as they stay down that end, it wouldn’t bother me too much personally if I stumbled onto it without knowing, but it probably would a lot of other people, and I’d still generally consider it trashy and inappropriate at best.

If you were actually at some sort of private gay club where public sex is allowed, all good, but I feel like you probably wouldn’t be questioning and trying to justify it if that was the case.