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!

doctor Clean your teeth Hmmm. Something isn’t adding up for me. I think the joke works much better if it’s your dentist!

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.

The VPN works because you can use the service in another country that doesn’t require digital ID.

No way to be sure? It is absolutely sure that they are harvesting every bit of data they can from you.

My wife was shocked when she googled herself and found information that could only have been obtained by reading all of her emails. I explained that Gmail and other mail services are not charities, and if you’re not paying for them with money, you are paying with something else.

It’s obviously to Lenovo’s benefit to have people believe that RAM prices will not drop, so that they will not wait out the current price surge.

The price will drop if supply exceeds demand, and if competition increases.

You are right. And the traditional text that I saw in Japanese temples was written from right to left, top to bottom.

There are claims and counterclaims. Both sides sound convincing, but that’s what prosecutors and defense attorneys are supposed to do.

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!”

John Bigbooty, you are the weakest individual I ever know!

Bigbooté! Bigbooté!

What are you talking about? None of the Gospels were written by apostles. It’s very unlikely that any of them could read or write, before or after Jesus.

If Christians are people of the Book, why do they eat pork and shellfish, wear mixed fabrics, and why don’t they stone to death adulterers and children who disrespect their parents?

What’s that? The New Covenant, you say? Okay, then why, given the example of the Lamb and the Suffering Servant, do Christians fight in armies as opposed to turning the other cheek and loving their enemies? Why don’t they sell everything the own and give the money to the poor?

There’s always a justification for doing the opposite of what was explicitly commanded in the Bible. Before Constantine made Christianity the state religion, you could not be a Christian and serve in the Roman army. After Constantine, to serve in the Roman army you had to be a Christian. Hmmmm.

That sounds like a very Catholic interpretation (I grew up Catholic). Funny how we need to be told what to think, by people who have a vested interest in maintaining the existing power structures of the church, when the original teachings of Jesus were to illiterate farmers and fishermen.

Do you want a list of the contradictions in the Bible? Or discrepancies in all the manuscripts that we have found, let alone all the translations?

There is an enormous amount of justification and adoption of bizarre interpretations, just to try and fit our theology (both current and past) into what the Bible says, and what supports people’s preconceived ideas.

After a while, I just got tired of difficult passages in the Bible being explained with, “oh, you have to interpret it like this for it to make sense”. Or, “it’s a mystery”. A few times yes, but over and over again? No, it seems obvious that we are making the Bible do things it was never created to do.

And, if you can, try to approach it without the implicit or explicit understanding that it is a divinely inspired text. If it can’t stand up on its own, it’s definitely suspect.

Dan McClellan has a good YouTube channel on biblical scholarship issues.

I suspect it’s because the characters in Japanese at least, all take up exactly the same sized box. We find English easier to read when it uses a proportional font, so different letters take up different widths.

Also, Japanese is commonly written top to bottom, left to right, in printed materials but left to right, top to bottom, when handwriting or for casual text. Once in a while, though, they do top to bottom, right to left. I’ve seen this in temples, so I think it’s a traditional format.

In my mind, left to right, top to bottom make sense when writing with ink, because then your hand doesn’t smudge the already-written characters. Unless you are a lefty, of course.

It took me over 60 years, but I have finally understood that the mistranslations, misunderstandings, and outright fabrications of a small group of people thousands of years ago maybe influential, but that doesn’t make them true.

The number of logical, philosophical, and moral backflips that you have to do in order to make any sense of it can only work if you have already decided that they are true. Without all that hand-waving, it’s ludicrous.

I see your nostalgia and raise you this: this

I actually had to learn to use a slide rule in high school, in the late 1970s.

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.