If you want another story, when I was a four year old girl, I asked my mother how my dad proposed to her, looking for a fairytale. She told me they’d been together for eight years, so “at that point it was really shit or get off the pot.” This was probably the first time she swore in front of me, and she only did it a dozen times or so ever (though I was twelve when she died, so she was still editing herself).

My dad also separately started hitting a silver quarter with a spoon on the night after their first date, and hit it so many thousands of times over the next several years that he was able to shape it into a ring for her, which is one of the most romantic things I’ve ever heard, but that wasn’t a proposal, so she didn’t tell me that story for several years.

Obviously it’s not a romantic thing, but also related to the individual’s level of comfort with seeming insults, this is a recent situation that did not make sense to a coworker of mine.

My dad just cut his finger off (non dominant pointer, so either #4 or #5 most important, depending on how highly you rate pinkies) the other day after many, many decades of woodworking and general tinkering. He’s otherwise okay, but it hurt like a bitch and it couldn’t be reattached. He’s mostly regretful, with a touch of existential jolting.

My sisters and I got him a giant foam finger two days after it happened and he laughed his fucking head off. I got a pretty good chuckle on that very day from “hey, 9/10 ain’t bad,” but I’m pretty sure that was mostly the painkillers, because it’s not a good joke.

My coworker told us under no circumstances to get the foam finger and we should just be nice. I get the sentiment, but that would scare the shit out of my dad. For context, after shaving his wife’s head during the course of her chemo treatments, my dad looked at her in the mirror when she was feeling nearly her lowest and said that he’d always had a crush on uncle Fenster, but he’d never expected to get so lucky. She laughed uproariously.

I was raised by these people, so that’s the kind of thing that I say. A relationship with someone who was always earnest would not work for either of us.

Yeah, freakonomics is often this close to making a breakthrough and then they back off into neoliberalism

It’s going to look like a shag rug as soon as they touch it

They’re in Chicago, grabbing people off the street and punching restrained people.

Edit: my bad, this is us border patrol, not cbp. I swear I’ve seen cbp involved though, I’ll keep looking

Edit edit: USBP is part of CBP

Okay, I’m starting from the position of: authoritarian countries are not functional countries.

Within the last few years they had such significant protests in response to a woman who died in police custody that they had to pardon 20k people imprisoned in relation to them and 80k people facing charges. Then they strengthened the laws around the cause for the arrest. That’s not what a functional country does when its people are unhappy.

If the only metric is money, sure. Iranian women aren’t exactly happy though

That sounds good, but I wonder if workers in fast moving fields still suffer from being out of work for however long the term of the non compete is.

So they can pay for a funeral and take time off to grieve without the specter of homelessness over their shoulder.

It can be incredible for sherbet, though.

Not only that, but they knew about it at the same time that they were aggressively advertising to black and Hispanic women, telling them to powder their crotches, which caused a bunch of uterine cancer

I wonder if that’s the only way it’s visible. Like, I would expect to hear some reference to reporters or their accounts of events if there were any. There are unfortunately a lot of options right now for war journalists and given the 18 month siege, I could see it being difficult for them to really get there.

Because of the quote from the article I included wherein he talks about banning prayer in public places.

You can argue that your prayer mat is a yoga mat. I still don’t understand what your issue with my comment is.

That’s something you can argue in court, but it doesn’t stop you from the hassle and it doesn’t stop the chilling effect that a law like that could cause. I don’t know what you’re actually disagreeing with me about.

Why would I ignore that the only way I can see to implement a prayer ban seems discriminatory against Muslims? That’s my whole issue and the point of my comment: a ban on prayer seems like it might be a whitewashed attack on Muslims.

Yeah, that’s it. I’m worried that this is just thinly veiled Islamophobia, because praying can occur in someone’s head with no outward indication that a person’s praying, so you obviously can’t ban prayer itself. You can ban public displays of prayer like a prayer mat, which means that Muslims must be on private property where prayer is allowed (good luck screening for that in the job search) at five spaced out and preordained times a day. I hope there’s another way to interpret a ban on prayer.

As I said, I hope I am wrong about my interpretation. What’s eyebrow raising about prayer mats?

I was with them until this:

The government has already tabled legislation to extend the religious symbols ban to all public school staff, and Roberge has also promised to ban prayer in public places.

I hope I’m interpreting this too cynically, but that sounds like something that’s not really possible (nailing down what is and isn’t a prayer just for this comment is giving me a headache, like does “damn it!” count?). What they could do is ban the use of prayer mats, but that would only really hit one religion. Hopefully that’s neither their intent nor the course they’d take.