LOL! My mother, for the record, has only complained about coffee *once* in my lifetime. It was when she was stuck in the *worse* hospital on the Island a few months ago. She said their coffee was "swill" and refused to drink it, which was so shocking that I willingly shelled out for Starbucks from their lobby every day, and also brewed her coffee in a thermos daily as well. For people who drink a lot of coffee, my family sure isn't very opinionated about it. They like it. Therefore they drink it. But they are, to my mind, shockingly disinterested in coffee snob topics. If I liked coffee, I'd have tons of opinions!

I myself am not a big coffee drinker, or indeed an any kind of coffee drinker, but since my mother and sister are I've spent several years carefully indoctrinating them into the superiority of bird friendly coffee. They are amused by my efforts, but mostly put up with me. They haven't complained about any of these brands, which I've bought on a rotating schedule to craft the illusion that I'm just playing bougie taste testing rather than trying to change their entire coffee-drinking way of life: https://www.emeraldology.com/9-best-certified-bird-friendly-and-organic-coffee-roasters/ But one note: When you pay your workers fairly and also plant responsibly, your product costs more.

I have several poems memorized myself and will recite them at the drop of a hat, not to mention quite a large number of folk songs and child ballads, but my kids never wanted to hear about the twa sisters either. (Moral: Don't share a boyfriend with your sister. It will end badly.)

Huh. My mother does the same thing, but as kids were were infinitely more likely to hear about Jim, Who Ran Away From Nurse And Got Eaten By A Lion than about *fireflies*. This probably says something about my childhood, or perhaps just my mother. To this day it perplexes me that my own kiddos did not even once want to hear about Jim.

It's plenty safe to take the bus by yourself, though the trip will take longer than the train. I'd actually recommend it for you, Kuovonne, as much as possible if you have mobility issues. The buses now all have entrances with no stairs, and that's very not true for the trains. And while *theoretically* trains have elevators and escalators, they don't *all* have them and they're often broken. The MTA has been dragging its feet for a really long time on upgrading stations precisely because any upgrades will have to involve improving accessibility and that's super expensive. (I don't entirely blame them - their funding is in the hands of the state for some incredibly stupid reason (I know the reason, it's stupid) and so they're continually screwed out of the money they need to do the job properly.)

When I was very very small, we lived in another state. And then when I was 3 or 4 we moved up to NYC because my mother thought it'd be easier to get a job in her home city than where we were. I remember being 4 years old and thinking very seriously about the fact that people where we'd been, in New Orleans, said "lightning bug" but people in Brooklyn said "firefly". And this is probably the earliest memory I have of thinking about linguistics in any capacity. I presume there were lightning bugs in New Orleans, and there are lightning bugs in NYC. But you know what? While there are definitely dragonflies in NYC, they're not in all neighborhoods! There were a ton when I was a kid in Bensonhurst, in Brooklyn, but when we moved to Staten Island (the North Shore) I never saw one! I've seen then in Battery Park City, though. Dragonfly is another pretty insect that is called different things in different parts of the country, or so I'm told.

Since we're all telling our war stories, the oldest would pee on the toilet, but would not poop there. At all. I remember asking my mother, when they were 3, "When will this kid poop on the potty!?" and my mother said "February 17!" and we had a good laugh - but no, she was completely right. It was in mid-February. Coming *real* close up onto the kid's fourth birthday, too. But then, the younger one, totally different. One day we woke up and realized that she was totally dry all day, and no poop accidents either. We hadn't even really *done* anything other than bring her into the bathroom when we had to go, and she was barely two. To this day, I have no idea what happened there. We didn't do a thing. It was all her. We certainly hadn't thought she was ready! Nobody believed it, either. We went to visit my grandmother and she was sure we were just completely crazy, that there was no way this child was potty trained, we MUST be trying to pull one over on her. She kept saying, in various ways, "But she's only two!" and "But really, don't you think she needs a diaper?" and so on.

It's a really big city. What sort of things does she like to do when she travels? It's no good telling you she should take a Big Onion walking tour if she hates history and also walking, or that she should go to the Bronx Zoo if she hates animals and walking. (Plus, there are NOT enough bathrooms and water fountains in that place.)

Okay, so maybe his ex didn't act totally honestly - but I gotta say, he's acting like a bad dad now. And I'm not 100% convinced that what he spent "as needed" on his daughter actually added up to what he ought to have been paying in child support the whole time, though I suppose he may have honestly thought it did. But to promise her money he thought wasn't there? No. that's not okay. There's nothing you can say to your sister that will make the two of them see sense, though. Literally nothing. I'm not sure I'd want to say anything at all to my sister if it was my sister, because the two of them are acting despicable.

So, yeah, she's being condescending. And even if it's totally unintentional, as some commenters suggested, she ought to learn to stop doing that because it's bound to be off-putting to nearly everybody. On the other hand... Dawn, you clearly can't stand her. So stop interacting with her more than whatever is minimally necessary for whatever reason.

It's very unlikely to be cancer. However, it's a lot better to go today to the doctor and get it checked out than to spend another week worrying and wondering if you should have gone already.

Brown rice does have higher concentrations of arsenic than white for the reason given. Additionally, if you're using *enriched* rice, rinsing just removes all the enrichments, aka, all the nutrients.

Whether or not you rinse the rice is generally a cultural thing, and has a lot to do with what you want your rice to do. If you rinse the rice, you'll get rice where the grains don't stick together much. If you don't, it'll be stickier. However, it's generally recommended to rinse brown rice because you greatly reduce the risk of contamination with arsenic that way. It's also recommended, so long as you're not using enriched rice, to rinse rice if somebody in your household needs a low-carb diet, because of course rinsing the rice reduces the starch.

I wouldn't cook beans and rice in the same pot, but you can certainly cook both of them on the stove! Brown rice takes about 45 minutes, a little less if you soak it first. Add a little more than twice as much water by volume as rice, and make sure the lid is on TIGHT. If you're not sure, crimp some foil on before you put on the lid. Beans... it depends on the variety of bean and, again, whether or not you've soaked it first. You don't need to measure the water first, just so long as there's a lot of it.

I have no idea what you're getting at here.

You know perfectly well that's not what I said. What I'm saying is that if you - or anybody here - actually really believed that all those zygotes and embryos were babies and people, then they'd care about spontaneous abortion just as much as they do about induced abortion. And they don't care. You just proved that you don't care. If you really believed that those were babies, you'd care about the fact that half of them die before anybody even has a chance to decide if they want to keep the pregnancy or not, often before they even know they're pregnant. But you don't care. So I don't think you really believe that they're babies. If you do, you must be incredibly callous and hypocritical.

Yes, and? If you think these are real lives of real people, shouldn't you care about saving them? Why not donate money into research? It would be very definitely not political - you'd only be helping people who want to have children, and those pregnancies that result. Why spend any time talking about induced abortion when half or more of all successful conceptions spontaneously end? Just look at the numbers! That's like saying you only care about gun deaths if they're murder, and not if a little kid accidentally shoots himself.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/13/about-six-in-ten-americans-say-abortion-should-be-legal-in-all-or-most-cases-2/

Why would it make any difference? I literally do not understand your thought process here. YOU are the one who believes, as near as I can tell, that personhood begins at some point earlier than 13 weeks. Therefore, YOU are the one who thinks that loss of a successful conception is the loss of a person's life. Why would it matter how that loss happens? This question isn't rhetorical. I'm very interested to know why you think there's some sort of difference.

Perhaps. I think it's "uncool" to hold objectionable opinions about rape survivors. I don't care where or when you hold them. But if you do hold them, you ought to have the courage of your convictions and not mind them being brought to light wherever you are.

No. Why would I? That doesn't make any sense.

So you definitely do not hold that opinion? Definitely, positively, absolutely? Because I gotta say, I am really certain I remember you saying that over there. Not that it matters, because you know what? "What you wear affects your risk of rape" is also, as far as I'm concerned, reason enough to reject your opinion on... everything. Literally everything, if you still believe it.

Do you think that people who have an abortion after rape are particularly unlikely to respond? Because what you're suggesting is that all the statistics and all the actual data needs to be thrown out. And I'm just not willing to do that unless we have some serious evidence that it's flawed - not "I personally didn't answer this survey and I don't think anybody else I know did either".

Do you think that those surveys are picking from a non-representative slice of the population?

If you don't hear outrage over rapists getting away with their crimes, you must be willfully covering your ears and going "LALALALALALA!!!!" I don't see any reason to care about your opinion on *this*.