So how about periodic checks - no license unless you can show you have a freaking gun safe in your home, with a freaking lock? This is not rocket science, and quite honestly, if people keep blocking sensible gun control laws, sooner or later the reasonable majority of the population who all *want* sensible gun control laws is going to get totally fed up.

Just to piggyback on "medications", check to make sure she's not taking routine benadryl. Because it's OTC a lot of people think it's safe and won't bring it up with the doctor as a "medicine they take", but it's really not. It can cause or exacerbate the symptoms of dementia.

re: cat bites - Obviously it's too late for Jenny in Florida to take this advice, but for everybody else, cat bites are ALWAYS serious, especially if they draw blood. You may be able to get out of an ER visit if it's a shallow bite from a cat you know has been vaccinated and it does NOT draw blood, but if it draws blood you have to go to the doctor immediately. Cat bites get infected very easily, and those infections escalate rapidly, as in "grave risk of life and limb" within a day or less. If you *do* decide to wait-and-watch on a bite that doesn't draw blood, you need to wash the wound thoroughly, apply some heavy antibiotics, and be prepared to move at the very first sign of infection. That infection will not clear up on its own. This is true for all animal bites, but especially cats. (You'll also require a re-up on your tetanus vax.)

Katy, were those two weekers still with their mom, or had they been removed? Either situation will have its own unique challenges you have to adapt to in order to end up with well-socialized cats. For the record, I'm not a fan of removing even feral kittens from Mom until a minimum age of 8 weeks, but even the most ardent early-removal rescue organizations don't advocate for earlier than six weeks unless there is a special situation.

Even true feral kittens can be pretty easily tamed as late as 8 weeks, and with more effort up until three or four months. (After that it gets a LOT harder. It's not really true that there's no possibility of taming an adult feral, but the cost/benefit analysis doesn't really add up for most of us, and even then you probably won't end up with an affectionate snugglebug, more like a roomie who tolerates your presence... but it depends on the starting point. Many feral cats are only semi-feral, and how "semi" they are affects how friendly towards humans they can become.) I would not, under any circumstances, release these kittens to new homes until they've been altered and had their first round of shots. You can do that as early as 13 weeks if they hit their weight - that's around when you'll be betting Mom done. I strongly recommend you find out what low cost options exist in your area. If you let these kittens go without getting them done, then dollars to doughnuts the new families, with the best of intentions, won't get them done before at least they all have one more litter. I only once let a pair of kittens go without getting them done first, and that's because we had a sudden family illness right after I brought them into my home and I had to scramble to find a new foster home. (For reference, they were about 16 weeks old, semi-feral, and within a week I had them using a box, playing with a fish-on-a-string, purring when I showed up, and tolerating light pets as they ate. They weren't exactly friendly yet, but I had high hopes.)

Don't forget - even back then, there were anti-vaccine movements. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/11/polio-vaccine-antivaxxer-history-duon-miller.html And it's the same for the smallpox vaccine as well - there have always been people who find it scary.

I think it might be better to report this person and *not* engage with them - no response, no side commentary, none of that.

Fritz, that story is inaccurate as reported.

I'm surprised the driver didn't just stop the bus until that jerk left. That's what would've happened here, no question. That's why people *don't* screw with bus drivers - it gets you literally nowhere, they just stop the bus.

I agree, but if they're gonna try for it it's really better they know before they get on the wrong boat.

To be clear, although you will get the best possible view of the Statue and also the Manhattan skyline (and a pretty good view of the Verazzano, if I do say so myself), you will NOT be able to get off at Liberty Island or Ellis Island. The SI Ferry goes to Staten Island and back. That's it. (And if you're about to ask if there's anything worth doing on the Island, the answer is probably not, unless you really love snakes in which case you should drop by the Staten Island Zoo. Or unless you really want some Sri Lankan food - the North Shore is home to the largest Sri Lankan community in the country, and we are all passionate about our Sri Lankan food options.)

I always think of the city as being terribly packed during Fleet Week, but apparently we only get a couple thousand members of the sea services each time, so I don't know where that perception comes from. Maybe it's all the other tourists.

Okay, Melissa, I'm just gonna put that on my agenda somewhere between "fixing climate change" and "repairing my first floor bathroom". It might take a few days to get around to, though.

In the mid-20th century, baby formula was, in fact, a formula - a recipe that you made at home, and some recipes did include the milk and the karo syrup. Babies can survive on that. They can also survive being put to sleep on their tummies and being cuddled in the car while the parents smoke with the windows rolled up. This is not exactly something to aspire to or be nostalgic for.

Why is it that science article writers are unable to ever, ever write an article on a study done on domestic cats without taking a moment to bash cats and call them antisocial jerks? Somebody ought to do a study on *them*.

First off, ktgrok, somebody who "stealths" and removes a condom when you agreed to have sex WITH a condom is not a "jerk" but a rapist - and somebody who pressures you into sex acts you don't like is little better than a rapist. Let's not downplay this. But secondly, if you're uncritically believing everything on reddit, that's a whole 'nother problem. Quite a lot of reddit, especially the more advice-y subs, is creative writing.

1. Overall, you all are talking about "ask culture vs guess culture", and if you google that phrase you'll find a whole bunch of pieces on the subject with illuminating anecdotes, though I think the original usage was over at Ask Metafilter. 2. As far as "Why would somebody say something if it's not directed at anybody", my only guess is either a. they're mandated to say something for whatever reason even though none of the people they're responsible for did the thing or b. they want to make sure that it doesn't start to be a thing among the people who aren't doing it or c. they want to ensure that when they actually talk to the person who did the thing they can say "Yes, I did speak to everybody about this and not just you". That last certainly seems ridiculous, especially when handling competent adults, but I am reminded that I did have to announce a new self-rule of "I will certainly talk to both children about ALL things, no matter what" after a particularly long period of "You always pick on me and never my sibling!" from both of them. (Why, yes, I suppose I do always assume that you are the one who left your jacket on the floor after you were the only one to go out all day....) This new rule annoyed both of them a lot faster than it annoyed me, and complaints died fast. But it's a bit silly to have to do with adults.

Meh, the metric system is overrated. In my actual day-to-day life I rarely need to increase or decrease a measurement by a factor of ten. Instead, I need to halve or double it, cut it to 1/3 or triple it, quarter or quadruple it. Standard measurements handle two of those just fine, and often the one in the middle as well. Metric is only good for moving the decimal around. If I want to cut a recipe that calls for 13 grams of something down to 1/4 of the size, I have to do math. Also, it has not escaped my notice that while the metric system has a whole buttload of prefixes to use, in practice most of them don't get used, and those that are used are typically only used with one base unit, not all of them. Nobody says "Five deciliters", they refer to "half a liter". They don't speak of "2 hectometers" either, but instead ".2 kilometers" or "200 meters". This annoys me.

re: wheel, pottery wheel - it was long after the wheel was used for transport that it finally occurred to anybody to use it for spinning and then for weaving. You can spin much more fiber into thread in the same time using a spinning wheel, but it was invented amazingly late. I think, though, that when it comes to transport the issue is one of infrastructure. The earliest wheels were big heavy things, which needed to be pulled by big heavy animals, and in order to do that you need all the gear to attach the animal to the vehicle in the first place. If you already have a system for moving things around, why change it? And of course, wheels are impractical in lots of areas, even today, places which don't have roads and have rough terrain instead. A mule can climb up a mountain. A horse and cart maybe can't. Once wheeled vehicles were in place, there was room to change the wheel itself to be lighter, so even a child could pull a handcart or ride a bike. But nobody's going to invent spoked wheels until there's a need, and there won't be a need until people are already using wheels in the first place.

Asprin, caffeine, tylenol - that's the combo to go to, and that's what Excedrin for migraines is. With that said, if you don't typically get migraines and this one isn't going away, especially if it doesn't go away after three days, go to the doctor. That could be a warning sign for a stroke.

When you get a bidet seat, the hot water comes from the same place as the hot water in your sink. If it's typically cool when you get there, most brands have a "wash" cycle - run it on wash on "hot" when you sit down and it'll be warm when you use it on your butt. The heat does not come from electricity. It's just plumbing.

Okay, so I don't know why nobody has said this - or why I missed it if they did say it! - but there is no "USA barbecue". Different places differ SO MUCH on what they call barbecue and what meats they typically barbecue and how they do it, to say nothing of ethnic differences. (And of course, some other regions have no real barbecue tradition.) So there's definitely no USA way of barbecue. You can talk about Texas barbecue, or North Carolina barbecue, but "USA"? No can do. It's topics like this that remind us that the US is a really, really, really big country.

If you get one and decide you don't like it, you can just not use it. If you intend to age in place, though, I definitely suggest getting one, and also getting whatever you'll need to have one functional, accessible bathroom for the future. (This is on my mind lately, as my mother clearly didn't think about that and now we're having to deal with this.)

It's hard to say. We really *don't* know what intervention works best, for a lot of reasons. We do know that neither a slap on the wrist nor Tranquility-Bay-style abuse are the right methods, and while I'm not clear on what went down with Josh when he was sent away it was definitely one of those two. Of course, the Duggars had failed Josh long before he began harming his sisters, him and all the other kids, through their involvement in what is quite frankly a cult and the associated child abuse pushed by the cult as the correct methodology. And then they went on to fail him and his sisters even more by not treating this appropriately or even trying to get any of them the help they needed. I would not be surprised to hear, from what else I know about their leanings, that they blamed the victims as much as him, or even more.

When it's somebody else, then it's "oh, rape and incest should be punished with the death penalty", but when it's somebody they know, even if he targets his own sisters and, presumably, daughters, it's "he's the kindest person I know".