I feel like I listened to this one like three or four years ago, but I listen to a lot of podcasts and unfortunately I don’t remember which one it was. It might have been Science Vs, or RadioLab, or Sawbones, or This Podcast Will Kill You, or even Box of Oddities. But it also might have been none of those.

I’m trying to remember this from a podcast I listened to a few years ago that covered this topic, so I might not have the details exactly right, but if I’m remembering correctly there is at least one evolutionary advantage in that there’s a virus (part of the herpes family of viruses, I think) that is asymptomatic and for the most part harmless, except when a woman contracts it for the first time while pregnant, in which case it can be pretty devastating to fetal development. But if the woman gets gradually exposed to the virus before becoming pregnant then her immune system learns to deal with it and it won’t harm the fetus. Of course that doesn’t explain why humans started kissing in the first place, but it could mean that humans who did engage in kissing may have had a significant breeding advantage.

That’s how it goes sometimes. The Mines Act of 1842 in the UK didn’t get passed because a bunch of children (some as young as 8 years old) died in a horrific mining accident. It was passed because during the investigation of that accident it became known that the women working in the mine were wearing trousers, and due to the excessive heat in the mines, were working topless in the presence of men. Victorian England wasn’t scandalized by a pile of children’s corpses, but goddamn it, something had to be done about those bare tiddies.

I can only see a Vogon.

Edit: I lied, I can also see Rygel from Farscape.

Is Strawberry Shortcake still a thing? If you’d have asked me to bet money I would not have guessed that anyone under the age of 40 would have recognized that character.

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Usually when the news media talk about “the economy,” they’re not talking about the financial well-being of workers, or the average citizen. They’re talking about how much extra money corporations and the ultra wealthy are making. If every time you read about the economy you mentally transpose the words “the economy” with “rich people’s yacht money” what they’re writing about becomes a lot clearer.

1. “Everyone is being paid such ridiculous poverty wages that they are functionally unemployed.”
2. “Rich people have tons more yacht money.”

They’re not actually opposing statements. One is a direct result of the other.

I want Devo to do a cover of it.

It wasn’t so much that there was a stigma against watching Monty Python per se. It’s that it became sort of inextricably linked with a certain type of kid who became obsessed with it, could (and frequently would) recite all the lines of the movies from memory, and would tend to be a little obnoxious about their fandom. They were usually nerdy kids who already weren’t well liked by the more popular cliques, and aggressively shouting lines from Holy Grail at people wasn’t helping matters. Like, my friends and I loved those movies, but I guess not as much as the theater kids who were galloping around the school on imaginary horses shouting, “Ni!” at people and demanding a shrubbery.

I’ve never lived in Utah, and we had goths instead of mods, but SLC Punk was a fairly accurate representation of how I grew up, and the people I grew up with. Right down to how the singer (who was straightedge except for his bi-polar meds) in my first band died.

I think the real reason is that the bleeding second that people’s access to healthcare is no longer tied to their employer there’s going to be a mass exodus from the workforce as people go out and start their own businesses, or move to a job with a better work/life balance, or to a job that just isn’t soul-crushing. This will make it much harder for businesses to underpay their employees, and I think there are very powerful business interests who see Americans having unrestricted access to healthcare as an existential threat to their profitability.

If we go to war I’ll be very surprised if they’ll announce it ahead of time. I think it’s far more likely that we’ll just wake up one day and already be at war.

I’m a machinist.

A lot of engines have a big plastic trim piece that sits on top and doesn’t really do anything except make the engine compartment look tidy. I guess you could call that a topper.

This group sounds like something that would have been made up in a Hollywood writers room for a mid '00s comedy police procedural. Like someone who would have been foiled by Shawn Spencer on an episode of Psych.

Gorn.

Only way to get rid of it is to build a makeshift cannon out of some random stuff you find laying around.

I bought one of those on a whim a while back, and I was pleasantly surprised with how good it was. Quality control is always kind of a crapshoot with those cheap Chinese pen brands so I don’t usually get my hopes up, but even though the pocket clip on mine feels loose and pretty janky, the actual pen itself is really solid, and has a surprisingly good nib for its price point. I ended up carrying it with me a lot because it’s not only a nice compact size for a pocket pen, but it’s cheap enough that I won’t be devastated if I lose it.

And to think, this whole time I was using the rubber band trick like a sucker.

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At this point I can only assume that Microsoft is actively trying to punish me for using their products.