I’d wager that his lease has a mandatory arbitration clause that requires him to pay up front then try to get it back via arbiters chosen by the landlord.

Hell they already submit plenty of pseudoscience as evidence that juries lap up like a pack of dehydrated wolves in the desert. Why not add some worthless text that shows the officer in a sublime light as well?

Baptism cleanses you of sin, doesn’t it? This guy timed it just right!

I’m so old that the last time I wrote a research paper, it was on a word processor with no Internet connection or spell check.

Given such constraints, I can’t fathom the concept of waiting until the end to add all the references. If I didn’t do it as I went, I’d have surely died.

I should add that we always read each other’s papers before submission to get a second set of eyes for errors, misspellings, and grammatical quagmires. It was mutually beneficial as the reviewing made us all better. Is that still a common practice?

Do you by chance live in Dallas? I’ve got a front door that needs serious adjustment and got absolutely swindled on trying to install a generator last year. Haven’t been able to find anybody to work on either.

I used Angie’s list for the door several months ago, paid four hundred dollars, and watched my door come off its hinges two weeks later.

I misread tone on the upset part then. All due apologies for that one.

Just like paid streaming services, Reddit, Twitter, etc., they’re free to charge as much as they want, bilk mountains of money out of people while simultaneously selling out their personal data and content.

But they won’t take my money or my data.

That’s the only thing I can control, so I do.

You seem upset that I pointed any of this out. Not sure why. I was a rabid baseball fan growing up and was fortunate enough to have both American and National League teams to go watch. I could afford to attend several games each year by mowing lawns as a teenager.

Today, with considerably more income, it’s more financially difficult to attend a game than it was when I was a ragtag odd job teenager.

Since spectator sports are not a necessity, and I personally think they cost too much, I chose to cease my attendance.

You do you. Won’t bother me.

Everything is on TV

Ticket prices are on par with a mortgage payment

Parking prices are on par with a day’s pay

Concessions damn near require financing

And let’s treat every person who comes through the gates like a terrorist

WHY IS ATTENDANCE DOWN?

(Not that they care since the sweet sweet luxury boxes bring in a ton of revenue)

Last professional sporting event I attended was in 2013.

Last time I paid to attend a professional sporting event was in 2005.

I just see no reason to bother with it.

Weed legalization hasn’t been sudden though. It’s progressed from medical to decriminalized to legal state by excruciating state.

As this graph is national, it makes sense that there wouldn’t be a cliff because there’s no particular date when we could say weed became legal.

Still not legal in any way here in texasss, and I assume we’ll be the very last of the last to do so. But even here, it’s so easily accessible that a good number of younger people I know tell me they prefer weed to alcohol. In legal states, that tendency must be much higher.

I don’t live in a civilized state with legal weed, but I can get the hemp derived delta 9 gummies at any smoke shop, and they do a damn fine job (until Ken Paxton gets a hard-on for criminalizing them anyway)

Since I’ve had easy access to cannabis that I don’t have to smoke, my desire to drink has plummeted.

I’m not gonna tell you that I’ve quit drinking. I’m not even gonna tell you that I’ve quit binge drinking.

But I am gonna tell you that I was once that guy who centered his entire existence on “when can I start drinking?”

Today, without any interventions, without any criminal charges, without any AA, without any conscious decision, I’ve somehow become entirely indifferent to alcohol.

I’ll buy a twelve pack of beer here and there or a bottle of whiskey. Used to be either would be gone the next day. Now it’ll take months (plural) to get through either one.

Downside: I’ve been a whole lot less social without the lubrication of alcohol. Weed doesn’t make me social. It puts me to sleep.

Upside: I’ve pretty much ceased all alcohol related bad decisions. No more sorting through texts from the previous night or having to apologize.

Really big upside: No hangovers

Young people don’t have my decades of experiences to arrive where I am today. Seems like they’ve found the equilibrium without first having to pay to price of alcohol consequences, and good for them.

I’ve been on a jury once. In that particular case, there were a couple jurors who took it upon themselves to police anybody bringing up anything that we were instructed to disregard. You may not think twelve people is a lot, but I’m my experience, it was twelve wildly different personalities which was frustrating, but ultimately beneficial in coming to a unanimous decision.

Further, they sent us out of the courtroom several times during the trial so opposing counsels could fight over what could and couldn’t be entered into evidence for us to see.

I’ve seen those things once in my life while on a boat in the Philippines. Really quite something to experience in person.

How are the clarinet lessons going these days?

I spent several months last year actively looking for a therapist. I’m not talking a single casual Google search and done. I’m talking months of calling, emailing, physically driving to. The only therapists I could find who were taking on new patients and would accept my insurance were magic Jesus Crystal types whose “therapy” was little more than thinly veiled proselytizing.

Given how it seems people need to go through several therapists to find the right one, I gave up after failing to secure the first.

I almost fell for that whole better help scam but fortunately it was exposed for the personal data mining nonsense that it is before I signed up.

I learned of my father’s death weeks after the fact. My involuntary reaction was an emotionless, “huh.” I think I was forty eight years old at the time.

I hadn’t spoken to him for over thirty years, and had suffered decades of nightmares that he’d found me.

After learning he had passed, the nightmares finally ended, but the lifelong fight or flight tendency to keep to myself and never rock any boat remains.

My sister has said that she’s jealous of my daughter because we have a pretty close father/daughter bond - something my sister never knew and never will.

In my fifties now, I generally avoid human interaction as much as is physically possible. While I could cite other reasons as to why I’m this way, I can confidently point a rigididly extended index finger at dear old dad as the foundation of it all.

My parenting duties complete, I mostly just exist waiting for the sweet sweet embrace of death when I’ll no longer have to go make money for the man or pretend that I enjoy the saccharin sweet small talk of co-workers who don’t give two shits about me or anybody else, but professional decorum for the win, right?

I don’t even look forward to weekends because those are just two day stints of solitude doing chores so I’m ready to go make more money for the man on Monday.

I was both of those dads.

“Go get me a beer and let’s figure out the answer to your question!”

Hoofta.

Not that I need to tell anybody here, but if there’s an arena with bigger egos than politics, it’s academia. I’d pay money just to watch the carnage.

While I never enjoy the fiscal years some other countries use, I’m accustomed enough to work with them. It was the comma notation you’ve laid out that threw me the first time I saw it.

I do a tax return for a guy who has some income in India. Their overall number formatting is so foreign to me, when I did this guy’s return for the first time, I had to screenshot a couple of the numbers and send them to an Indian friend of mine to ask what the hell the number was.

Send the scam a hundred bucks, lose it, sue Google for fraudulent endorsement.

(Yes yes, this wouldn’t work in the real world against Google’s legions of lawyers, but I like the thought exercise)