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Most authors do still do book tours by visiting book stores. Most authors don't have a national TV show five nights a week.

Matthew Perry had a terrible play with him as star in London a couple of years ago, so he may be doing more writing.

The two things people outside the US understand least about America are the guns and the health care system.

In the 1960s and 1970s it was a lot less common for relocating to mean having to find a new job for a partner. As women entered the workforce, moving became a much more complex disruption.

When I lived in Dublin in the mid-1980s, coal fires were still allowed within the city limits. While the resulting smog wasn't nearly as thick as this one (or the 1948 Donora, PA one they reference), it was entirely thick enough to make it difficult to see - and incredibly acrid and uncomfortable to breathe, and if the fog persisted, the smog would stay, sometimes for several days. I remember remarking on how unpleasant it was to a neighbor, and she looked at me in surprise. "I've never noticed it." A few days later, though, she came back to me and said she noticed it *now*. Sometimes you have to point these things out. I think Dublin finally banned coal fires within the city limits in the early 1990s. It was really tough on anyone's lungs.

What I don't understand is taking bragging rights for something that's *not your achievement*. If you can't make it up the mountain and back down again without the assistance of trained professionals, then *you didn't climb Everest* - they did. When you think about the sherpas climbing that mountain over and over again leading these commercial expeditions, *their* achievement is astounding.

I think it's always hard to tell how much the person who presents the news is a journalist - and it's very easy for outsiders to attribute more to the presenter than is entirely justified. The New Yorker followed Maddow around a couple of years ago and shows her writing her scripts, and I know she's worked as a print journalist, but *now* a lot of the credit for the spadework and research that makes her possible really has to go to her staff. I bet it was one of her staff who did the searches that surfaced Randall Williams' background and tied his story together. And it's certainly true that while I think Maddow is scrupulous with her facts, she takes an unseemly glee in exposing Republican malfeasance. The giggling and face-palming play well on TV but I can see why the staid New York Times might see them as "not-a-journalist".

To be fair to Barbara Walters, I think it's clear she was just stunned at how far Schlafly was willing to go in lying about what the ERA said. Commonplace, today; shocking, then. I first encountered Schlafly's take on things sometime in the late 1970s while driving across the southwest late at night, when skip meant I was picking up a station from, I don't know, Chicago or somewhere. Let me tell you, the rage kept me awake on a long stretch of empty interstate...

I assume that Planned Parenthood still operates in Missouri the way it used to in NY State, using a sliding scale of charges based on what you can afford to pay. If that's the case, then it's likely PP is picking up some or all of the costs.

Why *wouldn't* you pronounce the "o" in "opossum"?

The waiting for the phone call part, not to mention knowing they were on a shortlist, was the least credible aspect of it to me. Richard Feynmann wrote in his autobiography about being awakened one morning with the call and being annoyed that there wasn't any advance notice - or any chance to say, thanks, but no thanks. I don't think it was out of character for Penny to have come around to being excited about the pregnancy. At every step of her relationship with Leonard she's been the one who's been scared of taking the next step forward - the first time he told her he loved her she freaked and left; it took her a long time to say she loved him; etc.

I think a lot of us are hoping that if Assange gets extradited from the UK it's to Sweden, where he still hasn't faced the sexual assault/rape charges. In the past, the UK has eventually (after a lot of controversy and pressure) declined to extradite people facing hacking charges (which is what Assange is accused of, really) to the US. It's important also to remember that Wikileaks/Assange are being indicted on events that took place in 2009/2010. At the time, Wikileaks was much more credible as a journalism/publishing operation than it is now. There are lengthy descriptions written by witnesses at the time of him and his colleagues working hard to understand the material they'd gotten from Manning and how best to present it and what to select. There's no doubt in my mind that at that time (when he was also much less famous) he was behaving the way a journalist would. The fact that *since* then he appears to have behaved as a partisan in the 2016 US elections isn't really relevant to that. The big question for me is whether he collaborated in or directed stealing the material in the first place. I think Manning did act in the public interest, but if you use the Pentagon Papers as a guide, the New York Times and the Washington Post *received* them; they didn't advise Daniel Ellsberg about what to take or where from. I think that crosses a serious line. That said, it's odd that Trump has turned so decisively against Wikileaks. He *loved* them in 2016!

In the world outside the show, I think they'd have really struggled to find time in Laurie Metcalfe's schedule, since she's currently starring on Broadway in a play about the Clintons with John Lithgow. Eight live shows a week doesn't leave you with much time for anything else. AIUI, it wasn't CBS that vetoed it but Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady who said they wouldn't consider doing the show without Parsons. Seems reasonable to me - from the beginning the three they thought were indispensable "persons of essence" were Parsons, Galecki, and Cuoco. Now, obviously the show changed a lot over the years, but I suspect they wouldn't have gone on without any one of those three - because then it's a different show and you have to rethink everything. And Lorre knows how hard it is to rethink a show midstream because he had to do it when Charlie Sheen combusted during season 8 of TWO AND A HALF MEN.

In case anyone's curious, the song Wallace Shawn was singing while digging the garden is "The Garden Song", by the long-serving folksinger David Mallett. It was I think the very first song that made the folk scene aware of his talents sometime in the late 1970s, so it was great to hear it popping up.

I thought it was a decent finale. Sheldon's speech gave the show the opportunity to give each main cast member their own curtain call, which was nice. The final shot was fine with me; of course in real life Sheldon and Amy wouldn't win the Nobel for another 20 years and everyone would be getting offers and opportunities to move on and out and away, but for this moment in time we and they get to remember them as they were. After 12 years, I'm glad the show got to the end without ever betraying any of its characters. Yeah No: Jane Leeves got pregnant and they wrote it into the final season. It wasn't the writers who decided that one. 🙂

Roscoe definitely should have been there.

Talk about continuity. After watching the finale, I decided to replay the pilot. And there, in the middle of a discussion about a damaging story that's breaking is this: Dan : "It's going to be in the papers tomorrow." Mike: "Not necessarily. Let's not make it the story and panic. What if Tom Hanks dies?"

Calvada: No, I thought of THE GOOD FIGHT, which had a China cyberspying reference recently. Kemper: How can it be too late? The first primary is still 10 months away!

Let slip that you're British.

I'm a professional writer. I get to exercise my inner Sheldon about how words and their spelling, ordering, and usage should be. 🙂

I assume her money is going to tuition and textbooks and between law school and her job she doesn't have time to go shopping. Which in her case I imagine means scouring the thrift stores. I don't have a problem with it.

He said it, quite clearly. It's one of those seconds that tosses you out of Jim Parsons' otherwise excellent performance. The other one that always bugs me was at the beginning of Sheldon's relationship with Amy, where they are playing Counterfactuals and Sheldon talks about the Danes inventing Danish pastry. *Sheldon* would know, though the writers didn't, that "Danish" pastry was in fact invented by Viennese bakers, who brought the pastries to Denmark during an extended period of inability to find employment at home. In Denmark, they are called "Wiener brod", or "Viennese bread".

Sheldon would absolutely be the guy who corrected everyone who calls it...I can't even bring myself to type it. SHERBET. There is no second R!

Did Pence have personality before he allied himself with Trump?

As an alternative, you could try Blendle.com. You do still need to put in a credit card, but it gives you access to myriad publications. You pay out of your account balance for the articles you read (usually like 25 cents or so), and can ask for a refund if the article wasn't what you expected/wanted.