Dakar sounds like a nightmare, but you might want to revisit Miami, which you mentioned as another hell hole.

I have been in and out of Miami about 30 times over the last three years and have always found it OK. They have been making constant renovations in all this time, both in the roads approaching the airport and in the terminal.

Check-ins are speedy, immigration and customs are nearly always a five minute walk through--even if you do have to walk about half a mile from the gates to get there (with some people mover belts en route).

Salsafied it may be, but at least there are a couple of Cuban restaurants where you can get something palatable, even if a lot of space is given over to dreadful fast food franchises. You can get a decent cup of coffee (where else in the US?) and the bean soups at the cafeteria are not bad. Not cheap, of course, but then what is?

Staff are generally helpful in either language--English or Spanish--and I can't say I have ever had a bad trip through there.

It sounds like there is no future for this relationship, but there is a certain irony here that this man picked up the tab for this mentally ill woman to have medication and therapy and now that she has been therapized, she has discovered that he is not good enough for her!

Poor Bill! He had better watch out.

.. the number of young women who are taking over corporations is so small that you cannot be sure that you have the right comparison group when you compare them to young men playing with Nintendos.

I have just finished reading First In His Class, a biography of the young Bill Clinton, and found myself quite awed at the way in which high-powered young persons like Bill and Hillary Clinton went about life from a very early age. It doesn't seem like they ever had time to watch TV, because they were always busy making friends and influencing people. However, you can hardly extrapolate from the behavior of Rhodes scholars and their circle to ordinary working people.

The United States comprises people of a great variety of ethicities and cultures, and the kind of generalizations you find in this type of article are very questionable.

I think it probably IS true that upper-middle class women can now earn enough to live independently, so issues like two being able to live as cheaply as one while saving a deposit to buy a home are probably much less significant than for earlier generations--and that couples are perhaps less likely to hook up for economic reasons.

On the other hand, it also seems that upper-middle class women are less likely to have children, or if they do, then fewer of them, because they fear the economic downside of raising children in an age when marriage is often a temporary arrangement.

It seems to me more likely that the author is fascinated more with the ROLE played by Laurie in 'House' than with the actor himself.

Laurie is a typical alumnus of the Cambridge University Footlights comedy club, whose former members include people like John Cleese (Monty Python), Peter Cook, Emma Thompson, David Frost, Clive James, Eric Idle, Sacha Baron (Borat)Cohen etc.

(One is tempted to add Hugh Grant, as a perfect exemplar of the type, but he was actually at rival institution Oxford University, home to 7 of the last 11 British prime ministers, not to mention John Wesley, Richard Dawkins, and Rupert Murdoch.)

Cambridge University is an elite institution whose undergraduates are selected purely on intelligence, academic merit, and promise. You can't buy your way in. As the list above would indicate, these are all performers who combine humour with great intelligence. Many of them write and direct, as well as performing.

Possibly this is the aphrodisiac quality that the writer has indentified.

Presumably public schools will not be making field trips to this theme park, but the real intention is to use it to indoctrinate the children of fundamentalist families. It would just be an amusing folly if it did not have this sinister purpose.

It will also provide more ammunition for all those citizens of the world who believe that Americans are collectively crazy.

However, the response to this is surely that freedom of religion means allowing people to believe what they believe, regardless of whether it seems rational.