Utterly uninteresting. Why was this posted? I guess that, when you watch too much TV, a glistening turd may resemble a gem.

Xanthro's argument was a little more nuanced than you make it out, Anonymous. Also an important fact that you overlook, and which Xanthro stated, is that Jews were never absent from what is now Israel. They were in fact a very small proportion of the population until the late 19th-early 20th century -- but the entire territory was quite underpopulated at the time anyway.

Hoo boy. I dearly want the Dems to win back the Senate, but boy, would I ever have to hold back the puke to vote for Ford. I'm glad I don't live in Tennessee.

What a self-satisfied blowhard O'Reilly is.

Yes, by flight movements, amazingly all top 10 airports are in the US; and that measurement is germane to the Pilot's article. However, by passenger volume, LHR and CDG are indeed ahead of nowherevilles like PHX. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_busiest_airports_by_traffic_movements).

"Yet during the war, Ross shows, in one dismaying incident after another, that Richard Strauss, Schoenberg and Anton Webern were swept up in Hitler's rage and made vile public avowals of anti-Semitism themselves."

Schoenberg, an earlier convert to Christianity, re-converted to Judaism in the early 1930s out of solidarity with his fellow Jews; and he fled Berlin for the US in 1933. I find it difficult to believe that he was caught up at any time in any right-wing anti-Semitic nonsense.

Strauss and Webern did, however, compromise themselves.

Wow, your letter sounds just like something I would have written freshman year at selfsame college. Florida to Cambridge -- winter was hell, roommate situation awful, I was depressed and miserable and lonely.

things really did get better after freshman year. Eventually I moved to the dudley co-op, which maybe you should check out, because it's a great, laid back, not at all type a community. And freshman roommate situations do go away, thank god. looking back on my frosh experience, I should have just gone to my RA and said I had to get the hell out of dodge, and to get me one of those psycho singles (do they still call them that?). But it sounds like you are talking much more to the people in your life who are supposed to be there to help you than I managed to, which means you are doing way better than I was at the same time my freshman year.

I still live in the area, and I still hate the winters, but I don't regret having stuck with the school -- the connections and the name are just too useful to have for the rest of your life, not just so you can have what we think of as the classic career successes, but because the name gets you the benefit of the doubt in most of your future endeavors, however strange they may be.

Hope this perspective from one who's been there is helpful to you.

(despite the sig, I'm not maxn, that's my husband, and I'm late for work so not gonna re-sign-in. )

Jeez, guys, chill the fsck out on the Farhad hating.

However, I will make this point: The future of driving is not the Smart. The future of driving is no driving.

Very creepy. I have to admit that I stopped using ReiserFS and switched to other filesystems (ext3, jfs) when I found out about his case. And the ReiserFS project has its own life, so it's not really fair to the developers; but Reiser is just too diabolical for me to stick with the filesystem that bears his name.

How did the formerly progressive state I went to college in manage to throw so many votes to Coleman and other awful tools like Michele Bachmann? Yuck.

Tiller clearly was more courageous than all of the fanatical so-called pro-lifers put together. A real tragedy.

As happens sometimes, Cary completely misses the mark here and goes off on his own (charming but irrelevant) hobbyhorse about couples being able to live apart.

LW's girlfriend is having a tough time right now, and she's obviously taking many steps to make things better: exercise, therapy, drugs, job-hunting. Dropping "oh, by the way, this living together thing is not working out," on her, especially if you love her and want your relationship to continue, is not going to help things. Three months is not a very long time to know whether living together is a good idea -- massive changes in living circumstances take take to get used to and living with a lover requires practice and patience, even for extroverts (I imagine, anyway...).

In any long-term relationship there will come times when one partner is being kind of awful because there's something kind of awful going on in their lives. Yeah, your girlfriend will probably always tend to lash out angrily at you when things in her life are not going well, but things in her life will, one hopes, not always be bad, and she may also get better at being nicer.

I'm not suggesting you let your girlfriend 'get away' with bad behavior -- you two have to find a way to manage that yourselves --; just that Cary's advice misses the point here. Introverted or not, people behave badly. Hence, living with other people is a pain. But it's also a spiritually and emotionally rich experience that allows us to stretch and grow.