and deal with the fact that a kid is crying? I mean, sure, it's annoying, but not half as annoying as some yuppie prick yammering obliviously on his or her cellphone. It's a matter of personal preference, I suppose, but I'll take the toddler -- at least it's not the toddler's fault. Yeah, if the parents are totally out to lunch, then that does make them assholes, I guess.

I can understand being pissed off at, say, a nice restaurant, but kids actually need to travel, possibly more than you do. It's not like they're irritating you strictly in the service of being some slick corporate huckster, which is probably the reason you're irritating me. And there's nowhere to take them, except, as many have helpfully suggested, to eject them unceremoniously from the aircraft. Ah, but then the loss of pressure would compromise you, as well, see, and you'd lose the opportunity to get that big account for your boss, whom you love deeply and who will light your blasted cheeks with one last glimmer of satisfaction and joy in your failing years.

I agree with the posters admonishing you whiny little self-important pukes not to pass on your genes. I'm afraid you really don't have any innate right not to be offended by other people. And while you may be all right at moving widgets or playing racquetball or whatever it is that gets you up in the morning -- you're certainly good at discussing these endeavors, loudly, in airports and planes; I've heard you ad nauseum -- you quite evidently don't have the mettle to undertake any authentic enterprise.

Problem solved.

Oh, of only women could be spuriously saddled with a lifetime of responsibility ...

if they want one, and men are equally charged with using contraception.

However, men are not ATM machines to be fingered at more-or-less random for bearing the immense financial burden of raising a child.

Hurrah for the LW's orgasms. However, she is -- or was -- an egregious user. Her relationship to men at a point 20 years in the past was essentially parasitical.

So much water is under the bridge now, though, that the only emotionally responsible thing to do is to keep her trap shut. And despite what I just wrote, there's no particular profit in beating herself up at this late date. Life goes on -- life has gone on.

That's because you misspelled it.

We get it: You had fun in your early 20s. Guess what. So did we. Sex, check. Acid, check. Peripatetic wanderings, check. In the 1980s and early 90s, no less.

Get over it, man: You didn't "change" shit. You indulged yourselves in some good times, and that's worth raising a toast to, but it ain't the stuff of dissertations.

Note to self: Investigate whether the company that manufactures and distributes Depends is publicly held.

you have a beer twice in their lives, you are, in fact, a Tea Toddler -- if not an outright Pepsi Preschooler.

Too late.

GB has pointed out many times that Southern states are subsidized by the Northeast. Please spare us another of his rants.

He's actually God damned funny, but I hope for his sake he's not really that toxic. And his exhortations for the rest of us to "stay out of Boston" are, to say the least, redundant. I actually started out this thread thinking highly of the place.

The New England Social Registry is full of inbred bug-eyed dangerous psychotics. Don't taunt them.

Everyone's still at it? Well, I checked in, so who am I to talk. Gigantic Bastard's probably ejaculated on his keyboard by now from all the attention he's receiving -- his points mostly amount to insubstantial, infantile name-calling. I can dig that, too, but lack his remarkable stamina. I wonder if people like him even realize that African-American culture, including as found in Chicago or Harlem, is deeply, deeply Southern? Whatever. Texas, by the way, receives 92 cents back for every buck it sends in. Still no California, but hardly on the dole.

There I go again. Well, somehow we've gotten off track here. The real question is: Demographically, do the Democrats need to reach out to the disgruntled denizens of Palin's America? And, leaving all this ignorant regional squabbling behind (the partisan divide doesn't seem nearly so geographic if you look at a county-by-county red/blue map and keep in mind where the population centers are), I have to say: No. No we don't.

Fuck'em. Jeer as they wither and perish, they're a scourge on our nation. And they come from South Carolina. And Ohio. And Oregon. And Colorado. And Michigan. And Texas, ad nauseum ... They require neither olive branch nor excessive cruelty. They are self-destructing, pass the popcorn.

Gonna let us know where it is you live exactly? My money's on suburban Philadelphia or one of those nearly-all-white cities west of Boston. Or maybe you're from New Jersey, Land of The Geniuses.

Dollars to donuts it ain't somewhere enviable.

People who "can't hack it" tend to still live within a couple hundred miles of whence they came, no?

I moved here to attend the best Jazz Studies program in the world, bar none. After college, I moved to Seattle for 5 years. For a variety of mostly personal reasons that are NOYB, I moved back to Texas -- Austin, where I lived for 5 years. Professional opportunity beckoned in Dallas, so I moved here with some misgivings, but have been nothing but pleasantly surprised ever since. (This, of course, owes largely to low expectations.)

And yeah, I know the East Coast well -- have family up and down it, parents both from there, I grew up there -- and I'll tell you this: Only New York City and Boston are worth a shit. I'm from a nice part of Baltimore, and God knows I miss the bay and the steamed crabs, but Christ, what a hole.