Someone wanted to know why Heather kept referring to Denise as midwestern since she grew up in Oceanside, CA.

According to Wikipedia:

"Richards was born in Downers Grove, Illinois,[3] the daughter of Joni, a coffee shop owner, and Irv Richards, a telephone engineer. She has one sister, Michelle, and grew up in both Mokena, Illinois and Downers Grove, Illinois. She graduated from El Camino High School in 1989, Oceanside, California."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Richards

I love "I Wanna Get Married." Beautifully song, jazzy and lush and yes, funny as hell.

Quite frankly, I'm sick and tired of you people talking shit about us raised-by-a-single-mother kids. How we're all going to end up in jail, on drugs, on welfare with our own out of wedlock kids. How we have intimacy issues or will grow up to hate men or our mothers. Don't get me wrong, I think there are a lot of single-parent kids who aren't doing too well, but I think it's a little too easy to assume it's all the mom's fault. Going back to biblical times, women were always blamed for the problems in the family unit and I think it's time we start looking askance at these assumptions.

As for me, I'm a well-adjusted, well-educated, boringly normal 26-year-old woman. I never did drugs. I drink in moderation and I've never had unprotected sex. I love and am extremely close to my mother. I know my father but was never that close to him since he lives in another country and I've always been OK with that. Growing up, I never felt like I was missing out on anything. We certaintly weren't rich, but my mom had a good job and we lived in a nice house, though in the 80s it was a lot easier to be middle-class with 2 kids on $40,000/yr.

I knew kids growing up who were struggling because their fathers weren't in their lives, but I also knew plenty of kids who's parents were married and had the same complaint.

All that said, I don't think I would want to be a single mother. It seems extremely lonely. Not for the kid, but for the mom. I can tell at times my mom really wish she had someone else to talk to about us. I want to have kids and would prefer to have them with a good man. But I'm not going to assume that's going to happen for me. Maybe I'll have children biologically in a traditional family unit. Maybe I'll adopt on my own in my late-30s/early-40s. Anything is possible.

Farhad alluded that this was an economic problem requiring an economic solution, so here's mine: Just don't buy from scalpers.

"What!?!?" you say, "And risk missing Hannah Montana?" Absolutely. Your kids will face a lot of disappointments in life. They'll get over this.

Scalpers will stop scalping as soon as their customers go away. Can you imagine what would happen if people just didn't pay $237 for those $63 Hannah tickets? The scalpers would lose thousands of dollars and as it gets closer to show time, in a last ditch effort to break even, they might even lower their prices back to $63.

A few months back, Arcade Fire played 4 sold out shows in NY. Scalpers made a lot of money in those first desperate hours after heartbroken fans discovered the show was sold out on Ticketmaster. But as it got closer to the show dates, a lot of scalpers were stuck with un-sold tickets. To add salt to the wound, the venue also released more tickets a few hours before the first show. Fans (not many I admit) were able to get face value tickets that same day. Scalpers surrounded the theater trying to sell tickets below face value.

Scalpers are sleazy cheats and if we really want to hit them where they live, real music fans will stop doing business with them.

As I remember it, the 8 GB iPhone was $599. Now it's $399. That's 1/3 less. Farhad's math is correct.

When I first saw the clip, I immediately cringed and thought, "Oh poor baby!" I have also become a jumble of nerves and confusion when standing in front of people trying to appear articulate and well-informed, so my original instinct wasn't to laugh, but to empathize. Obviously, I was in the minority. I knew the clip would be popular, but I was shocked how much people made fun of her. It's just plain cruel.

Also, how come no one's talked about the awful-ness of the question? If someone asked me why Americans couldn't find the U.S. on the map, I would shrug and say, "I don't know. 'Cause they're stupid?" Not very articulate or well-informed.

Anyway, thanks Rebecca for summing it up nicely.

As the earlier poster noted, Blockbuster forces studios to edit movies so as not to offend the family values customer. I think this usually happens with NC-17 or Unrated movies. I'm surprised that Farhad didn't list this as a possible reason why people wouldn't switch from Netflix to Blockbuster. It's the reason I haven't switched despite the lower price. As a matter of fact, one of my roommates was a Blockbuster user and when I told her about the editing, she was so offended she switched to Netflix!

That said, someone else also mentioned that one of the benefits of Netflix is not going to the store. I live in Brooklyn and there actually isn't a Blockbuster in my neighborhood. The closest one is a 20-minute walk. It wouldn't be worth the trouble in the long run.