I work at a large corporation and the non-technical people who are not managers send out hoax notices about suffering animals ALL THE TIME. They fall for every single one of them. Since I volunteer with animal welfare organizations, I feel it is my duty to investigate each one (it takes all of 2 minutes) and send out a rebuttal with a link to snopes or the results of my phone call to the institution involved. I regularly submit content to snopes as well.

At this point, I get email from people asking me to evaluate messages they receive before they send anything to the company. It helps that other employees have responded similarly to other hoax messages.

I do not know what kind of organization the letter writer works for. If it is a small office, just delete the mail, because the manager has a proportionately larger influence on the writer's continued employment. If it is a large corporation, it has a costly impact on productivity to send garbage out to the company. A snopes pointer, *NOT* CC-ed to the rest of the company would be more diplomatic. It would offer the manager an opportunity to correct the mistaken message.

I would certainly not quit my job over having a feather brained boss, especially if that feather brained boss is OK in other regards.

Someone's getting everyone's panties in a twist because hands are going to come out, asking for a bailout from the government. The more ooga-booga, the more the money (which we don't have) flows into those banks. The Chinese are going to dump us! Oooga Booga! Developers can't unload ticky tacky houses! Ooga Booga! Jobs! The economy! Oooga Booga! Now, Gimme Gimme!

I'm tired of all women being called "bitches". I say we go for the hip hop origin of the casual use and call all men "pimps". Or, we can go all Caucasian and call every single male a "prick" or "swingin' dick".

I'd bet the "bitch" thing would dry up pretty quickly and dog owners would be happy to have their word back.

I have perennially bad hair. Conditioner doesn't get the frizzies out. Every time I go to the restroom, I look at my frizzy hair while I wash my hands. On a whim, I shook the water off my hands and ran them on the frizz zones of my hair. It works! It smooths out my hair for about an hour or two.

There was a penguin at the Audubon Aquarium named Patience, who lived for 25 years. So, let's just say Opus is more like 36, assuming he's a blackfooted penguin.

I have been on the internet for a very long time, now. I have had people offer to do unspeakable things to me, to my livestock, to my possessions and to relatives I don't have. I've been insulted and villified and harassed.

What I do is to remove all of my material from that venue and not log into it anymore. Period.

There are lots of other online venues and there is Real Life. Even though I have lots of links on linkedin.com, I suspect if I need a job, I will be talking to people I know personally. Even though I have tried dating sites, I find myself dating people in my social circle, not strangers from online.

I am sad that these women are shit magnets right now. That's a problem with being a young woman. Lots of masturbators get off on harassing them. But, they can save themselves a lot of time and grief by realizing that this is a small section of a large internet and they don't need that, or even the internet, to have successful careers and friendships in the future.

When I was in kindergarten, I heard that hippies were scraping, drying and smoking banana peels. My monther, who was quite the Drama Llama, rushed us kids off to the doctor to have him talk to us about smoking banana peels. (Why a five and seven year old would smoke banana peels was beyond me). He told us that he and his teenaged daughter spent an evening trying it and it didn't work.

I would dearly love to see how the overprotective and litigation-phobic school administrators and parents are going to handle this. Will kids be issued butt plugs so they cannot defecate while at school? Will guards be posted in each lavatory to make sure the kids come out empty handed? Will children who defecate during school time be suspended, like that wacky and out of control girl who chastely hugged her friends on a Friday? One detention for Number One and two detentions for Number Two!

The real solution is to let the kids have access to beer and pot. We already know how that stuff works and we can share ours with them.

People wind up having relationships with the folks they see daily. People have "work friends" and "tot lot friends" and neighbors they have coffee with. Once the situation changes, like a new job or Junior going off to school or schedules changing, those relationships often change. Having those true lifelong friendships come out of it is a lot like dating. You meet lots of people, but if you want it to last, you and the other person need to make the effort to sustain it in light of other changes in context.

That said, I totally understand feeling hurt. Maybe if you really like this neighbor, you can have happy hour when you get home from work. That'd give you a context to keep the regular contact going.

When I was a teenager, we hugged each other all the time. If someone grabbed my titty, I belted him. Problem solved.