Then I read that they're giving them a fake engine noise so that old people don't get hit by them crossing the road.

I second a poster in a previous thread who suggested these quiet cars be given an artificial motor that sounds like the hovercars on The Jetsons, that melodic "b-b-b-b-b-b!" sound.

The worst gym idea ever was when a new gym opened in my office building with a pool, which made me very happy. Then on the tour the gym guy leading it said that they had wired the pool with speakers *under the waterline* so that even as you were swimming you would have music pumped into your ears. I think the collective reaction of my tour group (and probably all tour groups after that) caused them to re-think the wisdom of piping club music into the one place in the building (and the one time in the day, for many people) where you can float and feel relaxed and be alone with your thoughts.

The only thing that means is that your insurance might not cover it if you are outside the FDA-approved age range. There is NOTHING that prevents your doctor from actually giving this to you. I got it when I was 33, and my insurance still picked it up. If they hadn't, it would only have been $300, paid out over the six months from from the first to the third injection.

First, there are 64 known strains of HPV; Gardasil protects against 4.

It protects against the four strains that are most likely to kill you if not caught in time. Even if they don't kill you, treating cervical dysplasia is not fun. It is painful, time-consuming, and expensive (a lot more expensive than $300 for a series of IM injections). It also means you have to have Paps 3 every three months until you get three in a row with no abnormal cell growth. Awesome!

The four strains that Gardasil protects against are also the four that *don't* cause visible/tangible warts, so you can very easily be infected without ever knowing. The strains that do cause warts are not the ones that are going to cause you cancer.

However, no one will even discuss giving it to me and my insurance entirely will not pay for it (and I don't know where it is $300! I was quoted "three injections at $400 each", which is $1200.

Are you sure they didn't mean a *series* is $400? The series of three costs $300-360 TOTAL. They're $100-$120 apiece (I think mine were $120). This is standard pricing.

Also, if all you're doing is showing up for an injection, they can't charge you for an exam. They can charge you the price of the vaccine and the fee for the needle stick (usually administered by an MA) but if you see a charge for a billing code starting with 992** (like, 99203, 99313, 99214, etc.) and you haven't had an exam, call your insurance company and tell them that the exam never happened.

How about some decent gameplay? EVE -- smokin' graphics, weak gameplay (at least for me. Single player edition, anyone?)

I am thinking that you have to feel that shit in there, too. I mean, it's METAL... lodged in you sensitive bits!

1) The Mirena is made of plastic

2) Your uterus doesn't have any nerve endings

I've been on the pill for 16 years (with some time off here and there) and I can tell you I have NEVER noticed any kind of eggwhite discharge

Of course you didn't. You 're on the Pill. You DON'T OVULATE. That's the whole point.

For whatever reason, the number of pregnancies at that school this year is four times what it was last year.

Coincidence? They ALL just "happened to get pregnant"? Bullshit.

Maybe not. The pregnancy rate at Gloucester is still lower than the national average, so actually *last* year's rate would have been abnormally low, taken in context of the rest of the nation. Ellen Goodman's column today (in the Globe, although I think she's syndicated) touches on that. Other cities in Mass. have three times that pregnancy rate, why no articles written about them?

No matter what Carol Gotbaum did ...she did not deserve to be left alone to die.

She wasn't. She was left alone to cool her heels while her paperwork was processed. That's pretty much par for the course for drunk and disorderly. That she pulled a shackle chain over her head and around her neck in the ten minutes that it took to type up a police report (or whatever) is kind of her own fault.

All I'm saying is that the security and the police inside an airport can be trained to treat people like humans and use the same sort of discretion they use outside the airport.

Are you suggesting that outside of an airport someone who was drunk, screaming obscenities, throwing small electronics at people's heads, and becoming deadweight when people tried to get her out of there would *not* be cuffed and hauled off to jail?

They might not call it "boy crush" but they definitely engage in hero worship. I have a friend who harbors some serious boy-crushes on two actors and a singer (who I won't name just in case he reads this, which I doubt but you never know, because he'd spot himself -- and me -- in a heartbeat :-/ )which he freely cops to, or at least he has to me.

Whatever. Another Salon fake-gender-war non-issue. Expand your horizons, kids.