I'd like to point out, as someone who did four years studying anthropology (with an emphasis on folklore, I might add), that this guys claims to have studied anthropology for any length of time are as bogus as his claims to being a "liberal Democrat."

Does the term "mother's brother" ring any bells? It would if he'd attended the first day of any anthropology lecture on kinship patterns, of which marriage is a subset.

And "traditional marriage"? Who came up with that term? For those unwilling to crack an anthropology text, just sit down and watch "Romeo and Juliet" and "The King and I" to see girls being married off at fourteen (or younger) and men with more wives than they can easily count--traditions older than the current kinship pattern this guy is advocating as the only proper one.

Well, at least with the sit-down format, McCain won't do the bizarre restless pacing around the stage like he did last time. However, if forced to have his butt in a chair, the agitation will likely come out in other ways.

I'd feel sorry for him if I had any reason to like the man, which fortunately, I don't.

The only one who I expect to be gracious and polite is Obama and let McCain stick his own foot in his mouth.

I thought the individual in the cow suit was going to be PETA, not the anti-PETA.

As symbology goes, having the anti-gun-sign-carrying Playboy bunny be part of the Pro-Choice contingent was off--not, mind you, because Playboy bunnies are Anti-Choice, but because while Pro-Choice, they're also reasonably birth-control savvy. But I suppose costuming up a bunch of pregnant teenagers would be too true-to-life.

In any case, the ad makes me want to vote for his opponent.

The reasons why the Mormon church is getting more flack than the Catholics or the black Baptists are twofold: First, and most important, most of the money for Prop 8 came from Mormons. Ergo, it makes more sense to protest the people who paid the most to have it passed.

Second, there's the issue of hypocrisy and sour grapes. To be blunt, it's somewhere between hypocritical, ironic and tragic that the group getting their underwear in the biggest bunch over the idea of same sex marriage are the grandchildren--and cousins--of people who thought that plural marriage was normal, acceptable, and indeed, desirable.

Every time someone wants to rail against polygamy, they find some geriatric religious fanatic from the hinterlands of Utah getting an arranged marriage to a preteen, despite the fact that this makes a better argument against arranged marriages and child brides. No one wants to admit that once people are consenting adults, their kinship structures and sexual practices should be their own business, regardless of the number or gender of those getting married.

It's been 108 years since Utah was admitted to the Union. Rather than monkey with California's constitution to make it more similar to the Utah constitution with its "anti-polygamy" clause, the Mormon church would probably do better to remove that clause from their own constitution. It's not like the US at this point would ever kick them out, and even once the brouhaha was brought to the Supreme Court, it would be pretty clear that the state shouldn't care about the sexual and kinship arrangements of consenting adults.

I've been helping my mother deal with life after knee and hip replacement surgery. My biggest grip is with the hospital nurses. The female ones.

These women are positively bizarre. They proceed on autopilot with attempting to shoo me out of the room when my mom needs help getting changed, oblivious to the fact that I've been the one helping her these past month or that I'll be the one picking her up when they shove her out the door a couple days after the surgery. And the ones I've dealt with are too physically weak for some of the demands of the job.

I realize that a five-foot-nothing woman may not be able to lift a five-and-a-half-foot woman, but if you can't, don't play pat-a-cake and tell someone in major pain to move themselves. Either get a male orderly (if hospitals still have these) or another nurse of either sex who's big enough to do the job, or else get out of the way and let the patient's son do it like he's been doing at home.

If feminism is supposed to mean anything, it should mean that the "dainty lady" trip should have been left for dead back in the sixties.

I think the LW is one of the sort who think that paranoia and primness can substitute for common sense.

While not Jewish, orthodox or otherwise, I have been in a similar situation, with my cell phone out of commission, the intercom to the main meeting room not being answered, and with myself waiting in the main lobby of an apartment building which had recently had a members meeting about not letting suspicious characters in, forgetting that in the minds of the paranoid, everyone's suspicious. I then encounter a woman who's appointed herself door dragon, and despite the fact that I'm there at noon with an armload of manuscripts for a writer's meeting, I'm having to go through a rigamarole with her until one of the building managers or at least older male tenants comes by, rolls his eyes and says, "I think we can trust him" and lets me in and I leave him to argue with the self-appointed door dragon.

Honestly, just use common sense. And be polite. It's entirely possible that the orthodox guys may return the favor for you on the days when they're allowed to press buttons and use intercoms.