Thanks to wanderlust parents I spent my teenage years in Chicago, Edinburgh, Frankfurt, and Nairobi, but I am raising my children in the same small midwestern college town that I grew up in. The cornfield behind my childhood home used to get carved into a walking maze by the neighborhood kids. Now has become a development full of McMansions. I moved into one of them for a few years, but didn't like it. No trees, and the neighbors were both heavily indebted and entitled. The McMansion dwelling teenagers bore a striking resemblance to Uday and Qusay. One of them, drunk at 3am on a Tuesday, crashed the family Camry into my largest maple tree. So I moved into an older home across the street from a park. I see childhood friends at the park with their children and at the grocery store. The schools have gone froom great to terrible, thanks to Chicago clearing out their public housing into my small town. But that's ok, most townies send their kids to private school anyway. There were poor whites when I was young, and now there are poor blacks. It's all about the same. Crime is still low, and most people smile or wave when you drive by. I still travel a lot for work, and I haven't yet found a place I would rather live.

This shows that McDonalds could sell carrots. $0.10 worth ought to do it in a french fry box for $1.29.

As a side note: What the heck is this story doing in Broadsheet? Is this a women's issue?

"So maybe that's why the state gets involved in such matters -- like protecting a child from disease, maybe the idea is that communities need to protect children from names that might hurt them in the future."

As if the police state wasn't powerful enough, now the government is policing the names that we give to our children? The government already abuses all of the power that it can get its grubby fingers onto. I can imagine how this governmental power will be abused too.

And now on to the funniest names that I have seen:

Brothers: Lemon Jello and Orange Jello.

First, there was Salon's sexist/biased policy of having a BroadSheet, but no DudeSheet. But then you fill BroadSheet with articles like this which are gender neutral? What the heck?

"Biden said he wants to see college students paid to become teachers, and then paid as much as they would get if they went into a similar private field. "They'd get the same pay as an engineer gets to go in and work as a math teacher, as a science teacher, et cetera," Biden said."

The difference that NO democrat will admit is that engineers get raises if they do a good job, and get paid less if they do a crappy job. Teachers get the union wage no matter how bad they are. Perhaps that is why there is no engineer crsis, but there is an ever present educational crisis?

Corporations make their upper level employees work so hard that it makes the executives bad parents. This is true of both male and female executives. It is not related to the gender of the executive, it is the nature of high level corporate work.

Salon ignores how how this affects working executive women (as one would expect of a section of salon dedicated to women's issues), and instead chooses to write an article titled "Delinquent Dads." You are inserting anti-maleness into a gender neutral problem, and the term for that is sexism.

Shame on you Salon for lowering the level of discourse.

So LWs problem is that her husband is honoring their age old agreement on the split of household chores, despite him becomming unemployed. Her response is to threaten violence aganst him? I would have to ask LW: Is your real anger with the laundry, or is it with him not bringing home the cash?

If it is the laundry, then what the heck is her problem with honoring the agreement that they have had for years?

If it is the cash, then she is more of a pimp than a wife. "My bitch better have my money, or I will bitch slap her."

Either way, she is dishonorable. The real question is whether the spousal abuse shelter will take him in when he escapes from LW.

As a nerdy kid in the midwest, pre-internet, pre-cableTV, I read a lot of books. By summertime in junior high was 1 book per day. Today, I read fewer than 5 books per year. But I also spend 8-10 hours a day in front of a computer, mosty reading (Salon.com, Slate.com, ft.com, boingboing.com, etc.). I probably read twice as much material, but virtually none of it is in the form of a dead tree.

I see your legless vet, and raise you two US casualties and a brain damaged Iraqi child.

If we could only find a way to give Bush the Royal Flush!

Simple explination, men are trained to NOT be sexist (under penalty of career loss). Women are not similarly contsrained.

Simple explination, men are trained to NOT be sexist (under penalty of career loss). Women are not similarly contstrained.

That is a lot of justification for your sexist attitude. For example: It really doesn't matter why one feels more comfortable selling their house to a white than a black, it is still racism. It doesn't really matter what justification you give for outright opposing gay teachers, the act of choosing against them just for being gay makes you a homophobe. And finally... (lets repeat this together class, it will be on the exam):

It doesn't matter what justification you give, making a decision based on gender alone makes you a sexist.

You are the sexist (anti-male) liberals who impose the gender neutral law on us, while constantly making excuses for why you and your situation should be exempt. It is nothing short of rank hypocracy, and it does nothing but perpetuate inequality.