Either way, good on you for using them in the first place. So many people wait too long and end up permanently losing hearing because of it. Here's hoping your new replacements come in soon.

Looming death is very much a part of my world, right now. My 40-year-old brother has a massive brain tumor (diagnosed 6 weeks ago, didn't talk about it because I had too much to deal with,) and he's got maybe 3-6 months to go if he's lucky. Then this past weekend my dad suffered a very bad fall (after climbing on a bathroom counter to change a lightbulb, because, in his own words, he's an idiot) and now has 5 broken ribs. Which will heal, eventually, but the thing about rib injuries is they make you breathe shallowly, which if you're old is a straight ticket to pneumonia. So he might bounce back from this just fine, or he might suddenly spiral at any point in the next 8 weeks, and I could end up losing both of them at the same time.

In traditional Polish names, the male version ends in -i and the female version ends in -a. So a father named Pilsudski would have sons named Pilsudski and daughters named Pilsudska.

I'm sorry for your friend, monster.

Children of Men was a good movie.

So that you're... guaranteed to fuck it up and get everybody pissed off, but know exactly why?

You're 100% right, Flint--after running down the quote, which is in a ton of places, it turns out the original source is the blog of a guy who writes satire. The internet fucking sucks.

That's AI-generated, Bruce.

Sometimes I think it helps to remember that other people's lives are super weird, too. Like you just never know.

Case in point: a friend of mine, who is half-Chinese, half-Caucasian, was raised by his mother and had only minimal contact with his dad, who fucked off to China sometime shortly after my friend was born. In my friend's late teens (i.e., about 20 years ago,) he was informed by some relatives in China that his dad had died, and that was the last time he heard from them. Life goes on.

But now, out of the blue, an aunt in China has reached out to let my friend know that when his dad died, he actually left my friend 25% of an apartment in Shanghai. (This is the first he's heard of being included in his father's will at all.) The aunt and another relative also each own 25% of this apartment, and the final 25% is owned by the dad's new wife, who has continued living in the apartment for the last 20 years. The relatives want to sell, the new wife doesn't, and the aunt has reached out to my friend to get him on board so they can vote her out.

And he's kind of torn about the whole thing--all else being equal, he could definitely use the money. But it also feels like he's being used as a pawn to force a widow out of her home. He's been assured by the aunt (whom he barely knows) that the wife (whom he didn't know about at all) was not, in fact, the love of his dad's life, just a last-minute, super-age-inappropriate fling--she's basically the same age as my friend, so widow-ness aside, she's not a decrepit old lady, and has no children to support or anything like that.

And it's not like he can just refuse to deal with it forever. At some point, the apartment will have to sell, so why not get the proceeds now when he could really use them? But then there's all the insane paperwork to deal with over international borders.

Anyway, windfall or not, I'm glad no one has reached out to me to announce I'm the secret inheritor of overseas property. Also, you should never

Like a figure skater!

The fear-mongering about Mexican immigrants isn't about "taking your job" anymore, it's about them supposedly all going on welfare and committing crime. People are definitely scared about losing their jobs to AI, though.

It all went downhill after Bruce retired.

glatt wrote:

The last two times I have been up there to visit them, that basement toilet has been running.  I've wiggled the float to get it to stop, and suggested they let me replace the toilet with a modern one, but they wave me off.  I'm curious to know what their water bill is.  I suspect there are hundreds of gallons of water a day going down that toilet.

Perhaps you could just replace the mechanics inside the tank? It sounds like they wouldn't even notice if you did.