Oh, so it's like that guy who just quit smoking and is high on the whole thing.

You know what they say about the newly-converted....

To tie the WWII and genealogy thing together, my mother, who was a teenager during the war, has always been very conflicted by the fact that her great-grandmother immigrated from Germany. She was not pleased when I tracked down multiple lines of German ancestry on all sides of the family. Still, it was better than the Irish line I discovered.

A woman with a library of issues, my mother. I didn't tell her about the Catholics.

How far back have various people gotten with their ancestral tracking? I've got a couple of lines reliably back to the 1600s--hooray for early immigrants and obsessive-compulsive New England genealogists--and one line traditionally back to the 1200s. That early one, though, I look at with suspicion, because I've had connections made before on the strength of "Oh, grandpa always said we descended from so-and-so", only to discover that So-and-So died without children.

Oh, so it's like that guy who just quit smoking and is high on the whole thing.

I was going to say -- somewhere or other recently, I saw a conversation about obsessive personality traits, and about how, if it's not wild extremes of religion, you can easily become an insane fundamentalist about something else. Veganism was one of many examples, but I think anti-smoking was one too.

ita, you don't follow me around on the internet, do you?

Oh, so it's like that guy who just quit smoking and is high on the whole thing.

Ugh.

Anyone who tries to proselytize to me learns that it backfires quite spectacularly unless the doctrine in question involves things like boys in eyeliner or Apple products.

I was going to say -- somewhere or other recently, I saw a conversation about obsessive personality traits, and about how, if it's not wild extremes of religion, you can easily become an insane fundamentalist about something else. Veganism was one of many examples, but I think anti-smoking was one too.

Some people just go from one wild extreme to another. Like from religious fundamentalism to Marxism to radical feminism or whatever. Like they have to have one all-encompassing belief system, no matter what it is....

you don't follow me around on the internet, do you?

Maybe I do...ninja style.

Maybe I do...ninja style.

But with correct weapons, right?

Anyone who tries to proselytize to me learns that it backfires quite spectacularly unless the doctrine in question involves things like boys in eyeliner or Apple products.

You'll be happy to know I've been spreading the gospel of boys in eyeliner far and wide.

WASP -- The one person I know who's embraced the designation was pretty solidly middle-middle class (as in, lived on the "poor side" of one of the richest suburbs in America).

I found out a lot about my ancestors, especially the missing paternal grandfather's side, from ancestry.com. I also found out that the 1/8 Welsh on my paternal grandmother's side comes from Anglesey, which is about as close to Irish as you can get without actually being Irish.

I have a lot of trouble sympathizing with the vegan teacher. If you're hired to teach art, you should be teaching art. Not ignoring art in favor of non-artistic beliefs.

"Swords, daggers could be used to seriously harm victims, so this is a very serious crime."

Well, duh.