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.

How far back have various people gotten with their ancestral tracking?

My grandmother got her paternal back to pre-1650 in the Scottish Highlands. Again, before that time period it's based on a lot of passed down stories and family legend than anything concrete cause hello? Not a whole heck of a lot of paper. But she did have the success she did based on church records for marriages and deaths.

But with correct weapons, right?

You know it. I observe very proper ordnance etiquette.

I am not the genealogist in my family - on either side - but both sides have had rabid ones. My maternal grandfather's ancestry is clear back to 1630, Massachusetts Bay (I am a 15th generation American!), and my paternal grandfather is back to the 1600s too (Scots/Irish).

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

This warms the black cockles of my crusty little punkass heart.

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.

A genealogy-obsessed second cousin got one line of my family all the way back to the late 16th century, but when I had to do my family tree for 11th grade American history most of the lines petered out somewhere between 1820 and 1850. I'm sure if I was really into genealogy I could push it back a bit further, though.

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 don't think of WASP as necessarily wealthy. To me it has a more whitebread, "republican-cloth-coat" feel to it.

Okay, black crusty cockles sounds icky, no matter how punkass.

Can you have moist crusty cockles?