Depends on whether she was slicing up onions before you did it.

Could be a toss up.

thanks for the perspective, Jesse. Maybe that should be sent to NOW

and now I have Robin's number. OK, I am SO cell-phone challenged, it isn't even funny. I don't use it often, so I forget how. And then actually talking on them? Oy. They fluster me.

So if I sound like a moron, blame 50% on the device. The rest is pure me.

Luckily, it's not like NOW is making a huge campaign against that ad, as far as I can tell. They have a whole page of offensive ads: [link]

Thanks, Allyson! And, Sara, no matter how dopey you sound, you can't sound more dopey than having to leave your phone at home because you forgot to charge it, so you have it all over me in this instance.

Also dumb? asking someone to call on the cell phone and not charging it ... so it dies when they call.

Stephen Fry has a new, long post to his blog: [link] Anyway, this bit struck me:

In casting my mind around for a subject for a blessay I have come up with one that was forced to my attention the other night when I participated in a regrettable and unhappy verbal spat with an American gentleman. I shan’t give details about him, it wouldn’t be fair, so let’s call him Jim and leave his statehood, profession and other details unventilated. I will try and be as fair to him and as scrupulously honest about myself as I can be. It was an upsetting evening and I wish it hadn’t happened, but I suspect evenings like it are taking place everywhere around the planet.

We must begin with a few round truths about myself: when I get into a debate I can get very, very hot under the collar, very impassioned, and I dare say, very maddening, for once the light of battle is in my eye I find it almost impossible to let go and calm down. I like to think I’m never vituperative or too ad hominem but I do know that I fall on ideas as hungry wolves fall on strayed lambs and the result isn’t always pretty. This is especially dangerous in America. I was warned many, many years ago by the great Jonathan Lynn, co-creator of Yes Minister and director of the comic masterpiece My Cousin Vinnie, that Americans are not raised in a tradition of debate and that the adversarial ferocity common around a dinner table in Britain is more or less unheard of in America. When Jonathan first went to live in LA he couldn’t understand the terrible silences that would fall when he trashed an statement he disagreed with and said something like “yes, but that’s just arrant nonsense, isn’t it? It doesn’t make sense. It’s self-contradictory.” To a Briton pointing out that something is nonsense, rubbish, tosh or logically impossible in its own terms is not an attack on the person saying it – it’s often no more than a salvo in what one hopes might become an enjoyable intellectual tussle. Jonathan soon found that most Americans responded with offence, hurt or anger to this order of cut and thrust. Yes, one hesitates ever to make generalizations, but let’s be honest the cultures are different, if they weren’t how much poorer the world would be and Americans really don’t seem to be very good at or very used to the idea of a good no-holds barred verbal scrap. I’m not talking about inter-family ‘discussions’ here, I don’t doubt that within American families and amongst close friends, all kinds of liveliness and hoo-hah is possible, I’m talking about what for good or ill one might as well call dinner-party conversation. Disagreement and energetic debate appears to leave a loud smell in the air.

I really don't have the experience to say that this this true or not. Anyone else?

Now, THIS is offensive to women

Ugh. I read about that on a football board. The Pat's fan in me said "It's the Jets' fans, I'm not terribly suprised". Still incredibly vile (and sadly may go on at other stadiums as well - I'm reading a history of the Pats and during the pre-Bob Kraft era, Foxboro was a scary place to go to games, and not just because the old stadium was a dump).

I really don't have the experience to say that this this true or not. Anyone else?

Certainly wasn't true in my family. But I've gotten into trouble with being too bulldoggish arguing about what I think is RIGHT and PROPER in work situations.