President Obama is here in town and paid cash for a to-go order of 5 chili dogs, 4 regular dogs and a cheeseburger at the Varsity. Apparently no one explained to him the importance of onion rings and a frosted orange.

TV Tropes is in the news.

TV Tropes Bows to Google's Ad Servers, Deletes Discussions of Sexual Assault in Culture | ThinkProgress

Over at the Mary Sue, Aja Romano has a terrific piece about the redoubtable culture site TV Tropes’ decision to delete all of its content related to rape and sexual assault on the grounds that it was making it more difficult for the site to retain advertisers. She writes:

Today when you access any of these pages, you’re informed, “We do not want a page on this topic. It does not meet our content policy.”…This problem wasn’t a new one; in January, the Rape Trope index was locked due to Google threatening to block the site’s ad revenue for explicit content. This led to complaints about vanishing hentai tropes, with some users commenting that “creepy content and creepy examples” needed to go, and others questioning whether “creepy content” applied to rape tropes. At that point a user-led effort was made to rename all of the Rape Tropes so that they sounded less rapey (seriously), which rapidly turned into an admin mandate to go through all the renamed tropes and excise all creepiness.

But despite this frantic renaming/excision, either Google brought down the content policy hammer or the admins simply decided it wasn’t a battle worth fighting. When Fast Eddie noted the deletion of the trope page, he added, “There is no explanation needed beyond the fact that the topic is a pain in the ass to keep clean and it endangers the wiki’s revenues. We just won’t have articles about rape. Super easy. No big loss.”

Can I confess to some Schadenfreude that they're suddenly not the bastion of endlessly absorbing fun and geek free expression? Please please please?

Can I confess to some Schadenfreude that they're suddenly not the bastion of endlessly absorbing fun and geek free expression? Please please please?

Yes. Especially since I've been telling myself that I'm not allowed to make snarky comments about "Fast Eddie" anywhere.

Just want you all to know, I'm here, and I'm listening, and I'm nodding like a bobble-head at a lot of these posts.

About my own childhood, I'm not quite ready to post. One of my mother's and my last conversations (Jesus, just the beginning of this month) was about how the rest of the family didn't think she and I were very close. And then we shared that "but we know better" smile. And I can't continue this line of thought, or I'll wind up bawling at work.

Suffice it to say that there are very good reasons that I do not want children of my own, but I am willing to help take care of a family-sized number of my friends/chosen family. Close friendship and mutual assistance are exhausting in a very different way, but the notion of being responsible for someone's welfare the way my mother was responsible for mine in my early life simply terrifies me.

President Obama is here in town and paid cash for a to-go order of 5 chili dogs, 4 regular dogs and a cheeseburger at the Varsity.

I'm picturing him handing out lunch to the Secret Service guys and scolding them for not thinking to bring any pocket money.

What's a frosted orange?

I don't think it's a kids-today thing, or at least not entirely so: my step-sis was entirely capable of yelling "I hate you" and slamming the door.

I guess you're right -- looking back, I know at least one friend of mine had horrible screaming matches with her mother. It was just unthinkable for me, and for Stephen with his parents, too.

I think this. I also think I could eat onion rings till I got the heart-attack-with-purchase. Hi, Karl! Alan Grayson took my question online...bet he was wishing I could say it in cash...me too, brother, but I feel gutsier already.

My older sister (b. 1959) use to have screaming fights with our mother. Sometimes Dad would take me out for a drive so we didn't have to listen to them. Later on, Mom and my sister were practically BFFs. I can't picture either of my sister's kids telling her they hate her, but maybe they were just on good behavior when they were of the age to do so and I was visiting.

I know I wrote a school paper in elementary school about how John Denver and Olivia Newton-John would be my preferred parents.

Listening, especially easy listening, is such an important part of being a parent.

I don't think I ever told my parents I hated them, being also too invested in the 'good kid' role. I'm pretty sure others of my siblings did. My older brother was still saying it in his thirties, when his drug addiction was at its worst. I too flinch when near an angry person, even if not related to me. Not something I got from my parents; they were rarely angry, and never scary when they were. Maybe I got it from my brother.