Recent Comments

1. about 16 hours ago on Close to Home

   And what’s its air-speed velocity?

2. about 16 hours ago on Non Sequitur

   “It used to be that a person could live isolated from the world’s problems . . .

   Then it got to be that we all knew everything that was going on . . .

   The problem now is that we know everything about everything except what’s going on.

   That’s why you feel nervous . . . Five cents please!"

   www.gocomics.Com/peanuts/1974/01/19

3. about 16 hours ago on Lay Lines

   I don’t think all the hippies ceased to exist by 1974. The news media may have stopped paying attention, but there were communes and communities that lasted a while thereafter.

4. about 17 hours ago on Rubes

   I was expecting a hammer. He was really Thor at that bug.

5. about 17 hours ago on Reality Check

   …and that’s a wrap!

6. about 17 hours ago on Strange Brew

   His father was about to shoo him away anyhow.

7. about 17 hours ago on Kliban

   I didn’t know about all those. I’ll have to bone up on anatomy.

8. about 17 hours ago on 1 and Done

   It’s located at Conjunction Junction.

9. about 17 hours ago on Zack Hill

   He was saving it for breakfast.

10. about 18 hours ago on Off the Mark

    A good question, complicated by the fact that terms that were originally neutral can pick up negative connotations over the years.

    I think of “goy” (plural “goyim”) as neutral. (It derives from the Hebrew for “nation” or “people”—since it is said of Jews since the Diaspora that we live among the nations but are not of the nations.) But I’ve certainly heard it used disparagingly, especially by my late uncle at holiday dinners.

    “Gentile” is about as neutral a term as I can think of at the moment. (It also means “nation” or “people,” from the Latin.) It gets confusing, though, since some other groups (notably the Mormons) use it to mean anyone who isn’t part of their group. A friend found himself in Utah once and remarked that it was the first time in his life he’d been a gentile.