Not to mention the literally billions of birds that are killed every year by cats in the US.

As observed by that legendary grammarian Dave Barry.

There’s a long history of women dressing as men in theater. Look at the Takarazuka revue.

They are thinking that they have made billions of dollars, so why stop now?

I have noticed that a large number of for sale signs near me have pictures of 20-something female models for the agents.

My experience has been that real estate agents are rarely 20-something female models, and that anyone who contacts them will be passed off to someone more realistic existent.

In Sesotho, a language of Southern Africa, there are no swear words, however there are insults that (I was told) may cause someone to want to fight or even kill you.

Those insults:

• I’m not your mother
• You are like a cat that jumps across a ravine and scribbles up the other side

I also have RockSmith and a bass guitar. However, for 3 years I have been playing in local groups (the last year has been a community open mic where up to a dozen musicians sit around and strum together) and having a lot of fun. The thing is that these are almost all elderly people, self-taught, so they are not trying to become rock stars, just to enjoy playing music together. Playing music I have never heard before has been very good for developing my ear.

I go through periods of playing RockSmith a lot, and then not playing it at all for several months. Discovering user-created tracks that can be added as DLC has been fantastic.

The other thing I would mention is that even if you learn standard Japanese anime is going to have a huge amount of slang and idioms.

The good thing is that, as in most modern Japanese, it will also have a huge amount of English loan words. The pronunciation may be slightly different, but you can recognize things like “hambaagaa” or “paypaa”.

Of course, sometimes it can go too far, like when I lived in Japan in the 90s and on days when they encouraged people not to drive themselves, it was a “No mycaa dayi” (“No my car day”).

people they’ve given no other choice or recourse

I don’t know, I find I also have the option to not consume media that I can’t pay for or justify ethically. For instance, the only streaming service we have a subscription for is The Criterion Channel.

I read a column recently in my local paper by a farmer whom I know.

He argued persuasively that the problem with GMO crops is not that they have been genetically modified, but that the modification is often to allow them to resist high concentrations of pesticides. So the food that you are getting has been exposed to massively higher amounts of toxic chemicals.

Makes sense to me.

I’m currently reading in 3 languages, but a bit more narrowly than you.

When I was a young teen, and reading SF&F books voraciously (sometimes a book a day, or more if I had them), I ran across the Perry Rhodan series.

Finally something I wouldn’t run out of! It started in Germany in 1961, and published a novella weekly since. (They haven’t missed a week, and are currently past issue 3,000.)

The first 150 or so were translated into English and I scoured used book stores until I had all of them.

Now, 50 years later, I spent a week in Germany and bought issue 3323 in a railway station bookstore. My German was never great, and is now worse, so Google Lens has helped me get through it.

When I came home I did some searching and found all the English translations as e-books. I’ve read a couple dozen of the early ones and they are pretty dreadful. My 14-year-old self was not very discerning.

I also found e-versions of the German originals up to about #2000, which I could read laboriously, and French translations of the first 1,000.

The latter is a game changer because my French is good enough to read with only occasional dictionary lookups. Reading with Google books allows me to tap as word and see the English instantly, so it’s quite convenient.

That would explain why a pencil, which contains a “lead” (actually a polymer or graphite now) is Bleistift

Well, not terribly subtle, but if you are fighting with your spouse and they complain that you never say anything nice about their family, you can respond with:

“Well, I have to say that your in-laws are better than my in-laws”

“Operation Paperclip” for the Americans, although all the victorious countries grabbed as many Japanese and German scientists as they could.

That is to say, a significant portion of dust is actually skin cells shed by humans.

I wonder if there are some people on the American right who actually see it as a kind of Darwinian cleansing of their society.

They want to get rid of the week, the elderly, and the stupid, and this is a way for those people to self-select for extermination.

Of course there will be some collateral damage, but those who know better can protect themselves. You think that Trump and those around him don’t have every vaccination that you’ve ever heard of, and probably some that you haven’t?

That looks awful, but to be fair I have been driving on Highway 401 at the end of a long weekend (I’m usually going in the opposite direction, thank God), and the slowdowns start about 100 km from Toronto.

In Japan, on holidays like Golden Week, you sometimes get an entire highway, 75 km or more, stopped.

I get three to five spam emails every day from Republican agents asking “Patriots” to send money to help defend against the woke liberals. They keep changing the subjects and domains sent from, so it is difficult to block them effectively.

The kicker is that I live in Canada, and have never lived in the US or been eligible to vote in a US election.

That guy looks so much like he’s wearing a fake mustache.

For me, obsolete often means that I can no longer repair an important tool if it breaks. If I can’t get a replacement hard drive or video card or power supply for my ancient Windows computer, I need to think about getting a new computer, just to minimize risk.