Ormond

Actually I think India's birth rate is just about at replacement level now, with the only countries in the world above it being in Africa plus a couple of the most impoverished Moslem Southwest Asian countries (Yemen and Afghanistan) and a few of the small Pacific Island nations. The country in the world with the highest fertility rate is Niger -- which makes me wonder if that has something to do with their recent military coup. The drops in the birth rate have little to do with climate change but are a result of economic factors leading to the education and employment outside the home of women everywhere. The problem, though, is that it normally takes about 40 or 50 years AFTER the birth rate has reached "replacment level" for the total population of people alive in a country to stop growing -- you have to wait for the parents of babies being born today to start dying off before the population starts to stabilize or decrease from the low birth rate alone. Now that is already starting in China because of their former one-child policy, but it will take India quite a while. And the sorts of economic development that go along with the lower birth rate ironically have usually led to higher per capita energy use in the past. I tend to think some of the climate catastrophe predictions are overblown. But since this really is an unprecedented situation, no one knows for sure exactly what's going to happen, either in terms of the physical changes to the weather and environment worldwide or how human societies are really going to react to them. Just this year the experts on tropical storms admit they have an even harder time than usual predicting the Atlantic hurricane season, because for the first time in history we have BOTH an El Nino event in the Pacific, which usually suppresses formation of hurricanes, but also record high water temperatures in the Atlantic, which normally increases hurricanes and their intensity. We really aren't going to know which of those factors is more important until we've lived through the next few months and get to the normal end of the hurricane season in November. I think there is a similar degree of uncertainty around most of this. Hopefully the decrease in birth rates will help defuse some of the climate crisis, but I don't think anyone today know for sure if that's going to be true.

Here is the link to today's column. It is remarkable to me how Nancy was way more popular in the United States than in Britain for well over two centuries. A few decades ago the British name expert Leslie Dunkling remarked that it was amazing Nancy had not yet returned to popularity in England despite its being a top ten name in the 1940s and 1950s in the USA. Well, it has finally happened -- for the first time in centuries Nancy is more common for babies in the UK now than in the USA, back in the England and Wales top 100 while almost out of the USA top 1000. However, it remains to be seen if Nancy in the UK can reach anywhere near the popularity there it had in the USA during the Baby Boom years. https://omaha.com/life-entertainment/local/cleveland-evans-its-no-mystery-how-nancy-rose-in-popularity/article_bf68366c-378b-11ee-8d3a-079f77b2858f.html

I suppose this is curmudgeonly of me, but about the thread title -- though I am sure the great majority of mystery fiction deals with murder, there are some stories where it is another crime like kidnapping or theft which is the focus of the detection, especially in mysteries written for young adults or children. For example, I don't think murder was normally featured in the original "Nancy Drew" series.

I have never personally seen or heard the term "transmedia" before, but if it is a well-established term used by literary scholars for the life of me I don't see why it should be abandoned. My Random House Unabridged Dictionary includes five pages of words starting with the prefix trans-. It seems that it would be people who are prejudiced against transsexual or transgender persons who would be the ones objecting to the use of terms like "transmedia" to me. Why should "transmedia" be "distasteful" to a non-cisgender person any more than words like transaction, transalpine, transdermal, transducer, transference, transfix, transfuse, transmigrate, transmogrify, transpose, etc., etc. etc.??

As a gay man who is 30 years older than you, can I give some historical perspective? The way people come to label their own sexuality has evolved over time as society has come to be more accepting of GLBTQ orientations. Many gay men who are now over 70 have the incorrect belief that "there's no such thing as bisexual men" because it was really common 50 years ago for gay men to have a period during their personal coming out period when they labeled themselves as "bisexual" while trying to come to terms with societal prejudice. Although bisexuals wouldn't have been presented in a positive light in the media 50 or 60 years ago, the way homosexual men were depicted back then was even worse. Most gay men in the USA of my generation had the perception when they were young that they would be more accepted and have less prejudice against them if they were "bisexual" rather than gay, and a great many actually labeled themselves as "bi" for several years before they became fully comfortable calling themselves "gay" or "homosexual". I actually saw one research study published around 35 years ago that followed men who had called themselves "bisexual" in an initial interview and over time about half of them had switched to labeling themselves as "gay." Also, 50 years ago it seems to me that most men who did label themselves "bisexual" were men who had at least 50% of their physical attractions to other men. Those who were only occasionally attracted to other men would suppress that and just call themselves "straight" or "heterosexual". It really has blown my mind how in the last couple of decades I have seen young men willing to label themselves "bisexual" when the majority of their attractions are to women and only 20% or less of their attractions are to other men. In my experience that would almost never have occurred 50 years ago. I think the man in the choir you speak of was ignorant. But his ignorance was probably a product of having known many men his age who switched from self-labeling as "bi" to "gay" back when he was young.

Born the same year as my mother.

I am sure Scot's grandmother was smart, but really her statement doesn't make her much of an outlier from her generation. Scot is now 52, as you can see from his profile. His grandmother has a good chance of being over 100 if she is still alive. As such she would have grown up way before the time when the South turned Republican, and most likely was a Democrat because she was raised when the "Solid South" was solid for the Democrats.

Here is a link to Locus's obituary for author Sydney J. Van Scyoc: https://locusmag.com/2023/07/sydney-j-van-scyoc-19329-2023/

I just don't get how Pence's statement would be "inoffensive" to Trump since it starts with "Today's indictment." He is clearly putting it in a context where anyone can plainly tell who he is referring to. If he thinks not having the name "Trump" in that sentence means he is "avoiding taking a shot at Trump", I think he's being silly.

Trump's father died at age 93, so I guess Trump assumes that is a normal "lifetime".

All? What do you want Chris Christie to do or so that would anger Trump more than the things he has said lately? He just said “ And Pence just said I can understand being angry at these people for not saying these things to the media years ago, but those statements don't seem to be "going out of their way to avoid criticizing" Trump or trying to avoid making him angry. The whole Republican field is not as bad as DeSantis with his rhetoric about "weaponization of the Justice Department."

I haven't posted one of Trump's fundraising emails in quite a while and thought someone might like to see how he's using the last indictment to raise money:

So who owns the trademarks for Ex, Exe, Exx, Ecs, Ehx, Ehxe, Ehcs, and Ehks?

Here's the link to today's column: https://omaha.com/life-entertainment/local/evans-arnolds-popularity-dwindles-after-schwarzenegger-turns-to-politics/article_600133dc-2c90-11ee-a3eb-2bf58aea68cb.html I didn't have room to point out that Arnold may be reviving a bit in the UK at the moment. Or to mention the cartoon show "Hey, Arnold!" that ran on Nickolodeon 1996-2004.

In my experience "senior moment" is usually used for any type of forgetting, not just "forgetting where you are", which would be a more extreme issue.

Here is the link to today's column. I think it's a fascinating coincidence that the first person with Tyrone as a given name in the USA census was a Black man back in 1800, since the name later became so popular in the Black community in the later 20th century. https://omaha.com/life-entertainment/local/cleveland-evans-tyrone-comes-in-many-forms/article_44f80d54-217d-11ee-aff4-eb43d22a359a.html

That's good to know. But I am sure there are sodomy laws still on the books in some states that would provide a basis for criminalizing same sex consensual sexual acts. Why doesn't your reasoning apply to them? As a non-lawyer I'd like to know that.

OK, I only listening to the first minute of this and found the argument so stupid I couldn't listen to the rest of it. Just because a group of people in Charlotte declared independence in 1775 and Jefferson took some of their language to write his later Declaration of Independence does not mean that we should be celebrating the date of their action rather than the July 4 date, which certainly much more directly led to the actualization of real independence. If he was arguing that our celebration date should be July 2 rather than July 4, since the Continental Congress passed a resolution in favor of independence two days before the signing of the Declaration, he might have a point. (And for all I know he mentions that later in his argument.) But him starting off with trying to equate the small group in Charlotte with the Continental Congress is so silly it completely turned me off.

I am a gay man myself and I find the above rather frightening. If Arizona does this about the most recent ruling, doesn't this give right-wing Attorney Generals in other states the "permission" to do the same with the Supreme Court's rulings on same sex marriage and sodomy laws? Personally I would rather have to deal with the religious exemption to public accommodation than have individual states go back to not recognizing same sex marriage and imprisoning people for consensual sexual acts with someone of the same gender. The latter is a much scarier prospect to me.

"Never" is a long time. The last time I saw a map showing which states had signed on to the pact which would give their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner no matter who won the state, it included both Vermont and Delaware, who have the same three electoral votes North and South Dakota do. It also seems to me that younger generations are much less likely to have a strong identification with or loyalty to the particular state they live in. Many cultural changes which seemed impossible a century ago are now part of our everyday lives.

Here is the link to today's column: https://omaha.com/life-entertainment/cleveland-evans-dylan-is-a-modern-name-with-an-ancient-origin/article_0626ba2a-15df-11ee-988e-4355b8172f5a.html It was surprising to me just how recent the use of Dylan as a name for a real baby is. As the column points out, I could not find any reliable instances of a person named Dylan born before 1910. Any historical novel or film that has a character named Dylan is anachronistic -- it was only the name of the character in the Mabinogion before that date. Amazingly to me, from information readily available on Google, the first two babies named Dylan who were born in the United States (Dylan Stephens and Dylan Thomas Smith) both still are alive today. That shows just how recent this name is. Without the fame of Dylan Thomas, Dylan would probably still be a rare name confined to Wales and those of Welsh descent.

I never met nor remember having any personal interactions with Lord Manwoody, but I well remember the big impact his death had on others who post on this board and the glowing tributes to him. I am also amazed that this happened 20 years ago -- it's another example of how as one ages events you think happened ten years ago really happened twenty years ago. My condolences again to all of you who are having renewed grief reactions on the anniversary of this admirable man's death.

I don't think that's completely true, because as I understand it a very high % of college loan debt is held by poor or lower middle class people who took some college classes (or even trade school classes) but dropped out before getting a degree. They are the ones who most need the debt relief.

I certainly don't want to seem to be defending Ron DeSantis -- but when a right-wing politician advocates "eliminating" a department in the Federal Government, does that really mean that they want to eliminate all of its functions, or just remove it as a separate cabinet department with its own secretary and transfer its functions to other departments? One could certainly get rid of Commerce as a separate department (and even a lot of its other functions) without getting rid of the National Weather Service. I have always thought that conservatives tended to believe that decreasing the number of federal departments with their own cabinet secretaries would be a cost saving measure even if all the functions were retained. (I have no idea whether that's true, just think it's a conservative position.)

Pretty old, though not as old as the average "mainline" Protestant congregation. But the "conservative" denominations are on the same trajectory, just a generation behind. The Southern Baptists lost half a million members in 2022, and they aren't going to help that by their recent decision to disfellowship any church now in their denomination that accepts women as clergy. P.S. And according to Pew's research, the % of Americans who identify as Evangelical Protestants has gone down 6% in the last decade, exactly the same % decline as has occurred in non-Evangelical Protestants. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/12/14/about-three-in-ten-u-s-adults-are-now-religiously-unaffiliated/