62 Comments

I always drain my tuna before adding healthy, lifegiving mayonnaise and mustard. Water is easier to drain than oil.

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My husband likes tuna with olive oil but we buy tuna packed in water, because, as you said, it's easier to drain, and then he adds high quality olive oil.

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It’s oily fish usually made with Mayo. I don’t add oil to egg salad either.😀

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I'm sorry to rain on your embarrassment/hypocrisy parade but hooting at a caboose that turns out to belong to one's sister seems to me clearly to beat inadvertently admiring one's daughter from afar. If you hadn't just published this story no one might have known about it (unlike, say, our former president's loud remarks about Ivanka's bangability), whereas rolling down the car window and yelling appreciation of what one doesn't realize is one's sister's backside is much worse because publicly expressed. Just saying.

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Agreed. And calling it a pooper is icing on that cake. Very sexy.

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Haha yes exactly!

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Agreed. You did it with dignity and restraint. He basically wolf-whistled.

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Well, calling it a “pooper” might have made it easier to explain away to a pissed off sibling than some of the other comments I’ve heard made about asses.

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It was an anonymous butt. And juveniles being juvenile, and growing from recognizing the self-error. Please.

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In the long run, sure. At dinner that night, I’d have rather copped to being a jerk older brother than unknowingly perving on my own sister’s ass.

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The best tuna option these days is tuna in foil. Very little liquid of any sort and less of that tinny taste. Otherwise, it's tuna in water because that oil comes with a huge cost of fat calories. Plenty of other ways to add flavor to tuna in water like mayonnaise.

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This. And also the oil they choose is mostly garbage oil, if it needs a bit of oil, go for the good stuff.

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re: boy scouts manual and masturbation. I used to attend the Rockville Unitarian church where sermons were given by many different guests (including a former astronaut turned psychologist). Can't remember the background the speaker I'm going to quote. He told us about his attempt to be a leader of some type when he was a boy scout. He was interviewed by a panel of adults one of whom asked him about his opinion of masturbation. He replied that he thought it was great. He didn't get the job.

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I think the only appropriate response would have been “I’ll answer that as soon as you explain to my satisfaction why it isn’t creepy as hell a grown person is asking a kid that question.”

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I was under the impression that "mental masturbation" was a term that described the process of creating and submitting entries for The Invitational.

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No, that’s the process of figuring out how to make space on the mantel for the first prize you’re sure you’re going to win before finding out you didn’t ink at all.

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Word.

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Applause for " . . . beat me to the pun."

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What am I missing?

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Read the piece, it's in there.

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What piece? I've read this entire Gene Pool post, and I saw the comment and Gene's response, but I still don't get it.

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Have you heard the phrase, "He beat me to the punch" ??

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Ah, that's what I was looking for. I knew it was something simple, but you know--senior moment!

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Gene- The “lard president” made me lol. The church was basically responsible for Western music, education, book writing and printing, and Western virtue whereby it was valued for a king to be “good.” I’m not a defender of the church, this is just how I see its place in history. Today it still provides a candlelight of hope in Egypt, the Philippines, South American countries. Etc. Anyway, the Henry history on the church is a little fractured, the Church of England was regionalizing for a couple of hundred years.

Against that, Trump is pure cynical evil. Manipulates evangelical sheep openly. And they have sold themselves to a cult church of power and influence.

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Was a good king a good thing, or was it good to be the king?

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I buy tuna in water because my wife insists upon it, thinking it's healthier. Then, when I make her tuna salad, I add olive oil.

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Next up in the polling place: "Would you have a one-night stand with someone who just ate a tuna fish sandwich ?"

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Would you eat a tuna sandwich prepared by somebody who’d just had a one night stand?

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Would that be with themselves or another ? Also only one night stand was always a deal breaker since I needed some place to put my timer.

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Interesting how people are challenging each other on their personal feelings about a theoretical.

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Part of the fun is how you interpret the question.

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Tuna with water because that is what my wife demands. And it makes sense: you can tart up water-tuna any old way, but you’ll never be able to drain oil-tuna sufficiently to eliminate the stuff that’s bad for you. More proof, if any was needed, that women are smarter than men.

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not to mention that crappy vegetable oil they use tastes bad-

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 "I ink, therefore I am." That what the nagging voice in the back of your head keeps repeating Thursdays here at the Pool, when your self-esteem takes another whack ? Perhaps especially after submitting that Nobel lit prize worthy parody that even got a smirk from Old Stone Face (or whatever you call your significant other) ? Yep, what's funny tends to be subjective and moreover, we're told, is very much tied up with our sense of self-worth or self-esteem. So, I want you to go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell: "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore." (similar to what "Howard Beale" in "Network" said to do -- okay, exactly what "Howard Beale" in "Network" said to do).Well, I'm here to tell you now that you probably will have to continue to "take it" unless you carefully follow "Dale's Stop Dribbling and S-Ink It!" ---- a how-to guide to getting that monkey (okay, two monkeys) off your back, painstakingly put together after many minutes of analysis. The first two expert tips follow, with more to come (occasionally).

* Sure Pat and Gene are worldly and wildly knowledgeable, but don't expect them to recognize the name of the third position in the Kama Sutra (okay, maybe Pat) even if it makes an equisite backronym or resounding rhyme. Stick with genitalia and excreta.

* Change your name to Doyle. If you're already named Doyle, try Frankovich. 

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I didn't think this was particularly funny, but I am definitely a hypocrite for being both environmentally conscious and an incurable bargain hunter.

For example, some years ago, I decided to switch all of our household bulbs to LED, but because there were so many of them, and because LEDs are expensive, I shopped around online for the best bargain.

News flash: bulbs are fragile. The coffin-sized box that traveled from California to my home in Virginia was filled to the brim with Styrofoam peanuts. When I opened it, I thought "the planet is doomed."

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Did you try eating any? Many years ago, foamed-starch packing peanuts were introduced. I don't know if they are still being used, becaue nowadays they use the plastic pillow bags. But the starch peanuts were environmentally friendly, and provided a small snack while unpacking, with a little salt.

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You certain that stuff was always stored, handled, and processed in food grade conditions? They might not be so quick to shoo the warehouse rats off it if they thought it was only ever going to protect light bulbs.

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I refuse to hear such talk of weakness. Be strong! Eat the rat poop!

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Eh, I prefer to consume my rodent feces in the FDA allowed quantities found in canned goods, thank you.

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I am amazed that anyone would pick pining over one-night stand.

Could someone please explain this?

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The pine-ee is dead. I don't feel any betrayal at all if my spouse pines for a dead lover from her past.

Present-day infidelity, even for just one night, is a huge problem. I can't really see it the other way, so please explain your stance.

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Well, for me a one-night stand is something that might happen, with no real consequences or entailments (emotional entanglements), whereas pining is pining, and if the pine-ee is dead then the beloved is eternally pining for someone else, and therefore while they can't do anything about it, they're always pining.

I mean, I've had one-night stands, and they don't necessarily mean much. Pining, though, is: pining.

Does that make sense?

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Appreciate the candor. Our perspectives, and possibly our interpretation of the hypothetical situations, differ. I want the person that I'm in a relationship with to value me above all other living persons. If I am her 4th favorite partner of all time, but 1st favorite living partner (and only living person with whom she is presently physically intimate), then I'm still good.

In my mind, pining is involuntary. One-night stands are not.

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Hmm. Yes, we have very different perspectives. Interesting!

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I never have done meaningless flings. All my flings, even the short ones, have had meaning. So if I were to ever have one behind my wife’s back, it’d be a huge gargantuan betrayal and a problem. I still maintain that if I had to choose, I’d prefer something brief and over with than lingering and omnipresent.

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I suspect that Hortense has revealed the root emotional issue at play. Ask the question "Have you previously had a one-night stand that didn't mean much, with no real consequences or emotional entanglements?" Then ask the follow up question about one-night stand vs pining. I expect that the R-squared will be very high.

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It might also be useful to ask whether the person had ever loved someone who was pining for someone else. I realize that "someone dead" makes all the difference, but to me the idea that the beloved might have had sex with someone else is much less painful than that s/he might be secretly (or for that matter openly!) pining for someone else. I honestly can't imagine how one-time sex could be more threatening to a relationship than longing for another.

I feel compelled to add that my knowledge of entanglement-free one-night stands is decades old.

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Also: I see that 67% of 203 women so far have opted for one-night stand over pining.

Ladies: please help me out here.

Gene: are you ever going to reveal the gender discrepancy?

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I was horrified in college when I discovered I couldn’t do one night stands. It was a dark day.

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Both would hurt, but some people prefer physical fidelity over emotional attachment. They should perhaps ponder why.

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Well yes, that's what I don't get. It's like putting your beloved in a chastity belt.

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My guess is most such responders haven’t really thought through what each would really mean. The knee-jerk response is that the one night stand is bad - and it is, for the closed relationships most of us have - but when you think about it, having a partner who doesn’t love you so much seems way worse.

Also, there’s that whole losing out to a dead person.

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Yes, agreed.

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I think you're reading a lot into this, as are others. Pining for someone, to you, equals not loving you enough. Hmmm, not so IMHO. You can love two people equally. And you can expect that the pining may decrease.

But neither is a good situation.

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Yeah, it does boil down to how you interpret “pining”. Most of us likely have deceased loved ones whom we miss, and that’s natural. I took the spirit of the question mean “pining to the point it interferes with your current relationship”, to make it a damned if you do, damned if you don’t decision.

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Richard Kimball wasn't ON the train, but I digress. :)

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he was in the original TV show, but not the movie. I think.

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And of course Gene is correct, from the IMDB on the tv show: " En route to death row, Dr. Kimble's train derails over a switch, allowing him to escape and begin a cross-country search for the real killer . . "

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Yes he was on the train. He helped an injured guard before he fled.

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Oh, I thought the TV show tracked that he escaped a prison transport, he wasn't on the train. Like the movie.

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He was very nearly all over the front of it.

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Exactly.

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