On at least two occasions, a woman gave birth to twins right at the end/start of the year, resulting in twins born in different years.

Rye, barley, oats, and rice are also grasses.

Rye used to be a weed that evolved to resemble wheat so early farmers wouldn’t uproot it. But it evolved to resemble wheat so much that it became an edible crop in its own right.

I like QuiteRSS (if you use Linux or BSD, it should be in your package manager). It’s super-easy to sort and manage tonnes of feeds, it’s very clear what is read and what’s unread, and you can set it to never delete unread items. It hasn’t been updated in ages, but it still works (mostly. Once in a while a Qt update breaks it until someone can fix the packaging).

My second favourite isAkregator. It’s almost as easy to use as QuiteRSS, but unread items aren’t as distinctive, and sometimes an unread item looks read.

Wow, no, she was in the wrong.

I spent three years unemployed after I graduated college. It was perfectly acceptable to call a place and ask if they were hiring. Never did me any good, but there is nothing wrong with doing so.

Good. Software patents are bollocks.

Tom’s incongruity is entirely deliberate. Tolkien worked out Middle Earth in meticulous detail, but thought that a truly believable mythology needed to have a few mysteries, hence Tom.

Some disaster relief charities used to let people decide how their donations would be spent. Donors overwhelmingly voted for rebuilding houses, because everybody needs a house, and replacing someone’s house is nice and feels good.

The charities ended up with way too much money earmarked for housing, which they were legally required to spend on new houses. That excess money could have been spent on boring things like sewage, but they were legally barred from doing so. The result was a lot of people with unnecessarily big, fancy homes with no working toilets or running water.

The charities quickly dropped this practice, because donors directed the money to what felt right instead of to where it was actually needed or would do the most good. And that’s why we don’t run the country that way.

He’s a massive fan if The Beatles. He has their entire discography on vinyl records in good condition. (He bought them in the 1970s; I don’t know if that is more or less impressive).

He also likes Led Zeppelin, Thin Lizzie, and The Horslips. He has a bunch of their records, too. There’s also some Pink Floyd in there.

I was raised Catholic in Ireland. Catholics, like most Christians, tend to quietly ignore the church teachings they don’t like and emphasise the parts they do.