Heck no ... there was no place in the kitchen for me to shit.

I bought a house that had been occupied by smokers. One day I painted one of the bedrooms and everything seemed fine and I went home. When I came back the next morning, the top two feet of paint on the walls had flowed down off the walls and onto the floor. Not something I've ever seen happen before. Fortunately I was able to scrub the top with mineral spirits and get the next coat of paint to stick.

I looked at one apartment years ago where a dog (hopefully it was a dog) had eaten a one-square-foot chunk out of the corner of the bedroom door. The previous tenants had repaired it by nailing a pizza box over the missing corner. The pizza box still had cheese on it. Somehow this seemed worse to me than the two big mounds of dog shit in the kitchen.

The landlord was a wheelchair-bound woman who hadn't been upstairs to look at the apartment since the previous tenants had left. When I told her what was up there, she said if I took the place she would knock off $200 ... from the security deposit.

My first programming job in 1996 was $35K a year. It was pretty disappointing even then.

I went to a liberal arts college in the late '80s and tuition there was about $13K a year. Tuition at comparable liberal arts colleges these days is in the neighborhood of $75K, so it's in the neighborhood of a 6X increase (without factoring in inflation). Which is still a fuck ton but not quite as bad as indicated by this post. However: college tuition (especially at colleges like this) is a very fluid property. They offer quite a lot of "financial aid" which is really nothing more than a discounted rate rather than any actual money changing hands, and it's quite typical for a student to end up paying half the quoted rate. A college's tuition can be better regarded as the maximum rate they're going to charge kids from better-off families.

I grew up next to the Cuyahoga in the 1970s. It wasn't the part that caught fire (which was in Cleveland) but I have no idea why not. The river was chock full of old tires, rusting oil and chemical barrels, and there was a sheen of oil (or god knows what) over everything. All the industries in the town along the river (which included and still includes the factory that makes that green foam shit florists stick flowers in) had giant pipes that emptied all their shit right into the river. People still used to fish there, which is just mind-boggling.

There's nothing worse than those gray fake wood interlocking vinyl floor planks.

I live in the Philly area and a long time ago a lot of houses around here were built with curved windows that fit into turrets and cupolas and the like. Even 20 years ago you could still see these windows here and there, but they are completely gone now. You can still see buildings where they used to be, and the replacement flat vinyl windows look like total ass in curved window frames.

My mom taught me ORM. I'd rather have had the SQL mom.

They later added an Anthropologist, who understood that more questions needed to be asked. His first question was "do you want fries with that?"

That's a good Maxim to live your life by.

It's absurd that in 2026 people still believe in Bigfoot ... when it's obviously just a Yeti in a gorilla suit.