80% of those are things I semi-regularly do in my own prose, FWIW

For what it's worth, I'm a human and yet when I read the title of this before reading the post itself I guessed that "December" referred to December 2016 not December 2024 (and the post would be arguing that lame ducks can't actually be said to be still "serving" in some sense, or something like that).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Darn_Katz!

Huh, apparently someone still understood enough of my comment to upvote it despite the automatic conversion from the original LW markdown source to the current HTML having been completely botched.

[Fixed it by hand now]

Another example of the bottom-end exception: if you book a hotel or B&B at the last possible week, it's possible that it will both be expensive and suck, because both the mediocre but reasonably-priced ones and the pricey but decent ones will have been fully booked for weeks.

As he says, the standard advice of allowing 2 hours before a domestic flight makes absolutely no sense in today’s world.

The worst part of hearing that advice over and over again is that the rare times they are right you will still ignore them.  (I once got an email from Lufthansa to that effect, ignored it as usual and proceeded to arrive at the airport one hour before takeoff as I usually do for within-Schengen flights with no luggage to check in, found out there was some kind of strike at the airport and much much slower queues than usual, and missed my flight.)

But most of the 85% of people who don't run couldn't run a quarter mile at any speed

Any speed? I'd be rather surprised if anywhere near 42.5% of the population (especially if also counting people outside the US) would be unable to "run" a quarter mile in 10 minutes if they tried to.

How come B&N can ship to a ton of different countries including San Marino and the Vatican but not Italy???

How come B&N can ship to a ton of different countries including San Marino and the Vatican but not Italy???

Wait, is "throw spaghetti against a wall and see if it sticks" something you Americans actually say?  (I hope not actually do.)  I always thought it was something we Italians made up to mock Americans for eating overcooked pasta.