Sure is! Especially if you could end up upside down & under water dodging rocks…

True, but it didn't help me...

But my skills at bailing out were top notch 🙂

What helped was a friend who could see what I was doing wrong (really what I had no idea about how to do) & who also helped me figure out how to learn that skill.

I'd like to dispute that latter point...

Some people have a very hard time teaching skills that they are naturally good at. Some people have a hell of a time learning a skill that is completely foreign to them.

Ask me about learning to roll a kayak...

This is a radical and dangerous position to be espousing as the 13th draws near. 🙂

Fascinating! Would it be rude to ask for (approximate) pronunciations?

So, if we grant you that, where do elephants come from (and giraffes for that matter) and why do we have mosquitoes?

This is getting too complicated. I feel like the whole story line is at risk of falling apart.

Did it carry away two of each species, or did it only take the ones it could positively assign a gender to? And what about the termites and other critters that were already part of the ark?

It is always better when people survive & come out stronger. RIP two great songwriters.

Good, and sad, to know. I am exactly the sort of person who would try adding ginger to orange jam...

For a second there I thought you might have been talking about Schumer...

And the final nail in, one hopes, the coffin of the NYT.

"It’s not that those things don’t matter: they absolutely goddamn do... . It’s just that they never mattered much to the Times and they are, to appearances, mattering less and less by the day. I should remember that, and so should you."

On the journalistic neutrality of the NYT:

"...[it] then becomes blinding and finally crazymaking, which is just that there is zero, less than zero, stress put on the relation between those two “sides,” or their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority, or any of it."