Was it your ears

Wait, you mean the head of the "millions of people will get tortured forever and that's actually the best of all possible worlds" religion has some unpleasant beliefs??

Wow, that's so horrible.

Speaking of messed up urine, weren't you going to send me an article?

My Dad likes to say that Jesus almost certainly existed as a historical figure, because if he'd just been made up by Christians they wouldn't have made up somebody who so clearly disagrees with them on almost everything.

Hmm, it looks more like you after being multiplied by the square root of negative one.

Well, let me restate that: I could believe that that *is* the reason people do it, but if so they're not applying it sensibly.

Hmm, I don't think that fully explains it. The example that prompted me to mention it now was "Person dies after being hit by train as Victoria line suspended". It feels like the Victoria line being suspended is more likely to be searched for than the death?

For another example, "I felt sick as I realised what had happened" is natural English but "I realised what happened as I felt sick" conveys something totally different, yet that's the way round a headline would say it.

Of course you could interpret it as just "[one thing happens] as [other thing happens]" - so 'as' just means 'simultaneous with', which is natural usage. But then you'd expect "cause as effect" and "effect as cause" to happen equally often, which I'm sure they don't.

They sell t-shirts!

"Nobody knows how else to grow the economy that fast" would be just as true of the tulip bulb bubble, and just as irrelevant. The point of economic activity is to make useful things, not to generate growth for the sake of growth.

I hate when I'm "struggling to remain a democracy" but people keep forcing me to deny civil rights to a chunk of my population :(

You wouldn't do this with a book, would you? That would be Dickensian.