Fruity Oil Ice Cream

Yes, that is the name of Alton Brown's generic recipe for flavored-oil-based ice cream.

I heard about Prof. O'Connell (I saw the link, and Kiara emailed the section).  That is very sad.  I also saw the Yin article - it is sad as well, but obviously less sad than a man dying.

The DC gun ban really was a terrible idea.

Joe at work believes that Groupon/Living Social/etc. make money based on people not actually using their vouchers after purchase.  This doesn't make sense to me because, to my knowledge, these firms don't pay the restaurants or whomever extra money when people redeem their vouchers.  Maybe this is like your situation with the Groupon for Mova Lounge (where a vendor refuses to honor your voucher based on terms that are not explicit in the voucher)?

What a great idea.  (Note: this isn't sarcasm, but I didn't think an exclamation point was warranted.  There needs to be some sort of intermediate punctuation that expresses interest but not exuberance so that the reader doesn't conclude that sarcasm is being used.)

Just in terms of taxes, if we were married, we would definitely end up paying more in taxes.  I used a basic tax calculator and ignored other considerations (probably irrelevant anyway), but we would pay about $6,600 more in taxes if we were married.  Even if we assumed a reduction of our respective rent/utility bills by half, that would still be over $4,000 more.  One of us would have to stop working for the tax situation to work out better, but then, of course, we'd have less money.

B