Me too, the clouds overhead parted just before totality and the corona was so dazzling and magnificent. I really hope there aren’t clouds in the way during this one.

Marijuana was banned to target minorities, but alcohol prohibition mostly was repealed not because white people like alcohol (white people instituted prohibition in the first place, after all), but because alcohol is stupidly easy to make from a wide variety of substances so most cultures around the world produce some kind of alcohol with their local crops. You can use pretty much anything sugary: fruit (wine), honey (mead), and grains like rice and wheat (sake & beer). It is really hard to ban a substance when half the foods in our diet can be turned into that substance if you let it sit in a jar or bucket in your closet for a few weeks.

Prohibition was repealed primarily because it was a futile effort and with alcohol being banned, very strong distilled spirits were the economical way to discreetly transport and serve alcohol since it is easier to hide a few bottles of liquor from authorities searching your truck or business than to hide large barrels of low ABV drinks like humans had been brewing and drinking for millennia. It is also a lot easier for people to drink themselves sick with distilled drinks, so ultimately it was decided that it was safer to make alcohol legal and regulated instead of having it still plentiful, but getting people sicker and funding criminal empires. It’s a lot easier to ban one plant than to ban every food source with sugar in it, but the marijuana prohibition has clearly led to many of the same problems as alcohol prohibition did.

There are still people who would love to ban alcohol if they feasibly could. Many places in the US still have local alcohol bans, I currently have to travel two counties away to legally purchase liquor and one county away from home to purchase beer or wine. Prohibition only ended on a federal level.

A lot of the trees being cut down are old growth forests, there are nearly no old growth forests left on the whole continent and some animals specifically need old forests with their diversity of species and with different ages of trees throughout. Things grow back differently when you clear cut a section than when an old tree died and falls here and there or is harvested sparingly without destroying the surrounding trees and underbrush, so the lack of selectivity when harvesting is also harmful. Cutting down everything and replanting one species that grows ok in a clear cut area doesn’t restore the forest. Look at longleaf pine forests, for example. Nearly the entire southern US used to be longleaf pine and now it only exists in 3% of its former range. The southern US is still covered in pine, but it mostly got replaced with loblolly pines. You can replant some trees, but you can’t replant a whole complex forest ecosystem, and many of the trees people replant are ones they think they can personally profit from like the fast growing loblolly pines rather than slow growing species that need special care and land management practices to maintain good growing conditions.

Someone has to stock and clean and maintain all that space and pay for the electricity it takes to illuminate and air condition such a huge area. Good luck convincing people to increase their taxes in exchange for indoor tennis courts and lounging areas. I love the idea of having more free community spaces, but the last city I lived in had the downtown library basement essentially become a homeless encampment until they closed off that entire floor of the library and then the city sold the entire library to developers who plan to demolish it and build something else there. With people struggling financially and spending most of their time staring at screens, there isn’t much demand for government spending on new public spaces.

I don’t know if something like this is available where you are, but in the US there is a brand of milk owned by Coca-Cola where they filter out the sugars (lactose is a sugar), it is called Fairlife and is marketed as high protein milk. It still retains the fats and proteins and flavor of ordinary milk. It comes in a variety of fat percentages like ordinary milk for people with different dietary preferences.

My favorite plant milk is soy milk, but that isn’t as readily available out here as it used to be since conservatives decided drinking it would turn men into girls. I find oat and almond milks too watery and unsatisfying in drinks.

It only passed the Senate, the House wouldn’t even look at the bill.

I hate potatoes, so mashed and drowning in gravy is my favorite presentation. The butter, milk, pan drippings, and seasonings really carry the day and mask the potatoeyness. I have no idea why fries appeal to so many people, they are bland and their crisp texture vanishes in a heartbeat to become a very sad heap of soggy trash.

Paper tea bags usually contain polypropylene or another plastic so they can be heat sealed shut. They aren’t fully compostable.

If you said “I brought some guys back to my place last night”, do you really think people would be imagining a mixed gender group? Do you think they would ever imagine you brought a group of women back with you when you said that? Guys is masculine sometimes used to generalize across a group that includes non-males. It only applies when at least one male is around.

My boyfriend’s nephew calls me buddy and I am a woman about ten years older than him, we are both adults so he isn’t a confused toddler either. It might vary regionally. It simply means friend in our case. I don’t think he is trying to make me out to be younger than him. Maybe it is his way of declaring I am “one of the guys”, however.

If everyone starts using it, it won’t sound southern any more. C’mon, you know you want to.

The term upstate has no relation to the capital city, that was a mistaken assertion. It isn’t used very widely at all, it’s just a local term in a couple of states for their northern portions. Most states don’t have an area that is referred to as upstate.