X for cross has very old pedigree, dating back at least to Victorian railway stations, such as King's X.

I found a Firefox plugin which does an automatic redirect to XCancel.

His dad is the king's brother, isn't he?

> We cannot attribute any moral judgment to Bieber as a human being; we can only answer the moral question as posed in the song.

As a semi-off-topic little rant, why do we always assume that pop singers are singing about themselves and their own experiences? Can a song, as a work of art, not have an independent existence, much as a novel may? Pop, rap, and maybe country songs are all now assumed to be about the artist themselves.

Last time at a karaoke I sang a song that translates to "we're hitchhiking".

Little did the audience know that I wasn't hitchhiking at all and neither were they. I was just standing there, singing.

The question might be asked "why would we assume the singer isn't singing about themself?" In modern pop music it's become it's become standard that the "character" an artist "plays" when they're performing or writing is themself; there's no suspension of disbelief like with a play where there's an entire context around knowing that what you're seeing is a portrayal. Same with a book or movie or other works of fiction, and with those forms of media it's clear when you're seeing or reading fiction or non-fiction.

In a sense, some artists write novels and some write memoirs.

At least in metal music we usually doesn't assume the artist sings about themselves.

Fortunately most artists are neither fighting dragons nor worshiping satan.

The Futility Closet website (and, formerly, podcast) is an amazing treasure trove of fascinating facts.

Yes! and thank you for making me remember its existence

"It’s Q3 2026, and we should expect that everyone is utilizing AI at SOME point in their process."

No. Very much no.

Pick-up artists are not going to behave like decent human beings.

In Ireland, it isn't only rural addresses which have no house numbers. Plenty of houses even in towns had non-unique addresses before the introduction of eircodes. On my road, all the original houses (each standing on an acre plot) have numbers, but all the infill ones don't. You'd think the house built on the corner of 502's land might get 502A, but no. When my parents bought this house, the address was the same as many many others on the same road. They gave the house a name, so it would have a unique address, though the previous residents had managed fine for twenty years without one.

I had friends who rented around the corner. They had to give their address as "care of" the landlord's name, though the landlord didn't live there. That's because An Post knew his name, but wouldn't know the names of tenants.

Have Eircodes improved the situation? I know they’re supposed to provide a postcode unique to a specific address, but I’m not clear on how thoroughly they’ve been implemented.

Certainly every older house now has one. (It can take a few months, and there's currently a delay, so some newbuilds may not yet have one. I believe the advice is to apply well before the house is finished.) How much they're used varies. One house near me has a plate on the gate giving the name and eircode. I think that most people use them most of the time. I don't know whether there are any stats available on that.

Of course, if you've been subscribed to a monthly magazine for fifty years, you perhaps haven't bothered to update your address on file to add the eircode.

I got made redundant shortly before the release of LLM code generators, so I've never used one, but I did occasionally do this for short snippets from tutorials and suchlike.

I think that it's often true that Americans don't get British sarcasm. And it's similarly often true that British people don't get American sarcasm.