The City of Vancouver has a poet laureate? Who knew?

But at least UT would solve the main problem with Daylight Savings Time -- the extra hour of sunlight fading everyone's drapes.

Old-time comics nerds will point out that the Red Skull couldn't beat Captain America even when he had the freakin' Cosmic Cube, which would ordinarily put him well above the Mandarin in the power rankings up there with Loki-class bad-assery. But Herr Skull had issues that limited his effectiveness. On a straight-up power comparison, I'd bet on the Mandarin over Cap, though I might take the points

I've often wondered why supervillains stay in their own superhero lane. Why couldn't, say, the Kingpin offer an inducement to Dr. Doom to take out Daredevil or the Red Skull pay the Mandarin to take out Captain America?

I wonder how Michael B. Jordan feels knowing that for the rest of his life, no matter how successful he is, he will always have to use his middle initial?

There is a vast and complex body of law about what process, if any, is due when the government either refuses to grant, revokes, or declines to renew a license. Just for a sample, you might enjoy Ace Partnership LLC v. Town of East Hartford (2d Cir. 2/28/18) involving pawn shops and metals dealers who dealt with suspicious goods. If I may make a somewhat cynical observation, however, it isn't so much the case that A gets nervous when the government can yank B's license and livelihood without due process as that A gets nervous when the government yanks A's license, due process or not.

It gives the licensing authorities the ability to pull your license.

I don't know about West Virginia specifically, but in many states, the state constitution does.

Obviously, they don't think so, but nothing in free-market theory requires us to accept that what customers believe and are willing to pay for is actually in their best interests, even as the paying customers understand them. There may be good reasons for letting them make their own mistakes, but that's a different question

What, you don’t believe in free markets?

Believe in them? Hell, I've seen them. And one predictable feature of them is that they are -- at least in the short run -- full of crappy products no sane person should bother creating and no sane person should buy. In theory, they eventually get weeded out by competition, but sometimes there is an enduring market for a crappy product.

Just finished Bart Ehrman's The Triumph of Christianity, which was intriguing because I got involved some years ago in on-line discussions about religion and what you could teach in the public schools, and I frequently used as a hypothetical a history exam question: "How did a tiny splinter sect of Judaism become in a few centuries the dominant religion and most powerful cultural institution in Europe?" followed by an explanation of why the one answer guaranteed to get you an "F" was: "Because Christianity is the true religion and God willed its triumph" -- even if it was true.
On the subway ride home tonight, I expect to finish the final volume of Edgar Johnson's two-volume biography of Charles Dickens. An old-fashioned biography, a year older than I am. Rather Dickensian itself, as was Dickens.

Would someone please explain to me why someone should even have, let alone publish, an opinion about whether other people ought to wear socks in bed?

Certainly there are people who might like it, but I don’t see how that desire gives rise to an obligation on the part of the rest of us.

I'll take you at your word that you "don't see" it. Why you'd want to admit such a thing is another matter.

My formerly adorable grand-niece Mia, now 17, was a curseword sponge. She could pick up the correct usage of curses at an early age. My in-laws always called my sister-in-law Erica a bitch in a non-serious way. One day, two-year-old Mia wanted something from Erica and didn't get it. She clumped off muttering "bitch." At her second birthday party, she was standing by herself -- I was barely in earshot -- with a large balloon that popped. "Shit," she said calmly, glaring at the remnants of her balloon.
But the best one was a year later, when her father drove out to pick her up and bring her home but forgot his wallet. The route home was infested with pizza parlors, and Mia was hungry. "Father," she said, "let's stop and get a pizza." He put her off. She asked when they passed another pizzeria. No luck. When they got to the next one she was exasperated and said in a matter-of-fact tone: "Father, just get the fucking pizza." To this day, whenever we order a pizza, I always ask, "what kind of pizza?"

AE2 -- I haven't subscribed to any streaming service yet because it's just to damn confusing and I can't choose from among them. Each has something I want and much I don't and I can't get them all.

By the way, Megan, I doubt that Warren Buffett has made "his final billion" unless you know something about his health or his investment plans that the rest of us don't.

I never knew eating Tide pods was a thing. Leave and learn. In the absence of statistics about people eating Tide pods while thinking they are something else, I have no opinion about the need for or possible efficacy of a ban on "attractive" Tide pods. I am pretty confident, though, that it's a small-change issue either way, and not something any sane person should spend much brain power or outrage on.

Since the President of the United States saying stupid shit is news, just as his walking the streets of D.C. in his underwear and talking to himself would be, you can't not cover it. But what I'd like to see is a daily front-page sidebar entitled: "S**t The President Says," which would simply print the damn things, with, at most, basic fact-checking, and not cover them as real news unless something comes of them.

I haven't seen any lately, but there used to be "sleeping lawyer" cases in which the defendant claimed that his lawyer was incompetent because he slept through significant portions of the trial. The appeals courts tended to say that the occasional nod was OK, but that sleeping through significant parts of the trial was potentially problematic. But they usually tied themselves up in knots to find harmless error. I've always thought they were afraid to say candidly that if the lawyer had been awake during the same parts of the trial and done exactly as little as the sleeping lawyer did, they would not have found ineffective assistance, so whether he was awake or asleep was immaterial. That would have been an embarrassing thing to admit.

I've never seen such a thing. Do any undergraduates have to do their own work and thinking anymore?

Why is that any stranger than going to a museum looking at art that isn't for sale at all?

That's true, and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. (Though This Side of Paradise was nothing special. A precocious adolescent first novel hinting at better to come.) You can be both accessible to a mass audience and good, and it's a neat trick if you can pull it off, as Fitzgerald did. And an even neater one if you avoid blowing your money, as Fitzgerald didn't. I just don't see any pretentious wannabe pretending to like Fitzgerald and expecting any cultural cred for it.

Fitzgerald? F. Scott Fitzgerald? A lot of regular people liked him fine when he was active and publishing heavily in middlebrow magazines. If readers don't like him now, it's probably because his milieu has become dated without having passed into historical, more like John O'Hara than Dickens or Austen. Fitzgerald isn't a high-brow taste and nobody gets any pretension points for liking him.
I suspect that when Dylan scorned Mr. Jones for having "read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books," it was a shout-out to a fellow Minnesotan.

Lots of people get stupid when they get windfalls. You didn't; that's over half the battle. I expect you will work things out.

I've often thought there could be an interesting alternative history novel based on the premise that the New World didn't exist and Columbus and his crew starved to death somewhere near where Omaha would be today. How would the world have been different if you just couldn't get there from here?

But maybe I know you.:-)