Month: July 2024

Most everyone has been in a situation once or twice where you look down at your ticket while boarding your flight to double check your seat number only to find someone already sitting in your seat.

Typically the person responds respectfully and with a slight twinge of embarrassment as their error is pointed out to them. It happens to just about everyone at least once. There’s no shame in accidentally sitting in the wrong seat.

But what happens when you notice someone sitting in your seat but instead of them excusing themselves from your space, they direct you to sit in their seat? Their middle seat. Unless your original seat was in the lavatory, there is likely zero world where being told to sit in the middle seat feels like an upgrade. There’s nothing wrong with the middle seat per se, but unless your seat mate is your partner, friend or family member, you’re squished between two strangers fighting for armrest space.

There are all sorts of qualms people have about the middle seat. Having to step over someone to get to the bathroom, having other people step over you to get to the bathroom, someone inevitably falling asleep on your shoulder. The list could go on but it just comes down to comfort, which is why many people pay for a window or aisle seat. But it can feel like you’ve hit the jackpot when the airline seats you in a window seat without you having to pay an upgrade fee. That’s exactly what happened to this Reddit user.

The airline gods shone down on them that day and gifted them with a window seat that they were thoroughly looking forward to only to discover it occupied.

“It was an 8 hour flight, and I wanted to sleep with the wall support the window seat offers. However, when I get on the plane, a lady is in my seat. She says ‘oh, I didn’t realize. You can just sit here’ and points to the middle seat. I have a hard time with confrontation so I just accepted it. If this were to happen again, how do I respond,” u/Hairy_Visual9339 asks.

Commenters were quick to give the timid flyer advice for future encounters with audacity filled seat mates.

“No, that doesn’t really work for me. I’d like my seat,” one person quipped.

Another offered their own anecdote as a cautionary tale, “Made the mistake of not doing this on a train. Only one other person in whole carriage, of course it’s my seat. They have a laptop set up act like I’m being very unreasonable and so I sit somewhere else. Fine whatever. Four hours into 8 hour journey and the train is now complete full. I’ve been forced to move seats twice already, everything is booked and I’m some desperate, seat-less vagabond with nowhere to store my suitcases, wandering the aisles in vain, despite having a perfectly good reservation.”

When all else fails, tattle, “just say, “I’d rather have my window seat thanks.” and if that doesn’t work tell a flight attendant.”

“My response is always “oh, no thank you” and I just stare at them until they move,” someone shares.

Just because you’re an adult doesn’t mean you can’t tell another adult so they can fix the situation when your discontent is being ignored, in one person’s case, let the help come to you.

“Some guy tried to take my seat and stick me in his middle seat across the aisle so he could sit with his wife and teenager and I said “oh, no thank you. I picked this seat intentionally when I checked in”. He starts throwing a hissy fit, trying to get me to take his shitty middle seat and the flight attendant swooped in like a freaking goddess, and told him to move. He goes to the other side, still bitching, and banged his head on the luggage compartment so hard that three rows worth of people audibly gasped,” says a commenter.

A previous episode of “The Daily Show” addressed two hot-button issues at the same time: abortion and gun control.

It was one of the earliest tests for new host Trevor Noah, and he pretty much knocked this one out of the park. The segment began with a discussion about the pro-life movement’s laser focus on making completely legal abortions really, really hard to get.

Noah started with the movement’s push to defund Planned Parenthood on what turned out to be deceptive, altered, and debunked videos. And even he had to admit, pro-lifers are pretty great at what they do, given that they were able to get Congress to hold hearings based on … nothing, really.

Of course, not all people in the pro-life movement are against gun control, and not all people who are against gun control are pro-life, but there is a certain significant — and confusing — overlap on those two issues that is worth investigating.

So Noah turned his attention to the mass shooting in Oregon — the 294th of the year — and how we as a country are once again discussing gun control.

If pro-lifers are so concerned about the preservation of all lives, Noah wonders, then why don’t they support common-sense gun control measures?

There’s no need for doctored videos. Gun violence statistics exist (and they’re terrifying). Imagine if the pro-life movement rallied behind that?

Noah then brilliantly compared reactions from two “pro-life” presidential candidates on the Oregon shooting and on abortion.

First up was Jeb Bush on what happened in Oregon. He urged against reactionary gun legislation. “Stuff happens,” he said.

But compare that to his recent comments on abortion — which is, again, totally legal:

Now that’s a response fitting for a mass shooting.

Noah looked over to candidate Carly Fiorina for her thoughts on the Oregon shooting. Similar to Bush, Fiorina cautioned against taking any action on gun control until we know more about what happened.

Now compare that to her comments on abortion:

It’s not clear whether pro-lifers are waiting for an even 300 mass shootings in 2015 — which, at the pace we’re going, should be sometime in the next month or so — before taking action. But in the meantime, it’s really hard to see the “pro-life” rhetoric as anything more than hypocrisy.

In closing, Noah posed this to pro-lifers: If you actually care about lives, do something about guns.

Redirect the energy, lobbying, and rhetoric spent on fighting a more than 40-year-old Supreme Court decision toward sensible steps to curb gun violence.

“They just need to have a superhero’s dedication to life,” Noah says. “Because right now, they’re more like comic book collectors: Human life only matters until you take it out of the package, and then there’s nothing left.”

Watch the complete segment in the video below.

This article originally appeared on 10.06.15

Anna Trupiano is a first-grade teacher at a school that serves deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing students from birth through eighth grade.

In addition to teaching the usual subjects, Trupiano is charged with helping her students thrive in a society that doesn’t do enough to cater to the needs of the hard-of-hearing.

A six-year-old child farted so loud in class that some of their classmates began to laugh. The child was surprised by their reaction because they didn’t know farts make a sound. This created a wonderful and funny teaching moment for Trupiano.

Trupiano shared the conversation on Facebook.

See posts, photos and more on Facebook.

While the discussion Trupiano had with her students was funny, it points to a serious problem faced by the deaf community. “I know it started with farts, but the real issue is that many of my students aren’t able to learn about these things at home or from their peers because they don’t have the same linguistic access,” she told GOOD.

“So many of my students don’t have families who can sign well enough to explain so many things it’s incredibly isolating for these kids,” she continued.

Trupiano hopes her funny story about bodily functions will inspire others to become more involved with the deaf community by learning sign language.

“I would love to see a world where my students can learn about anything from anyone they interact with during their day,” she told GOOD. “Whether that means learning about the solar system, the candy options at a store, or even farts, it would be so great for them to have that language access anywhere they go.”

This article originally appeared on 12.14.18

Imagine you’re working at a school and one of the kids is starting to act up. What do you do?

Traditionally, the answer would be to give the unruly kid detention or suspension.

But in my memory, detention tended to involve staring at walls, bored out of my mind, trying to either surreptitiously talk to the kids around me without getting caught or trying to read a book. If it was designed to make me think about my actions, it didn’t really work. It just made everything feel stupid and unfair.

But Robert W. Coleman Elementary School has been doing something different when students act out: offering meditation.

Instead of punishing disruptive kids or sending them to the principal’s office, the Baltimore school has something called the Mindful Moment Room instead.

The room looks nothing like your standard windowless detention room. Instead, it’s filled with lamps, decorations, and plush purple pillows. Misbehaving kids are encouraged to sit in the room and go through practices like breathing or meditation, helping them calm down and re-center. They are also asked to talk through what happened.

Meditation and mindfulness are pretty interesting, scientifically.

Mindful meditation has been around in some form or another for thousands of years. Recently, though, science has started looking at its effects on our minds and bodies, and it’s finding some interesting effects.

One study, for example, suggested that mindful meditation could give practicing soldiers a kind of mental armor against disruptive emotions, and it can improve memory too. Another suggested mindful meditation could improve a person’s attention span and focus.

Individual studies should be taken with a grain of salt (results don’t always carry in every single situation), but overall, science is starting to build up a really interesting picture of how awesome meditation can be. Mindfulness in particular has even become part of certain fairly successful psychotherapies.

Back at the school, the Mindful Moment Room isn’t the only way Robert W. Coleman Elementary has been encouraging its kids.

The meditation room was created as a partnership with the Holistic Life Foundation, a local nonprofit that runs other programs as well. For more than 10 years the foundation has been offering the after-school program Holistic Me, where kids from pre-K through the fifth grade practice mindfulness exercises and yoga.

“It’s amazing,” said Kirk Philips, the Holistic Me coordinator at Robert W. Coleman. “You wouldn’t think that little kids would meditate in silence. And they do.”

There was a Christmas party, for example, where the kids knew they were going to get presents but were still expected to do meditation first.”As a little kid, that’s got to be hard to sit down and meditate when you know you’re about to get a bag of gifts, and they did it! It was beautiful, we were all smiling at each other watching them,” said Philips.

The kids may even be bringing that mindfulness back home with them. In the August 2016 issue of Oprah Magazine, Holistic Life Foundation co-founder Andres Gonzalez said: “We’ve had parents tell us, ‘I came home the other day stressed out, and my daughter said, “Hey, Mom, you need to sit down. I need to teach you how to breathe.'”

The program also helps mentor and tutor the kids, as well as teach them about the environment.

They help clean up local parks, build gardens, and visit nearby farms. Philips said they even teach kids to be co-teachers, letting them run the yoga sessions.

This isn’t just happening at one school, either. Lots of schools are trying this kind of holistic thinking, and it’s producing incredible results.

In the U.K., for example, the Mindfulness in Schools Project is teaching adults how to set up programs. Mindful Schools, another nonprofit, is helping to set up similar programs in the United States.

Oh, and by the way, the schools are seeing a tangible benefit from this program, too.

Philips said that at Robert W. Coleman Elementary, there have been exactly zero suspensions last year and so far this year. Meanwhile, nearby Patterson Park High School, which also uses the mindfulness programs, said suspension rates dropped and attendance increased as well.

Is that wholly from the mindfulness practices? It’s impossible to say, but those are pretty remarkable numbers, all the same.

This article originally appeared on 09.22.16

Have you ever wondered why people don’t seem to say “you’re welcome” anymore?

The phenomenon has really caught on lately but it’s roots go a back further back. Back in 2015, author and professor Tom Nichols tweeted out an angry response after receiving what he thought was poor customer service:

“Dear Every Cashier in America: the proper response to ‘thank you’ is ‘you’re welcome,’ not ‘no problem.’ And *you’re* supposed to thank *me*”The angry tweet elicited a number of mocking responses from people on social media.

— (@)

But eventually one person chimed in with a detailed and thoughtful response that just might give you pause the next time you or someone you know says, “no problem.”

u201cDear Every Cashier in America: the proper response to “thank you” is “you’re welcome,” not “no problem.” And *you’re* supposed to thank *me*u201d

— Tom Nichols (@Tom Nichols)
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It’s not about being polite. Our views on gratitude are evolving.

In a response that is going viral on Reddit, on person writing under the name “lucasnoahs” laid it all out:

Actually the “you’re welcome/no problem” issue is simply a linguistics misunderstanding. Older ppl tend to say “you’re welcome,” younger ppl tend to say “no problem.” This is because for older people the act of helping or assisting someone is seen as a task that is not expected of them, but is them doing extra, so it’s them saying, “I accept your thanks because I know I deserve it.”

“No problem,” however, is used because younger people feel not only that helping or assisting someone is a given and expected but also that it should be stressed that you’re need for help was no burden to them (even if it was).

Basically, older people think help is a gift you give, younger people think help is an expectation required of them.

Nichols took a lot of flack for his comment. But the insightful response reveals something important about gratitude.

The thoughtful response from “lucasnoahs” doesn’t apply to everyone. After all, there are certainly a lot of people of any age group for whom acts of kindness and gestures of gratitude are “no problem.”

Still, his message conveys an important idea that doing well for others does not have to be a grand gesture. It can be a simple act — and the additional act of letting someone know that it’s really no problem helps relieve any potential sense of debt or guilt the person receiving the gesture might otherwise take on.

Most of the time, doing the right thing is indeed no problem. In fact, it might be the solution to a lot of the daily problems we grapple with.

This article originally appeared on 08.15.18.

WWE announced on Saturday that Bad Blood is returning for the first time since 2004 on October 5 from State Farm Arena in Atlanta.

In its latest collaboration, WWE paired WWE champion Cody Rhodes with producer Metro Boomin to make the announcement. In the promotion the duo team up for an old fashioned stakeout of State Farm Arena, where Metro Boomin asks Rhodes if they’re going to sit there until October, which he replies that’s exactly what they’re going to do. They then question each other on why they’re not doing this in their respective tour buses.

WWE’s last Bad Blood event took place in 2004, when Shawn Michaels squared off with Triple H in a Hell in a Cell match. The event originated in 1997 as Michaels faced off against the Undertaker in a Hell in a Cell match as well.

The Bad Blood show comes as Rhodes has elevated to the very top of the WWE card, earning a champion’s return home assuming he’s still carrying the belt a few months from now. It’s also a good event name to revive with the Bloodline still going strong (and now having an internal battle brewing). The last time WWE hosted a premium live event in Atlanta, Day 1 emanated from Rhodes’ home state in 2022 when Brock Lesnar headlined the show to win the WWE championship in a 5-way match.

Every few months, the conversation surrounding the uses of outside writers is brought up in rap music. Hell, sometimes ghostwriter allegations are even used to kick-start a lyrical feud or two. Although other genres are sticklers about accepting written assistance, Burna Boy isn’t a fan of it in Afrobeats.

Today (July 6), the “Sittin’ On Top Of The World” musician took to X (formerly Twitter) to slam reports that he uses ghostwriters.

“Any name you see credited on my songs are only producers of the songs or Featured artists, NOT writers,” he wrote. “But for some reason, the western world considers producers as writers of the instrumentals, and they just throw their names on there as writers. Nobody fit to write for Odogwu (strong men).”

People online quickly replied to Burna’s statement with a screenshot of the credited contributors on his breakout hit “Last Last” to suggest that he was lying to save face.

“No dey give us lamba jor ,” wrote one user.

Others found themselves confused by Burna’s sudden to flex his songwriting abilities. However, the call-out seeming traced back to Logos Olori‘s appearance on City 105.1 FM in Lagos, Nigeria. During the invterview, Logos alleged that Burna used a songwriter as a result of his hectic professional schedule.

Watch the full interview below.

Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever got off to a rocky start to the season, as the young Fever squad led by the first overall pick faced an early gauntlet of tough teams and struggled to establish an identity or a rhythm over the course of a 1-8 start to the season.

However, since then, the team and the rookie star have both settled into a groove and are 8-5 over their last 13 games, climbing to eighth in the standings and have a real shot at a playoff berth midway through the season. It’s clear that the game has started to slow down a bit for Clark and she’s also learning her teammates better to get them the ball in their spots, as evidenced by four games with double-digit assists in the last five games (with none prior).

On Saturday afternoon, Clark and the Fever produced their most impressive performance of the season, both individually for the rookie star and as a team. Indiana picked up an impressive win at home over the top-seeded New York Liberty, giving them just their fourth loss of the season, and Clark became the first rookie to post a triple-double in league history (two games after coming up one rebound shy).

Clark led the Fever in all three categories with her 19 points, 13 assists, and 12 rebounds, with Aliyah Boston adding 18 points and eight rebounds, NaLyssa Smith putting up 12 points and 11 rebounds, and Kelsey Mitchell adding 14 points in support. After the game, Clark made sure to shout out her teammates, noting she can’t get a triple-double without their help and calling it a team effort.

Most importantly for Clark and the team, the win moved them to 9-13 on the season, and with four games left before the All-Star and Olympic break, they’ll have a chance to inch even closer to .500 before getting a month off.

Is Ice Spice ready to retire from twerking? This may seem like a silly question, but that is all the chatter online among fans following a video of the “Phat Butt” rapper took off like wildfire.

Yesterday (July 5), Ice Spice tried to enjoy the second day of her Y2K! World Tour. However, supporters online noticed that as she began to shake her tail feather for the Open’er Festival crowd, something was off.

In the now viral clip, Ice Spice’s face is hard to read. But users online believe it to be a mixture of boredom, annoyance, and regret. Now, her super fans, the munchkins, are considered for mental health.

“Ice Spice is tired of this fame sh*t ,” wrote one user.

“Ice Spice don’t even look happy twerking anymore ,” penned another.

Others threw their support behind Ice Spice, chalking up the moment to workplace fatigue.

“Everybody have one of those days at work they don’t feel like being there, but they have to do their job ,” joked another.

While some took it as an ominous sign for what’s to come.

“She’s just soullessly twerking no hope for the future anymore ,” chimed another.

View more fan reactions to the viral clip below.

With several weeks remaining on the Y2K! World Tour, Ice Spice has plenty of time to phase out the move (if she wants).

Is there a special angry agent in the water? That’s a question music fans have asked themselves all year following an endless cycle of diss records in rap. But the pop girlies weren’t safe. Camila Cabello and Charli XCX seemingly found themselves propelled into a fan-fueled beef too.

Yesterday (July 5), the “Hot Uptown” singer put the rumors of friction with Charli XCX to bed (hopefully for good). During an interview with Independent, Cabello claimed that the supposed online tension between the pair was just a marketing ploy.

“But [Charli] called me and was like, ‘Hey, I hope you don’t think that I’m actually mad,’” she said. “‘This is me playing into the ‘Brat’ era.’ And I totally respect that, you know?”

The ladies’ conversation was in reference to Charli XCX uploading a clip (captioned “LOL”) to her TikTok page singing along to her song “I Got It,” after Cabello teased “I Luv It.” Fans pages for the singers quickly took the video to be a direct jab and a subtle co-sign to claims that Cabello copied the track.

Then Charli XCX took to X (formerly Twitter) with another shady message. “Comee onnn mess is fun! Nothing matters,” she wrote.

Later in the conversation with the outlet, Cabello addressed the remarks. “There’s only one song that really references that genre a little bit for 15 seconds,” she said. “What I was worried about was the relationship between me and [Charli].”

There you have it. You can now cross off a Camila Cabello and Charli XCX feud from your 2024 beef list.