Also - I know this as a dog owner whose #1 use for those plastic bags was #2 - that you can order bags comparable to the grocery store bags online now, something like $20 for a few hundred. So if you can get plastic bags, and still use plastic bags the "ban" is only banning stores from giving you plastic bags.

A few years I did the volunteer beach clean up, they usually do it around this time to get the beaches ready for the season.This was before the plastic bag ban. We got big black plastic bags (plastic!) so we could walk the length of the beach and pick up what we found. Except for cigarette butts and an occasional "poo bag" that someone left on the beach instead of tossing in the trash, most of the "trash" was seaweed, broken shells, scraps of driftwood a couple beer cans or bottles and the occasional sock or flip flop.

I think sitcoms have to be willing to take risks and they all seem so bland and safe today. When you think of the classic sitcoms - I Love Lucy, All In The Family, Seinfeld, The Larry Sanders Show, even the earliest years of SNL - they were willing to take on subjects nobody else was doing at the time, to go for broke.

I don't know about consumer protection, but I have noticed something similar in commercial books, mostly fiction in terms of "readability." The print seems lighter - more dark gray than black - the type is smaller as if they're trying to save on paper, and sometimes the paper quality is thinner.

Yes, Lanier had chronic health problems - I think she died around '14. I did hear that her books had been optioned for a series and then stalled out which is a shame because that's a series I'd watch.

One of the subplots of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" was an engineer who figured out how to convert static electricity so that it could be a power source.

Okay, this is not about me throwing a book across the room but how a thrown book led to an award winning series.

There was a woman named Virginia Lanier -poor and with a modest education, but a voracious reader. I heard that when they published that list of 100 great books, she already read 98 of them. Anyway, one day she got so disgusted with a book she threw it across the room and told her husband she could write better, so he said, "Why don't you?" The result was the first in her "bloodhound" series, "Death in Bloodhound Red" about a woman who trains bloodhounds for search and rescue. It won the Anthony Award for Best First Novel. Lanier was 65 when it was published.

Read it like prose, not poetry - follow the punctuation not the da-dum, da-dum

Try Ozymandius, by Shelly or the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay

Everyone sucked up to Darcy because he was rich, but Elizabeth judged him by his attitude and behavior, not by his bank account. He wasn't used to that, it was unique in his experience. When she does start to like him its not (as she jokes when she tells Jane about her engagement) after she sees his beautiful grounds at Pemberly, but after he goes out of his way to help her family out of what was an embarrassing and potentially devastating - from a social point of view - situation.