Boots McGraw

I will be attending the wedding of a nephew, some two thousand miles away. My entire immediate family, and many of my extended family will be there. I am the only one traveling more than a few miles to attend.

Having gained thirty or forty pounds since the last time I wore my suit, some ten years ago, I find I can't fit into it.

I have already spent over five hundred dollars on plane fare, car rental, and a wedding gift. I can't afford to spend an additional three hundred to five hundred dollars to buy a suit I will wear only once.

Would I be insulting my nephew and his bride-to-be if I opted to wear my best shirt and slacks, instead, when the rest of the family will be dressed to the nines?

If I have to buy so as not to offend my family, what are my alternatives to find a cheap suit? And by cheap, I mean around one hundred dollars, no more. I live in Dallas, Texas.

My tax assessment went up twenty percent from last year. I don't believe it's possible my home could appreciate that much in value, considering the neighborhood where I live.

I will be appearing before the county tax appraisers to state my case, but I am unable to find for how much "comparable" homes nearby sold. Realtors aren't willing to share this information with me. Trullia.com doesn't list neighboring houses I know were sold in the last year, and zillow.com is utterly worthless; I couldn't care less what they *think* my house and my neighbors' are worth.

Home sales costs have to be public information, just like tax assessments. But where can I find it?

If it were Styrofoam packing peanuts, I'd reuse them to ship the things I sell on eBay. But these are huge blocks of the stuff, several cubic feet each, that were carved out to hold the various pieces of the ceiling fans I bought.

It seems a crime to chuck these in the trash, and a worse one to burn them. The city where I live recycles # 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 plastics, but not # 6 (which includes styrofoam). Any suggestions as to who might take this waste?

I bought a home near Dallas, with nothing in the front yard but two young trees. I want to add bushes and other plants near my house. I'm not trying for any particular effect, other than to cover empty spaces between windows and doors.

Is it now too hot and dry to attempt this? When is a good time to landscape? What low-maintenance greenery should I choose? Since we have long, dry stretches of weather, I'd rather not have to worry too much about weeding or watering.

While in the middle of using my Olympus D-510 (bought in 2002), it beeped, then shut off. New batteries don't turn it back on; nor does using the A/C adapter.

The camera has neither suffered damage nor been mistreated. Any suggestions as to its malady and subsequent treatment?

Do these things just up and die after a time? Is it time for "Requiescat In Pace" and a decent burial?

I shattered a glass shelf into a million tiny fragments. I swept up the larger pieces and vacuumed as best as I could. How can I make sure there aren't fragments still lodged in the carpet fibers, waiting to cut the soles of my feet next time I walk barefoot in that room?

I have a Nordyne E2EB-020HB furnace / air conditioner with no heat pump. It's four years old, in a house I bought eight months ago. I have a programmable thermostat, installed after I moved in.

The heater kicks in at the appropriate set temperature. It will run less than five minutes before it shuts down. Within seconds, it will turn on again. It will run for about a minute more, then shut down, again, repeating this rapid on and off cycling until I manually shut off the furnace.

I did not have this problem when I ran the A/C this summer, so I doubt it's a faulty thermostat.

I have a pier and beam house, built in 2003. No rain gutters were installed. Just after I bought the house this past March, we had two months of almost continuous rain. When I had extra ventilation grates installed along the skirting, the contractor commented that it was wet under the house.

I now find that I can smell a musty odor in the bathroom cabinets, where the pipes come inside from underneath the house. I think this is from mold growing where the ground has been wet for so long.

How can I confirm this? Who do I call to check out and fix this problem? What would be done (besides installing rain gutters)? What can I expect to pay for this service?

I am aware that Gebhard and Johnson "cleaned up" the data in 1979 by removing responses from convicts and male prostitutes. According to their work, this did not significantly affect the statistics of Kinsey's work.

Even with the "cleaned" data, the report shows 10% of white men were "more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55". This statistic is largely responsible for the "10% of everyone is gay" rule we see bantered around all the time.

But who were actually interviewed? I have heard that the men consulted for this survey were all college students and staff, a group largely unrepresentative of any larger population.

Is this true? When I was in college, I purposely gave the most outrageous answers I could to any survey offered to me, just for amusement. I would hate to think the results of such a high-profile project might have been swayed by drunks looking to make a joke.

There are spambots here posing as real people, and "answering" questions with canned answers, always referring to some dubious web site. For two "members", I have flagged every one of their answers and bogus questions (about twenty-five, each), but their accounts are still here.

What is Yahoo's policy about this kind of spam? How will Yahoo stop this, so the rest of us can enjoy Yahoo answers?

Short of counting them by hand, of course. Is there a section of Yahoo Answers that tallies your responses?