The problem with demonstrating a basic competence of a skill is that others who do not have even that much expect you to do things for them far beyond your competence level. Carpentry, photography, cooking... doesn't matter.

My father-in-law comes from a long line of men sharing the same first name. His mother didn't love the trend, but respected the family wishes, so she and everybody else just called him by the nickname common for his middle name (which she otherwise would've used as his first). Now if anybody calls looking for somebody by his first name they assume it's spam because nobody who actually knows him calls him that.

At first I read your comment as a dark joke about unfaithful wives having kids with their deployed husband's brother, but then I realized that it makes more sense that the men who weren't deployed were naming their sons after their brothers who were deployed or killed.

Reddit has jaded me into assuming the worst in commentators.

Some of the best advice I ever received was to not spend more time thinking about something somebody said than what they did.

So often we dwell on something that was just an offhand casual remark.

A former employer of mine had developed a theory he called the "50:50:90 Rule", saying that if there are two ways of doing something, you'll guess wrong 90% of the time. (It was most commonly demonstrated when hooking up hydraulic hoses) I'm no mathematician, but I think this situation would demonstrate the correlary henceforth known as the "25:25:25:25:99.9 Rule"