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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • My parents have belonged to one of those for years. One of the cool things about theirs is their farm usually grows much different varieties of vegetables than you can find in regular grocery stores. They regularly get white and purple carrots, and some variety of orange carrot that has a little bit of a peppery/gingery bite to it. One year they got some heirloom variety of celery which had too much flavor eat raw. Imagine biting into a stick of celery and being physically overwhelmed by the amount of celery flavor you’re experiencing, like, “Jesus Christ… the celery… too… powerful…” It was absolutely killer in soups though.


  • Yup, I can type about 90-100 wpm on a QWERTY keyboard if it’s normal conversational English. Probably half that if it’s something that contains a lot of long technical words. The thing that got me over the hump with getting good at typing was a game called QWERTY Warriors. It was a Flash-based web game that I was playing like 20 years ago, so I don’t know if it’s around anymore, but it was a tower defense game where you had to defeat enemies by typing the word underneath them. It was a pretty painless way to practice touch-typing.







  • My Brother My Brother and Me probably fits the bill.

    The Box of Oddities is really good. Husband and wife team talking about spooky and Fortean topics.

    No Such Thing as a Fish, a podcast spinoff of the UK TV show QI. Four hosts each show up with an interesting bit of trivia to discuss.

    The Bugle. Comedians doing political satire. Is UK-centric but ends up being about US politics a lot of the time.

    If Books Could Kill. A couple guys tear apart popular self help books as well as pop-sci books like Freakonomics



  • I think if you’re going to go through the trouble to return your cart to the cart area then yeah, slot that bad boy into the stack the way it’s supposed to go. Otherwise it’s like those people who pick up their dog’s poop and just hang the bag on a tree branch for someone else to put in the trash. Either do the thing, or don’t do the thing. Doing it halfway just makes a different kind of mess.

    I found out a new (new to me at least) bit of cart-return etiquette last year when I was using the handicap parking spaces for a couple months following ankle surgery. Grocery carts double as walking aids for a lot of people with mobility issues while they’re at the store. Many people with those issues will purposely leave their carts in the handicap area as a courtesy for the next person with mobility issues so they can have it right away and not have to struggle all the way to the cart area. So there’s at least one instance where not returning your cart doesn’t make you a horrible person.





  • Any negatives?

    Yeah. You can kill people.

    When that stuff dislodges on the highway it’s not like your car getting hit by a snowball. It’s like having an entire wheelbarrow full of snow hit your car all at once at 50+ mph. Just the weight of it can KO your entire windshield. It’s a super effective way to make someone crash.

    Also, it’s not always just snow. If the snow on your vehicle sat there through a couple of freeze/thaw cycles, there can be a big sheet of ice underneath. If that goes through someone’s windshield it can kill them directly. If you live in a snowy place, pretty much everyone you know has a story about the time they almost died because some asshole was too lazy to clean off the roof of their SUV, or because a huge sheet of ice flew off the top of a semi-trailer.




  • I’m trying to remember this from a podcast I listened to a few years ago that covered this topic, so I might not have the details exactly right, but if I’m remembering correctly there is at least one evolutionary advantage in that there’s a virus (part of the herpes family of viruses, I think) that is asymptomatic and for the most part harmless, except when a woman contracts it for the first time while pregnant, in which case it can be pretty devastating to fetal development. But if the woman gets gradually exposed to the virus before becoming pregnant then her immune system learns to deal with it and it won’t harm the fetus. Of course that doesn’t explain why humans started kissing in the first place, but it could mean that humans who did engage in kissing may have had a significant breeding advantage.