Tolkien did describe hobbits this way [emphasis mine]: “...their feet grow natural leathery soles and thick warm brown hair like the stuff on their heads (which is curly); have long clever brown fingers....”

I could really confuse some future owner of our house. I installed laminate where the decorative layer is real wood. No repeating patterns.

There’s a traditional Georgian dish called khachapuri that is essentially this.

I tried some of that Genova albacore in olive oil for lunch today. It was good; I’ll be buying more.

Hmm. Kind of makes me wonder if there’s an opening for a fast food restaurant that only serves all-day breakfast items. I think none of the others (except maybe Sonic?) are offering them all day now.

Ha! I was thinking along similar lines. When I lived where there were Schlotzsky’s delis, one of my favorite sandwiches was a kind of hacked-together muffaletta substitute: their ham and cheese, plain (no lettuce, etc.), plus their olive relish. Really tasty.

I have basically that problem with my father-in-law’s 2014 Buick Regal that I’m driving today. There’s some kind of wonkiness with a switch in the shift lever. About one in five times when I shut the ignition off, the key won’t come out until I wiggle the shift release button and lever a bit.

I kinda feel for you! A few weeks back I did far fewer cherry tomatoes with this method, maybe 20, and it was still something of a pain to peel them. I was making a Spanish dish, papatas bravas (I think that’s the name—“angry potatoes”). It did turn out tasty, though, with the fresh tomatoes.

I couldn’t think what WoT was, but one of the first things Google suggested it could mean was “Waste Of Time.” :) Similarly to you, I was aware of, but hadn’t read, Wheel of Time before I watched the show. I didn’t find it compelling enough to want to watch a second season.

I fill with hot water and a bit of dish soap, then let it soak for a while. Even easier to shake and clean after that.

Very interesting! I like how for the past couple of seasons of Chopped, they’ve started including more context and a little bit of a wider perspective, where sometimes you can see more of the set, some of the crew, etc. It gives you a better idea of what’s actually happening.

My neck hurts like crazy if I watch TV at my parent’s house, where it’s mounted at least 3 feet higher than it should be. A couple of years ago my elderly father-in-law moved in with us, so my wife and I moved to an upstairs bedroom. I took the opportunity to get a new 4K TV and mounted it here, which is a really…

By that logic, why grind beef up at all? Why not just have a steak?

Being in the Midwest, I’ve never been to a Friendly’s, but the chopped cheese sounds like a cousin of our “loose meat sandwich.”

The farther left the country goes? I think your sense of left and right are reversed. Certainly I feel exactly the opposite of your cartoon. I once considered myself somewhere in the center. Now the right is so far away I can’t see it with a telescope. There has never been any large far-left movement in this country.

Clearly you need to be baking more cookies!

Our county courthouse won’t let you enter the building with a phone.

Holy cow, even though I’ve used it a lot, I completely forgot that the full name was originally “Twitter Bootstrap”.

Galadriel as a sword-wielding warrior goes against my head canon, for one personal example

But as I mentioned above, I’m about an hour east of St. Louis in rural Illinois in a county with no single town over 10,000, and even here Obama got 49% vs 51% for McCain. The weird thing is, somehow in the same county Trump got 72%? I just don’t understand that.