I have a fair amount of clover in my yard, but also sweet-scented flatsedge. Sedges are considered weeds by “lawn people,” but I’ve just let it go, and it makes a pretty good lawn of its own. After it takes over and fills in, it looks basically like grass. It’s native to where I live, and as a great additional…

Heh. That reminds me of once when my kids were little, and we caught a praying mantis and put it in a cage to study for a while. We put a grasshopper with it, which it stalked and ate. In the evening we put in a couple of field crickets. By morning the crickets were still there, but all that was left of the praying…

Along slightly different lines, my answer is any car...on a road course! Even a boring commuter car will be great fun to drive there, learning how to push it around the corners. Just one track day will teach you a lot about yourself and the car and make you a better driver.

I’m not sure how good the safety protocols were there in the 70's. They let me wander around pretty freely. :) Man, that lab was a fascinating place to be as a science-minded kid. I loved the rare days when there was no school and I got to spend the day with dad at work. He was a toxicologist, and he would usually put…

According to the internet, “Sustained heat for several hours at extremely high temperatures (900°F and above) will reliably destroy a prion.” So you just have to cook the brains until they’re really, really, really well-done. :) The company where I work has an oven to burn paint off metal parts before they’re…

Just wanted to mention that there is also mild giardiniera that is great on sandwiches, etc., if you don’t like the spicy stuff. I think it’s especially good in homemade shawarma.

I was a guy who ate oatmeal with lots of sugar and cinnamon and butter, but in an effort to eat better, for a while I’ve been having plain instant with one of these packs of nuts and dried fruit in it. I’ve finally gotten to the point where I actually like it this way. The nuts add some nice texture, and the fruit is…

For me it was always feeling like any mechanic I went to was cheating me. (They often were.) I determined to learn how to fix my own car. How hard could it be? :) Here I am 25 years later, having rebuilt several engines and done some track driving in my cars.

I was forced by a serious leak from the tub drain to do a bunch of work in our master bathroom. I wrote on the back of one of the pieces of drywall for the next unfortunate soul something like, “2020 - The Year of the Pandemic - God I hope I never have to replace this again.”

It’s sometimes unintuitive how things like work. I remember when I lived in Dallas, there was a side street I usually took to work, but there was a place where traffic would nearly always back up for a couple of long blocks. At some point, they put in a stop sign at a cross street about a mile before that area, and it…

So you do have questions, then?

There aren’t any Jewel-Osco stores in the lower 2/3 of the state. Very suspiciously missing from this list is Walmart! It’s by far the most popular grocery store around here, and I suspect in large swaths of the Midwest.

Possibly. I think generally that’s used for flooring with a plywood or other engineered wood core. What I used is kind of a hybrid: the top layer is a sealed real wood veneer, but the core is waterproof thermoplastic. Real happy with it, and it’s still looks great 2-1/2 years later.

There are a surprising number of such words. Does this article have your sanction, or would you sanction it? Do you cleave to these words, or would you cleave them from the language? Look up Janus words.

I disagree. I think the conversation between the orcs Gorbag and Shagrat in LotR supports the whole idea of orcs having wills of their own and some measure of independence. They talk about the Nazgul and Sauron himself making mistakes. Gorbag even suggests they “set up somewhere on our own with a few trusty lads,…

How about, “From whence came this?” :D

How about Amber Ruffin to take over The Daily Show? I’ve liked her on Late Night. I should watch some of her current show, but I just haven’t made time to do it.

In truth, even if you take the same coffee from a K-Cup and make it in a french press or pour-over filter instead of the machine, it will taste twice as good.

Eh, my local one can’t get much slower. Potato cakes with their 3 pepper sauce was great.

Cheers to this idea! I was one who only ate oatmeal with a lot of butter and sugar. It took me a bit, but I finally trained my taste buds to actually like plain oatmeal with nuts and dried fruit in it. The fruit provides just enough sweetness. I usually save the (fresh or frozen if I can’t get fresh) blueberries and…