Virtually every store brand foil I just searched for is 20-30% cheaper per sq ft than the cheapest parchment paper I can find.

This same technique works well for other veggies, too. The last time I roasted some red potatoes, I quartered them and made sure they were on the (foiled and oiled) pan with the skin side down. No sticking!

Shaka, when the walls fell

We’re really good at mispronouncing all those “foreign” names here in Illinois. See also the towns of Cairo (Kay-roh) and DuBois (Doo-boys). We somehow do manage to pronounce Illinois with a silent s.

Already mentioned in the post:

It looks like the contestants weren’t familiar with the book, and mostly guessed based on “snow” in the title, but they got the wrong meaning of “snow.”

Our TV has a volume leveling feature, but I’ve found that dialog in some shows is easier to understand with it on and others with it off. As you say, sound mixers seem not to be doing a great job these days. It’s similar to how dark many action scenes are. It’s often very difficult to tell WTH is going on.

When I was in the 8th grade the same paperback copy of Forever got passed around and read by almost every member of the class, including us boys. After more than 40 years I don’t remember very many details about it, but I’m sure it did make an impression on us all. It was a small rural school and a class of only 14…

I planted 1-year-old asparagus crowns last year, and they did very well. This year they’re already 4 feet high! They do grow fast; some of the sprouts have grown 8 inches in less than 24 hours. You could probably make a cool time lapse of it.

This reminds me of manakish, which I heard about recently on the radio. Those are typically filled with za’atar and olive oil, sometimes plus other seasonal things. I have a bag of za’atar I need to use, so I was going to try making some soon. I bet some onion mixed in would be a tasty hybrid between the two dishes.

Don’t forget pre-Office Rainn Wilson as one of the aliens!

I don’t know about elsewhere, but burgers from my local McD’s have fresh chopped onions on them. Very strong oniony fresh onions. Requires a couple of Altoids afterwards. This is on a Quarter Pounder; not sure about the others, because I haven’t had one for a while. Do they use different onions on different burgers?

Exactly what I did last year to keep the squirrels out of my new asparagus bed. I think this year it won’t be necessary, since it’s already sprouted and 3 feet high. Early spring!

Most important part of this post: have a perfectly functioning exhaust fan.

Oh, I think those things you mention are above-average. That’s the problem: the actual average of creative works is so, so low that these “objectively” mediocre works are above-average.

I re-read The Silmarillion last year, and I’d forgotten how well it hangs together. I’m a pretty big fan, at the age of 57 having read LotR 42 (!) times now, but this was only my 5th or 6th time through the older matters. It really is one long tale, and not a series of different ones as some people seem to think. As…

I think the win should go to the Sprite, as mentioned by others, but I have to at least nominate the Neon for the classic ad:

My wife and I discovered the Gold Nuggets a couple of years ago, and they’re now our favorites. (Not easy to get just any produce here in the rural Midwest.) We have a bag of them on the counter right now.

This seems like a good place to restate my belief that it should be illegal for radio stations to play the sound of a car horn. They do so fairly often it turns out, and almost every time, it causes me a moment of panic as I look around to see if I’m about to be hit.

Seems like he may have opened himself up to some criminal charges, like unauthorized access to a computer system, for looking at those text messages?