Also tasty: make a chunky tomato sauce with cubed onions and sliced bell peppers cut in thirds, add cumin, black pepper, garlic powder… Then heat up the dogs in it, keep it at a low simmer on the stove (or chafing dish): hot dogs with an extra tangy sauce to be ladled over in the bun.

It isn’t that Americans are loud. They are loud and oh-so-unbelievably-clear in their speaking voices. One can hear all the details of how aunt Linda was cheated on by uncle Charlie when he went on a business trip to Kansas City from across the piazza. Sheesh!

I don’t know about yokes. F1 drivers use them, I know, but they are supposed to be ‘hands on’ all the time. Can I drive for tens of miles holding the yoke with just one hand while I finish my big gulp? 

It’s the only one that works using smarts. As long as you’re careful if using a knife, you’re golden. The best thing to use, though, is a spoon. The smallest spoon available. My cutlery set has coffee spoons, about 2/3 of the size of teaspoons. The bowl is small enough to fit under the lid with the concave side out,…

Cupcake pan. One half hard-boiled egg in each.

if you’re bald, shave your head or have very short hair, you will lose a lot of body heat through your head. Your face too.

Having a full tank of gas when things go pear-shaped is very optimistic. When you are driving on a road, from one place to another, you will have spent gas going from A to not-quite-B. Furthermore, police officers know they have a fixed shift, and they don’t need to conserve gas to last an unknown number of hours. And…

That might as well be from the brakes, if you go freewheeling on a long downhill stretch.

Pickle juice, a resounding YES. Toothpick with a fingertip-sized (and shaped too) piece of a very small cornichon and a lime-stuffed olive (not an olive pre-stuffed with preserved lemon peel, but an honest-to-goodness pitted green olive stuffed with a carefully cut piece of just the pulp of the lime*)

The risk of having a bill come in the wrong amount (because of a glitch, someone misreading or just writing down the wrong numbers from the meter, or, as it happened at the beginning of the pandemic, the bill coming in as the “monthly average” because the meter readers were not out doing the readings) and messing up…

What I did with my pooch was to make fireworks seem normal.

“So, if you’re in California, Pennsylvania, Arizona, or Minnesota, you’ll want to hang your air fresheners somewhere else.”

Voting should be by essay “In times of uncertainty, it takes a special kind of person to take the public trust in his or her hands and represent the people of the state of Maine in all legislative matters. Such person, who shall, in my opinion, represent the 2nd congressional district of Maine is none other than…”…

“Senators normally wave the reading of bills…”

Let’s be frank: do the dick pics we send those senators really need to have been sent unsolicited to us first? Can’t we just crop them from porn site pics? Crop out everything but the thick, veiny bits of the photo? A thousand times a day, every day? Like a DDoS attack, but with more ‘D’?

I bet he has friends.

“…should be roasted incessantly.”

He will. Believe in me, he will. He’ll have to die first, and that’s a long time to wait for it, but when it begins it will last for at least an eternity.

In most of Brazil those are called “May flowers” or “October flowers”, depending on the latitude you’re at (they tend to bloom later in higher latitudes, it seems).

One question I have is why aren’t cars equipped with double glazed windows and windshields. And better thermal insulation under the cabin panels. Just because cars already produce a lot of heat from their engines, it’s ok to just waste energy? And electric cars, can they spare the battery charge to run heaters just…