When flying business class I have actually been encouraged, both implicitly and explicitly, by the flight crew to remove my shoes. The amenity packs given to passengers, especially on long-haul flights, usually include socks or slippers, and on Chinese airlines the flight attendant will often open the slippers for you…

Okay, so I know this is utterly ridiculous, but I have half a beef Wellington in my fridge and I’d like to reheat it without cooking the meat any more than it already is. Sous-vide would seem ideal except for the whole puff pastry thing.

All I can say is that I live in a big-city apartment with too little cupboard space for my food and about 2 square feet of counter space, so despite cooking rice 2-3 times/week I won’t even consider making the space for a rice cooker that only does things that I can do with other things that I already have. (This…

I’d love to see how a whole small bird goes, but I think you’re going to have to make sure the cavity is well filled with something or you will have the floating problem you had with the turkey again. A well sealed bag of water should do if you just want some flavor-free ballast. I’d love to see pheasant, pigeon, or…

If you’re renewing your US passport from overseas, I strongly recommend having a professional photo done by a shop near the US Embassy. In the digital age, a lot of places that do ID photos have a button on their cameras that will properly size a photo for a US passport, but your average local shop will not…

I agreed with you until you mentioned the Groucho Marx glasses. Then I remembered that I occasionally got hassled entering the US and China on my last passport because I have longer hair and a beard now. Much bigger change than taking off a pair of glasses, and not something I can easily take off. Ok, so I could…

I currently work for a company whose core business is, let’s say, not an industry I really want to be associated with. However, when I accepted the job the company was branching out into a business that I find morally very appealing, respectable, and responsible (and was exactly in line with my training and…

Weird, I’ve been using Vivaldi since the day it came out of beta. LastPass was the first extension I installed, I installed it from the Chrome web store, and it has worked flawlessly for me. Maybe it’s platform-dependent? I’m running it on Arch Linux and haven’t tried it on any other platform (though I’m hoping for a…

For whatever it’s worth, awhile back I met a guy who works for Hermes and he pronounced it “air-may”....

I can assure you that the pronunciation they give for Hoegaarden here is correct, or at least as close as you can get with sounds typically used in English speech. I speak Dutch and used to work close enough to the Hoegaarden brewery that the local police were the ones from the town of Hoegaarden. I don’t know if it’s…