Instead of #7 you can do the Ben Franklin trick, get someone to do a favor for you. They will have a better opinion of you since why would they do a favor for someone they didn't like?

I'm not much of a meat eater myself, but I have found that meat served this way does taste better. (Of course, it could just be the butter they spread on it at fancy restaurants after it's cooked.)

Think of it as an industrial process then. If you found a way to get more plastic out of a batch of oil or more finished planks out of a tree trunk that nobody else seems to have thought of, wouldn't you expect to get some reward for showing other people how it's done?

Yes, I enjoyed The Finder as well.

Yep, I remember seeing the plans in print a long time ago. What magazine I wonder?

A hockey puck of fat from National Archives "Food for Space Travelers: 1966"

He's a vampire, so I figure he has demonic powers at his disposal to aid in this. Or, he could turn them and do various vampire tortures on them.

I like the part where he has them repeatedly disemboweled for this.

The advantage of this type of landing is that it allows you to break your wrists as well as your ankles after falling from a great height.

Drinking while golfing will not improve your game, but it can improve your score.

Sounds more like you were seeing that big moon on the horizon type illusion.

Sometimes the stealing is less than sly. A version of The Scream was stolen by the usual method of pointing guns at guards, ripping it off the wall, and running away. If you want a Vermeer, you apparently just have to acquire convincing police uniforms and fool a night watchman.

You have to specify tomato ketchup because you can buy, or used to be able to buy, things like mushroom ketchup and walnut ketchup.

Nothing new here, some pilots weren't happy about flying P38s because of a compressiblity problem.

One of the things you find on a bank teller check list when you fail to balance is, "Is the error divisible by nine?". Someone asked me why once so I showed them the algebra. It was a trivial explanation, but they seemed very impressed.

Not sure what being literate has to do with success in crime at this level.

I have read several postings about making clear ice and they all seem to agree that distilled or boiled water still doesn't do the trick, at least not for large cubes. People seem to have success making small thin ice clear enough.

Too true. I'm thinking hard wood instead of ceramic.

Never did trust the 120 tapes. They seemed to break or bleed audio on the equipment I had.

Well, the school anatomy model is pretty standard school horror fare. The anatomy rabbits with pistols is totally new to me.