If you live in a major metro area or near a decently sized city, it might be worth a google to see if there is a knife rental and sharpening company that serves the local restaurant scene. Usually these places will sharpen your personal knives for just a couple of bucks. Sometimes your local supermarket will also…

Yeah, thermometers really help if you’re a new cook getting to know your appliances. My sister had lived in her house for like 8 years and one day I cooked there and I discovered that her oven ran hot. Like, really hot. But I was paying attention and the food didn’t burn. I mentioned to her that her oven seemed to be…

I wish more cookbook writers and recipe developers would be specific when they’re talking about salt. Very few recipes specify what kind of salt, or if they’re using kosher salt, whether they want Diamond Crystal or Morton’s. I tend to assume they want Diamond Crystal, as that seems to be the industry standard. But…

The definition of alluding eludes her. 

This is my problem with a whole lot of historical fiction. I can understand the work of creative nonfiction, where a writer/researcher sometimes has to fictionalize a conversation between two people that we know happened. But the way that a lot of historical fiction makes real people into characters often seems to…

Both the characters of Shirley and Britta started out with promise and then devolved into weird stereotypes. There’s very little of the holy-roller Shirley at the outset of the show, and by the time Yvette Nicole Brown left the show, that was the character’s only trick. Likewise, Britta started out as a pretty sharp…

I feel like every couple of years this cycle repeats itself, where Chevy Chase will complain in an interview that he was cooler than Community and the show wasn’t funny, and McHale will respond with deference. From what I can tell, the main cast have mostly stuck to the high road: they acknowledge that Chase was…

What I find truly baffling is how Youngkin, an extremist by word and deed, is being put forth as the “new moderate face” of the GOP that will be more palatable to independent and moderate voters. If this is where we are as a country, we’re so fucked. 

Now that is a fascinating story that I would like to dig into. It’s like the start of a novel. Like, they lived together until she died to keep the story going and everything? All while grandpa was dating other women? That’s wild. 

Sorry, typo on my part. It was Edward who washed out of military training. That’s my bad. Andrew did have a military career as a pilot. I didn’t mention William and Harry’s service because I assumed it was common knowledge.

I’ve decided I just can’t think too hard about any of this because none of it makes any sense.

The British royals don’t have to serve, but many historically have. Elizabeth II—then princess Elizabeth—joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in 1945, making her the first royal to enlist for full-time active military service. Charles served in the Navy for a few years, training as a pilot. Both of his sons…

A word of caution on the Podium Chill water bottles from Camelbak: The are a big pain to disassemble and clean the mouthpiece/jet valve. The videos from Camelbak only partially break down the mouthpiece to clean it, but you have to pull the whole thing apart regularly to clean it or you will get mold under the rubber…

I don’t doubt it. Bad road design is endemic in the US, and I’m sure that some county engineer could find tons of ways to fuck up a roundabout to mitigate its main advantages. 

This is why I’m not terribly fussed about the bullshit that Ohio’s Republican secretary of state pulled with the summary of the abortion measure that will appear on the ballot. Yeah, it’s insane bullshit. But it’s also a summary that voters only see when they get into the voting booth. I doubt that anybody is going…

Yeah, we’re conscious of this effect in our house, too. We do shop at multiple grocery stores, but that’s only because the three stores we frequent are all on the same street, within a half mile of each other. The main two are literally across the street from each other. If they were farther away or required a second…

This is good info. The other thought that I had was this: If we’re really interested in pedestrian safety, we should be thinking not about banning driving maneuvers like right on red but about road and intersection design. How many of these intersections with right on red could be redesigned as roundabouts? Doing that…

Outside of cities/metro areas, pedestrians are so vanishingly rare in much of the country. We’re so car-centric. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to ban right on red in places where there is virtually no pedestrian culture. 

Thanks (I’m a gal, but that’s neither here nor there). I feel your pain. I’d love it if my region had anything coming close to a unified public transit plan. We’ve got buses, but they’re unreliable and they take forever to get anywhere. So I’m car dependent even though I don’t want to be.

My current car is a base model, so it doesn’t have a lot of fancy tech features. I use the basics: backup camera, sat-nav through Android Auto, cruise control.