I moved to New Zealand six months ago, and I have had exactly one truly bad meal since I’ve been here. I haven’t eaten any Maori food, so I guess all the food I’ve eaten has been from another country.

The one that surprised me the most was KFC. We moved from one state away from Kentucky, and we had to come here to have truly good KFC.

I was expecting the Chinese food to be good here, but it’s really good. So is the Korean, Indian, and Malaysian food. The fish and chips are good. The burgers are great, even from McDonald’s. The absolute best was Filipino food from a tiny little restaurant in a random strip mall near Sylvia Park. That food changed my life.

In fairness, I have had a couple of “fine” meals—as in, “well, nothing special, but it was fine.”

The one bad meal was Pad Thai made by Thai people at a Thai restaurant down by the beach. It was just way too sweet, which makes me wonder if they saw me and made it “for a white guy” or something.

I feel like if you’re writing the sentence “an optional, paid version of our browser that offers Brave […] without its extra features,” you need to sit back and take a long, hard look at yourself.

Ruby Bridges–the little girl featured in maybe the most famous photo of desegregation, being walked home from school by US marshals, the photo that inspired Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With”–she’s still alive. And not super old, either; she’ll turn 72 this September.

That’s the fact that blows me away about segregation.

“The past is never dead; it isn’t even past.”

Animators also tend to take a lot of shortcuts, though; especially when it comes to backgrounds in shots. I could definitely believe that some animator was like, “ok, we need a science-y looking decoration back here” and so they went on a royalty-free stock 3D asset website and downloaded this one based only on what it looked like.

Oof, that’s an intrusive thought I wasn’t expecting to develop. Good call, no metal then.

I agree that we could all stand to be a lot less convenience-driven. But there’s also a level at which, until the companies providing that convenience are forced (by public demand or by regulation) to provide a product that people will accept, most people won’t give up that convenience. Which makes my complaint less of a personal feeling of grumpiness and more of a call for something that could actually work for more people.

That’s what I tell myself, at least.

I’ve had silicone straws before that also had a lot of nucleation sites because of texturing, and ended up foaming up the drink in the process of sipping, too. Is there a particular thing I should look for? Or do I just need to suck it up (ha) and buy a titanium straw?

I agree that sipping is probably the best option. My problem is that most to-go cups at restaurants use lids for structural reinforcement; they make the cup less sturdy (because it’s cheaper) and count on the lid to keep it stable.

For clumsy and forgetful people (it’s me, hi, I’m the problem) the option right now seems to be buying a reusable straw that ends up sitting in my silverware drawer permanently, living with the fact that I’m just always going to have some sort of stain on my shirt, or drinking subpar, flat sodas. Or, I guess, switching to a non-carbonated drink. None of them are my favorite options. Come on, scientists!

I feel like this comment is written for a different post…?

Yep, right now that seems like the best option to me. But the problem is that most to-go cups at restaurants require lids for structural integrity. It’s also not the greatest solution for particularly clumsy people (like me) who tend to spill drinks down their shirt.

I used to listen to an actual play podcast wherein one of the cast was really good at specifically identifying phrases and sentences that could be sung to the opening lines of “Camptown Races” and singing out “DOO-DAH! DOO-DAH!!” My favorite one was “Polynesian shark-tooth sword.” (This might be a Kingdom of Loathing thing?)

And then, of course, there’s the xkcd and resulting generators that, beautifully, find Wikipedia articles (or really any random line of text) that can be sung to the tune of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” I especially like the ones where they fit surprisingly well and you’re also like, “wait, why is that a Wikipedia article?!” like “Private Purchase Naval Weapons,” or the ones that are only singable because of a parenthetical clarifier like “Silver Comet (roller coaster).”

Moved to New Zealand.

Paper straws are scientifically terrible for carbonated drinks. All of those fibers make a ton of nucleation sites for the CO2 and just make darn sure that your carbonated drink isn’t carbonated by the time it gets to your mouth. Seriously, if you wanted to design something to intentionally make a carbonated soda flat by the time it gets to your lips, I don’t know how you’d do it better than with a paper straw. Maybe a long hose that shakes the liquid as it goes through?

And sure, ok, plastic straws aren’t great environmentally. But surely there was a third option before we went back to literally the worst choice? Something decently cheap, biodegradable, and non-porous? Can we not invent something like that? There’s tons of industrially-compostable polymers, right? Wouldn’t those break down in the ocean over time?

A large number of culinary fruits aren’t even botanical fruits, yes. Most of them are botanical berries (and some things that aren’t botanical berries are still culinary berries). Conflating the two linguistic domains causes lots of problems!

They probably don’t even produce the bottles. They probably just put the water in the bottles.

Tomatoes are both a fruit (botanically) and a vegetable (culinarily). “Vegetable” doesn’t have a botanical definition, so the old aphorism about tomatoes “not being a vegetable” is trying to conflate terms from two different domains and hoping you don’t notice.

I’m not as old as you, but I remember window trays at Dog n Suds (and our local, the Mug-n-Bun) in the 90s. They did actually clip on the window, and if you had your window fully open they had you roll it up an inch or two so it could attach. I assume that wasn’t new technology at the time. They didn’t look quite like this, though; they were cantilevered on rubber pads so that the top of the tray lined up with the top of the window. By then they had moved away from glass serving dishes to Styrofoam with lids, so it wasn’t really a problem to get things into the car, height-wise.

I mean, this is almost certainly a staged display for a car show, but I’m just verifying that these trays (well, ones kind of like these) do exist and were (are?) used.

20 years after women earned the right to vote in Texas…?

Nah, RUDs happen, and everyone knows it. It even happens to NASA—in fact, if I recall correctly, the only major spaceflight operator it hasn’t happened to is ULA. SpaceX even publicly released a video supercut of all their explosions on some anniversary or another. The risk of this is built in to the entire industry; this won’t change anything, and probably shouldn’t.

Billionaire vanity spaceflight shouldn’t be a thing, but this isn’t what should change that.

iirc, paintball marker is slightly translucent, right? So maybe like…a sticker?