ArtieShaw

If I see gills I’m not touching it.

It’s not for everyone, but Penguin Island by Anatole France features great auks. I read it many years ago and enjoyed it (in a dorky 19th century satire sort of way). Not for everyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_Island_(novel)

I think you get it from eating turkey.

oooh - pure destruction. I can respect that.

That’s wonderful!

My orange cat has appointed himself as house monitor, so he’ll alert us to any danger or weird situations. When the kitten escaped from the back patio, which is enclosed, he ran to my husband and alerted him. He can be a jerk, but overall he’s a good dude.

When I’m home alone I can always count on him. If I hear a weird noise? If that little guy is snoring I know that it’s just the wind.

My current oldest was a stray for about 4-5 months and she seemed to regard anything wrapped in plastic as a valid food source. We assumed that reason is that she had been scavenging garbage.

One of my favorite “new kitten” moments was coming downstairs to find that she had taken about 12 sample bites from a package of toilet paper. She stopped doing that.

I swear we fed her well, but she had some habits from life on the streets.

My best girl is really into being petted while standing in a bathtub or shower. No water. She’s done this since she was a kitten. Like Kika, she’ll lure you to the spot for petting, then meow until you and she are both standing in the tub and she’s getting pets.

Two different houses and three different tubs are involved here.

I sometimes wonder if it’s related to the time I had to give her a bath when we first took her in as a stray. She was weak and underfed, and had a bad case of fleas. I gave her a bath, which she hated and I hated - but when she hit the water you could see blood in her fur from all the flea bites. Poor kitty. It was probably the first time a human had given her much attention. And it helped with the fleas, so she probably felt much better afterwards.

Sometimes I tell myself that she’s trying to tell me she’s still grateful for that, and that she trusts me.

Or else she’s just a weirdo. I’m fine with either.

Shock: I’m not really Artie Shaw.

I collect ancient coins and this explanation doesn’t fly for me. There’s a certain amount of “artisanal-ness” in the production of ancient coins - which were all handmade. Like, I’m looking at a tray of coins right now and there’s no way a simple go/no-go tool would be helpful. Also, for this purpose a simple handheld counterweight balance would be more accurate and portable. The existence of these simple balances, along with reference weights for various denominations, is well documented.

Moreover - if you’re an ancient merchant, what is more important? The weight of the silver or the ability for it to pass for a denarius issued by Rome? Particularly for international trade, it seems to have been the former. Bankers’ cuts and countermarks are commonly seen on coins, and seem to have been an early form of foreign exchange. (eg - I’m travelling from Athens to Ephesus with a stock of my local currency. If I pass it to a local banker in Ephesus, they can evaluate it, determine the local exchange in terms of silver, and give it a locally recognized countermark to assure their own merchants that they’re getting the equivalent local value).

That being now off my chest, I’ve got no great answers for the dodecahedrons. I strongly suspect that it was a nifty thing that metal workers made as a master’s thesis.

Casefile. It’s not that content is boring or uninteresting. It just knocks me out.

I missed out on those! We were there for less than a week and never saw them on a menu.

They were on my list, though.

I’d say that both White Castle and McDonalds are a separate food entity. In form, they’re both burgers. That much is true, but the overall thing that you eat is consistently something else.

This is may be more obvious for WC because in spite of being the oldest fast food hamburger, they also depart more radically from the norms of cooking and presentation. Whatever McD’s is doing is a little more arcane. It presents itself as a burger, but doesn’t really taste like a burger.

And if you’re adding regional chains, Culver’s deserves a mention.

I noticed that they had a presence in London. We didn’t stop to compare them to the US version, though. I had weirder things to try.

That’s kinda brutal, but I’m going to back you up on the thing with hamburgers in Canada. Maybe it’s just limited to Ontario, but when we moved there we were consistently shocked by the weirdness of the burgers. For the first year or so we shopped around trying to find a good burger and eventually just gave up. Our local pub served some that were OK.

And before anyone chimes in with the thing about all Ontario burgers being prepared well-done by law, it’s not that. I’m pretty sure our time there pre-dated that law. I think they may have been “spicing” them with onion powder, but who knows.

The burgers at Burgermeister in Berlin were quite decent. Those were the only ones we tried, though.

I’d be !00% on board with including women in the draft. Fair is fair.

Personally - like I told the recruiter from Annapolis 30 years ago, “trust me when I say that you don’t want me anywhere near your military.” If I were drafted I think I could fail out of basic on my own lack of merit.

If there were other service options, I could happily do other work. For example: Math, science, or language tutoring for teens. I could have helped out a kid who actually wanted to get into Annapolis but didn’t have strong enough academics.

Speaking as a new hobbyist (2 months), I went with an Creality Ender 3 V3 KE. The cost was in the $250-300 USD range and it had a decent range of features.

I’ve used it almost every day since unpacking it. It’s pretty easy to get to know. The Creality cloud slicing tool is good enough for me (for now), and can be run via a browser or app.

Microcenter has a variety of display models that you can check out. If I had known about it I probably would have gone prior to making my selection. I’m not sure my choice would have been different, but a little extra knowledge never hurts.

I have a low key interest in birds and have been using the Merlin app to ID them by photo, description, or their song. You can set it to record, then just chill in the backyard while it lists the birds it hears.

I’m not a soda drinker, but Green River gets me right in the nostalgia.

Occasionally, I’ll have some club soda with a bit of vanilla or hazelnut syrup. Not too sweet, but enough to taste. Plain soda water is also good.

I knew someone this happened to. Several months after moving into their new house they started working on a neglected secondary bathroom on the 2nd floor. They didn’t go back there too frequently because it wasn’t a priority, but it was a really cool space connected to their bedroom via a small dressing room/closet.

One day she noticed a low, humming drone and checked the wall of that closet. She claimed that the whole wall was warm to the touch and vibrating. That was not an easy or cheap job, but we got to make jokes about bees for a couple of months.

Exactly. After the American revolution started, England needed a new place to send convicts.