Other comment hit the nail on the head with their link

But for those who won’t click the link, its basically just that once upon a time that’s what the price of a package of nails that size was, bigger nails cost more pennies than smaller nails.

While we’re on weird hardware measurement, I might as well talk about wire gauge

Basically it’s an arbitrary standard because it’s what someone somewhere set up their wire making equipment to do and other people just followed the same standard (though of course different parts of the world use different standards for different things, so there’s diff6 “gauge” measurements in use in various places for different things)

But the general idea is you would start with a thick wire/rod, and pull it through a die to stretch it out into progressively thinner wire

The original rod would be 1 gauge, one pass through the die and its 2 gauge, one more pass and it’s 3 gauge, etc. which is why the diameter gets smaller as the numbers get bigger

Then there’s shotgun gauge, and I have no idea why this is the standard they decided to measure this by, but it’s what it is. It’s the number of lead balls that size it would take to make a pound.

So a 12 gauge shotgun has a bore of .725 inches. It would take 12 .725 inch lead balls to make a pound.

For a 20 gauge shotgun, the bore is .615, and you’d need 20 balls that size to make a pound.

And then they throw that system out the window with .410 shotguns and just call it by the fucking bore diameter.

And I’m not gonna even touch on railroad gauges, American screw sizes, etc. not because it’s not interesting (to me at least) but because I’ve run out of fucks.

The abbreviations come from Roman times, popular currency in Rome were librae, solidi, and denarii.

There were 12 denarii in a solidus, and 20 solidi (or 240 denarii) in a Libra

In pre decimal British currency they kept the latin abbreviations, but denarii became pence, solidi became shillings and librae became pounds (and this is why the £ symbol for pounds looks kind of like an L)

And over the years at different times currency was issued in various fractions and combinations of those, such as quarter penny (farthings) and half pennies

I actually did a make your own pizza party a while back, I encouraged people to get weird with it and a lot of my my friends are kind of foodies, so here’s a couple standouts

Goat cheese, hot honey, fig preserves, and capocllo

Spicy hawaiian - grilled pineapple, bacon, ham or spam, jalapenos, drizzle of hoisin sauce

Mac & cheese

Taco- taco meat, cheddar, red onions, jalapenos, lettuce tomato

Cheeseburger - ground beef, cheddar, mustard, ketchup, pickles, onions

Desert pizza- pie filling, vanilla glaze, crumb topping

Sort of a knock-off flammkuchen- creme fraise (sour cream would probably also work fine,) gruyere, onions, bacon

Buffalo Chicken - chicken, hot sauce, blue cheese crumbles, diced celery, shredded carrots

Breakfast pizza- eggs (we used quail eggs because my pizza oven is on the small side and we could get them, just crack them right onto the top of the pizza,) bacon, sausage, hash browns

Chicken Tika masala

Greek- kalamata olives, feta, spinach tomatoes, balsamic

And of course we had all of the standard pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, olives, peppers, etc.

A couple different sauces - standard pizza sauce, pesto, vodka sauce, Alfredo, etc.

I played for a handful of years around 2009-ish

Never got very far, don’t think I hit max level, never got super into any particular aspect of it

But I had fun fucking around online with some friends

Probably the biggest source of strife in my marriage is that my wife played for the alliance and I was horde.

And well over a decade later my text message notification sound is still a murloc.

Anecdotally, really just shoplifting in general.

I work in 911 dispatch, been there for about 7 years, so long enough to have a decent feel for how things have changed since before COVID.

And while I’m not keeping a personal tally, it definitely seems like over the last couple of years I’ve been getting a whole lot more calls about shit like people stealing a single red bull from a convenience store. (Yes, they call 911 for that sometimes, and we also answer a lot of the 10-digit non emergency lines, it all pretty much has to go through us one way or another, it’s the same cops responding whether it’s an emergency or not so at some point it has to end up with central dispatch)

We actually have a couple convenience stores with security guards now because of this.

Most burritos I’ve had have the ends folded in which may make them a calzone

nobody alive today was alive and in the military for any major conflict that we were actually victorious in

There are still a handful of WWII vets kicking around

Also depending on how you want to define “major” and “victorious” you could maybe make an argument for Dessert Storm, and possibly the 2003-2011 Iraq War. (Whether we should have been involved in those wars in the first place, and how those wars were fought are separate issues, and I certainly wouldn’t call them “unqualified” victories, but I do think there are absolutely certain angles you could look at them from and make the argument that the US was the victor in those conflicts)

I think the basic premise of your question is kind of flawed.

Generational age brackets are always a little fuzzy, but most definitions tend to define millennials as people born from about 1981-1996

Which means come the end of the 90’s, the oldest millennials were just turning 18, the youngest were just entering preschool, the “average” millennial would have been about 10. Personally, I was 8 in 1999.

So most of us weren’t exactly politically-aware in the 90s, let alone actively criticizing anything besides homework. And a lot of us probably had parents who wouldn’t have let us listen to RATM because of the parental advisory sticker on their albums.

My main concerns at the time were things like video games and cartoons

Then right around the time we started to be old enough to really form political opinions, 9/11 happened and the world went insane around us.

I have a big bushy beard which somewhat limits my costume options if I’m going for any kind of accuracy unless I want to wear a mask

My two standby costumes that I dust off when I find myself with unexpected Halloween plans are

A lawn gnome. I dye my beard white, put on a blue ren faire sort of tunic, a wide belt, and a red pointy hat

And a Monty Python lumberjack. Red flannel shirt partially unbuttoned over a bra, suspenders, high heels, and a knit hat. I also have a big ol’ double bit felling axe I may trot out if the occasion warrants it.

I suppose I can also lose the heels and bra and just be a regular lumberjack.

It is a bit outside of my area of expertise, but if I understand what you’re asking, the police usually aren’t going to just call up your family and say “hey, your adult child just did a crime and we thought you should know”

Unless there’s a good reason for them to do that. If they suspect that you may be a danger to your family, they’ll of course advise them and give them some more details.

Or if they’re trying to locate you, they’ll probably contact your family, but usually they’re going to keep details vague, they probably won’t come right out and say “we think your kid just robbed a gas station o do you know where he is so we can arrest him?” They’ll probably keep it to something more like “he may have been present during a robbery and we have some questions for him”

But of course every situation, police department, individual officer, etc. is unique, so I won’t claim that there’s absolutely no situation where that might happen.

The specifics are probably going to depend on where in the world you are, in the US it’s generally going to be a no unless you’ve specifically listed them as an emergency contact, they’re your medical power of attorney (which is separate from legal power of attorney) etc.

I work in 911 dispatch, so I’m not specifically covered by HIPAA, though we have some similar regulations and obviously we rub up against the edges of the healthcare field. My wife also works in a psych hospital, and my sister in a nursing home so I get to hear a lot of stories about stuff like this.

My wife has to deal with a lot of cases where a parent is trying to contact the hospital about their adult child who’s a patient there, but since they’re not listed on the correct paperwork the hospital can’t even confirm that their child is in fact a patient there, even though they were standing right there next to them when they were admitted a couple hours earlier.

–

I get calls at work a lot because someone’s child/parent, boyfriend/girlfriend, brother/sister etc. was taken to the hospital by ambulance earlier, and when they called the hospital they can’t tell them they’re there because they’re not on the paperwork, so they call us freaking out trying to figure out where their loved one is, and all I can say is that they were transported to the hospital, I can’t tell if they haven’t finished signing it, already been discharged/left AMA, if they possibly had to be transferred to a different hospital, or more likely the hospital just can’t confirm anything because the person calling isn’t an emergency contact.

–

Recently I had a call from a woman who was freaking out. Her husband was missing, his car was in the driveway, and she saw a lot of blood around the house.

While she was on the phone with me her friend was calling the hospital to check if he was there, but the hospital couldn’t tell her.

Then her friend gave her the phone, and since she was listed as an emergency contact they confirmed that he was in fact there.

What happened was that he had a bad nosebleed and had his brother give him a ride to the hospital, but didn’t tell her and of course he was an older guy who never has his phone turned on.

–

My sister once had a patient who had apparently led one hell of an interesting life, and at different points had been a doctor, a lawyer and a priest, so aside from his resume sounding like the setup to some kind of joke, he also knew his way around all of the ins and outs of how the whole system worked, but being a patient in a nursing home with probably the early stages of dementia setting in, he wasn’t always acting rationally, and apparently it was an absolute nightmare for the staff and his family to navigate the changes he was making to his paperwork while he was there.

Depends a bit on what you’re doing with them

For hard-wearing work pants, I think Duluth firehouse pants are pretty hard to beat

Dickies or Carhartt are solid, more-readily-available options

If you’re looking more for lightweight hiking pants, I used to have a pair of north face zip-off pants I really liked, but I’m not sure if they still make the same or similar model, but I’d take a look at their offerings. They were a bit pricey but not outrageous.

Barring that, a lot of my outdoors clothes tend to be Columbia.

For sort of a middle-of-the-road that can kind of fill either role, I’d probably go for BDUs. No specific brand recommendation, there’s a lot of companies making them, and while I haven’t tried them all, the ones I have have been pretty much the same. Just kind of get whatever you can get a good deal on online or whatever your local military surplus place stocks.

Mines a 16 cup model, so that could be the difference.

I don’t think mine has ever moved at all when I’m using it, and I’ve done just about everything you could ever want to do with a food processor.

The only time I’ve seen it struggle with anything was when I had it almost full of ground beef to make homemade hot dogs. It got it done, but it wasn’t happy about it, and I’m pretty sure that emulsifying that sort of quantity of meat would be a struggle for any machine that could reasonably fit on a countertop.

I honestly can’t say I’ve experienced that.

It might be that newer or different models are lighter, like I said, mine is over 10 years old.

Or it could be down to something goofy like your countertops being smoother than mine (not unlikely, I have some shitty laminate counters that are pretty beat to hell)

Yeah, ours works great as a dehydrator, I just wish it came with more dehydrator racks. You can order more I’ve just never gotten around to doing it

We do also have a breville toaster oven/air fryer (slightly different model though) and do love it. Probably use it more and get better results from it than our regular oven.

It is not, however, the greatest air fryer out there. It’s certainly passably but we definitely get better results from the crispi, and the Ninja is much easier to clean.

I whole-heartedly recommend their toaster ovens without reservation. And if you lack the storage/counter space for a dedicated air fryer o it will certainly do.

My one wish is that they’d make a toaster oven with a rotisserie.

My wife worked at a fancy kitchen store for a long time. She tested out a whole lot of small appliances, demo’d them for customers, saw what people returned and exchanged, etc. and generally knows what’s what.

And her general advice is to go breville for basically every small kitchen appliances. I can really only think of 4 exceptions- KitchenAid for stand mixers, Vitamix for blenders, croquade for waffle makers, and the Ninja Crispi for countertop air fryers.

I’ve really put our breville sous chef through it’s pages over the years, Shen had it since before we started dating to easily more than 10 years, and it’s still going strong.

I’ve had frog, it’s practically the original “tastes like chicken” food. They have maybe the slightest bit of fishiness to them, but nothing a little bit of seasoning won’t almost totally cover up.

Similarly gator is also almost a dead-ringer for chicken, just chewier (not surprising, I’m pretty sure just need to look at a gator to be able to tell it was gonna be tough and chewy)

So I’m thinking odds are that dino tastes like chicken.

It’s become a new years tradition to just play a bunch of random asylum movies just to have something on while we’re hanging out and so we have something to occasionally point to the TV and comment on.

We usually try to pick a known movie that we can start at a specific time so that something cool happens at midnight. A favorite is Hitler getting punched in the balls in Kung Fury

Shitty b movies. Anything by the asylum, anything that may have once appeared on an episode of MST3K, any weird VHS your parent brought home for you one day back in the 90s by some obscure polish director that you half-remember and now that you think about it where the hell did your parents even find that movie?