Courtesy Flush

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It has lyrics: You lost the game. Daaang.

It would be HILARIOUS if a military band did that instead of playing Hail to the Chief. He gets off Air Force One and you just hear Fum fum fu fuuum, DUUUUURG.

While the nation was functioning, meat and dairy would have been regulated by the USDA, not the FDA.

It works remarkably well as a ska song.

I find the original Talking Heads version to be too whiny. I don’t find it enjoyable to sit through. The Cardigans/Tom Jones version I have one note, one change I’d make: Nina’s vocals seem to have a band-pass filter applied, it sounds like she’s literally phoning it in. I wouldn’t have done that.

I’ve never once seen it called that, at least not in American English. It tends to be labelled “cornmeal.” Almost always ground coarser that wheat flour is.

Nachos are usually corn tortillas, not wheat flour tortillas.

Tell you a problem I’ve had with it recently: search.

Used to be, you’d search Youtube for something like 'how to make a zero clearance throat plate for table saw" and you’d get pages of useful results, then some not so great results, then things that make you say “no not that kind of throat.” and by then it’s just giving you results with at least one of the search terms in it.

Now, you’ll get maybe ten relevant results, then about ten results that have absolutely nothing to do with your search, just…stuff it would clutter your home page with. Like you’re not trying to find information. You can feel that “increase watch time at all costs” shit.

I took two years of French in high school, I can say ai as a avons avez ont. Because that’s most of the french I actually spoke aloud in that class. Two years I “studied” this language, I’m not sure I’d be able to safely spend a week in France, I’d be hit by a train because I didn’t understand the warning sign.

That’s not how they taught me English. In second language classes, they’ll try to teach you rules like adjective order; like how we always say a wonderful big red balloon. If you said a red wonderful big balloon you sound broken. ESL students will be taught that their first semester, a native English speaker will follow that rule perfectly without consciously knowing it exists for 30 years until it is pointed out by that linguist tiktok guy.

This is one place where I think modern schools categorically fail, is teaching languages. They teach languages in ways that are easy to create multiple choice tests for because those are easy to grade. In reality, you don’t teach an Anglophone French by speaking English to him, you teach French in French. It can be practical to have a common language to fall back on but you learn a language by speaking it.

Now, “Ancient Egypt” refers to a knee bucklingly long span of time; There were pharaohs who employed archaeologists to study the Giza pyramids, because by the time anyone named Ramses was around, the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre were already thousands of years old. If you were to end up as a Connecticut Yankee in King Djoser’s Court, some 5500 years ago, none of the languages English evolved from have emerged yet. You’re going to be operating at the level of holding up a basket with a quizzical look on your face until your host says “nb.” Then you’ll try to say it back, and so forth. Your vocabulary will build and eventually you’ll be talking just like one of them.

Land in Ptolemaic times and you can do the same exact thing but in Greek or Latin.

Who else is talking to them?

Mouse. Singular. Cat.

It’s actually funny going back and watching early episodes of The New Yankee Workshop and hearing Norm brag about the “new” glues that were coming available. “This is a one-part glue, you don’t have to mix it up, it’s ready to use in the bottle, it’s water proof and it cleans up with water! I wouldn’t have even tried doing this myself without these modern glues.” They avoided showing brand names and such on the show; Norm was usually careful to hold the glue bottle with the back facing the camera, but he’s clearly holding a bottle of Titebond 2, with it’s blue cap.

And I mean, yeah. imagine building furniture without PVA glue, you change how you think.

I don’t know about that. I tried using both ChatGPT and Gemini to brainstorm for ideas for the name and branding of a woodworking Peertube channel. They both struck me as similar yes men with little to no imagination. Both suggested things like “sawdust and smiles.” And they would both, ALWAYS start a response with something like “That’s a great idea!” “That’s a wise approach!” "Your concern is very valid!’ Such brown nose, very kiss ass.

It doesn’t seem to be too useful for this particular use case, either.

My father once told me of an old IBM machine, I think it was the System 3 model 15D or one of its contemporaries, or maybe the original System 38. It had some amount of memory, like 32k of memory (I’m going to get these numbers wrong), and to upgrade it you could spend many thousands of dollars to have IBM come install a control board to upgrade it to 64k. The memory was already physically in the box; they manufactured and delivered it to the customer, and sold the memory control board as an exorbitant cost option, when it was the RAM (it might have even been core storage) that was the expensive part to make.

To a lesser degree, I’ve been hearing about cars that install cost options on all models, but they don’t hook them up on the lower tiers. Like apparently all Lotus Exiges have power mirrors, they’ve all got motors in them, but they don’t give you the switch unless you pay for it. You can go to a Ford dealership, buy the right switch and just pop it in and it’ll work. I suppose it can make some sense to reduce part counts, but it’s getting to the point where it’s "we installed the option in the car, it’s hooked up, it’s perfectly functional, we’ve already put in the expense, and we’ll allow the software to turn it on if you pay for it.

Let me clarify this part of my thinking: That line has moved a lot since the lifetime of Thomas Chippendale.

When you think about what it would take to build an ornately carved mahogany highboy with a high gloss varnish in 1750 versus today, including logging, transporting exotic wood around the planet, the actual woodworking…hell, just compare applying a shellac french polish versus spray lacquer today.

I could run a fairly decent woodworking racket given 10 cubic meters a year. Does that include branches and such?

Ten cubic meters of free wood a year. Huh. That’s an oak or two.