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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • My Brother My Brother and Me probably fits the bill.

    The Box of Oddities is really good. Husband and wife team talking about spooky and Fortean topics.

    No Such Thing as a Fish, a podcast spinoff of the UK TV show QI. Four hosts each show up with an interesting bit of trivia to discuss.

    The Bugle. Comedians doing political satire. Is UK-centric but ends up being about US politics a lot of the time.

    If Books Could Kill. A couple guys tear apart popular self help books as well as pop-sci books like Freakonomics






  • I think if you’re going to go through the trouble to return your cart to the cart area then yeah, slot that bad boy into the stack the way it’s supposed to go. Otherwise it’s like those people who pick up their dog’s poop and just hang the bag on a tree branch for someone else to put in the trash. Either do the thing, or don’t do the thing. Doing it halfway just makes a different kind of mess.

    I found out a new (new to me at least) bit of cart-return etiquette last year when I was using the handicap parking spaces for a couple months following ankle surgery. Grocery carts double as walking aids for a lot of people with mobility issues while they’re at the store. Many people with those issues will purposely leave their carts in the handicap area as a courtesy for the next person with mobility issues so they can have it right away and not have to struggle all the way to the cart area. So there’s at least one instance where not returning your cart doesn’t make you a horrible person.





  • Any negatives?

    Yeah. You can kill people.

    When that stuff dislodges on the highway it’s not like your car getting hit by a snowball. It’s like having an entire wheelbarrow full of snow hit your car all at once at 50+ mph. Just the weight of it can KO your entire windshield. It’s a super effective way to make someone crash.

    Also, it’s not always just snow. If the snow on your vehicle sat there through a couple of freeze/thaw cycles, there can be a big sheet of ice underneath. If that goes through someone’s windshield it can kill them directly. If you live in a snowy place, pretty much everyone you know has a story about the time they almost died because some asshole was too lazy to clean off the roof of their SUV, or because a huge sheet of ice flew off the top of a semi-trailer.




  • I’m trying to remember this from a podcast I listened to a few years ago that covered this topic, so I might not have the details exactly right, but if I’m remembering correctly there is at least one evolutionary advantage in that there’s a virus (part of the herpes family of viruses, I think) that is asymptomatic and for the most part harmless, except when a woman contracts it for the first time while pregnant, in which case it can be pretty devastating to fetal development. But if the woman gets gradually exposed to the virus before becoming pregnant then her immune system learns to deal with it and it won’t harm the fetus. Of course that doesn’t explain why humans started kissing in the first place, but it could mean that humans who did engage in kissing may have had a significant breeding advantage.


  • That’s how it goes sometimes. The Mines Act of 1842 in the UK didn’t get passed because a bunch of children (some as young as 8 years old) died in a horrific mining accident. It was passed because during the investigation of that accident it became known that the women working in the mine were wearing trousers, and due to the excessive heat in the mines, were working topless in the presence of men. Victorian England wasn’t scandalized by a pile of children’s corpses, but goddamn it, something had to be done about those bare tiddies.