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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

V for Vendetta

Things got changed a bit for the movie if you’re only familiar with that

The man is Adam Susan (renamed Adam Sutler in the movie, played by John Hurt) the leader of the ruling Norsefire party, he falls in love with the “Fate” supercomputer that runs the government surveillance system

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.

This feels like a wonderful gift, this video needs to be projected behind every speaker at the next round of protests, with an accompanying message flashing at the bottom saying “Trump posted this himself” à la South Park’s “this what scientologists actually believe”

It’s him literally labeling himself as a king, complete with a crown

Shitting all over America.

What possible angle could you look at this from and say "yes, that is a mature, mentally stable person who should be in charge of anything?

And since most of the media is kind of dropping the ball on this, we need to be sharing this around as something like “Trump posts AI-slop video of himself as a king shitting on America” instead of the bullshit headlines I’m seeing about it.

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?

Just gonna chime in to say check with your local libraries to see what they do have available, and also check with surrounding libraries,

My local library is a small branch of a countywide network of libraries, so I can go check things out from any library in the county.

I was a little surprised to learn that my local branch has mobile wifi hotspots available. They’re nice for families that are struggling to pay for Internet service so their kids can do schoolwork, I’m also thinking about checking one out for road trips and such.

A bigger branch has a pretty impressive library of things available- tools, cookware, board games, small appliances, AV equipment, etc.

One thing I’d really like is vehicles, although I’m sure it would be an absolute liability/insurance nightmare, not to mention the upfront and ongoing costs and such, so I totally I totally understand why it’s not a thing.

I’m lucky that I’ve always been able to borrow a car from my parents when I needed one because mine was in the shop or whatever. Not everyone is so fortunate though, and unless we step up our public transit game, a lot of people need cars to get into work and run errands and such. A small fleet of basic sedans or something that you could check out for a day or two when needed without paying out the ass for a rental would be amazing.

And almost everyone needs to move something big or transport a few people once in a while, so a pickup truck or passenger van in the fleet might be kind of nice.

Even if it’s not totally free, they could be rented out at-cost and not have to turn a profit like regular car rentals.

Anvil firing

You get 2 anvils

Pack some gunpowder between them

Light a fuze

Run

The top one shoots off into the air

And you try not to looney tunes yourself.

American/meat-eater

Bread stays out but is wrapped

Butter stays out in a butter bell (that’s not a common thing in America BTW but they should be)

Some sauces and condiments and such that are packed full of salt and vinegar and such stay out

Leftovers and such go into the fridge after a few minutes to a few hours, there’s not exactly a hard rule here, just kind of based on what feels right and whenever we get around to it. Overnight is too long, with few exceptions if it’s been out that long we’d probably throw it out.

One exception to that is if I make stock, there’s a good chance that’s going to sit out for a good while to cool down. It takes a while to get a big pot of liquid down to a reasonable temperature to put in the fridge. I also figure it’s been simmering for several hours, so odds are there’s no bacteria alive in it, so I throw a lid on it to try to keep it that way, especially when I do it in the pressure cooker because it’s basically been autoclaved at that point and it’s staying in a pretty damn close to totally airtight vessel.

Most vegetables and fruits are fine out on the counter for at least a day or two, and some will last weeks or months depending on temperature, humidity, how much light they get, etc. but most of them last a lot longer in the fridge so that’s where they go. Onions, garlic, potatoes, pineapples, and bananas always live outside of the fridge. Other things like apples, citrus, tomatoes, peppers may go either way depending on how fast I’m planning to use them and how much fridge space I have. Cut-up produce always goes in the fridge.

If you’re dining out getting it hot and fresh from the oven, I’d tend to agree with you

But if you’re getting delivery or takeout, which at least in the US, probably accounts for most pizza consumption, odds are that when you eat your pizza it’s probably been sitting in a box for at least a few minutes, maybe up to an hour or so, soaking up its own steam and juices, and maybe going cold

Which, of course, would change the texture and probably not for the better.

Freeze drying is actually pretty neat

The first step is indeed freezing, basically the same as you would in a regular freezer

But then you take that frozen food, keeping it frozen, and put it in a vacuum chamber.

You might remember from sciences classes in school that different atmospheric temperatures result in water (and other things) freezing or boiling at different temperatures. It’s why water boils faster at a higher altitude (and why some packaged foods and recipes have different instructions if you’re more than X feet/meters above sea level, the air pressure is lower and so water boils at a lower temperature.

You may also have heard the term sublimation, where a solid turns into a gas without melting into a liquid in-between, like dry ice does, which is solid carbon dioxide, and why it’s “dry”

Under a vacuum, ice does the same thing, it turns right into water vapor without melting into water in between.

It actually does this under normal pressure too, but much more slowly. That’s actually a lot of what freezer burn is-the water in your food sublimating away into water vapor. And if you’ve ever left some ice cubes in a freezer for a really long time you might notice they sometimes kind of shrink and get misshapen even though the temperature never got above freezing.

Side note- water actually does kind of a lot of weird stuff when it comes to freezing and melting, in like how given the right conditions, even at normal atmospheric pressure, it can melt or stay liquid well below its freezing temperature, and of course the fact that it expands when frozen.

So the end result is a totally dry, usually pretty shelf-stable product. Because it was frozen, it can retain a lot of it’s flavor that might have been cooked off or evaporated with other drying processes.

Some things also take on an interesting texture from the process because all of space in the food that used to be full of water is now full of air. Freeze dried fruits, for example, tend to be really crisp and crumbly sort of like a chip or a cracker, where dehydrated fruit often can be sort of leathery.

And the vacuum process also has effects on some foods besides just drying them out. Skittles, for example, are sort of sealed by their candy shell, so they expand and pop, sort of like popcorn, due to the water inside of them sublimating and expanding until the shell cracks.

If memory serves me, the marshmallows in lucky charms are freeze-dried, which is why their texture is dry and crunchy instead of gooey and fluffy.

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I’ve largely avoided any major injuries pretty much my whole life, so I don’t have the best frame of reference

Most scrapes, bruises, cuts, sprains and other common injuries are right as rain in a couple days, maybe a week or two if it’s a particularly bad sprain.

I tend to not get sick too often, but I have noticed that when I do as I get older stuff like a sore throat or cough will linger a few days longer than they used to, fever still breaks in a day or two, and I’ll be feeling just fine otherwise, just that little tickle in my throat sticks around for a while.