I don’t know if it’s still there, but when I visited the town of Ayr in Scotland about 25-ish years ago, they had a playground very similar to that right off of the beach. Everything was large enough to accommodate adults, and I think it may have actually been castle themed. No ball pit though. They did have a thing like a tilted merry-go-round that was at waist height and had no handles. Not sure what it’s called, but it was probably the funnest and most dangerous single piece of playground equipment I think I’ve ever come across. There were about a dozen of us traveling together, and I don’t think a single one of us walked away from that thing without catching a boot to the face at least once.

If the process and tradition of it appeals to you, then sure. You can find a cheap matcha set for under $20 (I think I saw one on Amazon a while ago for $10), so it’s not like you need to spend a ton of money to try it out.

I’m kind of lazy so I use one of those electric milk frothing whisks instead of a traditional bamboo one. But if you use that type of electric frother just be sure to use it in a vessel with high sides and a fair amount of extra room otherwise you’ll be wearing your matcha instead of drinking it.

Been listening to The Meffs a lot lately.

Yeah, black weirdly tends to be easier to see in the dark than some other colors. It often ends up looking darker than the surrounding darkness. Slightly lighter colors like brown and gray don’t contrast with the background as much and are much harder to pick out in the dark. People who have owned a black dog and a brown dog at the same time will have probably noticed that effect. At least that’s where I noticed it.

One element to a good sense of humor that most of the other posts failed to mention is the ability to laugh at yourself.

Lots of people with bad senses of humor think they have a good one because they have a favorite comedian who makes them laugh, or think they have a good sense of humor because they’re quick to laugh at someone else when they do something silly or stupid. But when they’re the person being laughed at for doing something dumb, they’ll become furious and storm off, and maybe hold grudges against people who laughed at them.

Someone with a good sense of humor will be able to see what’s funny about what they did and be able to laugh along with everyone else, even if they feel kind of embarrassed.

Great Britain is the big island of the UK which contains England, Scotland, and Wales. The United Kingdom is Great Britain plus the six counties of Northern Ireland, The Isle of Man, and (I think) some of the islands in the English Channel.

A Briton is a person from Britain.

IDK, man. Canada be weird sometimes.

Yes, it’s its own country.

Canada, along with Australia and a bunch of other former colonies, belong to what’s known as the Commonwealth, of which the British monarch is the head. It’s basically an association of countries that used to be ruled by Britain, but Britain no longer has a say in their laws or how they’re governed.

Australia didn’t have a revolution. Australian independence was a long process that lasted from 1901 to 1986. You may want to check the “The steps to full sovereignty” section of the “History of Australia” wikipedia article.

No, Britain is not all the same country. As previously stated, the island of the Britain is England, Scotland, and Wales, which are separate countries, but members of the United Kingdom, and are governed by the UK Parliament. The six Irish counties that make up Northern Ireland is still part of the UK. The rest of the Ireland, known as The Republic of Ireland, is very much not part of the UK. They did have a revolution, and won independence in 1922.

In the Wizard of Oz, Glenda the “Good” Witch is actually a ruthless drug kingpin.

She used her magic powers to summon a tornado and then merks the Wicked Witch of the East with Dorothy’s house. She then puts WWotE’s shoes on Dorothy in order to make her a target for WWotE’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the West. Glenda then uses Dorothy as a stooge to bump off WWotW, thereby putting herself in control of Oz’s vast fields of opium poppies, and cornering the entire opium trade.

It doesn’t make sense any other way. Glenda could have told Dorothy to use the ruby slippers to get home at literally any point, but instead sends her on a wild goose chase, and uses her as a blunt instrument to take out the only other bases of power remaining in Oz: the WWotW, and the Wizard, who Dorothy exposes as a fraud. Only then does she tell Dorothy to click her heels, and poof: everything is all wrapped up with a bow, and Glenda’s hands are clean. Her two main rivals are dead, and the Wizard is fleeing Oz in disgrace.

It’s some fucking Kaiser Söze level shit.

It’s also how the people who have to actually make the things engineers design look at engineers.

(Source: Am a machinist who has to make the things engineers design.)

Ulysses is a rough one. There are some novels that are so dense that you have to have already read it through once before you can really read it for the first time. I think Ulysses might take three or four.

I started reading it after hearing Robert Anton Wilson talk at length about why he loved the book. He made it sound amazing. And having read it, and read about it, I get why the people who love it really love it. It’s a meticulously crafted, ultra dense, heavily embroidered, masterwork of English literature. You can spend years and years reading and re-reading the book, picking apart layer after layer, and still find new elements to explore, and new threads to pull, which still all end up being perfectly internally consistent. It’s really an amazing literary achievement.

But it fucking sucks to read for the first time.

You need like a companion reference book, the Internet, a French to English dictionary for one of the chapters, and a map of Dublin. It’s not entertainment; it’s a project. And honestly, I’ve found it a lot more interesting to listen to Ulysses experts explaining the book than it is to actually read the book itself.

Brian and Bob were walking through the forest when they came across a set of tracks.

“Those are cougar tracks!” Bob exclaimed.

“Hell, no! Those are coyote tracks.” Brain said.

“I’m tellin’ you, I’ve been out in these woods since I was little, and those are cougar tracks!”

“There’s no cougars in this part of the country. Those are coyote tracks!”

Then they both got hit by a train.

For people who don’t know, the theory of chiropractics is that the light of God somehow shines into the human body through the top of the head, travels down the spine, and on through the nerves. If you can just fix any blockages (aka “subluxations”) in that flow then it will be impossible for disease to exist in the body. Because God’s light.

The founder of chiropractics was told this information by a ghost.

I know some people swear by chiropractic adjustments, but this is information I wish I’d known when I had my back injury because going to a chiropractor set my recovery back by at least three years. And the money I lost to that quack could have paid for not only the legit physical therapist that actually got me feeling better, but probably a decent massage chair too.

Same for me too. Reddit, for all its other faults, is still just about the only place you can still get candid opinions on products in a place where it’s discussed by a large group with a deep knowledge base. Especially with niche things like fountain pens, goodyear-welted boots, and stuff like that.

Not sure how long that’s going to last though. The search engines are already hip to that trick, and even in just the last few months I’ve noticed a change in how many Reddit links I get vs product links when I add Reddit to my search query. Reddit is hip to it too, and with recently becoming a publicly traded corporation they’re probably going to wring every last cent out of that until every post mentioning a product is a bot-infested sewage fire like everything else.

I’m not sure if they’re still around, but PostSecret and the Internet K-Hole were sites you could spend hours on.

If this dude figured out how to lift a full size duty weapon out of a retention holster using nothing but a plastic dino-grabber then he deserves to keep those guns.

The privilege is being able to choose to eat that way out of a sense of morality or fashion rather for the reason that it’s literally all there is to eat. The privilege is being able to turn your nose up at perfectly edible food for no other reason than that it’s got a bit of egg, honey, or butter in it without having to worry about starving to death. The privilege is also having access to such an abundance and variety of food that you can maintain a vegan diet year round and not have to fear that you won’t meet all the calorie, protein, and vitamin requirements you need to stay alive and healthy while much of the world is in a constant struggle to scrape together enough calories of any kind to stay alive.

Crash Worship. They did sort of tribal industrial experimental music from the mid-80s through (I think) the mid-00s. I don’t know if they came out of the OG Burning Man crowd, but they very much had the Burning Man vibe from back when the Burning Man experience still included shooting guns. I saw them play a NYE show at a 1920s-era movie house turned music venue called the Aztlan, and it was bonkers.

The show started with a massive floor-to-ceiling fireball, and kind of escalated from there. There were a lot of drummers and fire performers moving through the crowd flanked by a phalanx of nubile people in various states of undress carrying alcohol whose mission seemed to be to get as many people as possible as drunk as possible as quickly as possible. At one point I was so soaked with kerosene and alcohol that I was genuinely worried about lighting my own cigarette. Fortunately I was shortly put at ease about it when I got hit with a stray firework and didn’t burst into flame.

It was a pretty intense experience. It’s not surprising that Crash Worship has been banned from just about every venue they’ve ever played (and I think maybe some entire cities as well). There’s no way the owners of the Aztlan knew what they were signing up for when they made this booking. I’m glad I got to be there to see it though.

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Same.

I have to imagine that not a single pillow in his house has a pillowcase on it.

Quick LPT from someone who listens to a ton of audio books and podcasts at work: If you access YouTube via Firefox and tap “request desktop site” in the three dots menu and then play your video from there you can listen to the audio with your screen off, or in the background while you use a different app.