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Author | Topic: Who's the bigger offender: Conservatives or Liberals? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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Well, when you start out as mentally handicapped as OAnon Betty and then drink your own pee every morning... And she's undoubtedly doing even that wrong. I've heard from reliable sources (ie, the Internet) that drinking your own pee is effective only if you eat lots of asparagus. The more asparagus the better. That'll separate the hard-core believers from the mere dilettantes.
ABE: I just heard Senior Chief Malcolm Nance, momentarily unable to recall her three-name moniker, refer to QAnon-Betty as "Queen Gazpacho." Edited by dwise1, : ABE
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
So my next question was what is he going to do with the gold when the world goes to shit. He truly thinks he will have a valuable commodity. When the world goes to shit gold is going to be worthless, except to idiots like him. I would suggest that Phat have a chat with King Midas. He could neither eat nor drink since everything turned to gold. I'm deliberately leaving his daughter out of this. Edited by dwise1, : explicitly indicating Phat instead of "he"
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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I am willing to bet I could buy more food with a fifth of whisk(e)y in the post-apocalyptic world than Phat could with a pound of gold. Good luck finding a fifth of whisky to start your stockpile. Nearly half a century ago fifths (1/5 gallon = 757ml) were replaced by 750ml bottles. After WWII, German farmers acquired lots of material wealth as the starving city dwellers bartered away their expensive furniture, clothes, jewelry, art objects, precious antique heirlooms, gold, etc for food which the farmers had and were producing. Urban resentment against those farmers persisted for decades.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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Hey, wasn't there a James Bond plot, something about making gold radioactive? That was the Bond movie, Goldfinger. I read the novel over half a century ago, so I forget if that plot point was in the book (Wikipedia reports that the plot was to steal the gold in Fort Knox).
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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One night on Johnny Carson, in the early 70's I think, he was reading from a new book which gave synopses for serials (film or radio or both). He kept reading the cliffhanger depicting certain death for the protagonist and then the next installment would basically just brush that aside. And with every one he read, Johnny's reaction would be a huge head-shaking "What?!?!" that got bigger with each one.
The only one I can still remember (why did so much of my life happen half a century ago?) was for Kit Carson, I think. The cliffhanger was that Kit was tied up in a boxcar and the bad guy throws in a bundle of dynamite and the boxcar explodes. The next episode starts with "Escaping the boxcar, Kit made his way ... ". Then one night in Orange County, Calif, about 3 in the morning an earthquake hit which was strong enough to wake us up. I had grown up with earthquakes so as soon as I knew there was no damage I just wanted to get back to sleep for work the next day. But my wife was from Chicago so she freaked out and then she made sure to freak out our two young sons so everybody was on our bed freaking out and there was no way I was going to get any sleep. She turned on the TV for the news of where the earthquake was, but it took a while for the newsroom to set up. In the meantime we ended up watching a Tarzan serial that had been spliced together as a single film -- I'm pretty sure it was The New Adventures of Tarzan (1935) starring Herman Brix. I recognized it from a film series in the mid-70'sat my university where they started out showing the serial as a serial. In the scene in question, one installment ended with the bad guy getting the drop on Tarzan and shooting him point-blank in the face (he aimed and fired directly at the camera which was representing Tarzan's perspective). Then the next installment started with Tarzan ducking and grappling with the guy -- actually, the previous installment ended with the pistol firing point-blank and the next installment started with the preceding scene leading to a side shot of the duck-and-grapple with the shot going high.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
The plot in the novel was reportedly to steal the gold. The movie changed it to making it radioactive.
I've seen the layout of the vaults on a TV documentary show. A central shaft into the ground with a multiple levels. On each level vaults radiate out; ie, in a central space you see maybe 6 to 8 steel doors and an elevator. Behind each steel door is a vault room filled with gold ingots. Basically, as I recall, they start piling the ingots on the far wall and fill the room. The walls are done in institutional tile from the 1930's, so no gleaming metal and catwalks. They described that the gold is inventoried periodically which involves moving it all out of each vault room to count it before putting it back in. The logistics involved in just moving it from each vault are involved and slow, so trying to get it all out in a Goldfinger-novel-style robbery would have been virtually impossible, especially within the short time frame they would have had.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
I have a still! Teach a man to fish! I hope you know how to keep methanol out of the mix (usually the first vapors boiled off, as I understand it).
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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I had a still in high school, made apricot brandy. Somebody set up a distilling experiment in the high school chemistry lab, since that is a valid chemistry technique (eg, in Outlander we see Claire distilling ether). Nobody was allowed to drink it, but I remember a strong bread smell.
Yep, the temperature of the vapor actually changes as each fraction boils off. I've been having a lot of thoughts about that of late, one of my many Gedankenexperimenten. First, there was a short series on Netflix, Chug, in which the owner of a rum distillery (reminded me of the actor, Jake Johnson) traveled the world learning about (and getting wasted on) the local traditional alcoholic drinks. In the Czech Republic he visited a Schnapps distillery which they had him man. The boiler and condenser were connected by a hose. At first you leave them disconnected so you can smell the vapor coming out of the boiler. The methanol (bad poisonous) boils off first, followed by the ethanol (good poisonous -- it's still slow poison, but it's what we want), so the moment you stop smelling methanol and start smelling ethanol then you connect the hose to the condenser.
Chug was on Netflix long ago and my Roku search cannot find it anywhere now. It was just six episodes, which as I said was mainly him researching into traditional drinks and drinking customs around the world, which invariably led to him getting wasted. But the interesting one was in Austria and Eastern Europe. Besides the Schnapps, he sampled various forms of corrected coffee (ie, sweetened with booze) in Cafe Sperl (personal memories of that place; it's one of the settings in the series, Vienna Blood) and learned the story of liqueurs. Monks would grow and use herbs as medicine, but herbs wilt and spoil. When we learned of distilled alcohol from the Muslims (aqua vitae), the monks found that the alcohol preserved the herbs, very greatly extending its shelf life. However, you couldn't drink the stuff, so they added sugar and flavorings to help the medicine go down. Out of that grew a variety of liqueurs, many of which were associated with monasteries. In addition, he encountered a holiday Schnapps based on a family recipe including pine and spices, etc, resulting in Xmas in a shot glass. On the technical side, I'd been contemplating phase changes. When boiling a liquid, after it reaches its boiling point then the liquid stops getting hotter since all additional heat just converts more of the liquid to vapor more quickly thus holding the liquid at the boiling point. Same thing with melting ice in that additional heat only serves to melt the ice but not get the liquid hotter so ideally as long as you still have ice in your drink it will remain cold. That is what we were taught in high school chemistry class. In practical terms, we depend on water's phase change to cook foods at a constant temperature (ie, 212°F) by boiling it. Just boiling water keeps the cooking temperature constant, but since the phase change of oil is much higher we need to use a thermometer to control the temperature when cooking with oil. Also, in preparation for my grandsons' future kitchen safety training, I cooked a sealed meal in the microwave and immediately inserted my thermometer through the plastic: the temperature of the steam was read at about 212°F. A temperature of 140°F can be enough to scald you, which is why you need to be careful when removing the film from microwaved food.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
I did a lot of library research in high school about the techniques of making many of the common forms of alcohol. It was the subject of an English class oral report (my English teacher was married to my chemistry teacher, so I lost easy access to supplies after that). Kind of reminds me of an early episode of Breaking Bad where they "go shopping" in the school's chemistry supply room to build their cooking setup.
I use distilled water and other flavoring ingredients to dilute the final distillate down to a drinkable level. Which I keep hearing is the origin of our mixed drinks, mainly from Prohibition when the booze was of such horribly poor quality that they needed to mix it with something (or lots of somethings) just to make it drinkable. I also heard decades ago on NPR one of the origin stories for the margarita, this one told by the grandson or so of the purported inventor. Hollywood stars loved to go down to Ensenada to party, which included drinking tequila. One, reportedly Marjorie Main, wanted to drink but she couldn't tolerate tequila straight. So the bar owner diluted the tequila down and named the new drink after her. Alton Brown offers a different origin story which at least accounts for the main ingredients that go into it. Personally, I never went through a bar phase so I never learned mixed drinks. Instead, my drinking is normally ale, red wine, or straight tequila, scotch (single-malt Islay), or bourbon. In Germany I discovered Schnapps, which are unaged brandies -- I prefer Obst (apples and pears), Kirsch (cherries) is acceptable, but Korn (grain) tasted like rubbing alcohol ("better quality" vodka, such as Ketel One, also rub me the wrong way with that same isopropyl taste). Cordials are OK, but only in small quantities, plus I have virtually no experience with them (I once tried St. Germaine, which was rather strange). Trying to find Schnapps in the USA has always been difficult. First "shnaps" is just grain alcohol mixed into some sweet syrup so it's not the same thing -- "Peppermint Schnapps" was the first clue. The best I could do was Hiram Walker's Kirschwasser, which was OK. Then for several years BevMo started carrying imported Obstwasser, but it's been a few years since I've seen it there. Where one of my ponderings about phase changes led me was something like this (using the temperatures you just gave):
Of course, it's not that simple, but I think that's generally a good way to think about it. I arrived at that while writing the "how things work" section of my page on Kent Hovind's bogus solar-mass-loss claim (Kent Hovind's Solar Mass Loss Claim). Basically:
I offered that to justify examining hydrogen fusion and not, say, iron fusion, because there's no known way for the solar core's temperature to increase to anything remote close to their trigger temperatures. And then while reviewing my mental notes (instead of just falling asleep at night) it occurred to me that the same basic ideas -- including the role and non-role of phase changes in cooking with water/steam and oil -- must also apply in distilling.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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My friend, a tech writer, had done some bar waitressing in her past. One night while we waited for a table I went over to the bar to get us a couple glasses of wine. When I returned, she simply commented, "You haven't spent much time in bars, have you?" It was that obvious, I guess. Just about the only time I had spent in a bar had been for and supporting dance classes in a bar that had a dance floor. One night the teacher asked for me to order her a vodka and water telling me to ask for it out of the well ... then she had to explain well drinks to me. I was in my mid-60's before I had ever even heard of that, let alone learned about it.
I don't even know what to order when mixed drinks are called for. Last time with a drinks-dinner-dessert Meetup group for drinks I just ordered soda water since I knew that I was wanting wine with dinner. (I keep all my problem drinking at home)
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
Phat writes:
Burg = city, berg = mountain. Ice Burg I was wondering why he was talking about an "Ice Fortress". Maybe it was built next to a Scandanavian ice hotel. And for the edification of English speakers, "Burg" and "Berg" are pronounced differently. Most other European languages do not reduce their vowels to grunts.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
A family friend once offered me a taste of her "Apple-tini". Tasted horrible! And that's from someone who always drinks distilled spirits straight.
You may have heard of "smoky martinis" (by whatever name they use). When I saw one at BJ's it was a martini with a grape-sized piece of dry ice in it to create "smoke" spilling out of the glass. Purely visual effects, though it may have kept the drink cold and might have even carbonated it a bit. According to Google, a smoky martini should be a scotch martini using an Islay scotch (which have a distinctly smoky taste from the peat smoke used to dry the malt -- it's my favorite kind of scotch) such that it's the smokiness of the scotch that makes it "smoky", not cheap tricks. Another friend suggested scotch martinis. Basically it just scotch prepared as a martini, but the advantage is that you get more scotch in a martini than you do as its own drink. I tried gin once, but found it too fruity (like St Germaine was to flowery). I also don't like the fruitiness of Belgian Witbieren.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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When the topless waitress brought our drinks ... In 1970, Alan Funt of "Candid Camera" fame made a movie, What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? in which "Funt secretly records people's reactions to unexpected encounters with nudity or sexuality in unusual situations." One scene I remember (why is everything I remember half a century ago?) was a truck-stop diner that switched to topless waitresses for a day but without telling the customers beforehand. A few truckers are sitting at a table, the topless waitress approaches the table from behind one guy, she asks them what they want, he glances over seeing her for the first time and immediately answers automatically, "Milk" ... and then realizes what had just happened.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8
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Not just abortion rights.
As I understand, this decision is based on the privacy-rights arguments made in Roe v. Wade being flawed and invalid. A looming problem is that several other of our rights are based on the same privacy-rights arguments; eg, access to birth control, same-sex marriage, inter-racial marriage. Once this domino goes down, the Republican culture wars will go after the next dominos in line. We have already seen Republican office holders going after birth control.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5930 Joined: Member Rating: 5.8 |
All I get is a "Microsoft Start" page and a news feed, not what you're linking to.
What did it say?
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