I’m married and New Year’s Eve is our Anniversary. I do not think we have ever gone out to celebrate 3 times over 38 years. Because it ain’t worth it. Better to stay home and enjoy the rib eye steaks or wild game supper that I make for us at home. Add a glass or two of wine, and it’s perfect.

Plus the next morning, I don’t need to remember how I got home-- IF I got home-- or how to use socks and underwear.

Bars might be fun for the young, but only the young.

Solitaire and Mines it is then! Well, maybe a bit of Mahjong too.

Edit: Hey wait a minute! I got FreeDoom too! An eternity of gaming!

The reverence and fear of cast iron cooking pots and pans is stupid on both sides. People have been using cast iron under every condition from the big fire place in a castle’s kitchen to a fire pit in a peasant’s hovel to open fires outdoors to Michelin Star restaurants in Paris and London. And they cooked EVERYTHING in it because it’s what they had and all they had. There is no mystery to seasoning and care of cast iron. Just like there is little to fear from cooking with it.

Those that do worship in the church of cast iron-- just cook in it. There is nothing sacrosanct about it. If your Great Grandmother didn’t worry about it, why should you? Any damage you can do it can be repaired quickly and easily. So get over yourselves.

And those that fear cast iron cookery, get over it…They are often the same ones that are fearful of micro plastics getting ingested and yet have no care or concern while cooking with plastic cutting boards and utensils in plastic coated cookware.

Lots of ethnic restaurants that the back of the house is staffed by illegal immigrant Hispanics. It seems they can pretty much out cook everyone.

Making bacon.

Same reason people go to comicons or music concerts or protests. People just want to be with others who believe in and like the same things as they do. It’s a pretty simple and basic human behavior.

Violence is always a valid answer. It’s just not always the best answer. The problem with violence is it’s been proven time and time again to be impossible to control and hold to a limited use since there are no cool heads at that point. Nor do specific targets exist-- just collateral damage.

And no successful revolutionary has ever had a sound plan for after the victory beyond “I want the power now.” And they can either hold the power or not. But the idea of “for the good of the people” gets put to the side pretty quickly.

The issue I have is not that " You don’t need to reply." I don’t if I don’t care about you and your ignorance. Experience will teach you soon enough. But I have more than once provided detailed answers on subjects that I’m well versed and experienced in. Only to be insulted because the answer I provided didn’t fit what the person wanted to hear.

And when that answer pertains to a life threat level activity, then I can’t help you if you reject the answer. So hey if you choose to put an unknown 200+ year old pipe bomb next to your head and pull the trigger, then Ok it’s not my accident scene. And I’m no longer concerned if you live through the experience or not.

Oh god, I thought a wooden stake had been driven through Jeeve’s heart…

Yep, just like Kleenex, or Xerox, (a faded term for mimeograph/photocopy), Google has become a generic verb/term for search in virtually every language now. To google something is synonymous with search. It no longer implies a specific search engine. (I use Ghostery private search myself). Google has lost the war on their name and “It’s a Good Thing^tm”

But there does seem to be a greater amount of “search entitlement” these days for even the easiest of problems. People as a very general rule don’t seem to want to be bothered by the need to learn things on their own. They expect others to provide them all the answers in an effortless format.

I’ve even provided detailed answers to people on some ‘life threat level’ activities that were rejected because I didn’t simply reaffirm their ignorant and misguided thoughts in looking for shortcut answers.

If I am in that minority, 1/3 is a pretty large minority. That’s a pretty wide brush to paint with don’t you think?

Lubbock is considered one of the most conservative cities in Texas. And the unit conversions from US Freedom Units are an indirect poke at their conservative values. I often do the same for smug metric system using liberals-- see the US miles to nautical miles conversion rather than kilometers.

Remember kiddies: All measurement systems are made up scales by some random dude that thought it was a good idea at the time. No one of them is better than another.

Or it more like “you gotta do what you gotta do.” If it’s all that’s accessible, then it’s really not the virtue you might think it is.

Nah, you already know the problem, you just need to self medicate.

Well, at least it’s one thing they are actual experts in…

My money is on fusion before proper socialism.

There is always someone willing to twist the rules and game the system to get more money and power than everyone else. The 1% have always existed and so have the worker class. It will always shake out to that.

The nearest mall is a mere 50 miles away and I never go there. And yet I get painted with the same “fuck pickup trucks” brush right along with those that buy them as a mall cruiser.

While my truck does have a short bed, it pulls my 24,000lbs/11,000Kg tandem axle tilt bed trailer just fine. Which is more important to me than hauling groceries or people with it.

Plus the 4-wheel drive matters a lot when the roads have 6+ in/15cm of snow and it’s only 2 miles/1.7 nautical miles to the nearest paved and perhaps plowed road or when I need to drive down a logging road.

***The metric and navel conversion of measurements was done for those people living in Lubbock Tx.

I wash my hands for nearly a minute. But most of that time is spent trying to get those stupid no touch faucets to work.

They often are partially recycled material. But recycled paper isn’t like recycling aluminum or steel. There are limits to how often and how much of the cycled material you can add back to make useful paper products.

But paper towels can and does make great compost as most gardeners know. And a properly run landfill is a compost pile. But you need to keep the nasty garbage out.