The first cars I remember having as a kid were literally the two Pintos at the top of this ad, in those exact colors. My dad drove the brown two-door, my mom drove the blue station wagon.
The Ford Pinto is, of course, infamous for bursting into flames in crashes because its gas tank would rupture. My mom would sometimes use my dad’s car, and one Sunday after church, she drove it to a local bakery with my brother and I in the back seat. The small parking lot of the bakery had a slight slope down to the street, which was one of the main thoroughfares through town. The car was a stick shift, and when Mom got out she forgot to set the parking brake. She must have left it in neutral, which probably wouldn’t have been a big deal except my brother and I were rough-housing in the back seat, and apparently caused just enough movement to get the car rolling slowly backwards into the street. Gas tank first.
I didn’t know about the Pinto’s reputation, but I was scared anyway of course. I climbed between the seats and honked the horn to get my mom’s attention as the car came to rest with the back end hanging out into the lane. Thankfully it was a very slow roll, and it was a quiet Sunday, so the cars on the road were able to stop before anyone hit us.
Mom came running out of the bakery and drove the car back up into the parking spot; I don’t remember if she’d gotten her order yet or not. But it’s remained a funny story in my family ever since.
FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, is often cited in the media as a neutral advocacy group that fights for free speech on college campuses. However, it primarily spreads the word that conservative speech is under attack by illiberal liberals. It has been highly successful at persuading both left and right wing people that there is a full blown crisis out there.
FIRE, however, is funded by the Charles Koch and Bradley Foundations. Their politics are akin to that of the old John Birch Society. Universities they consider hostile to far-right conservatives or billionaire business interests often have their funding threatened by allied politicians.
The former president of FIRE was David French. He said his purpose was to “restore the marketplace of ideas to university campuses,” but it was hard to believe considering he was Pat Robertson’s lawyer.
As of 2022 this organization is now known as the “Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression” to reflect its intent to go beyond just universities, but their mission and their backing is still the same.
A lot of billboards up about FIRE here in Chicago, including at Midway Airport. Caveat emptor.
i mean this in the gentlest way possible: you need to eat vegetables. you need to become comfortable with doing so. i do not care if you are a picky eater because of autism (hi, i used to be this person!), you need to find at least some vegetables you can eat. find a different way to prepare them. chances are you would like a vegetable you hate if you prepared it in a stew or roasted it with seasoning or included it as an ingredient in a recipe. just. please start eating better. potatoes and corn are not sufficient vegetables for a healthy diet.
Need it to be easier?
baby carrots (good dipped in ranch)
Celery sticks (add some peanut butter or cream cheese for extra flavor and protein)
Broccoli (good with ranch, cheese, or salt/pepper/butter)
Canned peas (you can microwave in a microwave-safe bowl. Good with salt/pepper/butter)
Bell peppers (cut into strips, good with cream cheese)
Canned green beans (can be microwaved in microwave-safe bowl. Good with salt/pepper/butter)
Hummus (good with crackers or tortilla chips)
Salsa (good with tortilla chips)
Guacamole (good with tortilla chips)
Need it in something?
Can’t see it:
Hummus
salsa
Guacamole
Can see but disguised flavor (can usually be found store bought or done at home and use different veggies):
Dressed up ramen - just toss in some random veggies in ramen of your choice. Pretty much everything I’ve tried goes fine with it.
Sweet and sour pork (haven’t tried it but chicken should be fine in place of pork)
Texture problems:
Need it soft:
Hummus
Salsa
Guacamole
Cooked carrots
Avocados
Beans (personally I prefer black beans and canned baked beans)
Peas (make sure to cook well, great value brand has the softest peas I’ve tried)
Cooked broccoli (note: it does smell bad while cooking)
Cooked asparagus (note: also smells bad while cooking)
Cooked zucchini and squash (good together but can be eaten separate)
You can also puree most vegetables and eat with a spoon or use them as a dip
Needs to be crunchy:
Raw carrots
Raw celery
Raw bell peppers
Salad (remember you can put whatever you want in it! Even if that means no lettuce)
Most veggies are okay raw, and are usually very crunchy
Veggies google says stay crunchy after lightly cooking:
Snap peas
Brussel sprouts
Cabbage
Water chestnut
Bamboo shoots
Broad texture tips:
You can change textures by eating raw, cooking, chopping, pureeing, etc
You can separate different textures to use in different ways (ie using broccoli tops in a soup and eating the bottoms raw)
It also really helps to think about why you dislike a vegetable. I found that I am scared of green foods so I like to use those veggies for ingredients in things they are well hidden for. I’ve also learned that watching something while eating helps because then I’m not looking at the gross green things. When possible, I also like to get help hiding it (ie using cream of celery soup in my chicken and dumplings).
Also a lot of us grew up with vegetables mostly being prepared by boiling or steaming. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it can create unpleasant (mushy) textures. Try roasting or air frying to see if that helps change the texture or flavor to one that works better for you.
A favorite for me is a can of corn, drained, heated with butter, and black pepper.
Most vegetables will taste good and retain a pleasant texture if thinly sliced and tossed in a pan with some oil or butter for a couple of minutes (like a stir-fry but with just one ingredient). I cannot handle very-cooked mushy (and often slimy and/or stringy) greens at all, which is the only way I ever ate them growing up, so I used to think I just hated spinach and its pals. But no actually I love spinach, I just don’t like it overcooked. Hot (very) oil - toss with spinach - cover and lower heat to almost off - wait 4-5 minutes - eat.
If you want to learn to enjoy the thicker greens, like chard or kale, they do better in things, preferably with a strong flavor. I have been making variants on this meal for (holy shit) almost twenty years now:
@me3dia I wonder whatever happened to the guy who wrote that.
I literally made that dish again last night. While it may have been the last meal of a notoriously brutal mob boss, it’s a very traditional Italian dish that stands up to endless variation — it’s practically designed to handle substitutions. Don’t have escarole? No worries, spinach, chard, kale, even beet greens work just as well. Prefer a different bean? No problem; we use chickpeas instead of cannellini on occasion. Don’t like sausages? Fine, cut up some chicken or other meat, or even just a different veggie. Sautéed mushrooms are great. Want it to be a soup? Great, just add everything to however much broth you want and add some salt and pepper to taste.
Lots of dishes lend themselves to substitutions like this, especially if they’re just a few ingredients. If you like a dish but wish it was a little different, more to your liking, just change it. Nobody is going to come tell you you did it wrong. Recipes are great and helpful, but they’re often just a snapshot — one particular version of an infinitely variable concept of a meal.
So, I discovered a dumb little hack to fix the persistent problem I have of posts getting “stuck” in my Following feed. When it happens, I go to that account and unfollow and refollow it. For whatever reason, that clears out the clog and I start getting newer posts again.
Fun fact: after the American Physical Society held their 1986 annual meeting at the MGM Grand, the entire city of Las Vegas politely asked APS to never, ever come back.
Was it because the physicists were super-smart MIT-blackjack-team forerunners who took the casino for everything it was worth? Actually, the complete opposite: they didn’t gamble. At all. After all, they knew their statistics. Most of them were broke grad students who had no intention of throwing away their stipends on fundamental misunderstandings of Poisson processes. As a result the casino gaming floor was dead. Sometimes the winning move really is not to play.
Me the only time I’ve ever been to Vegas - had one beer and didn’t gamble a cent. Funny thing is, they happily welcome back hacker cons, and you’d think hackers would be at LEAST as aware of probability. Apparently not!
When I was a kid living in LA, we went to Vegas pretty regularly, since it was only about 4 hours away. My parents would find coupons in the LA Times in the off season and we’d go for a few days. Our whole family could stay in one of the fancy Strip hotels for like $20 a night, and there were $5 all-you-could-eat buffets with actually good food. Plus the arcades were amazing. And so was the hiking! Which is what we were really there for. Red Rock Canyon, with all its tiny caves that you can easily climb up to, is amazingly fun when you’re a little kid. Our vacations were very much subsidized by gamblers.
Relatedly, one time when I was a kid, a large chunk of my extended family went on a cruise to see an eclipse. Everyone on the cruise was scientists or science hobbyists. The crew didn’t know what to do with us! Everyone wanted the 6 pm dinner, no one wanted the 10 pm dinner that you had to dress up for. The casino was empty for the entire week. A group of passengers demanded that all the lights on the deck be turned off at night, even the pretty decorative ones, for at least an hour and preferably more, every single night. One night at dinner, my grandmother saw dolphins out the window, and as word spread the entire dining room emptied, even though it was still the middle of dinner. And that’s not even getting into how my grandfather started talking to the cleaning staff (who were not supposed to talk back) and found out they wouldn’t be let off work to see the eclipse, and within hours had formed an entire committee to go with him to demand to speak to the captain about this mistreatment of the staff.
There are… a lot of places where large groups of scientists probably aren’t welcome a second time.
All of those places should be regularly subjected to large groups of scientists.
still cannot believe that they aired this on live television then continued to be upset about people shipping destiel
This just popped up on my For You page. I have never watched an episode of Supernatural and I’m not going to start now, so I’m just going to assume that this is Booger from Revenge of the Nerds, later in his life.
Of course, Booger’s real name was Charles De Mar; his high school exploits were chronicled in Better of Dead. He was a key witness in a case against drug dealers who were trying to sell a mountain of snow, so he went into the federal witness protection program, moved to Chicago’s North Shore and changed his name to Miles Dalby. There he again got tangled up in some risky business, so when he graduated, the feds changed his name to Dudley Dawson and shipped him off to Adams College with a full ride. There he fell into a deep depression and both his grades and his personal hygiene suffered.
After narrowly avoiding rape charges while in a college fraternity, among other hijinks, Booger once again changed his name and moved to LA. The newly minted Herbert Viola finds work through a temp agency, where he eventually becomes a junior detective. He continues moonlighting as a marijuana dealer for pocket cash, though.
Viola sticks with the detective gig for a good long while, eventually becoming the grizzled character we see here. Made comfortable by the steep fees he charges his Beverly Hills clientele but ravaged by booze, pills and women, he’s decided to write his memoir — naturally he’s sold the film rights to a certain production company.
Viola has a God-given gift for prose, inventive and compelling. The way he weaves the threads of his life story together while seeming to remain detached, like a ghost or angel floating above it all, is uncanny. Some might even call it supernatural.
