What kind of plug is that? Type I should have slanted blades on the bottom, right?

This will be interesting. McDonald’s seems to be opening with “nothing is setting prices for them!” which seems a little disingenuous if it’s true that it’s being pushed from corporate and the franchisees have to account for deviations. I almost feel like the stronger argument would be that McDonald’s allocates franchises in a way that ensures they’re not direct competitors, mostly with geographic exclusivity. For this purpose, it would seem the “competition” is really other fast food restaurants. A variation of argument is how, for instance, Sirius and XM satellite radio got their merger approved: “XM is not my only competition, radio, CDs, iPods, and even this crazy new thing of streaming audio over a cell phone connection… that’s our competion.”

The last grandchild (i.e. no “greats”) of John Tyler, the tenth president of the United States, died in 2025. For comparison, Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president in the 1860s.

You’ll get no argument here, but I have a Subaru Outback, not that Ford-looking rectangle.

I just watched a slightly boomerbait youtube video where a bunch of English high school kids try American barbecue and sides, and apart from the sweet tea, the only thing most of them disliked was the cornbread, though to be fair half of them decided that because it looked like cake it was supposed to taste like cake.

Silly Brits. The stuff that tastes like cake is the stuff that looks like bread.

That reminds me: Lanterns is really good.

Star Trek Replicator Chicken fingers. It looks perfect and is always the same, but it’s the type of place where somebody probably got thrown out of a window for suggesting that a pinch of black pepper be put into the recipe. The sauce is pretty decent, but I hope you like it because it’s utterly necessary. Good lemonade too. Founder leans right, but not “Cathy-family” right.

If you live somewhere with a Layne’s Chicken, that’s way better. Popeye’s is generally better too, though it’s traditional fast food grimy versus “pretend we’re fast-casual” veneer that a lot of the chicken places like to do.

She needs to up her game: do it indoors on mats that her fellow competitors will need to use for pushups.

Wow, Gen X and the early Millennials are really aging!

Probably not, but it’s admittedly odd to verify that a home furnishing is obviously also a lump of seasoning.

Ted Lasso has it right: pigeon sweat.

Only exception for me is southern-style sweet tea where the tannins make the 'beetus juice taste a little caramel-esque.

Sure, but kinda ALL beer is an acquired taste, and frankly I don’t think I’ve ever thought, “I sure do want a tasty beverage and don’t care about the alcohol content” and ended up drinking beer. Even if you’re not getting drunk, the alcohol is the point, and everything else is mitigation.

That said, when I am feeling like a little bit of alcohol, I like a nice malty dark beer, stouts of course, but even a simple schwarzbier dark lager can do the trick. A very dry cider is even better though, edging close to the point where I might actually pick it purely for taste.

Yes, but literally three quarters of the US presence is on Okinawa. Just saying I think Tokyo is okay with that, as they get a the full military force multiplier with, from their perspective, a 75% discount on awful American behavior because the Ryukus are physically isolated and culturally distinct.

The August report, titled “Fracture From Within,” was compiled by experts in the CIA’s Red Cell, according to two U.S. sources who described the contents of the report to Drop Site News. The Red Cell, which is the unit responsible for providing “alternative analysis” within the agency, produced the assessment through a combination of open source information and U.S. intelligence… The CIA’s “red teams” are tasked with developing analysis and ideas that challenge prevailing assumptions and expose groupthink or blind spots that can take hold within the intelligence apparatus.

Basically, this is “what’s the weirdest shit that is kinda plausible if things don’t go how our consensus expects.” Useful I assume, but by definition unlikely.

Bit of a square, though.

Although building on that, I think the “Mainland” Japanese have been pretty content to have the Americans corralled on one little island (Post WW2, it was bases on the home islands that were shut down), with their easily othered country-cousins the Okinawans being the ones who have to deal with the American troops day-to-day, many of whom are dumb kids on their first tour. I can guarantee you that neither my dad in the 60s nor my brother in the 90s was interested in good-faith cultural exchange while stationed there with the Marines.

That ain’t no wagon.

signed,

Subaru crew.

Interesting as well that litre/liter isn’t even a “proper” SI unit; it’s just a nickname for a cubic decimetre/decimeter held over from France’s original metric system.

I also like to imagine that the path to working for the BIPM is not always a glorious one: “Jacques, you have spent the last three years of your post-doctoral fellowship trying to settle on the units you wish to use in your abstract. We think we have found the perfect place for your skillset…”

How do they know Christa McAuliffe had dandruff?

They found her head and shoulders on the beach.

Dark shit for an elementary school, but we were brutal.

Yup. In any lotsa-kids area, they’re everywhere, and everybody drives really slow because of it, but with 20 times the kids out and about, it’s not unusual at all that there’d be two or three times more fatalities.