You described it very well. With a good sharp (always important) knife, making radial (pole to pole) cuts is not difficult at all. I find it easier than holding the onion down with my palm and cutting parallel to the board.
Re getting ketchup out of the bottle:
I just swing bottles around with my arm one or two times. Works with ketchup, salad dressing, shampoo, detergent…basically anything. Everything inside ends up at the cap or dispenser. Very fast and effective.
My wife knows not to stand near to me when I tighten the cap on something. (This is an essential step.)
On glass ketchup bottles, you tap on the Heinz logo on the neck. It’s a lost art since squeeze bottles came along.
I try not to proselytize about my hobbies. I understand that just because I find something interesting doesn’t mean other people find it so. So if somebody asks me about my hobbies, I’ll give a brief answer and then let it go unless they ask further questions about it.
So here’s the short version:
“What do you do for fun?”
“I get together with friends and play board games.”
“Like Monopoly or Clue or Risk?”
“Not those particular games but, yes, that kind of thing.”
But here’s the longer answer I could annoy people with:
“Monopoly was published in 1935, Clue in 1943, and Risk in 1957. Look at movies or music that were released in the thirties or forties or fifties and compare them to movies or music being released in 2024. The same kind of changes have happened in board games over the seventy years. The board games people are playing today are very different from Monopoly, Clue, and Risk.”
But that’s just board games. If I want to discuss watching movies or reading history, I just come here and start a thread on the inner meaning of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood or how the Erie Canal fostered the economic development of the United States.
“Grade Up to Elite Cow?”
Wait, what is this neat and effective way? Can you describe it more or link to something?
Young people these days …
Why don’t they put it in toothpaste tubes? In Europe, mayonnaise and mustard routinely come in plastic tubes and if, god forbid, they used ketchup it would too.
The onion cutting method described above seems so obvious that I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t do it. No one taught it to me; I used from the first time I ever tried to dice an onion.
My wife buys sour cream in giant toothpaste tubes. I really like them.
Nevermind…I missed the answer.
(Whack-a-Mole asked about the mirror thing and then edited the question out as I was typing this answer)
The short version is this: we were all taught to aim our side mirrors straight aft, with a small sliver of our door visible. But if you look in your center mirror and side mirror you will see a huge amount of overlap. So, position the side mirrors about 15 degrees outboard and you will now close up the traditionally large side blind spots quite a bit. To do this right, have a friend walk around the car as you make the adjustments to verify you can see them smoothly enter one mirror’s field of view as they leave the other.
It works, but I don’t want to mess with 40 years of shoulder checking reflexes.
No, but I do have The Fox Experiment.
[Hijack] Man, I really wanted to like that game. Backed the premium edition on Kickstarter based on our family’s love for Wingspan, and played it several times–but it just never grabbed us in the way that Wingspan did.
Heaps more wastage in a lot of those tubes. Cut the end off one when you think it’s finished and there will often be a lot more product still inside.
The tubes are aluminum, not plastic. Not the same as the toothpaste tubes.
The only ketchup I’ve seen in aluminum tubes is the single-serving portion. And I think that’s the reason ketchup doesn’t come in aluminum tubes. The portion sizes are much bigger, and ketchup has a different consistency.
If those are the Daisy sour cream tubes, they are quite different from the aluminum tubes used in Europe. Another difference is that the Daisy sour cream tube stands on it’s lid, which would also work for ketchup. The aluminum tubes of mustard and mayonnaise (also tomato paste) do not stand on their lids, unless supported.
Toothpaste tubes, yes. It’s not the same with aluminum tubes which can be squeezed more efficiently. Squeeze keys help.
I waste very little toothpaste. Hold the tube at both ends and drag it firmly across the edge of the counter top, going from the crimped end to the top. If you master this technique you will end up with an amazingly flat toothpaste tube that has a wasted bit about the size of a pencil eraser. The tube ends up looking like you sucked everything out with a vacuum pump.
I store ketchup bottle upside down in the fridge so everything flows pretty easily all the time. When I get to the last bits I take the cap off and tap the rest our on the plate.
I play a lot of D&D since 1974.
And amidst edition wars and WotC hate, I tell everyone that the edition doesnt really matter. You can have fun with any of them, given a good DM and good fellow players. Fortunately I moderate a few FB D&D pages, and we keep edition wars to a minimum. Mind you, if you wanna say you have great fun playing AD&D and see no reason to change- that’s fine.
As an avid gardener and fig collector, I am sure that people groan internally when I slip in my comments about figs. But they sure perk up when I bring in a bunch of fresh figs or fig jam.