No, we just peel them the hard way.
I used to peel a banana from the top. Once someone mentioned peeling from the bottom, so I gave it a try. It’s a lot easier.
My mother’s kitchen sink had one of those built-in soap dispensers, which she liked. Until one day, the dispenser bottle broke or leaked dish soap all over the inside of the cabinet. Rather than replacing the bottle, my brother installed a pipe that leads to a large bottle of dish soap on the floor of the cabinet. Now, it’s never necessary to refill the bottle.
There’s a story of Joe Walsh proudly telling George Harrison he mastered the solo in “Nowhere Man”. It was actually a duet with George and John on the record. I always wondered why he wouldn’t just think it was George double tracking.
I remember seeing this story in an old issue of the Reader’s Digest when I was pretty young – so, late 50s or early 60s – only it was a truck stuck under an overpass, and the kid said “Let the air out of the tires.” Maybe there are other variations out there.
I was visiting a friend and noticed that her refrigerator opened onto the wall next to it instead of into the kitchen. I borrowed a screwdriver and flipped around the doors. She had no idea that refrigerator doors were reversible, and had been using it that way for 2 years.
Doesn’t that leave you with a peeled avocado with a pit in the middle? How do you avoid getting it all over your hands when you remove the pit?
I use Cervaise’s method. It works quickly and easily. And if you just want to eat the avocado without using it in a recipe, you can use a spoon to scoop it directly out of the skin.
I have one of these avocado tools. The knife is serrated plastic which works very well for cutting avocado skin but is impossible to cut yourself with. The three blades in the center work better than a knife for grabbing the pit, without risking damaging a good knife by slamming it into a pit. I don’t really use the slicer thingie but I’m very happy with the way the other two features work.
I was once using a hacksaw to saw off the top few inches of a metal gatepost in a chain-link fence (I don’t remember exactly why I was doing this). The post was maybe 3 inches diameter and there was a finial thing on top of the post. I was cutting horizontally a few inches below the finial. After laboriously cutting about half way through the post, it became clear that the post was not hollow as I had thought; it felt like it was solid metal. After even more work I had reached about 3/4 way through the post, and pulled the saw out to take a break. I put my hand on the finial and to my surprised it moved a little. I grabbed the finial and it lifted right off the post, along with the tail that had protruded down into the post and which I’d been unnecessarily sawing through.
That’s funny!
I wanted to replace a temperature sensor on my lawn tractor. It was threaded into the transaxle case.
A 22 mm socket and ratchet would normally remove it. But there was a wire coming out of the sensor, right in the center. It was a long wire that went… somewhere. So I couldn’t use a socket. (My plan was to remove the sensor, cut the wire about 12 inches from the sensor, and then make a splice when I install the new sensor. I didn’t want to cut the wire at the body in case I needed to use the old sensor for some reason.)
So I grabbed a 22 mm open end wrench. But I hate open end wrenches, because they only grab a couple corners, and you risk rounding them off.
So I took a closed end wrench and cut a slot in it using a hacksaw. I didn’t want to do this, obviously, since it ruins the wrench, but I didn’t have any other choice. But it worked - the wire went through the slot, and I was able to remove the sensor with the wrench.
It was then that I discovered the sensor wasn’t “hardwired”; there was an electrical pin at the center of the sensor, and the wire/connector simply pressed onto the pin. All I had to do was pull on the wire, and it would have come off.
I was hiking around a lake with a friend, when we observed a man laboriously carrying sand bags down to his canoe from a parking area high above
Friend asked him why, and he explained that when he was paddling by himself it really helped to have some weight in the bow of the canoe.
“Yeah, I’ve found that myself,” she said. “But I’ve usually just carried a few big, empty plastic jugs and filled them with lake water.”
He just stood and stared for a few seconds before whispering, “oh my God!”
FWIW I’ve encountered that tale several time with the solo being “And Your Bird Can Sing” and the Beatle being Ringo (Joe Walsh’s one-time brother-in-law and All-Starr Bandmate).
Same happened to me with my brother in law. He’s a good cook, but did not know about the easy way to scoop out an avocado.
If I had to peel them, I wouldn’t eat them.
Preach it! Those are the best moment of teaching bar none.
I’ve got an Excel story, too.
I’m self-taught with spreadsheets but enjoy them. If you hired me for my spreadsheet abilities you’d be really disappointed, but if you hired me for anything else you’d be delighted; I’m way better than most people and way worse than people who actually know what they’re doing.
Anyway, I was trying to help our school cafeteria staff by designing a spreadsheet that would communicate which students wanted which lunches. Each day the cafeteria offered two lunch choices, and by 9 am they needed to know how many lunches of each type to make.
The spreadsheet had to meet a few criteria:
- It had to be easy enough to use that teachers with no spreadsheet knowledge would use it.
- It had to be useable on a touchscreen where students could enter their choices.
- It had to communicate easily to cafeteria staff how many lunches to make.
The setup was pretty simple: student names in the first column, the second and third columns headed with the day’s lunch choices. Students would tap the row with their name and the cell under the choice they wanted and enter “1”. A formula at the bottom of each column totaled the number of “1s” in the column; and as a bonus showed how many students had made their lunch choice.
All good–except that different classes had different numbers of students. A class with 14 kids needed that “Total” line on the 15th row, but a class with 22 kids needed the “Total” line on the 23 row. I could put it on the 25th row for all classes, but then there’d be a bunch of blank space, and it looked ugly and made it less simple to use, and what if someone got a really big class?
I played with a lot of options and did a bunch of Googling, looking for ways to make the formula appear on the next empty row, before I finally found the solution. Can you guess it?
I put the “Total” line at the top of the page, not at the bottom.
Never in a million years. Good job!
Back in 2018 I stayed at Burg Reichenstein on a trip up the Rhine in Germany. Carrying a 40 lb backpack. This was, up to that time, the hottest week in the history of Germany. We got off the train and walked up the main street to the base of the castle and started slowing walking up the dozen or so switchbacks to get up the hill to get onto the castle grounds, proper. Took us a good 30 minutes to walk up that hill.
We get to the top and into the front desk to check in. The woman at the desk asks why we look so tired. We tell her we just walked up the hill, and she laughs and points out the window. There was a driveway basically right out of the train stop that was a gentle slope up, in the shade, right to the castle.
“Nobody comes up the other way!”
D’oh!
At least you weren’t moving a piano.
My physics prof once told us we didn’t need a cheat sheet as he would write all the formulas we needed on the board. That’s exactly what he wrote - F = ma. I think for the final we could bring one sheet.
I was taking an advanced physics class in college and once when I was taking a test I drew a complete blank on the formula I needed to answer one of the questions. Fortunately I was able to remember enough other formulas to derive it, since my professor wasn’t considerate enough to provide a formula sheet.