I always understood that revving an engine while it’s still cold was bad for it, because the oil is still thicker and hasn’t been circulating through the engine for very long yet. My Miata actually has a blue temperature light on the dash that glows until the engine has warmed up. It’s basically a warning to drive it gently until the light has gone out (because it’s a sports car, so they know people are going to want to take it up to the red line).
Actually, is it even necessary to let a car warm up before driving it anymore? Not by revving it, but just by letting it idle for a few minutes before driving it.
If my dad wants to go to a specific website he doesn’t already have bookmarked, he doesn’t type the URL in the address bar. He goes to Google, which he has bookmarked, and types say “www.straightdope.com” in the search box, and then goes to the first search result.
I kind of wish that including the “www.” was required IF the site is on a www subdomain. For most of the time I was working at my previous job (a public school district) “ourdomain.com” and “www.ourdomain.com” resolved to two different IPs. It’s probably extremely rare, but it’s still theoretically possible.
Depends on your definition of necessary. There are days during the winter where I live that if you don’t let the car warm up enough to get warm air out of the defroster you won’t be able to see to drive safely. You can scrape the windshield clear, but there’s enough moisture in the air that it forms a thin layer of frost as soon as you start moving.
I tend to rinse my dishes because we generally go a few days between washings, and the newer dishwashers are so airtight that we get an unpleasant smell if we don’t leave the door ajar overnight.
Oh, my God. I’m - I’m old.
I’m going to try to stop pricking my sausages, see how that goes.
I’ll try to stop typing www at the beginning of a web address, although I can easily go months without manually entering an address - I usually just type “bing” into google and click the first link.
I did learn to stop double spacing after a full stop, thanks to an early job I had doing word processing for a …word processing …store? Basically a mom & pop resume shop.
We still heat up the car here, but it’s for comfort and visibility and because we can do it from inside the house before we get our boots on.
And I still rinse dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, and won’t stop doing that. When the wife fails to do so properly, there’s always food stuck, or a gross film. But, importantly, I watched the install, and the drain pipe for the dishwasher is fucking tiny. There’s no way that sucker can handle any solids, even if there were some sort of disposal system integrated, the slurry would clog that thing right up. It would take years and years of running water to match the plumber’s fees.
Filling a kettle or whatever from the hot tap (or mixer on hot, I may be British but I’m not a cro-magnon), I still have to tell myself it’s OK. It was trained into me at an early age that hot water is not drinking water.
British plumbing, historically, had cold water directly from the mains, hot from a cylinder heated by a boiler, fed by an unsealed storage tank; the storage tank was often in the attic, and in a ramshackle old house, that could mean a storage tank containing dead pigeons, rats, what the fuck ever.
So why was hot water ever safe for anything? God knows. But that’s the history - and that’s why kitchen mixer taps weren’t a thing here (danger of backwash from hot supply causing contamination) - and that’s why I was taught that hot taps don’t contain drinking water. And I still feel a frisson of rebellion when I fill my kettle from the hot tap.
A lot of people believe dogs always walk a clockwise circle before lying down, but that’s only in the northern hemisphere. Dogs in Australia and the rest of the southern hemisphere circle counter-clockwise before lying down. A dog standing on the equator will just lie down without circling.
I didn’t think my little funny was going to cause a threadjack, sorry.
I was referencing a meme I’ve seen about clueless older folks and the internet.
Oddly, however, I fairly often do this, in a way. Chrome’s address bar (by default, I think, otherwise I set it up years ago and forgot) acts as an input box for Google’s search engine if you just throw keywords in there instead of an address. If I want to go to a website, it’s often easier for me to just type in “Amex” or “Comcast” and then click the first link instead of entering the whole address. Not vastly easier, granted, especially now that we can leave off the “www”, but whatever.
And yeah, I’ve done it by typing “bing” when I want to use that search engine instead of Google. For… reasons.
I’d never heard that until a few years ago when I pulled my boat battery for the winter I was given a lecture from my elderly uncle about never storing it on a cement floor. I looked it up, definitely BS, but I’m not clear: was there ever a reason for it, or always an old wives tale?
Re: Post period double spaces
Interesting discussion - We made our kids to take formal typing in high school and their +60 y/o teacher was an absolute fanatic about doing double spaces. She said it was to make the sentences easier to read, which sounds like BS after reading all your comments. However, 10 years later my kids still do it, she ingrained it into them so much, it’s habitual.
Turn off your air conditioning before you turn off your car, because leaving your air conditioning on when you turn off the car so it starts immediately when you turn the car back on kills your battery/engine/air conditioning. Something about the battery surge from having to immediately power on your AC sort of like letting your car warm up first.
I still believe pre-rinsing saves power and hot water when the dishwasher runs. Newer machines have sensors to detect whether there is still muck on the dishes. So it’ll run shorter or longer depending upon how stubborn the dirt is. The cleaner the dishes are going in, the quicker the cycle ends. At least, that is my theory to justify my continuing to pre-rinse.
