I voted yes on the unknown switch but that’s not entirely true. My bedroom has a double switch and for years I had no idea what the 2nd switch controlled. Then I ran into the electrician that wired the place and he told me it does nothing - it’s a dummy switch. I asked him why it was there and he told me there was a double switch before the reno, so that’s what he ordered. When he replaced it he realized that the second switch was a dummy, so rather than patching the drywall, he reinstalled a dummy switch that does absolutely nothing. We are in the habit of switching them both on or off at the same time.
Cut it out!
That Alice’s Restaurant poll is my favorite in a long time.
“Fat is good” sounds kind of patronizing to me. Fat is, at best, neutral, and in some cases not good at all, and its relative goodness or badness is really context-based, I think.
That said, I can’t imagine why anyone would ask their partner if they looked fat in X. It sounds like a trap.
I am fat. I’d rather not be fat, but I’m not particularly hung up about it, and I would never ask my partner this question. For one thing, I’m fully capable of assessing for myself whether a particular outfit is flattering or not.
What they should be saying is, “I’m feeling really insecure about my body right now. Help me focus on the positive qualities of my appearance.”
Or something.
Why don’t people just say what they mean?
Possibly because we’re the species (or a species) that’s figured out how to say something we don’t mean.
It’s a useful talent (see: fiction and hypothesizing); but it’s often misused.
As far as 1960s album covers go, a napkin is a sorry substitute for whipped cream.
I wouldn’t mind seeing Dolores Erickson wearing a napkin.
I think the problem with the “Fat is good” and related issues is that most of us would like to be at a healthy weight. Myself included. But a lot of what was culturally and socially considered as a “healthy weight” was anything but healthy. For women, that often meant waif, or dangerously thin, and for men it was often a muscular “cut” look that takes unhealthy practices to maintain.
And of course, personal preferences remain above and beyond the cultural norms. For me, myself and I only, I definitely prefer a more zaftig feminine ideal, but since everyone is going to draw the line differently, the question is absolutely more about reading your spouse’s comfort with their own weight rather than anything else.
For music when in the car, I’m by myself I always have something on - radio, selected music, audiobooks, podcasts. My first and second cars had cassette players which was used frequently, my third and fourth had CD players in frequent use (the third also used a radio dongle to play from my devices, and the fourth had an AUX jack for the same), and my current car is all Bluetooth pairing all the time.
With my wife, or with friends in the car, it varies dramatically, so maybe 75% just conversation in that case, though sometime with some background music on if the conversation lulls. I ended up voting 25%, since sadly most of the time it’s just me in the car - probably less than 25% in aggregate, but more than zero.
When i drive by myself, i usually leave the radio on. When i have other people with me, it’s pretty much always just conversation.
I voted Other in the radio silence poll because I only turn off whatever I’m listening to when I need to hear the GPS. It drives me nuts when the nav voice talks over what I want to hear. It’s a little less distracting when my stuff pauses and restarts but finally hearing the punchline and “at the traffic circle, take the third exit” at the same time gets on my nerves. In all, I’d say that accounts for about 5 - 10% of my drive.
Whereas one of the reasons i use my phone’s GPS on its own, and don’t pipe it through the car’s sounds system, is that if i do the latter, the radio is muted every time the GPS says anything, and that annoys me. I listen turn on GPS mostly in case there’s a traffic jam somewhere i want to learn about, and not because i need to know which exit to take.
I can focus on one or the other, as my interest dictates.
Yes. Sometimes I’ll use the Apple Maps app through my iPhone to my car dashboard display; when it vocalizes a navigation instruction, it smoothly reduces the volume of whatever music is playing, but doesn’t silence it completely. Nice touch.
That’s what happens with Android auto, too, but it drives me nuts, as I’m usually more interested in the radio than the traffic directions. I guess if it was just music, and not news, it might be less annoying. But I’m often listening to NPR when i drive.
I want a stick on the floor AND paddle shifters that turn with the steering wheel.
No speedometer, but a ginormous tach on the dash I can see through the steering wheel.
Headlight dimmer on a paddle mounted to the steering column on the left.
Stick shift next to the seat, please — and I do mean a stick shift; the setup that when I first learned to drive used to be called a standard, and now is rare. Not an automatic.
That didn’t seem to me to be clear in the poll.
In my observation, it’s the opposite—most cars are manual, and it’s only in North America that automatics are so popular.
It’s your car, so you can have whatever sort of transmission you want. Even fully electric cars usually have some sort of “gear shift” that at least selects between forward, neutral, and reverse.
Is this for a manual or an automatic? If the former, how would you keep the two shifters in sync?
Interesting; I’ve never come across this before, which is why it wasn’t an option in the poll. Is there an existing car model that uses this sort of headlight dimmer?
I like driving a manual transmission, but I’ve pretty much made up my mind that my next vehicle will be electric, so I’m assuming this custom built car I’m building in this poll will be an EV. Since you can’t get a manual transmission on an EV (they don’t have a transmission at all), I don’t really have a preference as to how you select forward, neutral, and reverse. Although I’d prefer it not be a touchscreen.
For the speedometer I chose “other”, but in sense it’s more like “all of the above”. I want the dashboard to be a screen that allows the driver to choose how they want their speed to be displayed.
Dimmer operated via the turn signal stalk, like every car I’ve driven in the past 30 years.
I guess something like a Porsche PDK.
All my current cars have a dimmer to the left of the steering wheel, but maybe it’s not quite correct to call it a paddle because they’re not very wide. Wider than just a stalk, though. Same control as the turn signal, also.
That’s a point; and I probably would get an electric, or at least a hybrid. I don’t think I’m going to go back and change my vote, though.
I definitely don’t want a touchscreen; not for anything. It’s bad enough being stuck posting on one; no way I want to try to use one while I’m driving.