Wait, there aren’t allergens in refined peanut oil.
http://www.peanut-institute.org/eating-well/allergy/peanut-oil-no-allergens.asp
“Unrefined, “gourmet”, “aromatic”, or cold pressed oils are the oils that may still contain the proteins that cause allergy. They can also be referred to as “crude” oil. The use of these specialty oils is limited, however, it should be recognized that not all available peanut oil is highly refined. If an allergic individual is unsure as to whether a product contains or was fried in highly refined peanut oil, that individual should ask the manufacturer or restaurant for clarification.”
So I’ll believe you, but when you’re dealing with a restaurant staff that has trouble with the difference between “Is there peanut oil there” and “are there peanuts there”, asking for the exact type of oil is asking too much. When the consequences of eating the wrong cookies have almost put her in the ER (and that was even with the close attention of her pediatrician cousin in his own clinic), she tends to pass on the whole thing from the start.
You make some good points. However, the “mainly (but of course not exclusively)to scare the Russians” part still pertains, and the Alperovitz book builds a good case for it.
I won’t keep going with this hijack, except to recommend the book. One interesting data point: how Truman (at Byrnes’ suggestion) postponed the Potsdam meeting with Churchill and Stalin until (barely) after the Alomogordo test, which occurred during the meeting – and how Truman’s attitude toward Stalin immediately changed, to one of bossiness.
(Obviously, Truman had to use some other excuse to publicly postopone the meeting, so he went with the lame “have to finish up our fiscal year business here in DC”).
A lot of my friends think that when drawing blood with those vacuum containers, their blood gushes out under its own pressure. Not very surprising, just common.
I didn’t know Washington DC and the state were different things.
Unrefined peanut oil isn’t used for frying, and basically only exists in theory. You can probably find a tiny bottle of it in a gourmet market if you look hard enough, but it isn’t going to be used as an ingredient in anything other than maybe salad dressing.
Years ago, I worked with a woman whose favorite football team was the Washington Redskins, because at the time she picked them she thought they were “our” team. Her confusion can be forgiven, since she was only 6 or 8 when she picked them. She had since, of course, realized her error, but she remained a Redskins fan anyway. Her reason for picking them was still better than my reason for picking the Miami Dolphins: a Dolphins sticker fell out of a box of my breakfast cereal one morning, making them the first NFL team I was consciously aware of. And it’s worth noting that she and I were both old enough that the Seattle Seahawks did not yet exist when we picked those other teams.
Quick, who was George Grove? Don’t look it up.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about this (pretty much whenever I see a big green sign with white writing), and I think it ultimately comes down to the difference between visual cues and verbal cues. I think we can all agree that the part of the brain we use to identify something that we’re seeing is different from the part of the brain we use to identify something that we’re reading about. The words “a beautiful sunset” are different from actually seeing a beautiful sunset, even if they ultimately evoke the same image. So when I read or hear directions that say “look for the sign that say 495 East, and then the sign that says 280 North, and then the sign that says Exit 21,” what comes up in my head is a visual image of a green sign with white writing, and then another green sign with white writing, and then a third green sign with white writing. And when I’m actually trying to find the location, there will be many additional green signs with white writing. And then I’m lost. It’s not even about the type of emotional connection that Left Hand of Dorkness describes. I just have no visual reference to picture 280 North, or 495 East. What image is going to come up in my head? Whereas I can actually picture an Arby’s (with a ten-gallon hat). I get that some people don’t understand. But insisting that 280 North should form a different visual image in my mind from 495 East that I can then use to navigate isn’t going to make it so.
Playing Facts ‘n’ Five (think scattergories when all you got is paper and pen) with my kids. My wife and step-son decide to play as well.
We go through the exercise of picking letters and get to the part of naming categories. My wife says, “Don’t pick hard categories like Books. We’ll never get those.”
We thus played the rest of the time with such categories as Colors, Desserts, Ice Cream Flavors and Cartoon Characters. Sigh.
My wife was confused over WW1, WW2, the Korean war, and the Vietnam war.
It started when she said there were WW2 veterans playing a game and they were in their 50s :dubious: I told her my father was too young to have been drafted for WW2, and he is 75!
This lead to a discussion where such gems as the Vietnamese bombing Pearl Harbor were uncovered. 
I have had some doozies too.
True, but I for one believed for a long time that any egg that a bird laid (that was more than microscopic size) was fertilized.
Other than the murder, the only thing I remember about Sharon Tate was her appearances as one of Mr. Drysdale’s secretaries on The Beverly Hillbillies - speaking of which, that show isn’t rerun nearly as much as it used to be; I wonder how many adults’ experience with TBH consists solely of the movie.
I thought the stories about people believing that the Germans and the Soviets were on the same side throughout World War II were hard to fathom - until I heard my younger brother say it.
Apparently, some things are “common knowledge” to the point that nobody actually “teaches” you them. For example, until I was about 12 years old, I didn’t know that pretty much every river is freshwater. (I also hadn’t grasped the concept of rivers pretty much always flowing out to sea rather than the other way around.)
Speaking of things we might take for granted but a lot of adults - especially younger ones - probably have never heard of, how about The Little Rascals / Our Gang? (There’s something else that was aired pretty much everywhere for years, then fell off the face of the earth.)
I just this minute found out something I didn’t know, that apparently everybody else has known for over 40 years: there are no (or very few) aluminum Christmas trees.
The thread on the moon landing “hoax” led me to a website that has a list of topics that are strange but true, and one of them was about aluminum Christmas trees. I wondered what could be controversial about that, so I clicked on it, and was amazed to learn that many, many people think there is no such thing, and never was.
So I looked it up, and found that they pretty much stopped making them around 1970, which is the year I left home. Since I’ve never been interested in having my own tree, I had no idea they weren’t around any more. But we had one in our house that we used for several years when I was a kid, and I just assumed that they were still popular — much less muss and fuss, much cheaper, much safer, and IMO just as pretty.
Cheaper, safer, just as pretty as what? Real trees? Because you do know that many, many people use artificial Xmas trees – they just aren’t aluminum. Various kinds of plastic, mainly.
Because, all jokes about a Starbucks on every corner aside, in any given area, there’s only one of a particular fast food restaurant around but lots and lots of green signs.
Me, I don’t have an issue with green signs, I just wish there were more of them and they were displayed earlier. I also wish that it was illegal to have branches hanging in front of street signs and all house numbers should be painted on the curb in something that’s easily illuminated by headlights.
So common, in fact, that’s what the lab tech told me. I wondered, but accepted the word of someone who ought to know.
(“Bloody experts!”)
My grandparents had an aluminum tree that they used until at least the early 90s. They may have been cheaper, but they were decidedly not safer. The problem was too many people insisted on hanging lights on them, which caused a high risk of electrocution. When the safer and more natural looking artificial trees became affordable everyone stopped making the aluminum ones.
A couple of days ago, I met up with some of my uni classmates to rehearse an oral presentation we have coming up. I was making my speech: “High school is a difficult time for everyone, but even more so for LGBT youth …” One of them stopped me and said “Wait, what does that stand for?” It turned out that all three of them were wondering the same thing. I appreciate the heads up that I should say “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered” in the actual presentation, but I was shocked to realise they didn’t know. I thought it was a really common acronym.
My sister also has a lot of these. She’d never heard of Socrates, thought Mt Everest was in the USA and thought the Nazis were in WWI.
Acronyms and initialisms are great shortcuts for the in crowd, but they really need to be defined the first time you use them. As you move from specialty to specialty, you find the same acronyms with different meanings, and it’s hard to keep them straight, even for people in that group. CI is a confidential informant to a cop, continuous integration to a software developer, and cochlear implant to a deaf/HoH person (Did you get HoH from context? It’s used constantly at hearing loss conferences without defining it).
I’m attending the World Tea Expo next week, and one of the seminars is entitled “TDS in RTD: How Much is Enough?” From the description, it’s clear that RTD is ready-to-drink tea. TDS, on the other hand, has many possible meanings. I think it means total dissolved solids in this case, but I’m not really sure.
The tech told you it’s under your own pressure? So which is true?
She had a significant role in “Valley of the Dolls,” and was part of this exchange:
Director (to himself, while assessing Jennifer’s assets): “Six hundred dollars for a head dress that no one will ever see.”
Jennifer (Tate): “I feel a little top heavy.”
Director: “Oh honey, you are a little top heavy."