In patching my roof a few years ago, I got roofing tar on my hands. That stuff is like road tar in that it is very difficult to get off skin. I was out of mineral spirits, which does the trick nicely, so I was scrounging around the house for something that might work. In my wife’s bathroom I saw baby oil. My thoughts went like this: Baby oil is nothing but mineral oil with perfume. Mineral spirits is a less refined version of mineral oil. Both are petroleum distillates. Hmm.
I poured some baby oil on my hands and - voila! - it took the roofing tar (also a petroleum based substance) right off. My next thought was “We put this stuff on baby’s butts?!?!”
Cooking/shucking corn. Leave the husk and silk intact. Grill or nuke the corn. When it’s hot, cut off the thick end of the cob, squeeze from the silk end until the ear pops out from the cut end. Throw away the silk and husk in one chunk.
Like any other petroleum distillate, it should be kept out of the reach of children and only used externally (though swallowing presents no danger - it has been used a laxative for many years). The overall risk is quite small, and certainly not enough for people to ban baby oil from their homes any more than they would ban gasoline, furniture polish, paint thinners, etc.
With all due respect Doctor Jackson, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with parents of the new millennium. These are people that will ban oranges from schools and peanuts from baseball stadiums, let alone gasoline and paint thinner in their homes.
Accurate evaluation/perception of risk is just not a thing for “the kids these days”.
Marry a locksmith, or always keep one in tow, that way when you are faced with a door that is locked you can ask them to pick the lock, and if it all turns out to be illegal anyway then they will take the fall instead of you.
If you’ve got scratches on finished wood furniture, you can hide them by rubbing a piece of walnut on it. It’ll gradually stain the scratched part until it matches the surroundings.
I’ve posted this elsewhere, but it’s so effective and cheap, I try to pass it on whenever I can.
To get rid of fruit flies: Pour some apple cider vinegar (NOT regular vinegar) into a small bowl. Add a few drops of common dish soap. Stir lightly. Give it a day and you’ll have fly corpses galore.
I heard about this a couple years ago, and have been using it. It usually works. The only time it doesn’t is on some particularly slippery round shoelaces I had. They just wouldn’t hold a knot.
I’ve also gone to shortening my laces on my shoes. The standard ones on tennis shoes are so long that even after double knotting, the ends and loops drag the ground, making it much more likely to step on them and pull the knot open.
Here’s my hack - I don’t cut the lace, because I want the ferrules on the ends to remain intact so I can feed them through the eyelets. So what I do is thread the shoe, center the lace, then pull some of the excess to the middle and tie it off in a loop knot. Then I as I’m lacing up, I feed the ends through the loop near the end to secure the loop in the slot above the tongue.
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I learned this from these very pages a few years ago and it is amazing. I no longer double-knot my laces yet they rarely come undone. One small improvement on the TED presentation. In the video Terry Moore tells you to reverse step #2 of lace-tying, making the bow. Much less awkward is to reverse step #1, the initial crossover-and-under. The result is the same but I believe it takes much less effort to unlearn-relearn.
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The problem with that is when you get to the point to pull the loops tight, your hands are on the opposite sides from the direction you want to pull.
Angled spots are a lot easier to pull into and back out of, because the turn is much smaller. Perpendicular slots require a sharp 90 deg turn. Sometimes in some parking lots because of other cars, traffic, people walking, etc, the lane you are turning from is narrow enough to make that right angle turn a chore.
But yes, it is important to realize that the turn is at the front and the back of the car trails, so it doesn’t follow the front wheels directly.
I’ve heard that and tried it. The reasoning seems to be the stem provides a convenient handle. I find that I prefer having a pop top on the banana. By the time I’m down far enough on the banana for the lack of a handle to be an issue, I can just plop the rest in my mouth.
Glass jars are fairly thick and fairly sturdy. Hitting the lid flat on a surface is not going to provide the kind of shock to break it that falling on a corner from ~3 ft up will.