After cutting onions wiping your hands on a large flat stainless steel knife blade or other SS utensil really does get rid of 90% of the smell. Not sure how the chemistry works but it’s very effective.
90% running alcohol in a spray bottle makes an excellent, safe way to kill inside ants. Kills them then evaporates.
George Foreman grill lives up to the hype!
Potatoes for burnt skin
A few years ago I stupidly tried to grab a spoon that was in a pot of boiling water (the handle was outside the water) and burned my thumb and part of my index finger.
A friend from the former Soviet Union told me to try something he heard back home: slice an uncooked potato and hold it against the burnt skin.
I usually find such “home remedies” to be useless and would not have tried it, but I was in pain and nothing else was available at the time, so I gave it a go. Lo and behold, the pain quickly subsided. As soon as I removed it, the pain came back, and when I put it back the pain subsided again.
The weird thing is that, not only did it relieve the pain, but after I finally took it off about 1/2 hour later, there was no liquid-filled blister at the end (which had started forming right after I grabbed the spoon). The skin did look a bit damaged, but the bumpy blister was now flat.
I have no idea what chemical in potatoes helps with this, but it does indeed help. I have used this a few more times over the years, and it always helps.
Note: if you end up trying this at some point, keep in mind that after 5-10 minutes of holding a freshly cut slice, the pain starts to increase again, and replacing it with a newly cut slice helps bring the pain down again.
I actually used to get pass out/vomit sick from the pain, so Aleve (or the Rx of it before it was OTC) never worked for me. I don’t get that sick any more, but I get bad PMS physical symptoms. While it might not be entirely woo, I was hesitant to try any Pamprin or Midol, thinking they were just ibuprofen in pink packages. Holy shit, was I wrong. They don’t clear up all my symptoms, but they do get most of them back to manageable levels most of the time.
I have a skin condition that is often treated with the same things as rosacea, so I’ll have to try MoM. It’d be cheaper and easier than any other option I haven’t tried yet.
Hairspray is good at taking out ink, but so is rubbing alcohol. Not every time on every surface, but after a toddler and an errant pen had a good time on my grandmother’s couch, some rubbing alcohol removed all the evidence and no one was the wiser.
Another pregnancy one … when I was pregnant, the baby was presenting breech late in the game, and I was scheduled for a c-section as a result. In a Hail Mary move to get the baby to turn, I went to an acupuncturist for moxibustion, which is where I let someone stick needles in my little toe, and burn herbs (it seemed similar to burning incense), again … near my little toe. My OB agreed that it was worth a try, btw.
I went in thinking it was woo (and I kind of still do) … what does my little toe have to do with anything? And if the herbs are so great, why not burn them up near my mid-section where the baby is, or where I can breathe them in? (I guess I was breathing them in, because, you know, air, but it really didn’t seem especially strong.)
Sure enough, I had just got home when the baby … started flopping around like a fish on amphetamines. This was MUCH more movement than anything else I had experienced during the pregnancy, and by this point, the baby didn’t have very much room in there. It was truly crazy. I was visibly bulging out in all directions. I know people joke about late pregnancy being like the movie Alien (plural? I can never remember which one) but this was way beyond that. And a few times previously, I had seen/felt the baby’s foot or elbow sticking out from my abdomen, which is also kind of creepy, but again, it was that x 100.
I actually don’t think Eastern medicine is completely woo, I think more and more, they will find common ground between it and Western medicine but still … my big issues are:
Okay, the baby might have done this on that particular night anyway, and the moxibustion could have been a coincidence … but it was so extreme, and the baby had turned herself around (from down to up, so the wrong way) about a week earlier and I hadn’t even noticed.
How did the baby know when to stop? There were cartwheels going on, and she previously hadn’t had strong preferences about where she was … so how does this process get her doing somersaults, and still end up in the right place?
The whole thing was very weird. I will also mention that this was my first, and only, experience with acupuncture, and people always seemed to say that the needles are so tiny you don’t even feel them – I did not find this to be true, I found it fairly painful.
Topical or oral?
I just go straight to: massages are good. Even if you don’t have misaligned magnetic lines or whatever, they make you feel better. I had a kinda medium backache that was taken out by pressing . . . shoot, it’s been long enough that I don’t remember where. But it wasn’t in the back. Near the groin, maybe?
She really knuckled in and it was unpleasant. But: massage. I’ll put up with a lot if there’s a massage involved. And it worked.
I have rosacea, but just the redness and flushing, and not the “pimply/bumpy” parts. Which symptoms does it clear up for you?
Yes, naproxen is the absolute shit for cramps. I too got it when it was only available by prescription, through my GYN. Lifesaver!
Here’s mine: I saw this Saveur video about peeling a whole head’s worth of garlic cloves in 10 seconds. I was at least 90% sure it was bollocks, but I needed a ton of garlic, and I figured the worst that would happen is I still have to smash and peel it, and I have two bowls to lightly wash.
Holy. Shit. It actually worked. It was really loud, and I’d say 15 seconds is probably better, but after 10 almost every clove was peeled, and merely needed to have wisps of papery skin brushed off, where they had landed back on the cloves during the shaking.
And I’m a complete skeptic, but I’m not above using the placebo effect on myself. I use lice-repelling herbal hair spray on my kids, and if it came down to it, I’d put money on it having no scientifically demonstrable effect. But it is an *extremely *effective treatment for my anxiety condition in regards to this issue!
Lesson: irrational fears may be effectively treated with irrational cures. 
Yes! The killer application of this technique for me has been cipollini onions. Those little monsters are impossible to peel and yet you always need them whole. No more x-ing and blanching and losing half the onion. A miracle!!!
I’ll just give you a moment to clean up that sticky mess of raw egg from the counter… ok? 
To tell them apart, spin them while upright. A raw egg will not even complete one rotation before flopping on its side, while a boiled one will spin away happily.
I had a particularly persistent bout of hiccups and when I complained about it on IRC a friend of mine suggested a spoonful of sugar. I thought it’d be one of those “does not help but amuses the onlookers” kind of deals but decided to give it a try anyway, and of course it worked instantly. If it had been a bit more mischievous friend suggesting something like that I would’ve never believed them enough to try it and would’ve continued to suffer every few seconds for who knows how long.
After several years of low-grade chronic pain, physical therapy exercises, medication, various herbal and home remedies, none of which worked, this person read my neck muscles, then stretched and re-aligned them. According, I suspect, to ley-lines.
Whatever. It worked. No pain since then.
And, I hope she never reads and recognizes this, I did not for a minute believe it would work. I agreed because she’s a good person and wanted to help someone (me), and I would not deny her the opportunity.
It worked for me; I hope it worked for her.
Also for boiled/non eggs: Spin them on their sides for a little while (like 10-15 seconds) then touch them for a moment to stop them, then let go and observe: hardboiled eggs will just sit there while raw ones will start to wobble/turn a bit because their yolks are still moving inside the shell.
By the way, I did test the fob science test this weekend and found that putting it to my temple (like I’m shooting my brain full of Fob Rays™) does the best in amplifying the signal and increased the range I would get when I held it under my chin by about 30%.
My sister, mother and I get hiccoughs really badly, and they’re loud. And usually at an embarrassing time :eek: . We have tried all the folk remedies (except not drinking, because that’s just taking it too far). The only thing that works and is always 100% reliable is drinking a full glass of water upside down. I can’t even count how many times I have shown people that no, they don’t stop if I just drink a glass of water, but they really do stop if I drink water upside down. Basically: put your mouth to the wrong side of the glass, then bend over until you can drink.
The end result is my level of dignity is below 0 - I hiccoughed loudly, looked insane drinking water upside down, prolly showed everyone my knickers and then had to run to the loo because I drank so much water. But at least no more hiccoughs.
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I’m excited to try the garlic thing. Does the bowl need to be really big like in the video, or does a smaller bowl work just as well?
At least equally impressive is the Zyliss garlic press.
You don’t peel the cloves - simply press them with skin on. Mashed garlic comes through the small holes; skin stays behind. Works like a charm.
Ranque-Hilsch Tubes
It’s a tube with a central plate in it that has a hole in the center. Compressed gas is fed in tangentially next to that plate. Hot air comes out one end of the tube, cold air out the other. That’s it. There are no moving parts, but the tube separates gas into holt and cold molecules. It’s Maxwell’s Demon made out of plumber’s parts. And the damned things work. You can buy them (as Vortex tubes) to provide refrigerated or heated air, and the device requires no electricity or fuel or a separate heater or cooler to change the temperature of the air – all you need is a supply of compressed gas.
I wonder if most hiccup cures are psychosomatic. James Thurber said that a sure cure for hiccups was to twist your little finger and say “Garbo” backwards. Damned if it didn’t work for the first ten or twelve times I tried it, but it doesn’t work anymore. At least for me.
Did you check mouth open vs mouth closed? My son claims that mouth open works better, but it’s something he’s remembering checking out as a kid (mid-thirties, now) and he was putting it under his chin.
No, the testing procedures weren’t that detailed. The experiment continues…