OK, jumping on the bandwagon…(Which probably needs derivation also)
What size were hailstones before they had golf balls? (or horse-pills, I’ve heard both)
BTW - My Mom grew up in the 20’s and she commented several times that sliced bread really was a great invention. Try slicing it yourself…every time…
Every Saturday morning my Grandfather sharpened his knives. And every Saturday afternoon my Grandmother helped bandage his fingers.
David Letterman, as a young TV weatherman in Indiana, was allegedly once disciplined for forecasting “hailstones the size of canned hams.”
So did mine. She’s the only person I ever knew who could slice bread straight. Oh, I miss her bread.
There’s a fascinating documentary “How Beer Saved the World”. :dubious: They make a pretty good case …
It’s on Netflix
Grandpa should have made her a bread slicing box. Or maybe he did … :dubious:
It’s like a miter box for wood, but with a closed end and lots of spaced slots. 
You can probably find them at a good kitchen supply.
I looked up Ig Nobel Winners, and I went back to 2001, and I couldn’t find it.
Here’s the one that I’ve always wondered about: what did people say tornados sounded like before freight trains?
Since a lot of them happen in the great plains I would imagine they would compare them to the sound of a buffalo stampede.
IMO, you should really open up a new thread rather than tacking marginally related questions onto existing threads as you would get more response to what seems to be a good question.
Thanks, Kimstu! I was just looking in the wrong place.
Well, actually, if you were looking straight to the source for a list of Ig winners, the Annals of Improbable Research is actually the place to go. Although the Wiki page has the same synopses there too.
Past Ig Winners (Has additional information, links to actual research, photos, etc.)
I’d have thought that the Igs would require that government grant money had been spent on a project before it qualified. Grad students using existing equipment on their own hours shouldn’t qualify, to my mind. Not that anyone is likely to ask me.
Or try Amazon. But really, that’s just minimizing the pain, because bread still doesn’t like to be sliced, much less straight. You need to let it cool enough that it won’t bunch up, and you save yourself a lot of trouble if you get a stout well-serrated bread knife that is long enough that it doesn’t keep popping out of the grooves. Then, well, you’re in business. Relative to not having a bread slicing frame and a good long bread knife, that is. But if you’re in 1928 and slicing bread is just one of many other grinding household chores that have now been made much simpler with technology and products we take for granted instead of a hobby, as it is for many of us now, I can see how it would have been a relief to have that little burden at least lightened.
Thank you so much. It drives me nuts when I half remember something I heard on 'NPR “a few years ago”.
So, I was wrong, it wasn’t computer modeling. Huh.
Stop right there.
The only bread appropriate for slicing (i.e. standard loaf, not round nor small elongated) that one is likely to encounter unsliced (the bread, not “one”) is freshly baked and still warm from the oven.
The only thing this side of heaven that tastes better than freshly baked bread still warm from the oven is whole grain freshly baked bread with nuts and raisins, fresh from the oven.
One does not allow such bread to cool.
Especially if you made it with just a soupçon more sugar than the yeast really needs.
And if you don’t like nuts, you can still grind some into powder for that rich, nutty taste.
Any butter will do, but bread like that is worth Kate’s.
Traditionalists will want it with tea; real, not herbal, tea with honey to bring the tea and bread together …
I think I just gained five pounds.
Perhaps it is that people rarely order ONE pancake…usual order is a stack of 5 or a short stack of 3. So the idea might be that if something sells so well that buyers are buying several at once, then it would be selling like hot cakes.
I don’t necessarily disagree as such, but there is an opportunity cost to not ever having nice evenly sliced homemade bread to make an evenly grilled grilled cheese sandwich from. Warm bread likes to cling to the knife, forcing you to mangle it. And of course there is a price to pay for insisting on not having a sandwich of homemade bread at work the next day because you refuse to let bread get cool before it is completely ingested. Now, if they can make a USB bread oven accessory for the office…
I was about to shut you down at “opportunity cost”, because that term is just too cold to be used in reference to fresh baked bread, but then ‘grilled cheese’ caught my eye.
I will agree one can bake more bread than one can possibly eat while it is still warm, and so need to slice it.
For grilled cheese. A bit of Kate’s in the pan, with a sprinkle of parmesan on the outside.