The whole “http://www.” thing. Damn, there’s gotta be a better way.
Probably Hebrew calanders.
The Jewish calender, being only 354 days long, adds a month every three years or so. This “leap month” is tacked on after the month of Adar (roughly equivalent to March) and is named Adar B.
For my own usage, I use YYMMDD (no slashes). If I’m in a spreadsheet and need to sort, anything before 2000 starts with a decimal
… huh? I can’t work this out. I mean, I already know that if I want the screw to turn to the right then I have to turn it to the right, but I can’t imagine anyone would exactly need a mnemonic for that, and I can’t see how that helps me to remember which way tightens it and which way loosens it. What am I missing? 
The thumbs points in the direction the screw will move when you turn it.
Just how are you turning it to the right? The screw’s not moving, and the bottom of the screw’s moving to the left. Under normal orientation, where we’re a bit above what we’re screwing it’s natural, and when we’re straight-on we’re conditioned to assume the movement of the “top” is the “direction” of the screwing, but to me at least, when I am screwing something by looking up at it from below, to the point where I can barely see the top of the screw, clockwise doesn’t seem intuitively to the “right” to me, since the biggest part of what I can see is actually moving to the left.
… Ah, I think I get it; it’s mostly for use for when you’re underneath or otherwise in an awkward position? I think as you said, it’s just the way my mind works; I tend to think of it as moving in the direction the top’s moving, and therefore I somewhat automatically think of clockwise as “to the right”. Which I hadn’t actually consciously noticed about myself before. Interesting. Thanks for being patient with me, I feel very stupid now. Ignorance fought, I guess!
Well, I chalk it up a bit to me being overly literal-minded, but the mnemonic really is a problem when I am “under” the screw.
As opposed to what? Never knew there was another way of looking at it. 
Is ground floor = first floor what you want? Ie, the floor at ground level is first floor?
Yes, ground floor is another term for first floor. It’s usually the one with the entrances.
Saying “basement, first floor, second floor”, etc, is even better in cases where the building is on a hill and there are entrances at different levels. The ground floor is on two different levels in this case, and the name becomes less accurate.
The Eaton Centre in Toronto is like this; it numbers its shopping floors starting with Level 0 (a late addition built into the basement), which is below the level of the subway tunnels at the north end, and ending at level 4, which is well above grade. The street entrances at ground level are on Level 2 at the south end of the mall and Level 3 at the north end.
Well, I believe most modern browsers will at least fill in the “http://” part for you (i.e. you can just type “boards.straightdope.com” and you’ll get to the right place).
My vote is for POP/SMTP.
Yes, in the United States, buildings have either a ground floor or a first floor; they don’t designate two separate floors. The first floor is not above the ground floor. So the elevator buttons go (… B2 B1 1 2 3 …) or (… B2 B1 G 2 3 …), not (… G 1 2 3 …).
Wikipedia is quite wrong about this. There are no sources cited for that article (and there won’t be, either, because it’s, well, wrong.)
That’s the first time I’ve come across a reasonable justification for the “righty tighty” rule. Thank you.
One comment about calendar reform: good luck getting orthodox Jews to skip an extra day between shabbat once a year. And then they won’t be able to hold down jobs because 5 years out of 7 they’ll have to take a weekday off.
Further to what you said, I’ve encountered reverse thread on my previous job while working on the oil patch. Often, threaded sections are in series or are “nested” and when you loosen the entire unit you will either locally loosen one section or the other. At times, it’s super, super important that certain sections never, ever loosen, and those sections are reverse thread. If you indeed want to loosen those sections you must specifically target them.
I was going to say that, at least in Canada, we never use “cross the floor” to mean “vote against party lines”; if there’s a term for this, it’s “defying the whip” (assuming a whip is imposed). “Crossing the floor” always means joining another party (not even leaving your party to sit as an independent). So it’s nice to have some backup from the Mother of Parliaments.
To be fair, depending on the party and the circumstance, defying the whip might well get you invited to leave the caucus.
But then there would either be no Friday the 13th, or there would be one every month. (You seem to have started on Saturday, if the 22nd is on a Friday.)
I think Giles’s post assumes that we keep the other aspects of the U.S. system – divided government co-equal checks and balances. Just reduce or eliminate the “implied” or unreviewable powers of the executive.
Actually, I don’t thinkt there is any real support in the U.S. Constitution for implied powers of the executive. It’s something that some people holding the office have dreamed up and have been successful in pushing along to some extent. I think the Supreme court let out a huge brain fart in the Nixon tapes case. It should have concluded that there is no support in the Constitution to allow the executive any “implied” authority to withhold any information from the judiciary or the legislature. The very concept effectively assassinates the idea of co-equal branches of government.