The internet went from showing food recipe videos to alchemy in less than a decade. There’s going to be a quick video on how to make the philosopher’s stone from tomato sauce next week.
I WANNA DRINK THE TRANSPARENT SODA
leave milk out unrefrigerated in your house for 2 days
Some days ago, my sibling sent me this video out of the desperate hope I could provide the catharsis of seeing it torn to pieces. It has now been coming on 72 hours, and only now have I recovered enough to be able to do much of anything but scream, “WHAT?!” and “NO!” at the screen.
I cannot bring myself to confront the claims in this video in the order they are put forth without losing my will to live after the first one, so I will start with the least crazy and work my way up.
Bananas to ripen things: More or less true. You’ll sometimes see advice to cooks to store underripe fruit in a paper bag with one piece of overripe (but not rotten) fruit to ripen it more quickly. Misrepresentations: It will probably take longer than overnight to ripen something as green as some of those tomatoes, and it doesn’t have to be a banana.
Coca-cola and milk: The coke is more acidic than the
milk and curdles it, resulting in solid globs of milk protein which
settle out. The brown dye in the coke sticks to the milk protein globs,
leaving the excess liquid more or less clear. Misrepresentations: The video has been enormously sped up, which the editing does not make clear; the reaction takes hours.
Ketchup to clean metal: To my mild surprise, this is actually a thing (though you could just make a paste out of salt, flour, and vinegar and scrub with that and not get ketchup stains on everything)… Misrepresentations: …for cleaning copper and bronze. Which the jug shown in the video is not. The acid in the ketchup might take some of the tarnish off, say, aluminum, but at that point you might as well just use vinegar.
“Warm water clears wax from fruits!”: This is a mysterious and arcane procedure called “washing.” Misrepresentations: I don’t know what the hell they even did to the video on this sequence but as a person who has washed many apples in warm water, it does not look like that and the thin layer of edible wax applied to make them look good in the grocery store does not come off that easily.
Insta-freeze bottle: This is a real thing… Misrepresentation: …which absolutely will not happen if you follow their instructions, because a) they neglect to mention an important caveat (the water needs to be purified/distilled) and b) 5 minutes is not long enough for a water bottle to supercool. If you google any of the myriad videos and articles of people doing this trick, you’ll see numbers like “3 hours in the freezer” or “40 minutes in a salted ice bath.”
There is video of the trick working. Either that footage was taken from someone else, or they knew how to do it, did it, and then deliberately lied about the time for no apparent reason.
Putting a broken plate in milk for two days magically fixes it: To my immense surprise, they didn’t make this one up; the idea is that the milk protein casein can form into a plastic at high temperatures and bind to the ceramic. Googling it turned up some hobbyist potters commenting that they’d used it to salvage things that had cracked slightly in the kiln. Misrepresentations: Once again, they’ve misrepresented the method: everything I saw talking about how to do it said to boil the milk and then soak for an hour, not leave it out for two days like an offering to the pixies. And most of what I saw reported about it also said it only really works on hairline cracks, not full breaks, and doesn’t hold up long-term because the real structural damage isn’t repaired. And may leave a faint and persistent odor of boiled milk.
This is the kind of gibberish predicated on so many nonsensical assumptions that unpacking it would be more trouble than it’s worth. Plus, well, I can barely see anything with the low video quality, but what I can see of the vague blur doesn’t look much like a honeycomb in the first place. Suffice to say:
“Honey looks like a honeycomb” isn’t even in the ballpark of what’s generally meant by “genetic memory,”
what’s generally meant by “genetic memory” is also complete hooey, and
fluid dynamics is weird and swirling a thick, viscous, water-soluble liquid with a layer of water on top is going to do weird things.
But at least that I could potentially attribute to ignorance rather than deliberate intent to deceive, unlike…
Hot coals and peanut butter
This is the reason it’s taken me this long to post this. Every time I think about it my soul starts to leave my body. It’s such a mind-boggling level of bullshit that every time I’ve tried to put words around an explanation I’m quickly reduced to staring at the screen and mouthing “No” to myself in a voice of quiet despair, because I can’t even figure out where to start.
Well, okay, I guess I might as well start by saying I think their… let’s say inspiration on this was articles about scientists who made diamonds out of peanut butter and carbon dioxide. …With a press that’s designed to recreate the conditions of the earth’s mantle, and which is prone to exploding. So, you know, not something you can do in your kitchen. Unless you have one hell of a kitchen.
You can see the direct links to this in the nonsensical claim that this “works” because peanut butter contains carbon dioxide. (It doesn’t, particularly. It’s crushed peanuts mixed with oil. You know what would have a lot of carbon dioxide? The fire you pulled that glowing lump of charcoal out of.) It also mentions “pressure” when no particular pressure is involved, presumably because we’ve all heard about turning coal into diamond under heat and pressure.
Chemically speaking, there’s very little to make that crystal out of except carbon, unless you want to posit a mass migration of all the sugar molecules in the peanut butter to the center of the coal. And “carbon crystal” = “diamond,” and do you think if it was that easy to make diamonds they’d be that expensive?
I will guarantee you that crystal is a lump of quartz they covered in black crud and then peanut butter to pretend it was the charcoal.
But, of course, all of that is irrelevant, because by reblogging this at all, even to performatively despair that the internet does not seem to have come all that far since the days of Infinite Chocolate, I’m playing into their hands. Lifehack clickbait has done this forever– they deliberately seed in wrong or awful advice because people will share that to say how stupid/wrong it is. They led with complete insanity to get attention, and I gave them eyeballs on the video watching this, and I’ll be giving them more from writing this.
Maybe I’ll stick to the chaos god theory. It’s less depressing.
Jocks in TV shows are played by kids who used to be theater nerds
Obtained: the closest thing to tater tots you can get here.
I was glad to spot some a while back. Oddly enough, they didn’t have a noticeable bacon flavor, in spite of a little bacon in there. They did have some odd note that I wasn’t totally thrilled with, just eating them on their own. It wasn’t actively bad; the taste just didn’t scream “tater tots”. It was a little disappointing.
But, I figured they might work fine to throw on top of a casserole, which is what I decided to try tonight. Probably better than the hash brown triangle things (which taste more like a basic tater tot!), with more of the crispy outer surface.
One of those chilly damp days here that made some type of hot filling casserole seem very appealing.
If God never existed, then whose heavenly staircase did I march up, whose heavenly host did I best in battle, and whose severed head do I keep stowed in my basement?
“I’m not attracted to X, so I won’t date them”: okay then, you go ahead and do that
“I’m not attracted to X, and I demand that people who are X hear and validate this statement and give me their official permission to not be attracted to them”: please no
“I’m not attracted to X, and I demand that the entire world hear and validate this statement and declare X objectively unattractive”: you can stop now
Gets complicated when the people saying statement #2 believe that X people are trying to shove themselves down other people’s throats and make it mandatory to be attracted to X. Then they’re logically going to think they’re “fighting” for their “right” to not be attracted to X, and will yell this at X people.
For the record, I think that belief is almost always ludicrous and lacking in empathy – almost nobody wants to force people to be attracted to them! It’s just that it’s obviously demoralizing when so many people disqualify you as a sexual partner on the sole basis of your membership in X.
I think this is where a lot of this phenomenon comes from. Some of it is simple bullying and concern-trolling, but I think there’s also a lot of people who never internalized that they can make choices about their sexuality.
I see this a lot when I get asks saying “men should do [very specific behavior] in relationships with women,” where it’s obvious the asker just wants her boyfriend to do that behavior but has no tools for expressing that. The universal, objective rules of society may be up for debate, but the fact that such rules exist is not.
And when you’re deep into that mindset, it’s very hard to understand the difference between “you’re allowed to be unconventional if you want” and “being unconventional is the new universal rule.”
With Trump now claiming that he can unilaterally just take away the right of birthright citizenship, a right explicitly and unambiguously written in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, I just want to make something clear.
The Constitution doesn’t mean anything. Anybody in power can ignore it whenever they want, and they have done so repeatedly throughout US History. Screaming “this is clearly unconstitutional” is correct, but ultimately hollow – as any historian of the US knows. It doesn’t matter what the Constitution says. It never has. And it has certainly never mattered to conservatives – these people wield the constitution in the same way they wield the Bible – as a means to exercise power. That is the beginning, middle, and end of the right-wing relationship to he Constitution.
If you see conservatives screaming about adhering to the Constitution, ask them what they really want, because it is normally something dark. Because they will throw out the constitution as soon as it suits them. They have done so, and they will always do so, and calling them out for their hypocrisy will never change their mind. They want to keep and maintain power. That’s it.
Rules only matter in practical terms if the people charged with enforcing the rules have the power and will to do so. The GOP have made it abundantly clear, over and over and over, that they aren’t going to punish their own no. matter. what.
(The Dems might have made things similarly clear but the last time they had the kind of power the GOP has now, Facebook statuses were still auto-prefaced with “Jack is feeling” so I don’t remember.)
On this day, 30 October 1919, residents of the Pennsylvania Working Home for Blind Men demanded higher wages for their work, threatening to strike the following week if they weren’t granted. The visually impaired men made brooms, whisks, carpets and other goods, and their home had increased the rent with no increase in their wages. They formed a union and affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The boss claimed that the men “like the rest of the world, have got strike fever”.
Pictured is the home around that time https://ift.tt/2PskDGY
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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