... is that while they have lots of great flavor, they're like chewing old boot leather. If only someone could discover or breed a mushroom that combined the flavor of shiitake with the texture of a regular white mushroom or a crimini, or for that matter a straw mushroom, it'd be wonderful.
I need a steampunk icon. Instead of coming up with my own, I decided¹ to do something different and throw it out to my readership as a contest or challenge. The challenge is fairly simple: Reply Comment with an image that is fairly readily iconizable and, to you, sums up the essence of steampunk. Winner gets ... um ... well, credit and recognition, dunno if I can come up with anything else cool right now. :)
Have at it!
[1] And it's not at all² because I have a cold right now. Not one bit, never!³
[2] ...Well, OK, maybe a little bit.
[3] "And was never Iraqi Minister of Information! I make joke!"
Or, why on earth did American plumbing ever adopt these Rube Goldberg remote-operated stopper contraptions in sinks and bathtubs, when a simple rubber stopper does the job perfectly well? A rubber stopper usually seals better, doesn't fill up the drainpipe with bits and pieces and levers and linkages for stuff to catch on and clog the drain, and there's virtually nothing that can go wrong with it. Anything that CAN go wrong with a rubber stopper, you can fix for maybe a buck spent at the hardware store, perhaps even the hardware section at the supermarket, and probably without tools. When one of these over-complicated remote-linkage slow-leak devices goes wrong — which they do frequently — the vast majority of people need to call a plumber.¹
Ah, but the chrome-plated remote-linkage gubbins is SHINY! Doesn't work reliably, sure, but it's really SHINY!
[1] Come to think of it, that's probably a big part of the reason....
New Scientist reports on a new study at UC Irvine with startling (to some, perhaps) results. To cut a long story short, the study found that when you drug people with low doses of anaesthetics (around 10% of the dose used for complete general anaesthesia), they don't remember as much as people who weren't drugged.
Um ..... Duh? They needed a study to figure that out? It seems one of the more obvious possible results.
In related obviousness, I caught a part of a book review on NPR, the reviewer speaking in breathless, hushed terms about the central revelation of $AUTHOR's book as though the author had achieved some stunning new discovery about the world that had eluded philosophers for thousands of years.
The writer's earthshaking new insight? You might want to be sitting down for this: "Sometimes, no matter how badly you want something, you don't get it."
Where do they find these people?