Fondots
To expand on the abusive relationship aspect, say your partner, parents, etc. want to keep you from contacting people, maybe your family/friends, maybe the police, maybe your doctor (for example to seek abortion services, or maybe treatment for a health issue they’ve been trying to withhold medication from you for) they may check your phone to see who you’ve been contacting or even take your phone from you to prevent you from using it.
There’s also of course less savory reasons, cheating, dealing drugs, or other illegal activities.
And somewhat less likely, undercover officers, FBI agents, investigative journalists, etc. whose cover could potentially be compromised if the wrong people are around and that second phone goes off.
My workplace has a no s’mores rule.
Shortly before I started, they had a small fad of people making s’mores in the lunch room microwave. One of the trainees was a younger dude who had never lived on his own, and apparently had no idea what an appropriate amount of time was to microwave it, and put it in for 5 minutes or something, filling pretty much the building up with smoke.
We’re a 911 dispatch center, so evacuating the building to go to our backup center is a whole thing, they were able to avoid having to do that but just barely.
So no s’mores.
Gator- tastes like chicken, kind of tough and chewy, but come on, have you ever seen an alligator? Of course it was going to be chewy.
Frog legs- pretty much a dead ringer for chicken wings if you didn’t know what a wing was supposed to look like. Maybe just the tiniest hint of something fishy going on there.
Escargot - an excellent excuse to eat a bunch of butter and garlic and for some reason it’s fancy even though you’re eating a garden pest
Squirrel - kind of greasy, but not bad, darker meat than I expected. Not really enough meat on them to be worth it though, at least not the squirrels we have in my neck of the woods, I’ve seen some pretty big squirrels in other parts of the country though, so maybe they’re a little more worthwhile. If you had a handful of squirrels I suspect they could make a pretty good soup or stew though.
Rabbit- tastes like chicken, I’ve had it a few different ways, I don’t know that I would know the difference if you swapped rabbit for chicken in any of them, but I had a rabbit pot pie at a restaurant a few years ago that has been my happy thought ever since, probably the tastiest thing I have ever eaten.
Deer venison - very similar to beef, a bit gamey but I dig that.
Quail - tiny chicken, that’s pretty much all there is to it.
Pigeon- much darker than chicken, a bit greasy, overall pretty tasty (these were country pigeons, I don’t recommend eating city pigeons) a single pigeon breast is pretty much exactly the right size to make a pigeon nugget.
Bison- lean beef, maybe a bit stronger tasting but overall pretty well within the beef spectrum. If you didn’t tell me it was bison, I’d probably assume it was either really cheap or moderately expensive beef.
Wild boar- pork but not, kind of hard to explain this one, and the way I had it prepared had a lot of spices and seasoning so I can’t really give a straight appraisal of the meat itself.
Kangaroo- it tastes like it evolved on a different continent than any other mammal you’ve ever eaten. It’s still very much in the red meat family but there’s something else going on there that’s kind of hard to place, sort of gamey and stronger tasting.
Goose- kind of like a mix of duck and turkey, leaning more duck-like, and yeah, that tracks, you could probably just about assume that from looking at a goose.
I wouldn’t really consider these to be exotic, but a surprising amount of people don’t seem to have tried them, and they’re some of my all-time favorite meats.
Duck- its more like a red meat than chicken, can be kind of greasy/fatty but in a good way
Lamb- red meat, kind of a strong gamey taste (that again, I personally really like) oddly somehow gamier than venison despite venison actually being a game meat and lamb being domesticated. You could probably serve me deer and tell me it was beef and slip it by me, but I don’t think you could pull it off with lamb.
Goat- lamb, but moreso.
Liver- it’s kind of hard to describe liver in any way but livery, but iron-y and minneral-y are probably the best adjectives I can come up with. I’ve had beef liver and chicken liver, beef is definitely a stronger flavor but both are recognizably livery. Chicken liver is probably mild enough that as long as it’s prepared well most people could enjoy it, beef liver is definitely more of an acquired taste.
Chicken hearts- stronger flavored and tougher than regular chicken, but still recognizably chicken, imagine dark meat but lean. Little bit of a irony/mineraly taste, but not in a livery way, can be a little tough/chewy, and if you’re inclined to batter and fry them, they are the perfect size to make sort of a popcorn chicken thing with, or if you want to have little bits of meat for a stir fry or something and don’t feel like chopping up the meat yourself. They are also dirt cheap, at least around me.
Tripe- a bit chewy, honestly not too much going on flavor-wise, there’s something going on that tastes/smells of a barnyard but in a very pleasant way, but it’s almost more of a suggestion of a taste than an actual flavor.
Beef tongue- recognizably beefy, but definitely has something going else on, not quite livery but leaning that direction. Definitely something you need to braise or sous vide or something for a long time because it will be damn near impossible to chew otherwise, and it has its own unique texture, it will probably make you think a lot about your own tongue while eating it.
Chicken feet- look, there’s really no meat worth speaking of on a chicken foot, it’s basically all skin and connective tissue which is tasty and an interesting texture, but not worth it to me to eat themselves, some people do, but it’s not for me. ut if you want to take you chicken stock to the next level, use some chicken feet.
And these are probably the opposite of exotic, just weird or have bad press
Pickled pigs feet- salty vinegary vaguely porky jello with bones in it. I like salty vinegary things, so that’s not a bad thing in my book.
Scrapple- local delicacy for those of us in the Delaware valley, if you’ve ever heard spam described as everything but the oink, well scrapple has some oink in it too. It’s soft and mushy and fries up to a real nice crisp on the outside. Taste is sort of in a similar vein as a breakfast sausage, really nothing too wild about it.
Pork roll (you north jersey folk calling it Taylor Ham are crazy, it says pork roll right on the package, you’re wrong) is basically just spam with a better PR department, less salty, slightly different spices, doesn’t come in a can.
And on that note- spam, it’s delicious but very salty. If you like ham you’ll probably like spam.
Teeth have always kind of struck me as something we could eventually not just replace or regrow and make as good as new, but actually replace with something better.
Teeth are, by their nature, subject to a lot of wear and tear, corrosive environments, have a lot of nooks and crannies that need to be cleaned regularly, etc.
How fucking cool would it be to have some sort of cyborg teeth made of some material that won’t wear down, is more corrosion resistant, stronger than your natural teeth, etc? You could use your teeth as a bottle opener with impunity, or do everything else your parents always warned you not to do with your teeth.
I’m certainly no doctor or material scientist to suggest what the ideal tooth replacement material would be, but imagine having some kind of titanium alloy super teeth that would never wear down, corrode, or get cavities no matter what kind of neglect or abuse you subject them to, and are purposely engineered for easier flossing, may e even more efficient biting and chewing. Sure, the Jaws look isn’t everyone’s aesthetic, but some of us might consider it a worthwhile trade-off.
In the meantime though, this is damn cool if it pans out.
People always chime in with stories about how chiropractors helped them with XY and Z problem they were having.
And overall I don’t doubt them. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong with your spine or other joints, and I’m certain that some of them can be addressed by physically manipulating and adjusting it.
But the basic premise of chiropractic treatments is that basically all human ailments can be fixed in that way, which should sound like total bullshit to anyone with half a brain. And that’s before you get into all spiritual nonsense that pervades a lot of the field.
Now some of them understand that that’s a load of bullshit and may even be realistic about the things they can treat, but it can be pretty damn hard to sort them out from the ones who think that your pancreatic cancer is caused by ghosts in your spine and they know how to get them out or some bullshit like that.
Now if you have a good idea what your issue is and what needs to be done to fix it, take the time to carefully vet your chiropractor to make sure they’re not going to try some crazy bullshit on you, you very well may be able to get a decent treatment from them. Maybe you’ll even be able to save some money going with that.
But for most of us who aren’t doctors and so only have kind of vague ideas what exactly the issue is and that the treatments we’re doing actually make any sense, and don’t necessarily have time to do all of that research and carefully vet that the person treating them isn’t secretly a quack, you could just get the same sort of treatments from actually physical therapists, orthopedists, physiatrists, etc. with the added benefit of them actually understanding the issues and how to fix them properly.
Chiropractors are kind of like the rednecks of the medicine world. Some of them know exactly what they’re doing with that harbor freight welder, they may not do things by the book but they know for certain what works and what doesn’t and more importantly know when something is beyond what them and their buddies can accomplish on a free Saturday with a case of beer and when they need to suck it up and limp their truck to the shop and let a professional deal with it. Others know just enough to be dangerous and while they can get the job done 90% of the time or at least not make things worse, that 10% of the time something is literally going to blow up in someone’s face. And still others are just meth heads looking to make a quick buck and it’s a miracle they’re not behind bars. And when you see them hanging around the local watering hole, it may not be totally clear which is which until it’s too late.
The Roman Historian Sallust once said “Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master”
I remember posting that quote on Facebook once probably about 12 years ago. An older guy I worked with at the time chimed in that he was one of the few and how important liberty was to him.
Few years later he was spewing Trump bullshit.
I find this kind of interesting after Naomi Wu (also known as SexyCyborg) recently had a run-in with the CCP and has largely gone silent online.
For anyone not familiar with her/her situation, she’s a tech/maker YouTuber. She has a pretty radical look with enormous fake boobs and skimpy outfits, but she does have some genuinely interesting content. She had been calling out some security vulnerabilities that recently got some attention so that’s likely why the Chinese government, in her words, clipped her wings, but she had a bit of a target painted on her back regardless because of her appearance, being a lesbian, and because her girlfriend is a Uyghur.
The actual sprayer nozzle sits towards the back of the bowl and sprays up at an angle so any dripping is going straight down into the bowl not landing on the sprayer nozzle.
It’s getting fresh water, not recycling bowl water, I suppose there could be some small risk if Larry has explosive diarrhea all over the nozzle, but its probably no worse than if you have any splashback after using a regular toilet after him. Most of the models I have used also have a self-cleaning feature that will have the nozzle rinse itself (they still do need to be actually cleaned periodically of course)
There is a little bit of splashing, unless you’re abnormally small and skinny though most of it is probably just going to get your butt and staying in the toilet, once in a while I’ll get a couple drops on the front of the toilet seat and I’m pretty sure that’s just over-spray shooting directly between my legs, not poop water splashing off of my ass