Things you were shockingly old when you learned

ideal place for bacon is the grill aka broiler

EZ bake oven

"basic bike maintenance"

On a tangent, I've managed to avoid learning how to drive right up until my forties. It wasn't very useful in London, and now I'm fortunate enough to live within cycling distance of my workplace. But I'm reaching a point when I will probably need a car, so back in February I did my CBT. This is a day-long training course that teaches you how to ride a motorbike. At the end of it you can ride a 125cc motorbike for two years with L-plates. Which explains why there are so many Deliveroo drivers buzzing around with L-plates.

And so I am now the proud owner of a Peugeot Tweet, which does about 140mph and costs about five English pounds to fill up (the tank capacity is about a gallon). This gives me two years to learn about roundabouts and toughen myself up mentally for the inevitable time I crush a pram or something. And I now have a legitimate excuse to own a pair of leather trousers.

I remember the first time I went to Italy, I felt inadequate because I was surrounded by kids buzzing around on scooters. Crowds of them. When I was a kid I didn't buzz around on anything. This is a photo I took in Genoa last month, where even scooter drivers have trouble parking:
https://i.imgur.com/i7nNdAh.jpg

It's a massive culture shock. For a mixture of reasons - climate, the law, the distances involved - scooters and motorbikes are a tiny tiny minority thing in the UK. We all have cars instead. Cars upon cars, parked on the pavement and all over. And tiny stand-on electric scooters. Of which there were masses in Genoa, sitting unused on the pavement because everybody already has a scooter. The problem is that it takes a certain amount of money and commitment to learn to ride a motorbike, so why not learn to drive a car instead? I'm digressing here.

I grew up with a bicycle, and one thing I learned is that the brakes are different for motorbikes. On a bicycle the right and left handles control the front and back brakes. And that's true for an automatic scooter. But for a geared motorbike the left handgrip is actually the clutch! Not the brake at all. You control the brake with a foot pedal instead. And the gears go 1-neutral-2-3-4-5-6, which makes a certain amount of sense but feels weird. I also learned that motorcyclists are legally allowed to pull trailers, but only if they have a proper licence. And that my dreams of riding a motorcycle with a sidecar are likely to remain dreams because (a) the Ural is a 745cc motorbike (b) it costs £21! But there is still time to buzz around Morocco on a two-stroke.

The discussion of bacon reminds me that there is some debate as to whether you should spray cooking oil on the exhaust pipe. To season it, in the same way that you season a cast iron pan. It sounds like one of those things that might possibly work but wouldn't do any harm to try.

in that last scenario are you cooking the bacon rolled up inside the exhaust or laid in strips over it

it's hilarious that Linkin Park's founding bassist doesn't play on Hybrid Theory because he left the band for a year to focus on his other project, a ska punk band called Tasty Snax. might be one of the luckiest guys in rock because they let him rejoin after they sold millions.

— Al Shipley (@alshipley) March 19, 2023

Re: cast irons, I was shockingly old when I learned I didn’t actually need these cumbersome implements that are fussy as hell and don’t actually make the end product that much better.

(They are not any better than other cooking vessels, sorry yr in a cult)

i gotta dig out/reseason/start using my cast iron pans to try & up my iron intake, and they're convenient for recipes that go stove-to-oven, but yeah generally speaking fuck those pans. oooh i'm a fancy frying pan and i'm prone to rust and i don't like soap, oooh! like get over yourself cast iron, you're not all that.

and so heavy, god, and the handles will burn your skin off!! fkn cast iron!

that a sac fly doesn’t count as an at bat! what!!!?

dr seuss-ass declaration

Yeah it’s interesting that hitting a deep fly that advances a runner from 2nd to 3rd counts against the batter’s batting average but a fly that advances a runner from 3rd to home doesn’t. But I assume baseball people have thought these things over and maybe it all makes sense.

my initial read on that was that there's a species of, presumably, insect called a sac fly, & Tracer was astonished that they are not taxonomically grouped with bats. but desultory googling shows that crickets are involved somehow, and the baffling uk fauna gets bafflinger

wait there's baseball now, jesus

i have been looking at baseball statistics and watching baseball games and reading box scores for my entire life, not in a professional capacity, actually wait yes, for one summer in a professional capacity, but mainly as someone pretty knowledgable about baseball and how the plays are accounted for, and i just never knew that. it seems impossible but there it is

there’s a lot in baseball that could have sprung from the mind of dr seuss tbh

Lol!

I love my cast iron pan and it's perfect for dual hob/oven cooking stuff like variations of tortilla or cornbread. I season mine with plain old vegetable oil and won't fuck with any teflon shit. When I first got it I watched lots of seasoning guide vids on yt and learned that the Chinese had been doing this for over a thousand years.

I don't see what the big deal is about just washing them with a wire brush and hot water. At least they don't start bleeding toxic chemicals into your food if you scratch them, surely that is a major positive as well as the fact you only ever need to buy one.

chain mail scrubber ftw

https://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/cast-iron-chainmail-scrubber

So Tracer, how do you think a sac fly should be scored? How about a sac bunt?

https://sacsplace.com/

I'm pretty skeptical of the idea of "situational thinking" which implies that batters can just sky 'em out to right field whenever they want to. so it all seems kinda arbitrary to me and I suspect it all just balances out in the end.

i do covet that chain mail scrubber. they feel and sound so ~~~slinky~~~

perhaps with time and familiarity i too will come to love cast iron, but idk, a nice stainless pan w/ wooden handle still feels like the ideal 2 me

and every time i see "sac" i think cyst :(

you can do fried eggs on seasoned cast iron without it sticking, although I couldn't guarantee it every time and sometimes get a bit of sticking. But I'm not fussed about perfection. I think it definitely helps to warm the iron up for 3-4 minutes longer than you would do with that teflon stuff before cooking.

sac flie scoring predates sabermetrics and the league/coaches didn't want players refusing to do the one necessary thing to bring in a run or move a batter over because it'd hurt their standings in the batting race and taking unnecessary risks.

now it isn't even really necessary

"sac fly" also sounds like something that lays eggs in a scrotum

and then the eggs wld get fertilized by the dude's sperm

and then his balls would be pregnant

with jeff goldblum larvae

just to note that i don’t use teflon or any shit like that, i use stainless steel and yes, once in a while a glazed cast iron that i can actually wash like a normal pan instead of fussing about it.

I'm a stainless steel/carbon steel wok enthusiast as well, table.

lol, just ordered a chainmail scrubber and in my enthusiasm I didn't notice it was a China based ebayer, so might not get it for weeks. No more wearing out wire brushes for this fool!

we got a fancy carbon steel pan that we only use for eggs or egg-related dishes like shakshuka

there’s a lot in baseball that could have sprung from the mind of dr seuss tbh

I would not, could not, with a bat
I would not, could not, wearing a hat

I will not eat them with a ball
I will not eat them, Sam, at all

I would not eat them while playing Tetris
And I don't subscribe to Sabermetrics

That sounded like it segued into a Flight of the Conchords song at the end there.

that a sac fly doesn’t count as an at bat! what!!!?

it does count as a plate appearance, though. So it doesn't lower your BA, but it does lower your OBP. This is how you can have a lower OBP than BA, if you have more sac flies than walks (and HBPs)

enjoying all this sac talk

My favorite sac is Sacagawea

i mean it's not like you were deliberately trying to fly out, you were trying to rip a double. for some reason sac bunts not counting as at bats seems more normal... but it's true that it's the same principle. i dunno man. good point about OBP. it needs to show up somewhere. and it does!

It also shows up as an RBI

^^^

indeed

let us not sneeze at the good old ribbie

I only figured this out looking at a box score and trying to figure out someone that went 0 for 4 had an RBI.

how someone

I always thought for baseball fans most of the fun was in the stats and remembering the arcane rules, whereas watching an actual game from beginning to end was only an incidental pleasure.

“pleasure”

Should I have a put something like “a very rare occurrence”? Thought about it.

Computing pioneer Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, and her mother steered her towards mathematics partly in reaction to Byron's calling and life choices.

didn't quite work though...

Just listened to Kate Lister 5alking about Byron on Betwixt The Sheets current episode. So that's a coincidence

Huh, I'm currently reading "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" and Lord Byron appears in the chapter I was just reading last night.

Betwixt the Sheets comes out on a Tuesday so I was loistening to it while i walked around town. Had probably stopped a little before I saw that.
POdcast comes out Tuesday and Friday.