Um… There may not always be male and female plants, but pollen is definitely the ‘male’ form of a haploid gamete, and nearly perfectly analogous to sperm. The link should be able to take you to every part you’d not want to know about plants. Allergies are normal. People who don’t have allergies are the freaks, because their bodies don’t care that the tree is trying to have sex with their nose.

Hell, the part of the fruit that you eat is often the plant sperm that didn’t fertilize the plant egg. Pollen contains a second plant sperm that fertilizes a different part of the female plant and creates all the juicy goodness you ingest. You can read about it here.

Now, the dandelion is formed seeds, sure. So baby cannon it is. /shrug

Milhouse is not a meme!

Interesting how the ‘vintage’ ‘black border’ meme has a remarkably modern website watermark. Go back to sucking on your pacifier, you wanka.

I’ll forever be grateful to those thronal thespians of the page, who told me exactly whence the phrase, “Close, but no cigar,” came from.

This is a big one, and I’d add in an aggressive tax for owning multiple properties. Make single land ownership ~70% of what it currently is, and each additional property increases all your property tax by 300%. Couple that with getting rid of idiotic exemptions (seriously…I have a friend with parents that owned more than a hundred different properties in a semi-rural area [one that was going to become suburban soon] and paid nearly no taxes because they plunked a few cows onto each one until the development companies paid the big moolah for them) and there would be plenty of homes for everyone. Last report I remember said we had more than enough empty homes sitting around to house every homeless person multiple times over.

It was, when it was just people looking to get a tiny bit of income from renting a room in their house. Then people tried to make it their sole income, and then companies got into the game. Part of it is that the service became popular, so any cheaper rooms are snatched up instantly, and the user now gets to choose between a hotel-looking hotel, or a house-looking hotel, with nasty fees to get more money from you.

Okay, I think this is the one I read way long ago, but it says it was updated in 2021. I remember when I read it must have been early 2010s, and this dude even admits his grandmother was an impasta so… /shrug Amazing how memory gets skewed. I must have remembered the grandmother not being Italian line and somehow mangled it into him being Italian.

This is why pasta instructions will tell you to add the pasta only when the water is at a vigorous boil. Either you stir, or you have the pasta boiling like it’s a volcano about to pop.

There was a neat cooking blog where an italian fella went into all the ‘old myths’ that his grandmother used to tell him: Vigorous boiling; Large Pot; when to add sauce; etc. It all boiled down to knowing what you’re cooking. Pasta is starchy, so if it sits in hot water instead of being tumbled about, all the starch that’s been liberated into the water settles back on the pasta (and not in a good way).

The equator and its rain forests are much more pleasant. Plenty of shade and the temps don’t reach quite as high. It’s the tropics that get nasty. There was a stretch of the border between the US and Mexico that reached 115 this week. The summer I spent in Texas years ago broke a record for never getting below 90 for something like 45 days, and the apartment I had didn’t use AC. That was a nasty summer.

The amusing part is that we can’t even guess (accurately) what the actual tell will be. Somehow I don’t think the time gap between blinks is going to be it. I’m betting it’s going to be slang-based. There’s a reason kids use slang readily, and it’s often to separate the worlds of adult regulators and the ‘more free’ children/teenagers. Imagine AI trying to keep up with the slang, but just like adults, it will be unable to use it in the same way with all the pseudo-information packed into it.