Yeah, having access to a stone mill has been amazing for some things. Fresh sesame paste, peanut butter, etc. I wish I could afford one of those things!

PB: I make my own using the stone mill that a neighbour has.

Bread: If I can find a good "roggenbrot" I go with that. (A dense sourdough rye.)

Preparation: single-side toast the bread in a frying pan. Smear a not-too-thick layer of peanut butter on both untoasted sides. Add almost paper-thin slices of banana to separate the halves when put together, and to help prevent that protein sticking to the roof of the mouth thing. Put halves together so it's bread-peanut butter-banana-peanut butter-bread with the toasted side out.

Well, I used quicklime on it before burying it, only to find out later that quicklime isn't very effective at conce...

Oh. MY body. Not a body. My bad.

I banged up my knee hiking once. It hurt and was a real pain in the ass to get back to civilization. But after a few days it was feeling OK, so I didn't bother seeing a doctor.

About a dozen years later I'm in the hospital for orthoscopic surgery to fix up a torn meniscus that has, over that time, actually worn an extra groove in one of the bones.

OK, let's put it this way since the meme didn't register:

Fuck. Off.

Was that clearer? I mean seriously, fuck the fuck right fucking off. You're literally saying that a literal matter of taste is "wrong".

Fuck. Off.

Fuck the fuck right fucking off.

I have had dozens of scotch samples over the years from the kinds of people who, like you, insist that I've just "never had the good stuff". The range of prices has been from bottom-shelf as you said to stuff that there's no way in Hell I could ever afford.

I hated them all.

Is it really that hard to comprehend that sometimes people just don't like what you like? I'm getting a lot of this vibe from scotch fans here:

Perhaps the CD is theoretically capable of better. In practice, however, it seems they don't use that capacity (which leads me to suspect that "in theory, theory and praxis are the same; in praxis, …".

I don't have the technical chops to assess this. What I have are ears. And those ears tell me that actual physical CDs that I have held in my hand and put into a good sound system myself sound … well, sound perfectly fine for most music. It's just some outliers (like the aforementioned "Firth of Fifth") that sound far better on vinyl than any CD pressing I've ever seen.

I've never seen a CD that can produce bass that you feel rather than hear. I have seen vinyl that pulls it off. I suspect there's something intrinsic to the formats that causes this.

If there were channels available to, my money would be going to them annually in a subscription. So no argument here.

Survival.

It gets obnoxiously hot and humid here, see. 😅

I did that a while back too. It's remarkably liberating.

Chinese RMB.

I'm working through a newer edition of The 36 Strategems with an interesting twist over the classic: the examples keep the old commentary ones intact, but add two more modern ones as well for each strategem.

And somehow a daughter is a better daughter than a son could be. Which to me sounds like BY DEFINITION!!! 🤣

Yeah, I got the gist of the thing he said, but wow, was he ever awkward when it came to giving praise. (We need a "shaking head" emoji here.)