Minor annoyances

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Re: Minor annoyances

Postby cmsellers » Tue Dec 24, 2019 5:18 am

I've been seeing a bunch of "Moroccan spice" recipes lately. If you aren't up on what that is, "Moroccan spice" refers to ras al-hanout, a spice mixture with no set recipe or even list of ingredients, but which, like curry or chile powder, tends to reflect the cuisine of the culture, and also like curry or chile powder, American spice vendors seem to have developed a more-or-less standard recipe.

I like all the spices that are in typical American ras al-hanout recipes, but I have access to two additional spices which are commonly used in Moroccan cuisine, but aren't used in any American recipe I can find: grains-of-paradise and sumac. So for Christmas, I decided I'm having lamb, and I decided that I'd improvise and make my own ras al-hanout, including those two ingredients.

Thought I had both at home, bought the other spices that I was out of or low on when I was out, went to whip up the mixture, and discovered that either I'm out of sumac or it's ended up in some out-of-the-way cranny where I can't find it. Either way, I needed more sumac and drove to Central Market. My only reason for driving to Central Market on the day before Christmas Eve was to get more sumac and ... they're out.

My first thought was that it must not just me, there must be a trend of "Moroccan spice" recipes and other people had the same idea, especially given that I noticed they also had a "sorry, we're out" sign on their generic ras al-hanout mixture too.

Except... there would have had to be enough people who saw such videos, had the same idea I did, and knew that sumac was commonly used in Moroccan cuisine and available at Central Market. Are there enough of those to make them sell out of it?
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Re: Minor annoyances

Postby jbobsully11 » Wed Dec 25, 2019 3:31 am

I realized a little while ago that I needed to buy a few small Christmas presents that I had forgotten about. I looked up a few stores’ hours to make sure they’d still be open, and they were all supposed to close at midnight. I went out just before 9 PM... and almost all of them were closed.

I hope certain people like the liqueur stocking stuffers I got, because I had to go about fifteen minutes away to buy them (past two other liquor stores that closed early).
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Re: Minor annoyances

Postby cmsellers » Wed Dec 25, 2019 5:27 am

In the US, I've found that almost all stores close early on Christmas Eve, and many do on Thanksgiving. Unless they have a really well-maintained website, though (rare except with big chains), you probably won't get that information except by calling.
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Re: Minor annoyances

Postby NathanLoiselle » Wed Dec 25, 2019 2:22 pm

How dare you give my children liquor, Jbob! That was my present choice for them!
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Re: Minor annoyances

Postby cmsellers » Thu Jan 16, 2020 6:52 am

So, awhile ago, for no reason I can discern, my YouTube recommendations were suddenly flooded with videos of people reading Reddit threads. Which is... I'm kind of insulted that YouTube thinks I would watch those. And of course I click "remove video > tell us why? > cuz dis channel total shit."

I then googled to try to find out why on earth people watch these channels and find myself no closer to enlightenment. Apparently some people listen to them as podcasts, but that's the only explanation I could find that makes any sense. But that still doesn't explain why they're so popular that YouTube thinks I must want to watch them even after blocking multiple such channels. But, eventually, YouTube stopped showing me those videos, and I assumed it was over.

But suddenly, they're showing up in my feed all over again, as "recommended for you." And the "never show me anything from this channel again" option is no longer showing up. I googled, and for some reason it now only shows up on your homepage (Google made a similarly annoying change to Google News some time ago), and for some reason, though these are flooding my sidebars as "recommended for you," they're not showing up on my home page, so I can't block any of the channels.

So I'm blocking every one of these videos and not telling YouTube why because fuck you Google, that's why.
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Re: Minor annoyances

Postby jbobsully11 » Thu Jan 16, 2020 5:33 pm

Before I left work yesterday (the second time), I noticed my car's odometer was close to reading 45678 miles. When I got home, it said 45681, and I completely missed seeing 45678 (not that I would've had much time to look; I had to still be on the highway then).
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Re: Minor annoyances

Postby SlayerGoddess » Fri Jan 17, 2020 9:06 pm

The mexican music that my boyfriend likes really annoys me, and so does most country music.
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Re: Minor annoyances

Postby cmsellers » Sat Jan 18, 2020 4:39 am

I don't consider annoying music a minor annoyance. Some music can be physically painful for me to listen to. But even when it's not, it still tends to disrupt my ability to think. My current auto mechanic is great in a good many respects, but the primary reason I went with them initially was the fact that the waiting room does not play music.

That said, I have to ask. When you say you don't like most country music, are you talking about pop country (Garth Brooks, the Dixie Chicks, Toby Keith), traditional country (Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline), or both? I can't stand pop country either, and I find that's usually what people mean, but there are some philistines who like pop country and not real country, and I once had a coworker who couldn't stand any country music because she associated it with political conservatism.
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Re: Minor annoyances

Postby NathanLoiselle » Sat Jan 18, 2020 7:27 pm

I can't stand any country music. 'Cause it all sucks ass.
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Re: Minor annoyances

Postby SlayerGoddess » Sat Jan 18, 2020 9:07 pm

cmsellers wrote:I don't consider annoying music a minor annoyance. Some music can be physically painful for me to listen to. But even when it's not, it still tends to disrupt my ability to think. My current auto mechanic is great in a good many respects, but the primary reason I went with them initially was the fact that the waiting room does not play music.

That said, I have to ask. When you say you don't like most country music, are you talking about pop country (Garth Brooks, the Dixie Chicks, Toby Keith), traditional country (Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline), or both? I can't stand pop country either, and I find that's usually what people mean, but there are some philistines who like pop country and not real country, and I once had a coworker who couldn't stand any country music because she associated it with political conservatism.


I don't like most country music, whether it's pop or traditional. The very few that I can stand are by female singers. I'll admit that part of it is because I associate country with bad experiences, but I already disliked country, it just added to it.
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Re: Minor annoyances

Postby cmsellers » Sun Jan 19, 2020 6:01 am

So, I grabbed two boxes of turkey-sized oven bags at Target, which, if you don't know, have two bags per box. (I've never actually used one for a turkey; I use them for briskets and pork bellies.)

I got home, and discovered that one of them had been opened and a bag removed.

I suppose I could go to Target and they might refund my money, but given how aggressive Target is about loss-prevention, I'd probably get a file. And even if I didn't, the awkwardness isn't worth $1.25.

I'm guessing somebody needed a turkey oven bag for Thanksgiving, stole one from a box, and hid it it back, figuring that Target is a big corporation that can afford to lose $2.50, which is how shoplifters usually justify their theft. However in practice, shoplifting doesn't take any money out of the pockets of corporate CEOs, rather it leads to small price increases for the rest of us, a few cents or a fraction of a cent at a time.

In this case, some asshole basically stole $1.25 directly from me. Which, like, even poor and unemployed, I can afford, but it's the principle of the the thing. Fuck the selfish greedy fucker; they're probably someone I politically disagree with.

So I'm telling myself that maybe some vegan is stealing turkey bags to punish people for eating turkeys. Somehow that makes me less upset; maybe it's the mental image, which is pretty funny.
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Re: Minor annoyances

Postby Krashlia » Sun Jan 19, 2020 9:20 pm

NathanLoiselle wrote:I can't stand any country music. 'Cause it all sucks ass.



I could maybe tolerate it if it came from an anime OP or ED.
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Re: Minor annoyances

Postby SlayerGoddess » Sun Jan 19, 2020 11:22 pm

cmsellers wrote:So I'm telling myself that maybe some vegan is stealing turkey bags to punish people for eating turkeys. Somehow that makes me less upset; maybe it's the mental image, which is pretty funny.


Now I'm imagining vengeful vegans going around inconveniencing meat eaters by stealing out of multipacks, and I agree, it's pretty funny.
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Re: Minor annoyances

Postby cmsellers » Tue Jan 28, 2020 8:46 pm

So, apparently LibreOffice automatically corrects "themself" to "themselves." It took under a minute to fix, but seriously, how is it that in this day and age, LibreOffice still assumes this is a typo? I've been using it for about two decades, the word itself has been used since Middle English, and only prescriptivist assholes have a problem with it. Not only is "themself" a perfectly cromulent word, but LibreOffice's built-in dictionary recognizes it as such; I didn't have to add it to the dictionary, just remove the autocorrect option.
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Re: Minor annoyances

Postby Absentia » Sun Feb 02, 2020 8:11 am

I was searching YouTube for the intro theme to an anime I used to watch (don't judge me). I couldn't find the original because the artist is aggressive about protecting their copyright, but there's a cover version out there by another artist who is apparently less vigilant. It's a good cover, good enough that it took me (a non-Japanese speaker) a minute to figure out that it wasn't a different recording by the original artist.

The irritating thing is that I had to figure this out because the video was labeled as the original. So I clicked on another video purporting to be the original, and it's the cover version. And so on. Apparently every upload that hasn't been taken down is the cover. (I did finally learn the cover artist's name because there was one correctly labeled upload.)

Yeah, the vocalists sound pretty similar, but you can tell from the first note that it's not the original version that aired with the show. Did all these people not watch the show and make a mistake, or are they intentionally mislabeling their videos for clicks? Either way, it's irritating, and kind of shitty for both of the artists.
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