Damnit. Now I need to translate Olympic swimming pool area into football fields and multiply by an estimated human height when standing on another's shoulders to get a grasp on that volume.

Why can't they just stick to easy common references like washing machines or cars??!?

I still have a crush on Trixie.

Had a few really good tracks on it and a lot of interesting, sometimes unusual, stuff in between.

And I still want to lose this skin.

That surprises me as artificial banana is one of the absolute worst of the artificial flavorings in my book--gaggingly horrible and nothing like a real banana at all.

Edit: Since it was covered in other comments--for the record, I prefer my bananas on the green side and once they are fully ripe, they are less than desirable but still edible. Once over-ripe they are downright nasty.

Likely--They are not exactly good guys.

I haven't visited in years but back when they had a visitor's center you could drive up to, it was a pretty amazing place to see.

And useless trivia for the day: The owner of that mine, Rio Tinto, also owns the old 60's TV western series "Death Valley Days." When Rio Tinto bought out US Borax (the "20 mule team" stuff), the TV show was part of the deal.

So you'll see the Rio Tinto name on the credits now if you happen to tune into the show on some cable feed.

If only that was actually true. Fully box-ripened bananas are terrible. They are only edible when quite green in my opinion. Once "ripe" they are only suitable as an ingredient in other things like baking.

An actual tree-ripened banana is a wholly different thing than an artificially ripened banana...Those are actually good.

Very wise man--

You've seen 2+ decades of running joke from simply not verifying the definition of the word "ironic"...

I would argue that Rap and many other musical genres cannot be traced back to an origin at all. Like most things, they are the sum of many influences over longer periods and are more akin to evolutionary in development than spontaneous appearance.

Bad poetry to rhythmic music has been around a lot longer than 80 years.

They also had to remove beans from US air force rations which crews would eat in flight.

The issue was decompression--the gas inside expands as things are adjusted for landing and everyone got uncomfortably gassy during final approach.

I can't imagine what kind of discomfort could come from rapid emergency decompression should one happen to be carrying a big gas load.

Um, no. It's the salt.

Only recently did they start using salt compounds in soaking-wet Washington state...and only recently did undercarriage rust start showing up more than superficially. Magically those both correspond.

Old-school undercoating is a huge nasty problem of itself but that's another debate.

When that commercial flight disappeared out of Singapore a few years back, you could watch new areas of the ocean floor appear on maps with fine details as the search progressed for the wreckage. It looked like plow furrows as the scanning ships ran search grids and detail showed up. Most people don't know how generic and horribly low resolution the current depth data is until they see the details that show up in high res.

And so much more to go...

Clocks are big; Machines are heavy!

Because so much actually is.

Came up doing genealogy research--US government has pension application documents you can get copies of by request.

If you want to get into some catty shit, look into civil war pension applications from Mormon wives from plural marriages. After they had to break up, the wives tended to all apply for the benefit when only a single one was eligible--so they'd submit some really bitchy stuff to try and keep the other ex wives from winning the prize.

I've seen a bunch of letters to the pension office from my own ancestors as well as some from another "plural marriage" family and talk about "mean girls" in real life...

"...the loading officers had been pushing the enlisted men to load the explosive cargoes very quickly; ", "The junior officers placed bets with each other in support of their own 100-man crews‍"

This is actually possibly more nefarious than it sounds. I would quote it directly except the book is currently at my office--I have a railroad management manual from just before that era which explains how to handle workers of different "ethnicities." It gives specific instructions regarding African Americans.

In short, the text specifically says that African Americans tend to be lazy slow workers. The management advice to get over that is to slip in a ringer to set the pace for the rest--then it becomes a contest to see who can work the fastest. Once you get a bit of a contest going between workers and teams, instead of being lazy bums, African Americans would get a ton of work done and were one of the best "ethnicities" to have working for you. You just needed to install that pacesetter to get the ball rolling and make it seem like a contest so they'd keep it up.

Racist as hell but it was common belief and procedure at the time.

I'd speculate that the "contests" mentioned might have been an intentional race-based management ploy to manipulate worker productivity.

BTW, Italians are quarrelsome and not very sturdy of body so are not the best workers to hire, Japanese are too small and weak, Poles (that general region) are good workers but dumb, and on and on just to fill out a bit of the bigotry from that era. It wasn't limited to just the darker skinned folks.

"Just askin' questions"

"Some people are saying"

"I have heard"

"It looks like maybe..."

These are all forms of lying--in fact the most skuzzy kind of lies because they are built with a way to duck responsibility for what you have lied about. Building in that escape-hatch proves that the liar knows the are lying their ass off, pushing it to the legal limits (and beyond possibly), and is trying to fool the dumbest of their audience.

You will hear these types of skuzz-bag lies almost constantly by Carlson, Hannity, Formerly Limbaugh and Breitbart, Jones, and many other right-wing media talking heads. It is their "go to" operating procedure.