Jimmycrackcrack

I mean it's a pretty offensively bad example of an English breakfast but I feel like you could probably chill out a bit mate, holy shit.

Lol it really was. Also the reason I thought to call the council was it was supposedly the council's parking as per signage and also the machine unused to pay for tickets and yet these guys said that some arbitrary invisible line in the carpark marked the point where it wasn't technically council parking anymore even though that's who you're buying your ticket from.

The thought goes through my head everytime. One time I was on the middle of having one of those obtrusive thoughts in a carpark with the drain near my car and thinking "why do I always have these stupid thoughts?" And then dropped keys right down that drain as I was just about to go to work.

I was pretty lucky actually, it was an enclosed storm drain not connected to any sewer or anything so the keys couldn't go anywhere and it was completely dry inside and I was able to call the number for the local council and ask for help who called these two guys that apparently actually technically don't work for the council who told me that in fact the council weren't really able to help with that anyway and in fact they wouldn't normally either because of something tondo with the carpark being private property but because they happened to be out dealing with something else right near there anyway they'd swung by to help me out and they used a tool to open up this drain, hop in and pick up my keys that were visible through the grating. They did it all for me in about 10 minutes flat. I offered to buy them a slab of beer but they said they weren't allowed to accept gifts from the public. I bought them each a coffee anyway. Universe was really looking out for me that day. I was only about 10 minutes late for work after the whole thing.

I think it works on that level too 😏

You don't find it funny to think of the FBI setting up surveillance on someone that seemed dangerous enough to be worth monitoring but it was all for naught because they were just watching a front door for over 14 hours a day?

To me there's definitely an element of irony there both in terms of the troll's life being a little bit pathetic compared to their personas and in terms of the FBI seeming like this ultra serious organisation but being rendered ineffective by virtue of someone just intensely doing nothing for a long time.

I tend to prefer black beans actually. For some reason kidney beans have this funny effect of dulling the flavour of the whole dish.

I come from a country using the more traditional form of the "Westminster" system of government that the US' system is also based upon but which from the outset made significant departures from. Because your use of the term "opposition leader" I'm going to hazard a guess you might be from another Westminster Style parliamentary democracy nation as well. If that's the case I think what's happening here is that you're expecting a "leader of the opposition", a singular individual officially holding that specific title, like we have in Westminster style Parliamentary systems. The US works a bit differently, and no such role exists. Likely the reason you remembered a person occupying this role in the past is because you were probably seeing press coverage of the opposition party's official presidential candidate, which would look like a leader of the opposition to us but there's a big difference because they do a different job.

In the US system the elected representatives of both chambers of their bicameral system, which over there is referred to as "congress" rather than "parliament" as in many Commonwealth countries, are voted in by local electoral processes like in Westminster systems, however unlike in the Westminster system, the 'executive branch' which is the branch of government that is headed by the office of, 'president' is voted in by an entirely separate process and the president themselves aren't a member of the congress; they're not in the House of Representatives or the Senate and they also don't have to face question time by them either. When the president loses an election or serves out their maximum term limits, they tend to fade from media attention because they don't have any real job anymore in the party. In a Westminster system, a Prime Minister has a double job, they got their seat in parliament and thus eligibility for their Prime Minister role by winning an election to be the elected representative of a small local area within the nation they govern at the same time as their party's officially chosen leader which the party gave them through internal decision making. This means when their party is in power their job is to be both a local representative and a prime minister and when their party is out of government, their job is to continue to be that local representative (unless that local area got sick of them and also voted them out) AND the official leader of the "shadow" cabinet. In that role as leader of the opposition they have to represent the party in front of the media and respond to the actions of the government of the day and criticise and challenge them. They're a constant face as they try to either lead the party BACK in to power they lost or until the party has a vote internally and decides that the public probably won't vote for them while they continue to have their current leader and they decide to pick a different one.

In the US system parties have leaders in each of their two chambers of congress, one for the Senate and one for the House of Representatives so that's why if you ask your question as you've phrased it, some people might answer you with Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries who are the opposition or "Minority" leaders in both the Senate and House of Representatives respectively right now, both of them from the Democratic party which does not currently hold majority in either chamber hence "minority" leaders. This can get pretty confusing if you're used to the Westminster system because in the US, the election of their president and the election of members of their congress (which would be our parliament) are entirely separate elections and the process by which one becomes a one of two leaders in Congress on behalf of a party or by which one becomes a party's official presidential nominee are different and so you have no opposition leader or 3 depending on what you decide the equivalent of the opposition leader is.

So finally, the bit that hopefully explains why it seemed like before you had a more known face as a leader of the opposition. When they pick candidates for Presidential elections, as opposed to Congress, major parties in the US have since the 70s done this via a process of lots of separate local elections around the country known as the 'primaries' run by the parties themselves (which are private organisations) with votes cast by members of the public who've chosen to register with the party. It's a very long winded process but eventually this leads to an additional voting contest where the people voting are party insiders that are theoretically bound to vote in a way that lines up with the results of those earlier contests. This happens on the year of a presidential election so until then they don't officially have a nominee. Likely in the past there would have been a lot of coverage of a nominee once they became an official nominee so those could well be the people you were thinking of as opposition leaders before. There's usually also pretty strong favourites before someone is officially announced as a nominee including former presidential race losers sometimes as happened with Trump and so there's usually some faces that kinda looks like they're probably likely to be the next presidential nominee for their party before this process and also during the long months of primaries before the official final vote that picks a winner. If your question was why isn't anyone seemingly strongly emergent from your perspective this time around well as an outsider I'm less well placed to know the answer but I would suspect that the way things shook out last time with them having to dump Biden at the last minute and inserting Harris outside of the whole primaries process and then her losing has left them in a bit of a shambles and that messy loss combined with a lot of ill will over what seemed to be a concerted effort by party insiders back in 2016 to rig the process of selecting their nominee and the fact that they're in minority in both chambers of congress might have made the party a more fractured entity of late with less candidates that have strong public support and the blessing of the powerful party insiders, that are clearly raising their heads just yet. But this last bit I'm really much less informed about, I'm mostly just focusing on the US electoral mechanics because they seem so weird when you're used to the Westminster system.

If you trimmed them to fit, most likely you'd have spaces around the circumference of the circular dish unfilled by pasta so you'd put the trimmings in there.

Best shorthand I think, also sounds funnier too :)

I don't know whether I'm being helpful here or ruining a joke for everyone by being an oblivious and highly literal nerd but in case it's the former. These people are recreating a scene from a famous anime from 1995 called in English 'Neon Genesis Evangelion' or in this case one of the feature length films made after the tv series' run called 'End of Evangelion' (1997), which serves as a more complete ending to the original series. The scene in question is one of many in the film and series where the main character Shinji has a crisis of confidence and is unwilling to pilot one of the giant robots the series is ostensibly about and the character Misato attempts to talk him back to his senses.

Shinji's personal crisis comes at the worst time as he is at this point the only person on earth left able to pilot one of the robots and save humanity from a threat that is actively at play while at the same time the facility they're in which operates these robots is under an active assault by a specific faction of people sweeping the complex murdering everyone. In the lead up to the moment portrayed in this image Misato is trying to escort Shinji to the hangar in a last ditched effort to save him so he can pilot his robot before it's too late. The scene is kinda fucked up because in trying to snap Shinji out of his breakdown Misato kisses him and says "we'll do the rest later", but she's like 28 and he's 14. The frame they're recreating in this shot is a few seconds before that kiss.

I recently came across a horrible piece of software called Silverfast which now doesn't have a manual anymore. They still have their manuals up to some windows xp version which may or may not still be how certain parts of its operation are done, impossible to know. In lieu of a manual they've posted some videos on YouTube, some on Vimeo, different narrators each time, some terrible quality, some just fine, some of them seem from the screen recording to be a couple of versions old, some are more recent. They're covering single topics so that it SORTA functions like a replacement for the manual in that you can search for topics like one would in a manual and hopefully find a video but it doesn't function like a manual does since it's obviously not static and not a proper reference and you've got to imprecisely try to seek around to get back to bits where the info you needed was. To add insult to injury, of you search the website for the manual, they have a document referred to as the user manual so you think you've finally found it, but it turns out it's a quick start installer guide which would annoy me at the best of times because normally I'd say the steps are so basic that this document need not exist because it would be impossible to have the level of competence necessary to operate the software without also possessing the necessary competence for basic install but, but astonishingly those instructions are WRONG!

The frustrating thing is that the videos broken up by topic aren't a bad idea at all, IN ADDITION to a real manual but as a replacement!? I was so pissed.

Ok so what I'm about to say does come with the caveat that I do the pricking a hole in the bottom before cooking and also pouring cold water on immediately after boiling thing so maybe that's why it works for me but honestly I think this will work even if you don't. Your problem is that you want to remove the membrane between the shell and the egg, WITH the shell, otherwise it becomes very hard to peel in one go and it takes little chunks of cooked egg white with it at variable depths.

To do that, I smack the top and bottom of the boiled egg on a hard surface to precrack the shell at those two places, then I roll the whole egg very gently on it's side on that hard surface to create little cracks allover, it's important not to press too hard especially if it's softer boiled because it'll just bisect equatorially with the shell still stuck to both halves in broken fragments. Then, the crucial bit, once you've precracked the egg all over, you HAVE to start peeling at the bottom of the egg, that's the fatter end. There should be an air pocket in there that the precracked shell has sorta of collapsed in to, but hasn't broken off in shards because it's all held together by this membrane. If you pinch that loosened cracked eggshell at the bottom between your thumb and index finger to gather and collect it, you can kind of pull it up and off to the side a bit which will cleanly make a tear in the membrane allowing you to just kinda push the rest of the shell off in one piece. Because you can just sorta ease it off, sometimes it likes to come off in a nice big chunk like a jacket, sometimes you need to do a continuous spiral but as long you did that pinch technique you'll be pulling the membrane off at the same time as the shell attached to it and in so doing you don't have to pull off little bits of shell by themselves it's one continuous piece and it can't take chunks of the actual cooked egg with it like happened in your picture.