70. The Cow Tools Experience

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Lords:

• James is on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Triplefox
• Jesse is on Twitter.

Topics:

• One of the last "most wanted" Nazi war criminals lives in my town.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmut_Oberlander
• What's Michael?, the other cartoon fat cat
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Michael%3F
  • There are several What's Michael anime series, one of them has a particularly amazing music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWZLz1LQRnY&t=116s
  • The opening of the Heathcliff Cartoon uses one of the numerous Shuki Levy 80's cartoon themes. It rhymes "jubilee" with "superiority"! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LLb8EBU9nQ
  • He’s Wearing The Gravy Helmet, Again : The Greatest Single Panel in Modern American Comics: https://medium.com/@videocrime/hes-wearing-the-gravy-helmet-again-the-greatest-single-panel-in-modern-american-comics-10c269ca4102
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_cats_in_comics
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_cats_in_animation
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Tools
• In the patent for Tapper, the developers admit that it's just Space Invaders turned on its side
  • https://www.kmjn.org/notes/tapper_videogame_patent.html
  • "Upon an advancing patron such as the cowboy 54e in FIG. 2 receiving a filled mug 58b, the receiving patron will be moved or repelled back toward the door end of the bar a predetermined incremental distance. If the patron is moved to the boundary at the door image 52, the patron goes off screen for a predetermined time interval and then reenters the same bar at the door 52. However, if the repelled thirsty patron remains on screen, the patron will then be shown in a drinking pose 54f as in FIG. 3. When the patron, after a predetermined delay, finishes drinking the beverage, the empty mug 58c, is slid back toward the supply or keg end of the bar."
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Cold_Beer
  • Ice Cold Beer has an official digitization in "Zeke's Peak" https://store.steampowered.com/app/1093800/Zekes_Peak/
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/457890/TumbleSeed/
  • http://isoraqathedh.github.io/Orsaibts/anticharacterism.html
  • Shogun Assassin (1980) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081506/
• Brad asks "Hummingbirds have to consume twice their body weight in a day to survive. If you had to do this, what would your strategy be?"
• Realizing pop cans are 355 mL because that's 12 US fluid ounces.
  • The ounce is a unit of mass and the dry ounce of volume, but the pint and the dry pint are both units of volume.
  • https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/mc-mc.nsf/eng/h_lm00007.html
  • Soda vs Pop vs. Coke: Who Says What, And Where? https://www.huffpost.com/entry/soda-vs-pop_n_2103764
  • Plastic Recycling is an Actual Scam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g
  • How China Broke the World's Recycling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXRtNwUju5g
• Is macaroni and cheese known outside of America? Or, if you were opening a restaurant in a foreign country, what cuisine would it be?
  • How Thai food took over America https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2019/01/10/how-thai-food-took-over-america
  • What Color Is a Tennis Ball? https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/what-color-tennis-ball-green-yellow/523521/
  • https://www.pizzapizza.ca/catalog/config/dipping-sauce-product_1919/store/1/delivery
  • Wikipedia lists these other related dishes:
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonara
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_mac
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_spaghetti
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4sesp%C3%A4tzle

Microtopics:

• An oddly temperate day in the park in the middle of January.
• Not necessarily recognizing the war criminal who lives in your town.
• Checking the box that says "I did not do the Holocaust" on the immigration form.
• How it takes 50 years to deport a Nazi from Canada.
• Berlin, Canada.
• Getting a steak and a beer with the 110 year old who works with you at the grocery store.
• Where you go if you're really young and you want to become a war criminal.
• A thing that is strange but also very ordinary.
• Explaining Garfield.
• Heathcliff, the other other fat orange cartoon cat.
• Explaining cow tools.
• Tools that don't really look like anything but it's the best a cow can do.
• What it means when Heathcliff wears the gravy helmet.
• When an ancient comic strip gets funny again because the original artist finally retired and got replaced by a Tumblr user.
• Stealing all the fish from the fish counter and the vendor can't do anything about it because you're wearing a helmet that says "fish."
• Scrolling a web page and discovering how many helmets Heathcliff has.
• Managing the flow of mugs in this Space Invaders clone.
• The best electromechanical bar game that triggers your trypophobia.
• A story-heavy RPG adaptation of an electromechanical bar game.
• Playing a story heavy game and wishing the story and the game parts were separable.
• How magical girl shows and JRPGs both presentationally separate story from combat.
• Taking the fight scenes from a robot combat show and writing new scenes where the robots are going to high school.
• Learning to fly in place.
• Becoming a hummingbird and learning to do what hummingbirds do.
• Consuming the densest possible foods such as lead.
• Assuming that iron is the densest element because it's at the Earth's core and must have sunk there.
• Searching for densest foods and Google gives you the most nutrient dense foods, which is definitively not what you asked for.
• Arctic explorers bringing sleds full of frozen butter to eat.
• Eating your weight in salt every day.
• Whether 1 milliliter of water weighs exactly one gram everywhere, or just in that locked vault in Paris.
• The Canadian hotline you can call to report bars that serve you an American pint of beer.
• The metric pint.
• Ounces per ounce.
• Writing to Stephen Wolfram to complain about the dry ounce.
• That double gotcha bar trivia question about whether an ounce of feathers is lighter than an ounce of gold.
• Europeans getting confused when Americans talk about calories when they mean kilocalories.
• Using more significant digits than the speaker intended when doing unit conversion.
• Whether someone saying "a thousand" to mean "a lot" is one significant digit or zero.
• Whether in the Bible "forty" is used colloquially to mean "a lot."
• Taking a dialect quiz that tries to guess where you're from but it doesn't know about Canada so it guesses you're from the American Midwest.
• Whether recycling is still a thing or in fact ever was.
• Keeping people employed at a factory sorting plastic for no particular reason.
• Pasta and cheese being popular all over the world.
• How Canadians have Kraft macaroni and cheese for dinner all the time.
• The biscuit you eat!
• How Pad Thai is a psyop.
• Putting fish in a bucket and waiting until it becomes fish sauce.
• Fear of discovering the fish flavor in fish sauce and ruining Thai food forever.
• Putting fish sauce on pizza yourself because Domino's doesn't offer it as a topping.
• Opening a Taco Bell in Mexico.
• Asking not for whom the Baja Blasts.
• A can of cream of mushroom soup inside of a Shepherd's Pie.
• Another salty MSG flavored brown liquid.