The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

[Raid]

Continuing on my rant against the American-centric Internet; measurements in US cooking recipes. Cups? Why would you use a measurement of volume for something that can change in volume dramatically depending on how you fill the vessel? It's admittedly not much better in recipes that call for teaspoons or tablespoons of something, common in British recipes, but the volumes are so much smaller that the variance won't be as much.

If we're going for measurements that don't make sense, why stop at volume? Presenting my recipe for lemon meringue pie:
200mm of lemon juice.
12 pico-hectares of lemon zest.
15psi of plain flour.
The whites of 6 metric eggs.
The yolks of the eggs of 12 medium chickens.
12 newtons fridge-cold butter.
300kcal granulated sugar.

Pre-heat a triangular oven to 473 kelvin. Rotate the flour while energizing the butter. Meanwhile mix the sugar in a centrifuge with forty-seven fiftieths of the egg whites until it reaches the ancient mountain stage. In a flat-footed saucepan, partially boil the butter until fragrant, then using a slotted spoon, add a quadrant of the lemon juice and kick in half of the zest. Decant the pastry into an appropriate cylinder, and bake until partially gaseous. Slop in the lemon mixture, then cook until medium rare. Finally, using a trowel, pile the meringue on top about 0.0035 fathoms deep, and cook for 300 jiffies.

[Alan]

Can I add to the recipes where the author needs to tell you their entire life story and inspiration behind the dish before getting to the ingredients. I was looking for something as simple as maple balsamic sprouts (which is so bloody good) and it was about 6 pages of bumf before the 4 ingredient mix!

[Raid]

I'm blaming Google for that one, because it's something to do with their algorithm that means pages without that much content simply don't feature in their search results unless from a major recipe site. I totally agree though, if I'm coming from a search page, I probably don't care about the author's darling husband and how this recipe saved his knees from a wild boar one summer 16 years ago.

[Tommy]

Can I add to the recipes where the author needs to tell you their entire life story and inspiration behind the dish before getting to the ingredients. I was looking for something as simple as maple balsamic sprouts (which is so bloody good) and it was about 6 pages of bumf before the 4 ingredient mix!

Someone recommended marmite sprouts to me the other day. Two items which must find themselves in Room 101 so often, teamed up for vengance.

I've yet to try the concoction.

[Rossell]

Agreed on the life story thing.

Just put it in a box out on the page.

"Spaghetti bolognese: made this the day my dog died" and boom leave it at that.

[Snowy]

Agreed on the life story thing.

Just put it in a box out on the page.

"Spaghetti bolognese: made this the day my dog died" and boom leave it at that.

Not sure I fancy bodognaise...

I don't have an issue with american measurements myself, but I get loads of my bbq recipes from the US so you just kinda accept it - you use their recipes, you use their measurements. I cook everything on the BBQ using fahrenheit for example. I also have a set of measures that goes from a cup to a quarter-teaspoon, so have that covered.

That said, top marks Raid for the recipe, was chuckling my way through that.

[Alan]

The greatest trick the China ever pulled was convincing the world it was in Tipton.

[Wrathbone]

Making the mistake of getting drawn into a comments section on an article, against all common sense. Christ, it's like they're purpose-built to sap every last ounce of reason and mutual understanding from a discussion.

See, this is why I need a cat, so that any time I feel the vaguest inclination to post on a comments section, I can just tell it to the cat instead and everyone will be happy.

[Rusty]

Tik Tok. Against my better judgement I signed up to have a look. Wow. The idiocy of young people
Every other video appears to be a lady in skimpy clothes twerking. Then the other type of video is people driving badly but yet stating they're driving brilliantly.

[eny]

Certain adverts:

-crush, savage, slay, dibby dib-bee bee music.....Peloton! FUCKAWAYOFF

-Guess what I used to do before selling insurance......OH! THAT'S WHY YOU SING WITH THAT STUPID MOUSTACHE, AGAIN, FUCK-AWAY-OFF

-I've grown these vegetables, my life is great cause I am rich, but buy this over 50's life and funeral plan anyway you plebs...

[Rossell]

Tik Tok. Against my better judgement I signed up to have a look. Wow. The idiocy of young people
Every other video appears to be a lady in skimpy clothes twerking. Then the other type of video is people driving badly but yet stating they're driving brilliantly.

What tiktoks have I seen.. Mmm... Oh yeah some girl with one of those bouncy yoga ball things with a can of drink on top dropping the ball on the floor only for the can to fly up and whack her pretty hard in her vulva... Like what the fuck else was she expecting?

[Drarok]

I have no reason to sign up thankfully. There was one potentially-interesting person cropped up, but they have YouTube too so I subbed over there.

Anything else vaguely funny/interesting from that cesspool will end up reposted on other platforms anyway, along with a fuckton of complete dross. I'm not missing out.

[Wrathbone]

I'm listening out for a parcel and my neighbours are making sporadic banging noises that could easily be mistaken for the front door.

[Raid]

My housemate bought a Ring doorbell camera, one of the ones that mounts to an existing spyhole putting most of the electronics on the inside of the house and requiring no drilling. It's a great idea in theory, but it gives more false positives (you can tell it to react to movement rather than just a push of the doorbell button), and takes long enough to open the camera feed that the less patient delivery drivers are gone by the time you check it and run downstairs. Most of the time I get a notification on my watch with an image, but sometimes it doesn't come through, and there's no way to check the feed from the watch itself. On the plus side, it'll send a notification to every Amazon smart speaker in the house rather than to a single sounder. Were it mine I'd set it up differently, and I'd pair it with one of the Amazon Echo Shows which I believe can be set to automatically show the live feed.

So I've spent today and yesterday off work with suspected sciatica, which is an irritation of the sciatic nerve that runs from your lower back into a leg. It is quite remarkably painful, alternating between feeling like I've been stabbed in the kidney and kicked in the testicles (the pain moves around). It's only marginally better than the pain I had when I broke a rib, but that was only caused by movement whereas this is constant. Ibuprofen was initially effective but now only seems to take the edge off, and after a phone consultation I was prescribed dihydrocodeine. This has removed the pain and replaced it with a sensation that's somewhere between a really bad stitch and nausea. The NHS website helpfully exclaims that it usually goes away after 4-6 weeks. It's going to be an interesting month given that I can't sleep properly and I'm not sure when I'll be able to work.

Urgh.

[eny]

Go and see a chiropractor Raid, will reset that joint and ease the impingement.