Now where the heck did the blade to my blender go!?

[conuly]

I've checked the dishrack three times! Everything else to the blender was in there, so where is it?

***

When India Kicked Out Coca-Cola, Local Sodas Thrived

The Legend of Buster Smith

Everyone* Pours Bacon Fat Down the Drain, Everyone Lies About It

Powering a pacemaker with a patient's heartbeat

Ira Aldridge: The Black Shakespearean Actor Who Broke Theater's Color Barrier

Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong?

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Islamic State: Thousands of foreign children in Syrian camps

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The Trump administration is finalizing plans to strip funding from Planned Parenthood

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How the world got hooked on palm oil

Climate Change Enters Its Blood-Sucking Phase

Comments

[robby]

It's floating just out of reach, in the 4th dimension, along with all those single socks and sets of keys.

[conuly]

That's another question, about where my keys are.

[adafrog]

Some place the second sock of a pair goes.

[reynardo]

The socks are co-ordinating! (and I must count them for the latest guessing comp.)

[adafrog]

lol Awesome!

[marahmarie]

That actually happens here. I save all the oddsies just in the hope that eventually other oddsies will match them up again. 9 times of 10, eventually they do.

[movingfinger]

WSJ, much paywall. Years of living with aging-to-antique plumbing has made me hypersensitive to the potential for horribly expensive drain problems. I don't send fat down the drain. Indeed I try not to send anything oily down the drain---I swab pans as dry as I can with paper towels (which makes cleanup easier) or solidify then scrape.

If the blender thing has a dark bottom, it might just be upside-down in a shadow?

[conuly]

I have never understood the mechanics of their paywall.

As far as the blender goes, you called it.

[dancing_crow]

Ours always ends up in the bottom of the silverware section, upside down and waiting to bite fingers...

[marahmarie]

If the object's tiny enough, sometimes that happens here, too. Blender blades are the worst (and corn cob holders, ouch).

[workday_dreamer]

That palm oil article was fascinating. I wondered how it got so ubiquitous but I didn't realize that the West wasn't even the biggest consumer of it. Didn't realize that it's the green option comparative to other oils. Quite an interesting environmental problem to fix.

[conuly]

Yup :(

[heron61]

Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong?

I remember this - I went to a university which had a large engineering program in the early 80s. I wasn't an engineer, but I knew a lot of them, and almost all were men, except in CS, where more than a third were women. After graduating, I had little contact with people working in IT until the late 90s, and assumed that there were at least as high a percentage of women working in programming as there had been in CS at my univeristy, until I found out that there weren't, and now other fields of engineering had more women than coding.

[conuly]

That must have been a surprise.

[greghousesgf]

I haven't put bacon fat down my drain in decades. One kitchen sink backup is enough.
I would love to get a time machine and see Ira Aldridge!

[conuly]

I'd love to see him act too - he must've been quite something.

[pwcorgigirl]

Throughout childhood and for a long time as an adult, I lived in houses with a septic tank, which you never inflict grease on or else the system can fail. We always kept an old coffee can or large jar under the sink to hold grease until it could be disposed of in the trash.

I suppose the people who keep creating sewer fatbergs simply don't know any better Or have not had to deal with the consequences.

[conuly]

They definitely don't know better, and they also don't know better than to flush their tampons and dental floss.

[jessie_c]

You need to say a conciliatory prayer to the goddess Anoia.

[conuly]

Does she handle lost things now/

[jessie_c]

Lost causes, certainly. After all, You might be the One!

[pauamma]

It looks like you found it meanwhile, but my guess was going to be "in the sink" or "in the dishwasher", depending on how you washed it.

[conuly]

I wish we had a dishwasher....

[wendelah1]

LOL. Everyone does not pour bacon fat down the drain. Clearly this person was not raised by my mother. My mom saves bacon fat and uses it to season everything! I don't make bacon often but when I do, if there is fat left in the pan, it gets saved in a can or jar and is disposed of in the trash.

[marahmarie]

Yeah, we have dedicated glass jars for that, too, as nothing else seasons our cast iron quite as well. Grease clogs drains. There should be a sign above every sink inset into the wall that can't be removed, covered or painted over just to remind people of that (it would save people literally millions of dollars a year if they'd just stop dumping or rinsing grease/greasy objects into the sink; I use cheapo paper napkins to wipe off/wipe out greasy utensils, pots, pans, plates, etc. before rinsing and washing in the hottest water possible to dissolve whatever grease is left).

Oh, and for deep fry oil (which I'm trying to avoid; we have an air fryer now and I'm glad as I can't stand deep frying, anymore) I keep clean, empty coffee cans around to dump the oil into, then wipe out the pot or pan and rinse/wash as usual. The can of oil stays in the fridge (if the oil's clean enough) and gets re-used until it isn't, then gets thrown out with the lid on with plastic shopping bags tied around to minimize any leaks or spills.

[hudebnik]

No, I generally pour bacon fat into some heat-tolerant thing (e.g. a grapefruit half or discarded meat packaging) in the kitchen wastebasket. I also have a metal can on the counter into which I pour bacon fat that might be subsequently used for flavoring; unfortunately, we cook bacon much more often than we cook non-bacon things that need bacon flavoring, so the can is now full and will have to be emptied into the trash.

[conuly]

You either need to cook less bacon or cook a lot more bacon infused foods.

[marahmarie]

So you found it. I was gonna say check the garbage disposal, as ultimately that's where most of our missing stuff goes (not the socks, though; those wind up everywhere else. I've found them in the damn yard as they fell out of my hands and over the banister as I carried the wash in off the porch).

The other spot are drains themselves; dark colored (especially small, round, dark-colored) things tend to blend into them so well that unless they stop up the sink in the process I can go days without noticing they're there at all (well, I can thank my diminishing eyesight for that, too).

[conuly]

Garbage disposals only became legal in NYC within my lifetime and most houses still don't have them. (And in apartments, you have to sneak them in - landlords rarely want them either, because they think it might be a risk for the plumbing.)

[marahmarie]

Huh, all the units where I live are equipped with them (it's in FL, though). What landlords (at least my landlord; turning apartments for him, I see this first-hand all the time) have to worry about is the abuse of them. They get broken by people losing all sorts of metal or plastic implements down them; they back up from people throwing the wrong types of food or grease (or both) in and clogging them up...we were lucky ours was working right when we moved in and continues to, because honestly most of them don't work well (or at all) by the time a lot of the tenants move out (they do get replaced with new ones, though, as needed).

[conuly]

All that is the sort of hassle that landlords like to avoid here.

[marahmarie]

I've bookmarked (or email myself, maybe) a whole list of what not to put in the garbage disposal to share sometime soon, maybe. Another of the things that my Reading List gets me thinking about that just happen to coincidentally show up in SmartNews the next day...

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Did it maybe fall down into the bottom of the dishwasher?

EDIT: Nobody with a lick of sense pours bacon fat down the drain; that's just stupid. I realize there are a lot of stupid people in the world, but sheesh!

[conuly]

Nah, it was hiding in the dishrack.

Also, it is amazing to me what people choose to respond to. Who knew everybody was so eager to defend themselves against claims that they were bacon fat pourers?

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Good you found it, at least.

"NEVER, EVER, EVER PUT GREASE OR TOXIC CHEMICALS DOWN THE DRAIN!" is a Hot Issue and frequent talking-point for all of us with septic systems, because when they break down, it's not the city that has to pay to fix them.

A lot of different people cook in my kitchen, and some of them (one in particular) generate a lot of grease in the process. THE LAW SAYETH that edible grease is poured into a bowl of crow food (the cheapest cat kibble) to be given to my crowsies in the morning, and then the greasy pan is to be WIPED with a paper towel before it's washed.

I figure there are two kinds of people: those who are eager to defend themselves against claims of being bacon-fat pourers, but who nevertheless will pour grease down the drain if they're not reminded and watched, and those who are bloody damn tired of constantly having to remind and watch those people so they don't do this really gross and stupid thing. Seriously, it's like having to remind people not to shit in the sink - worse, really, because the septic tank wouldn't mind that.

[conuly]

What really gets me is that the business of selling grease is so profitable that people who empty grease traps often find their product stolen before they can get paid to haul it away. Why can't the home cook get in on that enterprise, I ask you?

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Because the game's not worth the candle. Even the greasiest of home cooks don't generate enough grease for it to be cost-effective for the grease-truck to drive around collecting it every week. Not only are people not going to pay for the service; they're mostly not even going to save their grease till the truck comes to pick it up, unless they've got some better incentive than the glow of good citizenship.