And a “perambulator” is a kid stroller. It was an enlightening moment when I first came across that word in Neil Stephenson’s “Seveneves”, delved into its etymology and then realised why my British friend called the stroller a “pram”. This is just a contracted form of perambulator.

It did not occur to me that there’s actually also a verb for it, so thank you for pointing that out! I love it, and I will use it henceforth!

I guess every religion old enough has such kind of loopholes. I know from Roman Catholic that there can be made up so many exceptions that the 40 days of lent before Easter books down to a few days of actually fasting. No lent if you’re travelling (commute to work counts), no lent if you have guests, and of course no lent if you are a guest somewhere else. And Sunday is exempt from lent anyways.

The permit requirement does not apply to kitchen knives, does it? Been some time, but I travelled to Tokio quite frequently for work, and always made it a point to go to kappabashi and get a nice cooking knife, some of the longer than 20 cm.

You can buy alcohol at Disney?! With everything being so prude about drinking in public in the US, this completely amazes me.

“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”

Put a smile to my face to see so many cats (and dogs) involved.

When I get up and do my morning business on the toilet, the cat comes and rolls around on the bath mat in front of my ear scratches and cuddles included. Turning on the bidet (yes, hidden flex) is the audible clue that business is concluded, he gets up, wait patiently in the door frame while I start brushing my teeth. I then walk downstairs (while brushing my teeth), cat as added tripping hazard on every step. He again waits patiently while I start the coffee maker, and only when I open the door of the cat food and treats cabinet, he starts being agitated until I put food in the bowl and put it down for him. And then there’s always this glance back, blinking before he digs in, and this very moment is my treasure for the day.

That switch flipped a few years ago. Unfortunately it only did so after my mother passed away, but I suddenly realised that I don’t need my dad’s approval in my life. And that he’s a toxic narcissist which I don’t have to like or have in my life. Understanding that, I could unravel a lot of crap from my childhood, which helps understanding some things that are wrong with me today. I guess the switch that flips when you understand that your parents don’t necessarily need to be good for you is a really important one.

Not just the internet, consumer computing as a whole became a shitshow. You need accounts for everything, Microsoft pushes you hard to use their online service, the default becoming that you to log onto your own computer you need to go through their online Microsoft account, which is terribly unsafe (if your ms account gets hacked, the hacker had access to you system). After “software as a service” more or less has been normalised, I’m just waiting for hardware going down that path, too. I’d say it begins already that I had to create a NVIDIA account to actually update drivers. Soon, this account may not be free anymore.

To most issues like this there are workarounds, but sometimes you have to dig deep. So it’s either you need to spend time to make things work like you want, or accept all this crap. For me, this is fine, because I like the tinkering. But I am also *administrating" most of my elder family members’ computers, which is a nightmare because of that. “So I saved the document, where is it on my computer,?” - “If you used the default OneDrive crap, it just is not on your computer…”

Theranos sounded like a superhero villain. I guess it kind of was?

I never asked for this. Wrong game, I know :)

The one we got was really expensive, but it was the only brand available in Germany that actually has those things in the market for 10+ years (so it’s a well tested product). It’s one of the premium brands for bathroom “furniture” anyway, and the bidet ones are their top of the line bowls, so I guess in the end we’re not just paying premium for the bidet. Including installation and all the other parts, I think it was something like 3 or 3.5k EUR. I don’t really have any comparison (the cheaper brand would be around 1k less), but the thing is well thought through, has tons of options, easy to clean, easy maintenance, and has some really long warranty. I still feel I splurged on it, but in the grand scheme of things when remodeling a house (roughly 150k in total), I did not really register. Don’t know if that helps in any way…

Remodeled the house including bathrooms, went for japanese style bidet (i.e. included in the toilet). Would not want to live without it.

• water temperature, as well as pressure, is adjustable. I have on with different presets, so every family member gets to have their own favorite setting
• not messy at all, has a very directed jet of water. Of course you can splash around sitting weirdly on the toilet, but that needs to be very deliberate. Mine has a function that when nobody sits on the toilet, the jet won’t start.
• there’s options with blow dryers, but even if not, just one dab to dry off instead of wiping and wiping and wiping.
• according to my plumber, it was one more water hose and an electric plug to connect. The device itself of course is much more expensive than a stander toilet. Just using TP now feels so terrible unhygienic. Imagine getting shit on your hand, and you have paper towels, or running water (and paper towels) to clean up. What would you choose? Maybe not really a “problem” solves, but a very, very nice luxury.