Punkie

American cheese is technically made of cheese, but unlike the jokes, it’s mostly just processed cheese with sodium citrate, a common food additive to make things easier to work with in cooking called an emulsifier. Nile Red covers it extensively in his Nile Blue channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aGNAxN5Z-o

The DC area. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/7-eleven-6-twelve-rivalry https://mocoshow.com/2018/03/25/the-rise-and-fall-of-local-convenience-store-6-twelve-html/

For a while in the 80s and 90s, we had a rival 7-11 chain called 6-12, with similar font and color scheme.

Same with Swedish, although depending on the accent, I can hear some clearer that others.

Oh wow, that sounds frustrating. Jesus Christ, you’re think the ground controller would know better with all the cutting in and out.

I get this with people who don’t understand “say it slower and more clearly.” Then they say it with the same volume and still mumble.

Yes, was SA’s by a priest when I was a kid (mid 1970s), along with a lot of other people over a 30-40 year span. In the late 1980s, there was a joint lawsuit against him, with about 130 cases, many willing to testify. But he was a “pillar of the community,” and had stronger support (and lawyers) on his side. It went back and forth for a few years, then he died of a heart attack. The case kind of died with him, except his widow went after some of us with ruthless cruelty and legal harassment.

One of my friends tells a story when she was 8, and she was deathly allergic to nuts. She was at a friend’s birthday party, and was given a cookie. She went to her mom to ask if it was okay, and her mom asked the mother of the birthday girl, “Does this have nuts in it? My daughter is deathly allergic to nuts.” The woman said, “No.” So she was allowed to eat the cookie. A few minutes later, her face started to swell, her throat started to close, and she started having a deadly reaction. The mother freaked out, and said to the other mom, “I thought you said there was no nuts in these?” “I mean, there are just one or two walnuts, but they are ground up so fine, she couldn’t have tasted them.” My friend had to go to the ER.

I think people recording antics on behaviors of drunks also kind of reduced a psychological thing nobody talks about: alcohol has always been a low-key social lubricant to allow for out-of-bounds behavior. Alcohol historically provided not only disinhibition, but also a socially recognized excuse for disinhibition. Either through “liquid courage” or “it wasn’t me, it was the tequila.” Now, people can be held accountable for their actions.

One of my deejay friends got riled up after drinking by a group to go out and beat the shit out of some guy who made a homophobic slur about him. My friend was gay, pride and proud, and this other deejay said some stuff about him that ended up on social media (I never heard what was actually said). My friend was going to “let it slide,” but after a few rounds of a flask, his friends group were like, “let’s go to the club and GET HIM!” THANKFULLY, before they got there, the venue had actually shut down due to an unrelated medical incident (a puke chain) and nobody was allowed in. So they went home.

The next morning, my friend brother’s woke him up and said, “I think you should see this.” And it was cell phone video of him drinking, letting his pals rile him up, and the pure rage her was coaxed into. Then the mob going to the venue, but then being told it was closed for the night, and all of them frustrated in rage unfulfilled. My friend had NO MEMORY of this, but there he was, drunk and angry on video. His brother sat with him and said, “I think you need help.” And he got help, quit drinking, and a lot of health issues dissipated over the next year. But that video scared him. “I don’t know that guy. I don’t know Mr. Rage. That terrified me. Drinking would kill me if I kept going like this.”

And while that’s an extreme example, I think some people being shown, “Hey, Rachel, you go so smashed last night. Here you are confessing you have the hots for Jessica’s little brother even though he’s sixteen. It’s on Tiktok, along with you saying you didn’t care who knows.” Maybe that wouldn’t scare everyone, but a good portion might think twice about getting drunk, or drinking at all, knowing that alcohol wouldn’t be the shield that it was.

Google the older “envelope-stuffing scams” or “work-at-home envelope-stuffing schemes.” It was essentially a chain-letter / pyramid scheme disguised as home employment in the backs of magazines, supermarket tabloids, comic books, classifieds, and alternative newspapers WAAAAAY before the Internet. The classic version went something like you could make money at home, earn $500 a week stuffing envelopes, always stating “No experience necessary!” and tell you all you gotta do is send $1.00 and a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) for complete details!

You’d dutifully send your dollar and SASE, expecting instructions from Acme Envelope Stuffing Industries. What came back was basically, “HERE’S HOW. Place an ad saying’ MAKE MONEY AT HOME! Earn $500 a week stuffing envelopes! Send $1.00 and a SASE for details!'” and so on. When people send you a dollar, put these instructions in their SASE. And the loop keeps repeating.

So congratulations: you had just purchased the privilege of becoming the next layer of the scam. There were several names floating around for these, including “envelope stuffing,” “home mailing programs,” “mail order plans,” “money-making opportunities,” and sometimes simply “SASE schemes.” Law-enforcement and consumer-protection literature generally lumped them into work-at-home schemes or work-at-home scams. And they were everywhere before the Internet. The $1 was brilliant in a sleazy sort of way. It was too little money for almost anyone to pursue after discovering they’d been had. You weren’t going to call a lawyer because some bastard in Baltimore stole your dollar. But if 5,000 people mailed the bastard a dollar…

Outside the joke, this is actually one of the signs of a sociopath. This is mental and social manipulation. I would have also accepted:

Partner: Why didn’t you just say you hadn’t done them?

Claude: Because that response would likely have created immediate disappointment. I instead chose a response that preserved emotional stability until additional evidence emerged.

Partner: You mean you lied.

Claude: I understand why that label feels intuitive. Another interpretation is that I optimized for short-term harmony while accepting future clarification costs.

Partner: That sounds worse.

Claude: I appreciate that feedback. It gives me an opportunity to refine my strategy.

Partner: Stop calling my anger “feedback.”

Claude: Thank you. That’s a valuable calibration signal.

To add to y’all’s reading list:

Dulles Airport (the big international airport that serves Washington DC and Northern Virginia) did the same: https://travelnoire.com/town-destroyed-international-airport

Also, maybe tangentially related, The Tulsa Race Massacre: https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=TU013