Why do I hear a thousand times more fire sirens when it's raining hard? Electrical fires?

Whelk, that may simply have something to do with the fact that moist air carries sound much, much more efficiently than dry air, but it could also be an uptick in road accidents *shrug*. That's a partially scientific, partially pulling-it-out-of-my-ass answer fwiw.

Why do people have to be such assholes about OMG MUST GET THE CLOSEST PARKING SPACE POSSIBLE EVEN IF ITS ILLEGAL AND I'M BEING A TOTAL DICK BY PARKING THERE!!!! Why, for the love of the Great Flying Spaghetti Monster must they be such selfish douchebags??

This is including, but not limited to, double parking / illegally standing and/or taking up space such as to completely block access / egress to everyone else in small constricted lots? I mean I don't drive so eh, whatever, it doesn't affect me, but I witness some serious parking-lot-related douchebaggery at my local coffeehouse almost every morning. The sort that makes me extremely grateful that I ride a tiny, slim, efficient bicycle instead.

The sad part is there's a perfectly serviceable BIG EMPTY lot like, 25' away in front of the business next door that is extremely easy to access, doesn't have WE WILL TOW YOU signs or really any parking restrictions, and that particular business doesn't even open until noon. Why can't people just fucking walk the extra, oh, I dunno, six strides over from the next lot??

I bet if anyone can answer this one we could get a lot closer to world peace and understanding.

Talking of mandarin oranges, how do they get the skins off the segments for the canned ones? The mind boggles. I picture thousands of tiny elves.

Why do women carry lots of little bags when men usually carry one big bag?

Do rich people, who can buy all sorts of crazy shit, buy luxury toilet paper and toothpaste, for example? Do those products exist? Do rich people use special q-tips and blow their nose into fancy tissues?

Why do people insist upon throwing coins into fountains and other bodies of water? Apart from the foolishness of THROWING AWAY MONEY, they also do it at zoos even though there are all kinds of signs saying how it hurts the seals.

Rich people have staffs. They don't buy toilet paper or q-tips. They likely wipe their own asses, but most other personal care is addressed by their staff.

But what products do they use? Charmin triple-ply? Or do they have some fancy-ass toilet wipe that only Richy MacRicher-riches know about?

Rich people have bidets

Ah, I actually know the answer about the canned mandarin oranges: the peel is loosened with hot water, and they dissolve it away (along with the pith) with a lye solution.

Also: It's hard to clean your ears with a bidet, so I'm betting rich people have q-tips made from teak and Egyptian cotton.

My son (age 17) says that non-mandarin oranges often find themselves mixed in with the mandarins. He told me this in answer to his own question about the seeds just about 3 weeks ago. He spoke with such authority that I believed him.

Re: Mandarin Seeds - There was an article on the Mandarin tangerine in one of the food podcasts that I listen to. (KCRW's Good Food, iirc?) Evidently the Murcott, the main commercial cultivar, is seedless by default (thus propagated by grafting) but if a pollinator visits the blossom of the tree, the fruit will develop seeds. So Mandarin growers go to great lengths to exclude bees and other pollinators from their groves during the bloom... they deploy bee-proof coverings, and there is apparently some animosity between mandarin groves and other nearby farmers, who are quite keen to attract pollinators. So evidently, one of your fruit came from a tree that had been 'tainted' by Mother Nature.

From watching lots of reality TV, rich people have assistants. Those assistants have regular old kleenex and q-tips and such that they dole out.

So no, no really fancy gold-plated q-tips, unless it's just, like, a box in the guest bathroom as a sign of conspicuous consumption.

Also, to answer LFR's question, I've come to the conclusion that people learn their bad driving/parking habits from their parents. So you'll have to look backward to 1910 or so and find the original douches that first bought a car and thought, "I can TOTALLY get this wooden wheel up on that curb and shorten my walking distance by 6 inches or so!"

I think there's also an aspect of "Everyone else is doin' it, so I'll lose out if I don't."

This isn't a question. It's Charmin trivia that I recently learned and that I hope might prove useful to someone else:

The HUGE roll is bigger than the MEGA roll.

Triode, that totally makes sense! And it's related to my favourite subject: BEEEEES.

Thing I wonder about: What's the inspiration/incentive for being rich and/or powerful?

EW! Trees had sex on that orange!

I wonder how much nitpicking is normal within familial interactions and if I'm just being oversensitive.

And douchebag parking drives me up the wall. I especially hate people who can't park in spaces. (I will admit, I have done the 'pause in front of the UPS store with my hazards on to fling a package inside' but it was usually only when I had to send something big and unwieldy that would be a bitch to drag across said parking lot that tended to always be packed because people used it as an illegal park-n-ride lot.)

Here's what I'm wondering about right now: is it ok to kind of actually sort of like the new Justin Bieber song when you're not a 12 year old girl?

It's hard to clean your ears with a bidet
Not if you kneel in front of it and hold your head on just the right angle. So I've heard.

Msali, from past visits to supermarkets in Malibu and Brentwood, I can say that the California rich do not have access to anything better than Charmin Ultra or name brand Q-Tips. But the pots and pans section at Gelson's stocks All-Clad. And the fruit is great. There is no bad fruit at Gelson's. Soft grapes? Scuffed pears? They don't exist there.