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Rantings of a Kitchen Luddite


Darienne

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53 minutes ago, weinoo said:

If BlueStar and Wolf start making phones, we're in trouble.

If I knew what BlueStar and Wolf were, I might respond to your post.  As it is, I don't even know what Bluetooth is. 

 

ps.  I Googled both of them.  We don't live in that snack bracket to begin with. 

Edited by Darienne (log)
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Darienne

 

learn, learn, learn...

 

We live in hope. 

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2 hours ago, Margaret Pilgrim said:

and we're always saying, "What's beeping?"  

Last night 2am, I heard the familiar sound of the squeaky folding step ladder. Some time went by so I got up and found DH standing in the kitchen with 6 smoke alarms spread out on the kitchen counters waiting for the 'chirp'. (I buy a new one every time change). Safety first.

I had forgotten that I saw a live cricket in the tub earlier. 😂. Meant to go back and catch it and toss it outside. Tiny thing and sluggish so I thought it could not escape the tub...who knows where it is now. 😬

Bought a cheap Oster toaster oven for the beach house years ago from Costco. Love it and surprised to see it still available. Simple dials. 

After extensive shopping for a new wall oven and finding the perfect one, it was being discontinued. Sat for a year before we had the time to schedule the electrician change from gas to electric. No regrets. Love it. Simple dial knobs. No songs. I don't need a pizza setting. 

The Oster old and new...

Screen Shot 2022-09-06 at 12.49.02 PM.png

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13 hours ago, paulraphael said:

 

 

What bugs me is that often, a simple, well-designed option exists. But it's 3 times the price of the complex, terribly designed thing that was created by marketers for suckers. 

Such as our Panasonic commercial dial operated microwave.   Sturdy like a tank.   Meant for idiot use in break rooms and gas station hot food counters.   $269. , more than double a household unit but we sing it’s praises daily,

Edited by Margaret Pilgrim (log)
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oh the beeps. If you barely brush up against the Bosch wall oven - away it goes - have to  get manual which I keep in a specific drawer with the rest of them, and reprogram. I heard an errant beep the other night - like 3am. Thought oh crud we lost power. never did figure it out as we did not have a drop. 

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1 hour ago, weinoo said:

If BlueStar and Wolf start making phones, we're in trouble.

 

BlueStar would use the old  Western Electric designs.

 

Maybe not a bad idea. We have an old princess phone t hat still does fine.

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41 minutes ago, heidih said:

oh the beeps. If you barely brush up against the Bosch wall oven - away it goes - have to  get manual which I keep in a specific drawer with the rest of them, and reprogram. I heard an errant beep the other night - like 3am. Thought oh crud we lost power. never did figure it out as we did not have a drop. 

 

BlueStar doesn't have any beeps and laughs at power outages

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1 hour ago, Annie_H said:

Last night 2am, I heard the familiar sound of the squeaky folding step ladder. Some time went by so I got up and found DH standing in the kitchen with 6 smoke alarms spread out on the kitchen counters waiting for the 'chirp'. (I buy a new one every time change).

 

Been there, done that, but for only two alarms. Last time it was a wine fridge way downstairs, letting its careless caretaker know that he left the door a bit ajar. Or he left the jar a door, I forget which.

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"There is no sincerer love than the love of food."  -George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Act 1

 

"Imagine all the food you have eaten in your life and consider that you are simply some of that food, rearranged."  -Max Tegmark, physicist

 

Gene Weingarten, writing in the Washington Post about online news stories and the accompanying readers' comments: "I basically like 'comments,' though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots."

 

"...in the mid-’90s when the internet was coming...there was a tendency to assume that when all the world’s knowledge comes online, everyone will flock to it. It turns out that if you give everyone access to the Library of Congress, what they do is watch videos on TikTok."  -Neil Stephenson, author, in The Atlantic

 

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." -Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer

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48 minutes ago, Alex said:

 

Been there, done that, but for only two alarms. Last time it was a wine fridge way downstairs, letting its careless caretaker know that he left the door a bit ajar. Or he left the jar a door, I forget which.

Or our confufflement when we couldn't figure out why our new fridge was insistently beeping.    Appears someone had inadvertently brushed against the "wine cooler" button which alerts you that your wine has been in the freezer for 15 minutes.

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1 hour ago, heidih said:

oh the beeps. If you barely brush up against the Bosch wall oven - away it goes - have to  get manual which I keep in a specific drawer with the rest of them, and reprogram. I heard an errant beep the other night - like 3am. Thought oh crud we lost power. never did figure it out as we did not have a drop. 

When I worked at Radio Shack, many moons ago, we always had a locked display case filled with various timers, clocks, watches, etc. A common prank to pull on "the new guy," opening the store for the first time, was to set *everything* in the case to start going off one device at a time, beginning about five minutes before opening time and continuing for a solid hour.

 

It was a classic of shock and AWE.*

(Applied Workplace Evil)

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“Who loves a garden, loves a greenhouse too.” - William Cowper, The Task, Book Three

 

"Not knowing the scope of your own ignorance is part of the human condition...The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club.” - psychologist David Dunning

 

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My grandmother was adamant - a cricket in house - driving her mad. At the time I did not know about the dying smoke alarm chirp. I finally tracked it down. She was not an affectionate woman but she displayed unusual emotion thanking me.

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1 hour ago, gfweb said:

 

BlueStar doesn't have any beeps and laughs at power outages

 

In the one power outage we've had here in 20 years (that was Sandy), the only thing usable was our gas range. A Bosch at that time - and I don't recall any beeping. As a matter of fact, I don't have any beeping from any of the stuff I'm reading about; I believe it's all shut-off able, at least for the beeps one doesn't want to hear.

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Mitch Weinstein aka "weinoo"

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And then there is the beeping thermostat which created one of life's most embarrassing moments.  Figuring the beeping meant the thermostat needed replacing, we called the furnace guy.  When he arrived the first thing he said was, "did you check the battery"?:$

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8 hours ago, gfweb said:

 

BlueStar would use the old  Western Electric designs.

 

Maybe not a bad idea. We have an old princess phone t hat still does fine.

 

My princess phone fell on the floor and cracked, but it still works.  Unlike one broken burner on my stove.

 

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Cooking is cool.  And kitchen gear is even cooler.  -- Chad Ward

Whatever you crave, there's a dumpling for you. -- Hsiao-Ching Chou

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16 hours ago, heidih said:

My grandmother was adamant - a cricket in house - driving her mad. At the time I did not know about the dying smoke alarm chirp. I finally tracked it down. She was not an affectionate woman but she displayed unusual emotion thanking me.

On the other hand, ours was not a dying smoke alarm chip, but rather a cricket.  We currently have a cricket somewhere in the kitchen.  It chirps all night.  And I do mean all night long.

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Darienne

 

learn, learn, learn...

 

We live in hope. 

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I’ll go you one better than that. For a week, I’ve had one in my bedroom/bathroom. As I am in the throes of an insomniac cycle anyway, I simply lie there and listen to him. He’s a most energetic cricket.

 

Off to Google “lifespan of crickets.”

 

And now that we are well and truly off topic…

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Don't ask. Eat it.

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1 hour ago, kayb said:

And now that we are well and truly off topic…

But at least we’re laughing. 

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Anna Nielsen aka "Anna N"

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 9/6/2022 at 12:34 PM, heidih said:

I lived my business life relying on sensors, emergency back up systems and similar in construction management. I don't want to be in a hospital or high-rise without them. But in my kitchen KISS

 

I don't know... a fuzzy-logic rice cooker is very cool and high-tech but a fuzzy-logic controller for a nuclear plant sounds worrisome.

It's almost never bad to feed someone.

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28 minutes ago, haresfur said:

 

I don't know... a fuzzy-logic rice cooker is very cool and high-tech but a fuzzy-logic controller for a nuclear plant sounds worrisome.

 

I spent 12 years working in the field of industrial process control, and I well remember Three Mile Island, our country's nearest brush with domestic nuclear disaster.  The supplier of our industrial color CRT's (quite high tech at the time) jokingly attributed the vibrancy of their color phosphors to the company's close proximity to the mutant reactor at Three Mile Island.

 

If I'd trust any company to run a nuclear reactor it would be Zojirushi.  It just might not be cheap.

 

 

Edit:  Amazon informs me the Zojirushi NW-JEC10BA is now up to $829.99.

 

Edited by JoNorvelleWalker (log)
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Cooking is cool.  And kitchen gear is even cooler.  -- Chad Ward

Whatever you crave, there's a dumpling for you. -- Hsiao-Ching Chou

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