Me and the family have been on the road recently, and yesterday we saw a food-grade tanker truck in the next lane. I amused myself for a while speculating about what might be in it: Pudding? Cottage cheese? Guacamole? Hummus? Blueberry yogurt, with the fruit on the bottom? (That one got a laugh from Ms. 17.)

Well, probably not, but on looking it up I found some probably reliable lists of what does get shipped that way. From Kan-Haul's bulk liquid transport FAQ:

• Dairy products ( pasteurized milk, and cream)
• Alcohol products (gin, vodka, and wine)
• Juices (fruit juice and vegetable juice)
• Vegetable oils (canola oil and coconut oil)
• Syrups and other sweeteners (corn syrup, honey, and molasses)
• Sugar alcohols (mannitol and sorbitol)
• Vinegar (apple cider vinegar and distilled vinegar)
• Citrus products (citric acid solution and citrus fruit terpenes)
• Non-food products (essential oils and mineral oil)
• Additives and preservatives (beverage bases, caramel color, and natural and artificial colors)

I think the most amusing item on that list is the molasses. Or perhaps the honey. "There's been a crash on route 202! Send a truckful of graham crackers!" But a tomato juice spill could also be amusing. Amusing, rather than just horrible. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near after a canola oil mishap.

Still I guess the really interesting items are the ones not on the list because they are less commonly shipped. I was tempted to write to one of these shipping firms to ask for weird stories, but they have work to do. Still I can dream that maybe there is a tanker truck out there somewhere carrying 11,000 gallons of butterscotch pudding.

Aha, someone in this Quora thread mentioned hauling processed pumpkin pie filling. I am completely satisfied.

Are Salisbury and Salzburg sister cities? And if not, why not?

“In a signal handler, can I…”

“No.”

“You didn't let me finish the question!”

“The answer is still ‘no’.”

In Blue Highways, author William Least Heat-Moon states that that the town with the silliest name in the U.S. is Intercourse, Pennsylvania.

I disagree. My own nominee is French Lick, Indiana.

This article about finding drowned bodies with quicksilver-filled bread says:

A loaf of bread was then filled with “over two ounces of quicksilver,” then thrown into the water

I was annoyed that the original source said this, because I found it unclear. Is that two ounces by weight or by volume? If it were water it wouldn't matter, but quicksilver is 13.6 times as dense, and two fluid ounces weighs nearly a pound. Conversely, a two-ounce weight of quicksilver is only a few milliliters.

I guess it must be the second, smaller amount, because bread stuffed with a pound of quicksilver would sink quickly, and you need it to float to where the body is. Also quicksilver costs money.

Today I'm feeling happy about the phrase "all up in my grill". I think it means the same as "all up in my face" but substituting "grill" (cosmetic dental work) for "face" is more pungent and flavorsome.

I wrote a while back about the hilarious phrase "too dumb to pour piss out of a boot" which I feel is funny for a similar reason.

Specific is almost always funnier than generic. I wonder, is "all up in my grill" funnier if the person actually has a grill, or if they don't? Maybe both.

What if there were a Jehovah's Witness splindere sect that took the Tolkien legendarium as literally true?
Wouldn't that be something?

People like to have fainting fits to show off how horrified they are about pineapple pizza, or Hawai‘ian pizza (pineapple plus ham) but I think it's pretty good and those people need to get a grip or find a less silly hobby.

Today I was thinking, prosciutto is good with orange cantaloupe. Why not put them on pizza?

Not sure what you'd call it though. I think it needs a name that it catchier than “prosciutto and melon pizza”.

Reminder: Anyone can edit Wikipedia and make it better...

Well, anyone can try.

What famous actors have the oddest names?

Offhand, I think maybe Meryl Streep and Humphrey Bogart.

I just realized the parallel between the John Birch Society (“who the heck is John Birch?”) and the Horst Wessel song (“who the heck is Horst Wessel?”)

In both cases it's nobody in particular, and the more you look into why they canonized their particular guy, the less interesting it gets.

Is this a common pattern of fringe political groups? Right-wing fringe political groups?

I think I would write more thorough, more interesting annotations than most of the people who write annotated works of literature.

(Exception: Martin Gardner's annotated Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are better than I could do.)

A while back I suggested the following aphorism:

It's not enough to make the coffee, you also have to drink it.

I'm not sure what I had in mind at the time — maybe just that it seemed like it might be applicable to many situations — but I think a couple of good programming-related examples are:

1. It's not enough to write the automated tests, you also have to run them

and

1. It's not enough to have a disaster recovery plan, you also have to try it out

A while back I complained that the suffix ‘-potamus’ wasn't widely-enough used. Recently I've had this word on my mind:

phlebopotamus

I'm not sure what it means. “Phlebo-” means veins and all I can imagine is a large rampaging blood monster, maybe something like the Blood Golem from Diablo II.

Today I also thought of

apotropotamus

and I don't yet knoe what that means, and I'm a rather afraid to find out.

I am sometimes in the habit of muttering under my breath “Mark Jason Potamus” but I don't know what that is about either.

I'm so tired of people talking about the dark side of the moon, how come you never hear anyone talk about the dark side of the sun?

Suppose I'm looking at a sentence of Hausa, Yoruba, or Igbo that has been transliterated into English. How can I tell which it is?

I know how to do this for most European languages, for Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, etc., but I don't know Yoruba from Igbo.

The most common picture of Carl Gauß depicts him wearing a black velvet cap. It is a pretty cool-looking cap, and I wonder if there isn't a small opportunity to sell math people black velvet caps like Gauß.

The same opportunity does not exist for Euler, whose most common depiction appears to have just gotten out of the shower, and to be wearing a bathrobe and to have a towel wrapped around his head.\

The Sun loves looking down and seeing the mortals scurrying about like germs, busy at our daily activities. But she's a little bit sad because she doesn't know much about what we do at night. She has never seen a late-night movie and has not even imagined sitting around a campfire, toasting marshmallows and singing songs.

One day the Sun was granted her wish to spend a night on Eartha. Just at sundown she was transformed into a woman. She had dinner at a jazz club, then went out to a cocktail bar where she met a new friend. They went out for midnight supper and then went back to the friend's apartment.

Just before dawn she kissed her new friend and returned to her work, content.

All numbers are finite, but some numbers are more finite than others.

Famous sisters Gloria Steinem and Media Steinem.

How sure are we that the blue-tongued skink and the blue-tailed skink aren't the same animal walking in different directions?

Does MODOK need to shave?

Does he blow his nose? How? He can't reach it. Now I picture the hapless AIM scientist who has to attend MODOK with an enormous spotted hanky when he catches cold.

In Serbian, Croatian, and other Slavic languages, srp (or ср̑п) means a sickle. And sȑpskī (ср̏пскӣ) means the Serbs or the Serbian language.

But it's Croatia, not Serbia, that is actually sickle-shaped.

Therapist: You're a very judgmental person.

Me: That's because is good to be judgmental

Me: Most people should be more judgmental actually

Me: I don't know what the fuck is wrong with them all