Noises on the radio while driving

Many in-car entertainment systems can reproduce sound rather well. Recently I was driving on the highway and I heard a strange sort of regular metallic knocking so I wondered what mechanical problem could have developed with the car to cause that. It turned out to be some irrelevant sound effect on the part of the radio program I was listening to: if I recall correctly, I surmised that it was the ticks of a clock before an election or referendum comes or we all get nuked or immigrants overrun the country or whatever. I was reminded of a program I used to listen to back in Ohio, aimed at commuters at rush-hour, which at one point would play the sound of numerous car horns. What idiocy: if we are in our cars then we rather need to be able to respond quickly to real car horns so it would help enormously if these fake ones wouldn't keep crying wolf. It would please me if the producers of radio programs were to be a little more mindful of this issue, especially when targeting what appears to be named drive time.

Breaking eggs

I rather enjoy cooking: especially, trying new recipes or my own simple ideas. They rarely turn out as intended but I usually like the result nonetheless. However, cookery is not something for which I have managed to make time for many years. My fantasy of a life with more leisure thus includes cooking more of my own food from scratch.

mst3kmoxie has recently encouraged the eating of eggs; I suspect that we had abundantly many in stock. So, this morning I thought I'd poach a couple each for me and Benjamin. As I held the first egg over the pan I realized that a gaping hole in what I'm used to is breaking eggs directly into the little poaching vessels. Normally with eggs I am doing something collectively with them so I get a Pyrex jug or suchlike to hold all the egg and break the shell over the rim. I wondered if it would work to just push my thumb through the side, grip the shell from both sides and part it, but I could easily imagine it failing. So, I tried something I vaguely recall seeing others do: a sharp blow with a butterknife to the side of the egg. This worked perfectly well, especially as I already had a suitable knife to hand, the one I'd used to get some butter to lightly grease the vessels before emptying the egg into them.

Tea strainers

This morning I was again washing out the tea leaves that had caught in the metal mesh of the infuser and I got to wondering, do we not have any materials that are very permeable to water but on only a minuscule scale so that particles visible to the naked eye can't even get stuck in them? Water molecules are after all very much smaller than fragments of dried tea leaf, they ought still be able to flow well through micropores I'd have thought. It thus seems as if there ought to be room for improvement where infusers are concerned.

(Actually, in this case I was making rooibos which appears to take the form of very thin twigs, so even worse for getting caught, and perhaps I'm just too attentive in cleaning the strainer afterward.)