COMMENCE PANTALOON INITIATION SEQUENCE

VHS — permanent marker on paper, 23 × 30 inches, 2010

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.

@stealingyourbones has made some delightful food abominations, which taught me I can replace the water in bread with almost any liquid.

So I tried Miso.

The yeast loved it and frothed up super fast. Mixing miso broth with the egg and oil smelled funky. The dough didn’t rise any fluffier than usual but the texture feels good. Then I decided to roll in some black garlic and green onion. I’d add nori crumbled up but I ran out.

This is amazing. It tastes like if miso soup was solid. The flavor is immaculate. It’s just missing the nori flavor. I can add that next time because I am 100% making this again.

Yes! I love sharing recipes! @lady-jeleania

Here’s my Gma Vesta’s hamburger bun recipe:

1 Tbsp yeast

1/2 cup warm water (miso broth)

- mix together and let it froth up

1 1/2 cup warm water (miso broth)

1/2 cup sugar

1 1/2 tsp salt

1 egg

1/4 cup olive oil

- mix all together, then add frothy yeast

5 1/2 - 6ish cups flour

- mix in slowly with a fork until it’s hard to stir with the fork, then stir together with hands until it stops sticking to your skin when you rub your hands together.

- knead the dough about 10min until it starts pushing back (it gets springy)

Let the dough rest for 30min.

(I make a redneck proof box by microwaving a cup of water and quickly replacing the water with the dough bowl and shutting the door to give it a warm place to nap. Do not microwave the dough itself by reflex.)

Roll out the dough and add any flavors you like. For the miso soup bread I chopped up a couple black garlics, and a handful of green onion. Roll it up like cinnamon rolls, cut into 12, and roll each into a ball shape.

Stick in a greased 9x13 casserole dish and let the dough rise to double size. (About 40min-1hr depending on how warm your kitchen is.) (the redneck proof box won’t fit my casserole dish so I stick the rolls on top of the oven while it preheats with a dish towel over it.)

Preheat the oven to 350 and when the dough looks nice and squishy bake it for 20min.

You can brush butter on top if you want. That would look pretty and help a sprinkling of furikake stick after you pull it out of the oven. If you wanna up the miso taste you can also spread a very thin layer of miso paste in before you roll it up with the other fillings. I’m gonna try that next time.

Marguerite Perey is one of the greatest radiochemists to ever live, and Francium is such a bullshit element that only an absolute master could identify and analyze it.

The short-lived intermediate actinide chain isotopes are mostly bullshit elements for a lot of the same reasons Francium is. Five of them (Radium, Radon, Astatine, Actinium, and Protactinium) are so scarce in nature and so ferociously radioactive that all of their names literally mean “unstable or radioactive element” because at the time of their discovery that was the only thing known about them. Isolating and identifying these bullshit elements demanded a total technical mastery of the cutting edge chemical and radiological analysis techniques in their time, as well as performing a tremendous amount of brutal physical labor. Preparing these extreme trace elements for study required processing thousands of pounds of raw uranium and thorium ores, often exposing the researchers and their assistants to high doses of radiation, just to obtain the extremely radioactive milligram-scale quantities of the intermediate isotopes they wished to study.

To even have the skills to identify Francium, Perey had to first spend years mastering the separation of transactinide decay products from raw mixed ore at the Radium Institute with her mentor and another true master in the field, Marie Skłodowska-Curie. Her work in Curie’s lab focused on the isolation and analysis of another previously discovered bullshit decay product, the obviously-named Actinium. Actinium occurs in high-grade natural uranium ores at a rate of 0.2 mg Ac/1000 kg ore, a concentration of 0.0000002%wt, so isolating enough of it to study required the painstaking and precise process of dissolving and refining thousands of tons of increasingly radioactive metals in powerful and dangerous solvents.

Upon isolation of a sample of Actinium (specifically Actinium mixed into a Lanthanum carrier) , Perey and the Curies would frantically study the element as its already intense radioactivity multiplied while even shorter-lived isotopes of Thorium, Radium, Radon, Polonium, and others grew in to the sample, obscuring its characteristics and endangering the researchers.

The decay of Actinium should have only initially produced beta radiation from its decay into Thorium-227, which in turn undergoes alpha decay into Radium-223. The days-long lifetime of Thorium-227 means that after a fairly short period of time, the Actinium sample will develop a significant amount of alpha radiation on its own. But Perey was skilled enough and fast enough to isolate and measure her samples before this process could happen, and what she found was an unexplained early spike in alpha radiation from some other very scarce very active alpha source, something that must have been decaying directly from the Actinium in minuscule quantities.

After analyzing several samples to make sure these results were reliable, Perey was confident she had discovered the elusive element 87, and asked Jean Perrin (her supervisor at the lab) to submit her findings for publication. At the time, she was a lab assistant and unable to publish papers, and did not get a degree until 1946, seven years later. She named the new element Francium, after her home country and the nation that sponsored her research.

While Perey was investigating the properties of Actinium, her mentor Marie Curie developed serious anemia and had to withdraw from lab work. She died of aplastic anemia in 1934, after years of continuous exposure to extreme radiation that destroyed her bone marrow and left her body unable to produce new blood cells. Perey discovered Francium five years later.

The dangers of working with highly radioactive elements were not well understood in the early era of radiochemistry, but the experiences of the early radiochemists left a huge impact on those that followed, and Perey championed studies of the effects of radiation and devised new protection methods for researchers throughout her long career. Though she was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize, she never won it, and her contributions and talent have been largely forgotten outside of the nuclear chemistry community.

The level of skill and care required to discover an element that is so immensely bullshit as Francium is staggering, and the numbers involved are unimaginable. The labs Perey and the Curies worked in were left unused for decades until their destruction in 1981, due to the intense radioactivity from sub-microgram quantities of these highly active elements contaminating the room. It’s likely that Perey never observed more than a nanogram of Francium during her lifetime studying it, and no quantity large enough to observe its bulk quantities has ever been assembled.