Yeah, in between the gold rush in San Fransisco, and the gold rush in British Columbia.

Fossicking and skerrig are related to mining activities, so may be more localized to areas were the gold rush was big. I confirmed they’re actual words.

My parents emigrated from Aus/NZ just before I was born, so I inherited a bunch of weird down-under, outdated vocabulary.

“What are you fossicking around in the pantry for?” “Did you find a few skerrigs of chocolate?” “I need to use the dunny.” “That guy in car dealership was apoplectic.”

Lots of other turns of phrase, but - with the possible exception of “dunny” are legit words.

EDIT: OK. A few others, I still use ‘blasted’ as an adjective. If my kids do something ridiculous, “Jesus wept, child,” sometimes comes out of my mouth. Then a bunch of, “running around like a sprayed blowfly,” or, “wandering around like a lost soul.”

Canned tuna fish.

IRC one of mushrooms’ main effects is to increase seratonin levels, so … Yeah, same basic thing.

I suspect round one is like eating milk, and round two is a fine cheese. Or eating cabbage, and later experiencing it as a well-aged kimchi. I’m sure it’s full of probiotics.

A longer digestive system is necessary to properly break down plant cellulose. This is why some small herbivores are copraphagic (eat their own shit, like rabbits): it takes two times through to extract adequate nutrients.

I’ve found Bewley’s to be quite good with hard water too.

IMO Yorkshire does well with hard water, and takes milk well.

I’ve been wondering a lot about absurdism in humour. There are people who laugh when they see something disastrous happen, like a man reflexively trying to stop a cement truck from tipping and getting squashed dead. Or a recent news story of the only fatality in a school bus crash: it was an observer who got hit by a vehicle as he ran across the highway to see if the kids were ok. A lot of the time this laughing response to a disaster is interpreted as schadenfreude, but a good portion of the time I believe it’s absurdism.

We try so hard to have agency, to do something, but the World doesn’t give a fuck. You have two choices when shit goes so wrong: you can wail about the unfairness of it all, or you can laugh at the absurdity of our efforts in the face of the colossal chaos of it all. The laughter is stronger.

It’s interesting to me that some cultures seem to have absurd humour baked in. The Aussies and Kiwis seem to have it. They just make jokes about and laugh at the most horrific situations.

I’ve been wondering a lot about absurdist humour. Dan Carlin relates a story of an old Air Force colonel who

Holy shit! This dude’s pluralising in Greek!

When they are in Kill Mode they are absolutely vicious. They’d reach through the fence and pull the chickens’ heads off.

Like, what made him vomit, what was his vomit made of, and if that wasn’t a fucking joint then what was it?

I don’t know what you’re talking about. They’re naturally superior.

That sounds like Gabor Maté’s work.

First time I’ve seen the word ‘cryptofascist’ outside of Red Dwarf.

We talking about horoscopes here?

Privacy concerns have also kept me away. I’m a bit inconsistent in application, but Google and Microsoft has me considering FOSS alternatives, Linux, and Graphene OS.

I also have to maintain a profile for professional reasons, though I get someone else to manage our pages. I don’t even know what it is, but I get anxiety within seconds of interacting with my feed, and I am NOT an anxious person. My ex is addicted to it. Sometimes I feel I lost her to FB and it’s echo chambers if unaccountable validation.