OP, let me introduce you to Wiktionary, where you can look up all sorts of words, “gravity” included.

It can be a little shaky around the fringes (obscure words; rare or slang usages) and with languages not closely related to English, but it’s an excellent resource for when you want to know why a word is the way it is. Or at least to find out that we don’t know for sure where some words come from. Gravity isn’t one of those, though.

You may also like to know that there is a metric physical unit named after Newton, so his name does get used in gravity-related concepts. At time of writing, the Wikipedia article for the Gravity of Earth mentions the unit in the first couple of paragraphs.

The R word as a verb has a different emphasis than does the (adjectival) noun that is taboo. The emphasis difference is common among identically spelled pairs of verb/nouns. The noun almost always has emphasis on first syllable, e.g. [a] record (noun) versus [to] record (verb).

But yeah, some people are going to avoid it anyway, not least because it’s indistinguishable in text form, and I wouldn’t blame them.

I note that the M word (to belatedly drag myself back on topic) doesn’t work as a verb.

This feels like the way that “AI” actually becomes AI; more than the sum of its parts.

I’m actually not comfortable explaining what the potential ramifications of that could be, because I don’t want to give it any ideas. In fact, oblique references like this might still give it ideas, but I don’t want to make it easy.

He loved nothing more than jivving jifts to his wife and family at Christmas.

There’s a little manual wheel under the LED display on really old models but with newer models it can be done digitally with the remote control.

Wait. Where am I. What year is this? This isn’t about VCRs at all!

(Apologies for the joke. I couldn’t resist.)

I’ve eaten raw salmon and it didn’t do me any haaaaaaa

any haaaaaaa

Is it worth getting?

Maybe someone else will have a better answer. I used it once in a blue moon to naively hack at some audio, and will install it or Tenacity to do the same in future as and when the need arises. In fact, I’ll probably end up going for Audacity and a wary eye for telemetry opt-ins because Debian seems to have a native package for it. Tenacity seems to be Flatpak-only.

I worked for a company that sold third level domains. The company got bought out a few times as it kept going bust and the market consolidated, but unfortunately, the final owners did not understand what they had - I’d long left by that point - and they let the root domain lapse.

Perhaps as a saving grace, no-one had been maintaining the infrastructure (I was one of the last), and it ceased to function at a technical level long before the domain ended up lapsing. That gave people an unpleasant kick up the rear end to move their important stuff elsewhere if they hadn’t already. (The price we sold it at compared to actual domains ought to have been a hint that it wasn’t for important stuff, to be fair.)

I heard talk of a potential lawsuit against the ultimate asset holders, but I don’t think anything came of it.

Theoretically, the current owners of the domain could do what this guy talks about in order to try to collect mail for those accounts, but they’d have to know which subdomains to set up in order to do that.

I had one of those domains, and yes I got my stuff onto a proper domain not long after I left.

I also had a couple of accounts with a non-Google free e-mail provider that went under. Unrelated to my employer. The domain ended up belonging to an individual who probably gets a heck of a lot of email for former users of that service.

Surprisingly, the Internet seems to look mostly favourably on Audacity these days. I never really kept up with it at the time, but apparently all the allegedly heinous (mis)features were opt-in. (Further verification of this may be required.)

I can’t tell if that’s the result of a really good scrubbing of bad search results or whether they genuinely cleaned up their act.

Either way, Tenacity, the fork that came about as a result of the controversy, still exists, and apparently has themes to change the look just like Audacity is claiming to have done now, so if you’re uncertain, that’s always an option.

Probably the plastic measuring jug that I use as an intermediary between the sink and the electric kettle. The kettle doesn’t have an external gauge, so it’s useful for putting specific amounts of water into it. The jug used to belong to my grandmother.

I want to say that I’d probably miss it more for its usefulness than its sentimental value, but don’t really want to force myself to actually decide for sure, nor damage it to find out.

That said, I’ve proven pretty sentimental about most things, regardless of their origin, so I’d definitely have some level of distress about it.

The Waterjet Channel used to do things like this. They’d launch stuff out of an air cannon at a torso made of ballistics gel on what seemed like a regular basis.

And I daresay The Slow Mo Guys, if not also the OG Mythbusters must have done something similar at some point, not that I can call anything specific to mind right now.

Neurons firing. I recognise one of those blobs as being oddly similar to the real-world administrative area where I grew up, not that I learned the actual shape of it until a few years ago. The blobs around it don’t match though.

Here’s a question: Do they go straight for it, or do they only seem to go for it when the toilet hasn’t been flushed (but unused) for a while?

There may be some truth to the idea that cats can taste the additives that are put into municipal water (in developed countries anyway), and it takes a while for those to dissipate once the water is out of the pipe.

Often, the only significant quantity of water that has sat for long enough is what’s found at the bottom of a toilet.

Alternatively, if you have a water filter for drinking water, and that makes it into your cats’ bowl(s), it might be imparting a flavour onto the water that you can’t taste but your cats can. Chances are your toilet doesn’t have the same filter.

The “cure” might be to provide water that’s not straight from the tap (faucet) or filter, and maybe in a different bowl/location in case they’ve developed a negative association with either of those.

But yeah, keep the lid closed on the toilet regardless.

TL;DR decoy toilet

Point taken. I have added a qualifier.

Reminder - if you subscribe to the name change - that the mnemonic for the Great Lakes has changed from HOMES to SHAME, with America right in the middle of it. You couldn’t make this up.

Lots of people do that every year. Some out of choice, some because they have no choice.

On the other hand, I’m someone who has always been with family. There was only one year where I wasn’t for the day itself and that’s because I was on nights. It was a little hard to deal with, but I’ve had worse experiences.

Like, say, the first summer I had a full time job after decades of school and university and suddenly not getting that six-week break. It was like I couldn’t breathe.

Or the existential horror of working nights and realising that there’s no great reset from one day to the next. You might not even realise you think of time that way until you have to be awake at the “wrong” times. Time’s continuous. No break. No fanfare when the weekday changes. Relentless unending time.

So yeah, that Christmas was kind of lonely, but I slept through most of it, and saw family a day or so later.

Insufficient information for meaningful answer. Are we talking full on mud volcano here, or are we talking about an unwelcome fart nugget?

For the latter, the nugget’s going in the toilet, I’m scrubbing my undies with toilet paper as best I can and then I’m leaving ASAP because I no longer trust my lower gastrointestinal tract. Yes, I’d continue to wear them. No I wouldn’t use water. I don’t like going commando and I’m not going to wear soggy undies for the sake of a nugget.

For the former, I’d probably get to and then hide in the bathroom and do whatever I could to clean myself up. Probably try not to cry. If alcohol’s involved, fail at that (though I didn’t start drinking until 18, so this is moot). Soggy clothing no longer optional.

Then I make an escape checking for any trails I might have left from ground zero to the bathroom on the return journey to the way out. I may take the coward’s way out and not claim any knowledge, but I’d be convinced that people would know it was me, and there’s a good chance I’d be right.

But I know I’d want out of there ASAP.

Anyone who designed my existence for the sake of feeding it into my head has something seriously wrong with them, and not just because they wasted a huge amount of time.

But I would like to know when my four years is going to be up.

“Wood-based hair removal effective but hurts like hell”

Wood?! … Well I looked it up and even though I see it, I’m struggling to believe it.

But by the looks of things, and to kill the joke, friction welded pistachio shells would have a telltale charred seam that the completely sealed ones don’t have.

… although to kill things further, welding would leave the same telltale marks if not worse.

Superglue on the other hand…