Biology class circa 2001-2003

I think you’re missing the point of why that phrase became a bit of a joke and is considered unhelpful. It’s not written off because people think mitochondria are unimportant or should be written off, it’s because when you’re a teen learning this stuff and they’re trying to explain how cells work, mitochondria are a particularly strange and complicated thing that’s thrown in to the mix, and it sounds important and complicated but in lieu of any real details there’s the sudden brick wall of this weirdly uncharacteristic phrase that doesn’t really sound like how you’re teacher normally speaks, doesn’t really read like how the rest of the textbook reads and other than some vague allusion to “power” fails quite spectacularly to tell you what mitochondria are.

Part of what made it maddeningly confusing was that these lessons are getting you thinking about how mechanisms can coalesce to form larger systems, encouraging you interrogate macro scale phenomena down to the smallest scales and see how it all ticks and then suddenly they hit you with this magic “powerhouse”, very poorly explained, and which because of that poor explanation appears somehow irreducibe. You know mitochondria have “power” of some sort but any of their own mechanisms are conspicuously left out of the picture. This is probably for good reason because of the difficulty of making a syllabus that isn’t too deep or broad for the time available and for teenagers to pick up but it’s a very sudden brick wall. HOW do the mitochondria power cells? Do the mitochondria have cells? Do the mitochondria’s cells have mitochondria? How are they transmitting this power to our cells? The way this phrase was used was more reminiscent of a slogan, or an ad campaign and quite unlike much of anything else one remembers from biology class, it felt very… out of context. Even the choice of the word “power house” always felt weird, as it wasn’t for me at least, a word commonly encountered so to use it as an analogy really undermined it’s ability to help you grasp anything as it sought to explain one concept in terms of another only vaguely understood concept. I gathered this was a similar term to “power plant” although other than a popular museum in Sydney I had never heard the term used outside of that goofy phrase and to say mitochondria function similar to a power plant, in that they produce power doesn’t really say much more than, “mitochondria are the energy source of cells” which is similarly meaningless in all but the most basic sense.

So, don’t blame the mocking meme for dismissing mitochondria, blame the weird ass phrase the meme mocks for completely failing to explain anything about them and relegating them to a single, cryptic, hand waving sentence.

Definitely did it in Australia.

I think a big part of why it took off and lives on as a meme in the internet forums sense of the word, was the familiarity of the bizarre and unnatural phrase to the young adults using those forums who remembered it from biology class.

Certainly that’s how it was for me because before Digg, or Reddit, even before Facebook (though I guess not that long before), I had had that phrase uttered sincerely as part of my education and it was so uncanny and funny to see that this highly specific and distinctive phrase was used rote, word for word, at schools all over the world and was as memorably unhelpful to others as it had been to me. Perhaps the positive feedback loop from this phrase’s new life on the web really has fed in to education in a life imitating art kind of way like you describe, but I can assure you it definitely predated it’s status as a joke, and that’s where that joke came from.

I think you actually usually can get them to list them all, never much interested, they’re all going to be completely random names you never heard of, just so long as I can reject them all, that’s all I care about, otherwise I have to browse a different website on principle.

I have so many because I realised recently that most of my favourite foods are basically if not literally sandwiches in some form. What springs to mind now though is the English Fry-up crammed in to a baguette. I almost said the ‘full-English’ but admittedly it’s not quite the full English.

• A crusty but still quite soft baguette is best, similar to bahn-mi bread but longer and not as chewy
• 2 fried eggs
• 2 Cumberland pork sausage (or Irish sausages if you can get them 'cos they’re so good) slided in to longish strips on a bias
• Long rasher bacon strips to match the length of the baguette (can fold them if they are a bit too long)
• 2 hash browns
• Heinz baked beans (just a couple of teaspoons)
• Brown sauce
• Ketchup
• A glare from the grumpy Polish woman that made it for you.

Ok it’s just a well known breakfast but shoved in a baguette but somehow it does something magical to it. Especially loved this in the UK when I had a bad hangover and I could just about drag myself to the little Polish run cafe near my place. They were great, albeit grumpy.

Is that a crumpet in the middle there?

You’re probably going to have to have a chat with your mum about this because if there’s not a good specific reason for her concern, then it would be helpful to you if she could relax on this issue because it’s impinging on your ability to enjoy your life as an adult. She should care about that and if she doesn’t that tells you something. Ideally you could avoid the whole issue by meeting your date somewhere other than your house, although it will be awkward if you are unable to return home with them at any stage. Can your sister or any of your friends give you a ride to meet your date elsewhere?

A point of confusion I have from your post is whether you’re asking about your rights to date people, or just your rights to have them pick you up from the house. As far as dating people is concerned, you say you’re 25, you can do what you want neither your Mum nor your sister have any choice about it. You do not have to justify this or use your recent birthday as an excuse for anything because there’s nothing to excuse. Whether you want to date people is up to you and you alone.

If your Mum specifically requested that you not do that it would be rude to just ignore her, particularly if she has some special reason to be extra careful, but it’s also a very strange request for her to make of her 25 year old adult-child so you’ll definitely need her to give a pretty good explanation why you shouldn’t do this. Similarly, it’s a very strange situation to be in that you’re worried about your sister watching camera footage of you as some kind of evidence of wrong doing, why is she in a position to do that and why would she want to? How old is she? Such behaviour is bizarre and controlling.

A lot of the details of your post sound like you’ve been living in strange and possibly abusive circumstances where your mother and sister are putting a lot of effort in to monitoring and controlling you, which they do not any rights to do. In most places I know of, a person is legally an “adult” at 18 years of age, how long have they been doing this to you? Were you allowed friends and relationship in school? What about afterwards at work or university?

Do you want to continue living with your mother? It might be a good idea to start gaining some more independence in your life so you can safely choose to live in a different arrangement if you want to. No offence, but the way you write does sound strangely young and naive for a 25 year old, especially the idea that you need to have either your mother or your sister around to look after you. Do you have friends that know about your living arrangements? Do you know many people outside of your house? If you tried to make friends and spend time with them, is that something your mother would try to stop you doing? It sounds like you’re very isolated and your Mum is keeping it that way on purpose. Unless there’s some very context that can explain all these details, then it sounds like there’s something very wrong about how your family is treating you.

I used to actually love Domino’s but then the pizza got a little worse, then a little smaller, then smaller again, then more expensive, then quite a lot more expensive, then the voucher system that was keeping prices under control was trashed and then the pizzas got way smaller again.

This was a blessing in disguise though really. I tended not to explore the local options before this because they were only occasionally good in one’s area if you were lucky and always much pricier. Since Domino’s pricing stopped being cheap it made it worth searching for cheesier pastures and there’s a local joint near me that does NY style and it’s really good. That was really just luck though, honestly there’s a lot of really crappy neighbourhood pizza joints that people assume will be better because they’re not a chain when they’re really no better I’m glad I seemed to have landed next to the cream of the crop.

I enjoyed that. I’d seen the doorknob one before but not the rest

I’m going to guess for knives. If you could reliably tell from the handle which was which it could be kinda handy I spose.

I see you’ve played draw-ee cakey before.

“this was our last HVAC guy”

Scale is not unimportant

Hah figures. Oh well good thing I never watched anything he made so I don’t even need to be disappointed

You write well dude, I feel like I was right there for all three of these.

From what I hear he’s really not so objectionable and people enjoy his videos. I am yet to ever watch one though and that’s purely out of spite. Somehow YouTube seemed to try so hard to push this dude in particular that I decided to specifically not watch anything he was in, this meant avoiding his stuff and also anything from anyone else I actually like if I could tell from the thumbnail or description he was going to be in it. I just about managed it because I’ve never seen anything with him directly, but I have ended up seeing parodies of his videos so I now in spite of myself know what must usually be in them, and I’ve seen the famous video critiquing all the spin off food businesses he’s started up off the back of his famous name.

He’s probably really not that bad, even if his obscene wealth is objectionable, but my contrarian nature just can’t abide all the hype and cheerleading. Hopefully when he finally stops being popular, I’ll have managed to miss everything he’s in and maintain my pointless personal record of dodging the beastly bullets.

Pretty sure it’s this

Yes I figured that that was how it worked when Dad insisted I asked because, although, of course, logically what he was saying made sense, I knew intuitively that that isn’t the world I live in, and that unlike a white collar career, the minimum wage world does not care about making conditions or contracts that would attract or retain employees because they have 100% of the bargaining power and will find a different wage slave if you ask weird and inconvenient questions. That was why it was so awkward and I was reluctant to ask in the first place.

The thing is, while I’m all for a “fuck them” attitude towards insurance companies, if I’m going to commit insurance fraud, even if I think the risks are exceedingly low, I’m not doing it for Dominos, and doing it for them is indeed what’s happening there because in a just world this should obviously be the cost of offering a delivery service and by taking on this legal risk myself (and the burden of the increased premiums in the case of an accident) I’m gifting Dominos, the multinational megacorp, the opportunity to shirk what should definitely be their responsibility.

The insurance issue and terrible amateur legal advice alone wasn’t actually what made me pass on that job, despite really needing it at the time. The rest of the interview was a train wreck in terms of me evaluating them as employers and though they seemed keen to hire me anyway on the basis of me apparently having a pulse, I was fortunate enough not to actually be destitute at the time and so wasn’t obliged to accept the offer.

I dunno that seems awful c-c-cold. Are you just trying to cause a big s-s-sensation?