Our quest for knowledge

A great many first-time readers of this blog find their way here by means of a search engine. They type some phrase into Google, and up pops a link to AnotherThink, the source of all wisdom.

Here are a few of the searches that led people to AnotherThink in January:

Use ruminate in a sentence. “After whipping up a mess of grits and eggs, I went into my ruminate.”

What is the coolest deodorant in the world? Pureed cucumber. Hence the expression, “Cool as a cucumber.”

Key fob history. It’s a little known fact the key fob was invented by Paul Pankratz, an unemployed plumber from Poughkeepsie. Needing to pay the bills, he sold the rights to a consortium of Chinese industrialists for a measly $200. Economists now agree that it was the lowly key fob that led inevitably to the Ginsu knife and transformed China from an economic backwater to a manufacturing juggernaut.

Another way to say I am looking for a different job. “As a child, I always dreamed of becoming a blue-jean riveter. Working at Levi these past 20 years, I’m at the top of my game. I’ve begun looking for new challenges, new horizons, and I think I feel a call in my heart to zippers, perhaps even inseams.”

Summary of the Big Bang theory. I once cooked a half-pound of black beans in a pressure cooker without realizing that the jiggler was stopped up. As the beans boiled, the internal pressure reached approximately 478,500 pounds per square inch, at which point the safety release blew. The beans instantly vaporized. A scalding-hot, brown slime exploded through the 1/4 inch safety hole with a roar like Vesuvius, coating every surface in the kitchen with a dripping, bubbling ooze. It was like that, only messier.

How to get rid of worms on the garage floor. This is actually a common problem in homes built in the New Jersey suburbs in the 60’s and 70’s. That small hump in the concrete is probably a dead mobster, and the worms… well, you get the picture. If your house was built in the summer of 1975, you may actually have mafia-connected union boss Jimmy Hoffa under your garage! You could make a killing, if you’ll pardon the pun. Call Geraldo, your local police, and the Orkin man, in that order.

Seven things that attracted me to my spouse. If you have to use Google to answer this question, your marriage is in deep trouble.

What it’s called when many raindrops collide and blend. “A frog strangler.” Possibly, a flood.

What if a toilet were directly over the equator? Actually, this is one of the first lessons they teach you in plumbing school. If a toilet is flushed directly over the equator, half the water spins clockwise while the other half spins counterclockwise, which creates a very nasty “parting of the Red Sea effect.” If your toilet refuses to flush, check your latitude.