A brand new pair of jeans shipping in a really fancy cardboard box
The most delicious ratatouille ever prepared
I live a life which is mostly isolated from news about what the British royal family is doing, but in the last few days I saw the story about how Prince Harry and Megan Markle are not going to return as “working members” of the royal family. This is a follow up on their announcement from like a year ago that they were stepping back from their royal duties. On the one hand, I legitimately have no idea what their royal duties were or what the work of the remaining working members of the royal family entails. I could definitely find out easily, but I’m not going to. I’m comfortable with the current dynamic.
All that aside, when I was reading about the relinquishing of their working members status, I noticed a sidebar article linking to another article from last fall about how Megan Markle has (US) political ambitions and is running for president or governor or something.
On the one hand, this sounds made up and probably not a real thing. On the other hand, if you were still stewing in the juices of having lost all your North American colonies 250 years ago and then watched them go on to become a world superpower all on their own — wouldn’t you install some sort of sleeper agent to try to take back all that power? Everyone views QEII as a nice old lady, but this sort of plotting could be what she thinks about by herself at night.
What you’d probably do is have Megan Markle become president of the US via a legitimate election, and then Harry would become “FIRST LORD” (not first gentlemen, first lord) of the United States, and you could find some obscure language in the Magna Carta that allows any royal who has secured a foreign title to un-rescind their WORKING MEMBER status and once again become a working member. Then you’d have Prince Charles and Prince Edward and his kids all step down and not be the kings and queens; so that Harry would be the first lord of the United States but also the King of England; and Megan would be the president of the US but also the First Lady of the King of England.
At this point you’d need to dig even deeper than the Magna Carta and probably totally fabricate some document that was supposedly attached as a rider to the Revolutionary War winding down documents that had some crazy language about reunification scenarios, and claim the US as a new territory.
With all that done I think you’d want to issue some new currency and you could cover it with pictures of QEII’s Royal Corgis.
The red light intersection was converted to a four way stop
I don’t like popcorn that much as a snack, but watching a guy pop a bunch of popcorn in a really big pan is pretty satisfying. I’m not sure if there’s an upper limit on how big a popcorn collection would have to be where I’d cease being interested in seeing it all popped.
If you start at the small scale with like a normal sized bag of microwavable popcorn, this is probably one of the more boring ways you can pop popcorn, but even this is sort of fun to watch as the bag grows and the pops all start popping. If someone was like “hey, I’ve got a bigger microwave and bigger and louder bag of popcorn — wanna see it?” I suspect that most of us would agree to see it.
Pretty soon though you’d hit a point where the available sizes of microwaves were a limiting factor and you had to switch over to a frying pan or stockpot or something and toss in some oil and pop your corns that way. This is fun to do because instead of just seeing a bag get bigger you see the little guys popping and flopping around the cooking vessel.
Once you’d exceeded the capacity of normal kitchen containers you could probably graduate up to some sort of oversized outdoor wok or something? This would be really cool to watch. I bet you’d have to keep stirring it so that you didn’t get a scenario where popped kernels were being weighed down by un-popped ones and burning them on the wok surface. This seems like a natural stopping place for popcorn popping — how many scenarios are there where you’d need more than a large wok amount of popcorn? Very few probably … but that’s not the point. The point is that you could pop more and it would be fun to watch.
If you’d just watched a full wok of popcorn be popped and someone indicated that they had access to a scrap metal yard or something where could fashion and even large cooking device and really move some units, I suspect most of us would be intrigued and go check it out.
At this point I’m not going to keep postulating more and more bigger things you could pop corn in … let’s just assume they keep existing. I think after each one happened I wouldn’t feel like I needed to go see a bigger one — but if it became clear that a bigger one was possible, I’d be on board for going to check it out.