by zbicyclist

Chewing Twice

Mitch4 sends this in: “I figured it must be an idiomatic expression, and a lookup confirmed it. But I had never before run across it in the wild.”

Your editor hasn’t heard this one, either. Mayor McGuffey’s name doesn’t sound German, so I guess we can’t call him a sour kraut.

There’s a suggestion here that this is a combination of two sayings: “I don’t chew my cabbage twice – Response when someone asks you to repeat what you just said. This phrase is probably a combination of: I don’t chew my baccer (tobacco) twice and I don’t boil my cabbage twice.“

I have no doubt that chewing tobacco twice would be unpleasant. Chewing tobacco at all sounds unpleasant. But what about boiling cabbage twice?

What Happens if You Boil Cabbage Twice

Boiling cabbage twice — or overboiling it — can significantly affect its texture, flavor, and nutritional value.

Texture and flavor changes
The first boiling softens cabbage, but a second boiling (or extended cooking) makes it mushy, limp, and less appetizing. Overcooked cabbage can also develop an unpleasant odor and lose its natural sweetness and crunch voyoeats.com+1.

Nutrient loss
Cabbage contains heat- and water-soluble vitamins like vitamin C and B vitamins, which are sensitive to prolonged cooking. Boiling it for more than 5–7 minutes can deplete up to 75% of vitamin C and reduce sulforaphane precursors by over 50% thelivinglook.com. A second boiling compounds this loss, reducing the health benefits.

Health considerations
Overboiling can also break down compounds that may interfere with thyroid function, especially in people with hypothyroidism eatandgeek.com. While this is more relevant to raw cabbage, repeated boiling increases exposure to these compounds.

How to avoid the problem

  • Limit cooking time: For shredded cabbage, 5 minutes; for wedges, up to 10 minutes
by zbicyclist

Fourth Wall

Mitch4 notes: “Or is it actually 4th-wall? I thought so because the art seems to show him looking out at us, but both parents are grimacing as though they heard this and are considering their responses.”

“Looks can be deceiving” seems like a phrase too old for Dennis’s purported age, so I’m going with 4th-wall.

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs – August 16, 2026

Similarly, hearing one side of a juicy conversation while on public transportation. If you are going to be talking loudly on your phone in public, please put the other person on speaker so we can get some closure. What did Betty say to Barbara?

This Gordo is from 1974. I had to memorize this in Catholic school, possibly less because it’s a great poem to introduce grade school students to poetry than because Kilmer was Catholic, something that was always emphasized by the good nuns. Original poem here. Ogden Nash wrote this parody:

I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.

by zbicyclist

Walking Spanish

billr sends this in: “Mike does puns ad infinitum. This is a recurring motif. What I don’t get is the text thread in the newspaper being held by the counterman. I know who Tom Waits is, but don’t know his music well enough to know if this is a reference to one of his songs. Jesus is a common name in some Hispanic-speaking countries, but “Walking Spanish down the hall” is beyond me.”