Under the Influence is Terry O’Reilly’s show and he’s usually really good about sourcing things. Pretty disappointing, honestly.

I did some research on this when I was hunting for stainless cookware and I would stick with three ply.

Three ply stainless pans have an aluminum core with stainless steel cladding. At least for the brands I was looking at, five ply stainless pans are alternating layers of stainless and aluminium, where each of the two aluminum layers is half as thick as the aluminum core in the three ply pan.

In the course of my research, I learned that stainless cladding is great for ease of cleaning, durability, etc. but for actual cooking performance, it’s the aluminum core that’s doing the heavy lifting. The stainless steel layer in between the two aluminum layers makes the pan more complex to manufacture (and therefore more expensive) and doesn’t help (or actually harms) the pan’s performance.

Yep. Exactly right.

In North America, Christmas lights usually have a plug end and a socket end so you can connect multiple strings together in series.

If you accidentally put the plug end at the top of the tree, it might be tempting to try to buy or make one of these cords so you don’t have to take the lights down and redo them.

It is as dumb and lazy as it sounds.

With Dijon ketchup?

I’m not sure if this is universally true but I’ve never seen a fully electric vehicle that uses motor oil. Hybrid vehicles with an internal combustion engine and an electric drive train would still need it, of course.

Not having to take my car for oil changes is bliss.

I’ve heard several horror stories from friends about bringing cars to Canadian Tire.

They forgot to put oil in the car after an oil change.

They somehow managed to put a wheel bearing in backwards.

They claimed the lock nut key for the tires was missing when it was in plain view in the glove compartment and they had been told where to find it. They wanted to charge to cut off the lock nuts, which is a common garage scam.

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Well, I managed to get sunburnt visiting Ireland. Twice. On two separate trips.

It was GitLab Duo.

We definitely have better tools for things like syntax checking and a linter step in the CI/CD pipeline has the advantage of not burning down a whole forest to do its job.

I made a contribution to a project that is using AI generated reviews and the AI bot gave me something like five or six suggestions, every one of which was wrong in some way or another. Only one of the suggestions was worth considering and the code that it generated to implement that suggestion was bad to the point of being baffling.

Last I heard, they were planning to hand responsibility for the renovation or replacement of 24 Sussex to the National Capital Commission, which should make the issue less of a political hot potato.

Heroes. The first season wrapped up its story beautifully. The second season was an aimless disaster.

I’ve read online that the original plan was for each season to tell a stand-alone story with a different set of heroes but the network was insistent on keeping the popular characters from season one on for season two. Peter Petrelli’s power is universe-breaking after he learns to control it, so the show ended up tying itself into a pretzel to explain why the answer to every problem isn’t “get Peter to snap his fingers and fix it”. There was also a writer’s strike in the middle of the season, which didn’t help.

I wasn’t into Megas XLR but it was part of cartoon Fridays when I was in school and probably belongs in this list.

You can’t list Oblongs, Undergrads, and Clone High without mentioning Mission Hill.

Chilly Beach is probably a deep cut for non-Canadians. I most often saw it described as Canadian South Park.

I’m not sure if it counts as obscure but Invader Zim also aired around this time.

Going back a bit further, there was Duckula, where the latest in a line of vampiric ducks was resurrected using ketchup instead of blood and became a vegetable vampire.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes was made into a cartoon of questionable suitability for children.

Yep, I just eat them straight. If I’ve bought the really big kind, I sometimes cut them into halves or quarters.

They’re great with smoked salmon. Put a little smoked salmon, a squeeze of lemon, a few capers, and maybe a sprinkle of fresh dill on a crostini or cracker. They’re also nice in pasta sauce.

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He passed in 2019

The Handbasket is run by Marisa Kabas who is a well respected independent journalist who has broken several stories about rumoured Trump EOs that turned out to be accurate.

French’s is owned by McCormick now but their ketchup is still made in Canada from Canadian tomatoes. Their mustard is made in the US.