When I was in public elementary school we had old textbooks and one of them was trying to talk shit about the Soviets by saying that their educational system was creating robotic, unemotional children who obeyed instructions unquestioningly. They juxtaposed a picture of Soviet students standing uniformly with a picture of American students all doing different things. I questioned it at the time and said if they took a picture of us doing the pledge it would look the same as the commies. I sound 100 years old but this was only 20 years ago.

Central air and garbage disposals are amazing and should be the norm

ATLA ironically may have desensitised me to the pledge thing by trying to show it as a creepy thing in the Fire Nation school. Instead, it just became part of the narrative flow, which was somewhat opposite the intent.

Then again, I've probably come to associate it with singing shitty school songs and national anthems in Australia anyway.

Someone didn’t grow up in the Cold War era. They drilled that shit and followed it up with “duck and cover” in case the Soviets nuked us. As if your desk provided cover from the nuclear holocaust.

"Central air" is a term I only learned the meaning of recently, but American TV assumes everyone knows what it is. Which is fair, if you all have it.

It's why no one has air conditioning in a lot of Europe. You'd have to have a separate system for each room, it would get very expensive very quickly, or I can buy a fan for the equivalent of $20. I know in places like the south of Spain they actually do this, but it's not common.

It's seriously funny how freaked out people get from garbage disposals.
They're quite safe. They don't have spinning blades. They have something closer to a dull grater and arms on swivels that catch loose food and push it against the stationary grind plate.

You shouldn't put your hand in one because the little weighted arms are going very fast and could hurt your fingers if they got hit, but it's unlikely to push them into the wall.

They're great if you have proper sewage treatment, since it keeps the trash from getting stinky and it basically just gets turned into fertilizer like a more efficient, roundabout compost heap that I don't need to remember to poke.

a hand blender in my sink? TF?

Are you referring to a garbage disposer?

On the pledge, some of us know.

Hollywood celebrities and writers all have "Central Air". The rest of us know what it is, but we don't all have it.