Under cabinet manual jar opener. It's flat and mounts under your cabinet of choice. Easy to use, but also easy to forget it's there! I sometime find myself jar in hand and half-way to wherever my husband is before I remember that I no longer need his skills.

Electric candle lighter. Rechargeable lighter with long neck. Eliminates the need for matches or standard lighters. The noise it makes does scare one of the cats, though. I haven't tried it on campfires yet, but I think that was something the ad said it could do.

This happened during street festivities for lunar new year, so a lot of people are connecting the dots. They don't mention that the car was aggressively trying to drive through a crowd, but it seems like it was trying to make its way through a crowd.

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/why-did-a-san-francisco-crowd-light-waymos-driverless-vehicle-on-fire/

Multiple witnesses said Waymo’s navigation technology became confused by festivities and fireworks that were lit to celebrate the Lunar New Year. Witness Anirudh Koul said the driverless car “got stuck immediately in front.”

Another witness said the car’s presence in the middle of Chinatown’s celebrations triggered frustrations in the crowd. “You could feel the frustration when people were just trying to celebrate,” she told KRON4.

No, they don't cause damage on their own. Birds get a windfall of big nutritious bugs. Humans might be a little creeped out.

It's an old game for schoolchildren. They all hold hands and run really fast single file. When they decide to "crack the whip" one or more kids at the end need to hold on tight or fall off.

Off the top of my head:

• That little triangle embossed on your plastic container says it has been / can be recycled.
  https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled
  https://www.earthday.org/plastic-recycling-is-a-lie/

-Anything involving babies and incubators is immediately suspect. (Or babies and bayonets, for that matter).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

-And this one is pure conspiracy, and I know it's not what you asked for... but it's ridiculous and 'tis the season. My mother in law is convinced that the lyrics to "Oh Christmas Tree" (O Tannenbaum) were changed by people who wanted to erase the true and original lyrics. By who? Big Tree financiers? Communists who are stealing Christmas and replacing it with trees?

Anyway...

The original lyrics, according to this conspiracy, praise God and never mention trees at all. It's completely ridiculous and always ends with the whole family singing along with the "true lyrics" from a badly photocopied paper that she hands out. I hope this doesn't come up again this year because it really makes me want to fight. Which would make me the bad person, because who initiates fights on Christmas? The next couple of days are going to be tough.

My understanding is that this only applies if there's no other way for the neighbor to access their own property. If the property owners can access their property from any other way (for example, from the city streets), there's no obligation for a landowner who owns the back of the property to allow them to have a second access point.

Does my backyard neighbor owe me the right to cut across his back yard to access mine? No. I have a driveway that connects to a city street.

On the chaos angle, I'd imagine that some of those homes have built backyard gates that allow them direct private access to that park. If someone were to buy up that strip they could cut that off and basically extort each homeowner for access. It's possible that the homeowners could claim some sort of "I've used this land for 20 years for access to the park argument," but that would involve individual claims, expense, and a general PITA legal mess. And depending on the locality, it may require you to prove that you've done improvements to the property and a whole host of other PITA things.

Best case for those homeowners is to pay a couple of thousand each to buy the lot and come to an agreement among themselves on subdivision and/or collective maintenance and access rights.

To be fair, after the attacks on 9/11 I heard a fair number of comments from people who were convinced their local high school football stadium would be a prime target for international terror rings.

"Think about it, Becky. It's Friday night and the whole town of Left Nube, Indiana will be packed in there. We're sitting ducks."

It's silly, but people project their fear locally.

Fun fact. My workplace added recycle bins to the breakroom a few years ago. The day after, HR had to call a facility-wide emergency meeting to explain that their use was voluntary only and that no workers would be required to use them.

Grown ass adults lost their shit because they saw a recycle bin.

The companion story: Hospital bosses ignored months of doctors' warnings about Lucy Letby suggests that not only did hospital management ignore the problem for almost 9 months, they had no interest in involving the police or outside investigators. They even required two of the doctors to apologize to her for their accusations.

So I guess she was getting away with it just fine.

There's a wiki article on the subject of nurses who kill their patients. It contains some general speculation on motivations.

The motivation for this type of criminal behaviour is variable, but generally falls into one or more types or patterns:[4]

Mercy killer: Believe the victims are suffering or beyond help, though this belief may be delusional.
Sadistic: Use their position as a way of exerting power and control over helpless victims.
Malignant hero: A pattern wherein the subject endangers the victim's life in some way and then proceeds to "save" them. Some feign attempting resuscitation, all the while knowing their victim is already dead and beyond help, but hope to be seen as selflessly making an effort.

I've seen this happen so many times and it's always so embarrassing. There's a lovely template that you can slap onto an article that says something along the lines of "this article appears to have been edited by someone with a close association with the subject." It's truly a marvel in how close it skates towards saying, "the subject of this bio didn't like parts of what people were saying, so they edited it to suit themselves" without saying exactly that. It's subtly brutal.

Fortunately for the feelings of people who edit their own wiki bios, I suspect that they probably don't feel the sense of shame that I would if I were in that position.

At some point, the question becomes: was the candidate too unqualified to understand what they were applying for?

I don't mind training someone if they're not 100% up to speed but they also need to be capable of learning and retaining things. A lot of that means that you need a foundation based on education and on the job learning. In other words, I'm not going to teach foundational shit that you should have picked up in high school.

One memorable example: we had one applicant who claimed a high degree of competence and related experience - and although I had some doubts during the interview I was realistic about the job market and our chances of finding someone who was a perfect match. She was personable, seemed smart, and had worked in the industry. How hard would it be to train her? If she could manage to pick up even the most basic parts of the workload it would be win to hire her.

A short list of what we learned

• no bachelor's degree (our manager was livid when she found out about that one)
• no understanding of basic science (like, "temperature is not measured as a percentage" basic science)
• a week into the job, asked when she was going to "start doing X," even though the job description was "you're going to be doing Y and Z." To be fair (?), the words describing X and Y were fairly similar and you might mistake one for the other if you had a poor grasp on either of them.

I'm going to gloss over a lot of irrelevant (but horrifying) detail here. We did have one memorable conversation where she said, "I'm so glad I applied for this job even though I wasn't qualified. You never know where you can get by trying!"

Where she eventually got was fired, but that took some time and the damage she did is still legendary. Part of that legacy of raging incompetence is that we fact-check resumes in ways that we previously did not. But the great irony is that she probably had no idea of just how unqualified she actually was. Again, the question becomes: is the candidate too unqualified to understand what they were applying for?