Try It: Either Elbow April 21, 2009March 13, 2017 TOYOTA This 30-second ad has been going around the Internet forever – but it will make you smile. SHERWIN WILLIAMS Forgive me if I already showed you this, but it’s a neat way to see what your house would look like – or at least a house like yours – with an endlessly customizable set of color combinations. OLD FOOD Randy Sailer: “The stilltasty web site looks cool! The appliance that really changed the way I shop for and store food, is a vacuum sealer. You buy the bags, pack the food, suck the air out of the bag, seal it and freeze it (I write a date and what the food is on the bag). The food lasts a long time without freezer burn (the arch nemesis of freezing); I have retrieved meat that is well over a year old and I can’t taste the difference. My wife and I have an efficient freezer in the basement that we keep fairly well stuffed. We buy stuff on sale (bulk chicken breasts a lot and we seem to have lots of boneless pork ribs now along with about half of the 80 lbs of blueberries we picked last summer). I think I first got the concept of bulk buying from your book.” ☞ Randy reports that he has a FoodSaver, which is way more expensive than the little $24 item I linked to above. “It is a bit big, but if you can leave it on your counter, you will use it more regularly. Our food saver was about $100 and we easily (really easily) made up the cost in less than a year through bulk buying and having less food go bad! We also use wide mouth ball jars and the sealing system for that when we want to freeze soups or other stuff that works in jars.” GAYS IN THE MILITARY – POLITICAL CARTOON Here. (And a related factoid: The first American soldier wounded in Iraq, Eric Alva, happened to be gay.) CUBA Chip Ellis: “Rather than allowing Cuban-Americans to send cash, Obama should have allowed them to send cars: If average age of cars is as reported and parts hard to get, it seems this would be a plus for auto industry, environment (any idea how much the emissions from those old cars are polluting the air?). Cuban-Americans sending new cars or their used cars (which most would replace with a new one or a new used one if they followed a certain financial reporter’s advice) would be a boon to the auto industry, self-image in Cuba.” YOU CAN’T LICK YOUR ELBOW It’s just one of those things.