Ask TheWebWeavers #3 || The Chewer

Sophia Ismaa Writes asks…

My aunt chews so loudly. Like, SO loudly that it sounds like there’s a factory operating in her mouth and every single one of the workers there are French kissing each other. I have told her I don’t like it because it gives me flashbacks to someone in my childhood and it makes me uncomfortable. She refuses to change. What do I do?

There are several courses of action that you can take for this particular problem. You have already attempted the most simple and effective one, asking her to stop, but that did not work. Unfortunately, chewing loudly is something that one often doesn’t realize they’re doing. So asking someone to stop might quiet them down for a minute or two, but then they’re right back to chewing like a lawnmower.

It’s quite difficult to change someone else, so the easiest course of action is to change either yourself or your environment.

  1. Wear earplugs/noise-canceling headphones
    • This option is, of course, a bit rude. But sometimes drastic measures must be taken. However, the drawback to this plan is that it will be quite difficult to follow the conversation. So it is recommended that one becomes proficient in the art of lip-reading before attempting this method.
  2. Avoid eating with your aunt
    • This method is also somewhat rude. But effective. You could claim to be busy or even say you’re eating with other people.
  3. If you are cooking…
    1. Make only Jell-O. It’s hard to chew loudly with Jell-O
    2. Make something like spaghetti that requires a lot of slurping (and other disgusting chewing sounds) to eat. Set the table so you are sitting really close to your aunt, and talk with your mouth full during dinner. Later, while there is still food in your mouth, laugh rambunctiously at your own spectacular joke and throw your arm around your aunt in a fit of giggles. Then just stay there on your aunt’s shoulder for a bit and keep eating, making sure to chew obnoxiously in her ear. Add loud slurping for a bit of pizzaz. If you want to get extra credit, laugh again at someone else’s joke later in the meal and “accidentally” spit a piece of food onto her plate.
      • This labor-intensive solution will hopefully make your aunt become more aware of her own chewing.
  4. Show her this post.

Do you have any questions that need answering? Send them to Ask TheWebWeavers using the Contact Page. Please specify if you want your letter to be anonymous. If you want the world to know who you are (otherwise known as this small corner of the internet), we’ll add a link to your blog to help spread the love.

Ask TheWebWeavers #3 || The Chewer

Sophia Ismaa Writes asks…

My aunt chews so loudly. Like, SO loudly that it sounds like there’s a factory operating in her mouth and every single one of the workers there are French kissing each other. I have told her I don’t like it because it gives me flashbacks to someone in my childhood and it makes me uncomfortable. She refuses to change. What do I do?

There are several courses of action that you can take for this particular problem. You have already attempted the most simple and effective one, asking her to stop, but that did not work. Unfortunately, chewing loudly is something that one often doesn’t realize they’re doing. So asking someone to stop might quiet them down for a minute or two, but then they’re right back to chewing like a lawnmower.

It’s quite difficult to change someone else, so the easiest course of action is to change either yourself or your environment.

  1. Wear earplugs/noise-canceling headphones
    • This option is, of course, a bit rude. But sometimes drastic measures must be taken. However, the drawback to this plan is that it will be quite difficult to follow the conversation. So it is recommended that one becomes proficient in the art of lip-reading before attempting this method.
  2. Avoid eating with your aunt
    • This method is also somewhat rude. But effective. You could claim to be busy or even say you’re eating with other people.
  3. If you are cooking…
    1. Make only Jell-O. It’s hard to chew loudly with Jell-O
    2. Make something like spaghetti that requires a lot of slurping (and other disgusting chewing sounds) to eat. Set the table so you are sitting really close to your aunt, and talk with your mouth full during dinner. Later, while there is still food in your mouth, laugh rambunctiously at your own spectacular joke and throw your arm around your aunt in a fit of giggles. Then just stay there on your aunt’s shoulder for a bit and keep eating, making sure to chew obnoxiously in her ear. Add loud slurping for a bit of pizzaz. If you want to get extra credit, laugh again at someone else’s joke later in the meal and “accidentally” spit a piece of food onto her plate.
      • This labor-intensive solution will hopefully make your aunt become more aware of her own chewing.
  4. Show her this post.

Do you have any questions that need answering? Send them to Ask TheWebWeavers using the Contact Page. Please specify if you want your letter to be anonymous. If you want the world to know who you are (otherwise known as this small corner of the internet), we’ll add a link to your blog to help spread the love.

A Rambling

Hello, peoples of the universe!

I’m going to try something new today, always dangerous.

A random word generator on the internet is going to generate a random word for me, and I’m going to keep writing whatever that crosses my mind until it reaches a post-sized blob of words.

And this will give you nonexistent readers a glimpse into my head, always dangerous.

The Word: Cottage

Hmm. The seven dwarves from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves had a cottage. I haven’t read Snow White. Did I capitalize the title properly? Is “the” supposed to be capitalized as well? Oh well. That’s mostly right enough.

What was I supposed to be talking/thinking/writing about? Oh yeah, cottages. I don’t like cottage cheese. Once when I went to Spinette’s house, we had cottage cheese for breakfast. It was lumpy and I didn’t like it. (Apologies, Spinette.) Cheese, in general, is lovely. I like mozzarella the best. Especially in stick form. Not cheese sticks where you peel it and things. The kind where it’s breaded and gooey. Is there a separate word for that or is it also a cheese stick?

Things I don’t like about mozzarella cheese sticks:

  • When the entire cheese part comes out and you have to just eat the breaded part
  • When it burns your tongue
  • When the cheese keeps stretching out and getting longer and longer and then the cheese reaches the length of your arm so you can’t hold it out any farther without asking for help, but that would be disgusting, to have someone else hold your cheese stick. But you have to do something because the cheese is getting lower and lower because of the effects of gravity, and eventually it will hit the table/your clothes/the floor and will be inedible.

Cottages.

They have straw for roofs in books, right? How do they keep water from leaking into the house? And why is it “roofs” and not “rooves”?

The plural of “goose” is “geese”. So following this logic, the plural of “moose” should be “meese”, right? BUT IT’S NOT. This is an atrocity. Personally, I say “meese” (although it doesn’t come up in conversation often) in the hopes of sparking a meese revolution.

Mouse to mice

House to hice

Is “louse” the singular of “lice”?

I probably shouldn’t Google it right now. I’m writing a post.

Google is a verb and a noun and a company.

I have to go do other more boring things. This is post-sized, right? Is it okay if I don’t proof-read? I probably didn’t make any mistakes…

Goodbye.

P.S. Does anyone read the tags? Would someone notice if I put something interesting there?

Is Cereal a Soup?

I was asked the other day “Is cereal a soup?”

Well, my immediate answer was no because cereal is cereal and soup is soup and cereal is not soup; but I try to keep an open mind, so I considered the question again.

Reasons Cereal is Not Soup

  • Cereal is cold
    • But cereal doesn’t necessarily have to be cold
    • Some soups are cold
  • Cereal is a breakfast food and soup is not
    • No one is stopping you from having soup for breakfast and cereal for dinner
  • Cereal is Cereal and soup is soup and cereal is not soup
    • What is soup?

What is Soup?

According to Dictionary.com, soup is a liquid food made by boiling or simmering meat, fish, or vegetables with various added ingredients.

Reasons Cereal is Not Soup: Updated Edition

  • Cereal is crunchy, and therefore not entirely liquid
  • Cereal is not boiled
  • Cereal is not simmered
  • Cereal does not contain meat, fish, or vegetables with various added ingredients

But what if you despised vegetables (like Spinette) and refused to eat any (like a five-year-old child) and you were also a vegetarian?

  • Note: Vegetarians don’t have to like vegetables. They can eat other meat-less food items like processed foods. For example, granola bars, popsicles, ice cream, chocolate, fruit snacks, gummy bears, oatmeal, Jell-O, etc.

If you were five-year-old vegetarian Spinette, then you would like your chicken noodle soup without chicken or vegetables. It would just be noodle soup. But this noodle soup does not contain meat, fish, or vegetables (like the cereal) and therefore, it is not a soup (even though soup is in the name. This is a similar dilemma as the one surrounding baby powder. There are no actual babies in baby powder as there is no soup in noodle soup).

So then what is noodle soup if not soup?

Soggy pasta, perhaps?

Sandwiches

Have you ever thought that if one person drops a piece of bread on one side of the Earth and another person dropped another piece of bread at the same time the world would become a sandwich for just a brief second?

I’ve thought about it. Along with some other things too.

But honestly, do sandwiches have to be closed off, my bread? The only sandwiches I have seen not closed off by two pieces of bread is a cupcake and Lunchables cracker sandwiches.

And must the two pieces of bread be parallel? Because I have seen sandwiches made of one piece of bread, just bent over. If those things are considered sandwiches, what exactly is a hot dog? Is it an incomplete roll or a one-breaded sandwich? Is a taco a sandwich? A pita falafel?

Also, if one puts a sandwich, say a nice grilled chicken sandwich, into a blender, is the outcome a sandwich? If it is so, what if someone spread the chicken sandwich mush onto a cracker and tops it off with another one, does that make it a “sandwich sandwich”? Or if a sandwich has three pieces of bread with filling in the middle is it a “sandwich sandwich” a “double sandwich” or just the normal term “sandwich”.

Is an Oreo technically a sandwich? Does that make the backward spelling of my octopus’s name “Oreo” also a sandwich? (Ze octopus’s name is Oero, for whom it may concern.)

If you have two pieces of bread stacked on top of each other, that would be an oxygen sandwich (assuming that most nonexistent readers live in places with oxygen) and if another piece was added on top it would be a bread sandwich. Following that logic, I’m guessing that all stacks of bread are automatically sandwiches.

Of course, I remember that sandwiches do not need to be closed off by bread, so that would make all edible things that are stacked a type of sandwich.

But, then again, do sandwiches need to be edible?

 

 

 

5 Things Not to do Whilst Baking

Do NOT do these five things ever when baking. It will result in unsatisfactory results.

From now on, “it” will refer to the baked goods that you have baked or are currently baking.

  1. Do not leave it in the fire too long and burn it.
  2. Do not drop off a cliff of any height. (It will be difficult to retrieve your baked goods.)
  3. Do not go swimming with your baked goods, no matter how much you may want to.
  4. Do not mix up flour and powdery white sand from the beaches of Wyoming.
  5. Do not burn your house down.

This list has been compiled from personal experiences. As you can probably tell, I usually buy storebought baked goods now.

Spices

In the household of my parental units, spices are commonly used. Or should I say, almost in everything— on rice, salads, soups, pizza, hotdogs, staining fingernails, smelling up clothes, my breath, my parent’s breath and the stinky shoes of my cousin’s. The relatively not so spicy manager of a certain inn that my parents own, actually complained about my cousin’s stank he oh-so awfully spewed across the halls. Not many people like it, the smell of spices radiating from a random spicy person.

Along with the smell of sulfur, smoke, vanilla, and Arachnid’s hair in some cases, I love the wondrous scent of spices. Each time my parental units cook, my stomach grumbles like a humpback whale um…uh… groaning (Please tell me a better word for this. I don’t research whales). Eating them (spices in food not humpback whales) is better, since it adds a bit of a flavor that cannot be found in the food that was spiced.

An example would be scrambled eggs: I literally put a whole bottle of black pepper on those otherwise tasteless blobs! They are called scrambled for a reason, so I think they should taste scrambled.

Sadly, everything has a dark side, especially spices.

Everyday, for the meal of nighttime, my female parental unit puts these “seeds” within the dishes. They add a scent, but once I bite them I get a taste so bitter, so ughh, so much like a bad aftertaste of something, that I have to gag. Sometimes I don’t chew my parental unit’s cooking and just swallow so I don’t accidentally bite on a seed, releasing the monster within.

When I was a mini human of small portions, I used to throw out the seeds from my food, resulting in more time organizing the food rather than eating it. If it’s really filled to the brim with large seeds (the ones that ensure plants growing in ze stomach) I will not hesitate to put the troops in order.

In soups, seeds are the worst. Once I eat all the beautiful soupy parts of the soup, little black seeds are left on the bottom. Of course, since I don’t like disorder (of food) I will throw out the seeds, but I have to do it secretly so my parental units don’t catch me.

I have to be like a ninja.

One moment, I’m here, the other moment, I’m not.

(Was that a good ending?)