The literacy crisis is real

On June 13, 2026June 13, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Go ahead, watch this TikTok video, which is being weirdly inconsistent about whether it’s willing to embed:

@victorvacheroncomedy
Celsius was designed by scientists. Fahrenheit was designed by someone who had to go outside. ☀️ ❄️ #USA #Weather #Europe #Travel #Comedy
♬ original sound – victorvacheroncomedy

In response to this video, I posted the following comment:

You will note that that comment has 4601 Likes in 8 hours, which is a pretty good number! I don’t mind getting lots of likes on comments. However, right after taking all of the screenshots I needed for this post, I deleted the comment. Why? Because the dumbest fucking people on Earth found it, and I cannot believe the pure bullheaded illiteracy on display in the many responses to this comment. This is just a sampling, guys, and the number of people who seemed to think that I literally meant human beings boil is absolutely staggering. Have a gallery:

I can’t decide which is worse: the “we don’t really boil” people, the “ONLY AT SEA LEVEL” pedants (the variance in boiling temperature is about 7% from sea level to the top of Mount fucking Everest; shut up), or the people who don’t seem to understand what fevers are. My favorite is the person who claims to have had a 106 degree fever for two full days; 106 degrees is a five-alarm, get-your-ass-to-the-hospital-NOW fever. 106 degrees will kill you stone fucking dead. Then there are the people who thought that I meant that people would … literally freeze into a block … at 0 degrees? Are you kidding? Tell me you’re kidding.

I mean, beach_lily really thought “Literally not true” was something worth saying. You’re right! Of fucking course people don’t literally boil! What the fuck is wrong with you that you thought you needed to point that out?

I’ve said it before many times, and I’ll say it again: it should be painful to be this dumb. Your brain should shock you or something. You should pass out before you finish expressing thoughts this dumb. I am absolutely willing to live by this; I live in daily, constant fear of actually being as dumb as these people seem to be. This is “democracy is a terrible idea” level dumb. These people’s votes count!

Society is so fucking doomed.

#REVIEW: Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings, by Neil Price

On January 14, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews4 Comments

Book cover of 'Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings' by Neil Price featuring a stylized ship's bow against a textured green background.

Turns out the Vikings didn’t wear horn helmets.

This is the second year in a row where I’ve deliberately decided to increase the number of nonfiction books I read. Last year I read a decent number of broad survey types of histories; books called The Assyrians, or A History of Japan, or maybe just India. And, while I can’t really claim this was a new realization, it became clear pretty quickly that that type of history is hard to do well, especially in a way that is accessible to non-specialists. I read a lot of biography and a lot of histories about specific events or smaller chunks of history; World War II, for an obvious example, is a pretty broad topic, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to write a single-volume history of that than an entire country or ethnic group over hundreds of years, right? Those types of histories are a lot easier to write, or at the very least I’ve read a lot more good ones.

Children of Ash and Elm, as a broad survey history of an ethnic group over a few hundred years, definitely felt kinda risky, despite the fact that Vikings are automatically interesting. A few hundred years of history, minimum, of a group of people that, to put it mildly, moved around a lot. I was going to save my two favorite anecdotes from this book for the end, but they’re relevant now: there is evidence that the Vikings raided both Constantinople and Alexandria, and remember, that was by boat, meaning that they had to sail around the entirety of Europe and through the entire Mediterranean to get there. In addition, they’ve found a Viking burial site in Greenland, dating to roughly 1000 CE, which in and of itself isn’t especially surprising. What was surprising? The corpse was wearing a cloak made of buffalo hide.

That’s mind-blowing, even if the most reasonable explanation is that the hide was traded a time or two on its way from the American Great Plains all the way up to, what, Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, then presumably bought or looted by the Viking, who eventually made his way back to Greenland and died, to be buried in what surely had to be his favorite cloak. I doubt there were ever any Vikings out meeting with the Comanche a thousand years ago, but hell, who knows?

Point is, this could have been much drier than it was. Children of Ash and Elm dodges every pitfall of this type of broad history and remains engaging and lively throughout; this was a great, fast read, and I plowed through its 500 pages in just a couple of days. I know you’re used to me saying that about big books, but history usually takes a bit longer, and I was fully expecting this book to take me a week. History doesn’t often keep me up late. This book cost me some sleep– sleep I was happy to spend, but nonetheless. And as I can’t claim any particular depth of knowledge in pre-Christian Scandinavia, I’m comfortable saying that the author did a great job of making the book accessible to non-historians. If you have any interest in the subject matter at all– and it’s the bloody Vikings, who doesn’t think they’re interesting?– definitely grab this one.

Sure, that’ll be easy

On December 7, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Another postlet tonight, as I had a meeting this evening regarding a literally once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for my son and I. Only thing is I have to talk my wife into it and then find $12,000.

No problem.

I have to tell this story right now…

On February 29, 2016February 29, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting2 Comments

…before I forget it happened.

Two of the boy’s great-aunts (my aunts, in other words) were in town this weekend while he was spending the night at Grandma and Grandpa’s, and one of them brought a big bag full of games and toys that her grandson has outgrown to give him.

One of them is a neat little anatomy puzzle, four layers deep, where the top layer is a clothed boy, the layer underneath has no clothes, the layer under that has no skin (in other words, just the muscles), then the organs, and then the final layer is the skeleton. The skeleton isn’t a puzzle, it’s just printed on the frame that contains everything else.

The puzzle is obviously European. The instructions on the back of the box are printed in six different languages, and the naked boy on level 2 is anatomically accurate. Now, I don’t give a damn about the boy having a puzzle with a cartoon penis on it. He has a real penis he can look at whenever he wants; there will be no damage done to him by looking at a cartoon penis.

I am enough of a juvenile, however, that I was in tears laughing when, just now, after having put the puzzle together, he brought it to me and informed me that it was missing a piece:

We found the piece, by the way.

In which I fail at baking again

On July 17, 2013July 17, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, idiocy, Parenting5 Comments

So this post at Cutting Corners is apparently pretty famous; it’s a recipe for making chocolate chip cookies out of chickpeas, of all things. A friend found it and posted it to Facebook. She made the recipe and, due to a hilarious (to me, anyway) confusion between the terms “blender” and “food processor,” damn near blew out the motor on every kitchen appliance she owns trying to mash up the garbanzo beans.

(NOTE: Garbanzo beans and chickpeas are the same thing. I didn’t know this until two days ago, and I’ll probably be using the terms interchangeably, so I might as well make sure you know too.)

Anyway, as someone who had just mashed up garbanzo beans for his buffalo falafel the other day, I was immediately intrigued. I like chickpeas; I like chocolate chips, and I like weird food. Plus she’d already hilariously screwed up making the damn things, so surely I’d be able to get it right, right? You can’t have more than one I’m a Dumbass posting for one recipe, the universe doesn’t work like that.

Pfah. I forgot the Cardinal Rule of Baking: Don’t.

I’m getting smarter, though: go ahead and read the recipe and see if you can spot the part that’s obviously completely wrong. Seriously, go ahead; I have time.

…

175 degrees, right? That’s gotta be a typo. But the post is supposedly really popular and there’s no mention of the oven temperature being wrong in the comments, so what the heck? Well, we’re making pea-cookies, which is already weird… maybe they just need to set or something and not really cook?

No. No, they do not. After the recommended ten minutes in the oven they looked exactly the same as they’d looked before I put them in the oven. I might as well have spent my time breathing on them. I asked my friend about it and she said that she’d baked them at 350 for ten minutes. She’d also drizzled some honey over them before baking, which I’d also done– which wasn’t in the original recipe. I jacked the heat in the oven up to 375 and left them alone for ten minutes.

No change at all. None. I decided to blame the honey and ditched the first half of the batch– luckily (at least, I suppose it’s lucky) I’d decided to double the recipe so only half of them had gone in the oven. I decided to leave out the honey on the second batch.

It took twenty-five minutes at 350 degrees in the oven before they reached the rather vile-looking half-burnt half-cooked consistency you see above, at which point I decided I didn’t give a shit anymore and pulled them from the oven. Also at this point Lisa realized that the recipe she’d followed wasn’t the one she’d linked to, which apparently just doesn’t work at all, and told me she’d put in slightly more than twice as much peanut butter as I had.

I don’t understand why my oven bakes things that don’t involve batter in no more than a minute or two longer than I expect them to, but whenever I try to make anything involving batter all hell breaks loose. I apparently have terrible luck with recipes but this shit is still ridiculous.

Punchline: as horrible as they look, the stupid little things didn’t actually taste bad. But next time we’re doing 20 minutes at 375 before we even check the oven, or maybe I’ll just cook them with a blowtorch.

We had BLTs for dinner. I was gonna make stuffed zucchini tonight but after the failure of the cookie experiment I wasn’t up for anything I hadn’t done a million times. The wife suggested I make the same remoulade we’d had with our crab cakes a couple of months ago, and I whipped some up. Dead easy– some mayonnaise with about a spoonful each of dijon, horseradish, and sriracha, with a few shakes of Old Bay on top, then mix together. It’s a great topping for wedge fries (which she’d also made) and we used it for the BLTs too.

Randomly, we decided to offer the boy a fingerful or two of it. Now, remember the ingredients: dijon, horseradish, and sriracha are pungent, and I don’t know any kids who are terribly into mayo. I figured he’d run screaming. We were both expecting betrayface.

He spent the rest of the meal loudly demanding “sauce,” which he refused to sully by combining it with any of the bacon or bread or potatoes on his plate, instead choosing to eat it by the fistful.

I don’t understand my kid.

OH YOU STUPID, STUPID ASSHOLE EDIT: As Facebook immediately points out: Celsius. The bloody oven temperature is in Celsius. Jesus. I’d even gotten a hint since she says you need 400 grams of chickpeas; I’d already done the conversion to make sure the 15 oz cans I was buying were in the right neighborhood. ARRRRGH.