“Ultimately, I wanted to be here.”
September 2024
Mystery Option Buyer Nets Fast $12 Million Gain on Stock Slide
Your Summer Fruit Salad Could Use a Fish Sauce Dressing
Adding fish sauce to your fruit salad might seem dramatic, or incongruous. You might even think it sounds “gross”—but please, suspend judgment for a moment. Consider how some folks swear by adding a cup of mayonnaise to chocolate cake batter. Mayonnaise isn’t just for sandwiches, and fish sauce isn’t just for stir fry. It happens to be the perfect dressing for summer fruit.
Fish sauce adds complexity
Fish sauce isn’t typically paired with fruit in the U.S.; rather it is used to accent savory foods. Which is great! Honestly, I’m glad fish sauce is becoming more of a household ingredient these days. It’s widely acknowledged for bringing a healthy dose of umami and complexity to dishes like chili and sautéed veggies. While the tawny condiment has a powerful fermented fish smell straight out of the bottle, it can be quite subtle when used with other ingredients.
Even still, it might seem like a wild and new idea to add it to fruit, but rest assured, fish sauce and fruit belong together. Sliced fruits are often enjoyed with a sweet, tangy, savory, and sometimes spicy dipping sauce in Thailand, Laos, and other neighboring Asian countries. It’s a common way to snack on green mango or other young, sour fruits. Salty, umami-packed fish sauce is usually mixed with sugar and chilis to contrast the sour fruit and deliver a flavorful, well-balanced bite.
How to make a fish sauce dressing for fruit
Although peak summer fruits—like peaches, plums, strawberries, blueberries, and tomatoes—are associated mostly with sweetness, they also exhibit a decent hit of acidity. That’s perfect for this fish sauce use case, and you can make a fish sauce-based dressing pretty easily.
In a glass measuring cup, I stir together equal parts (by volume) fish sauce, fresh lime juice, and granulated sugar (either white or brown is fine). Stir the mixture until the granules of sugar have dissolved completely. In a mixing bowl, Drizzle over a couple cups of cubed or sliced fruit. Gently toss all until all of the fruit has been dressed in the “fishagrette.”
I think this sauce is especially good over cut melon and peaches, but I recommend trying it with any of your favorites. Feel free to add more fish sauce, or bump up the sugar or lime juice, depending on the ripeness of your fruit. If you are excited for a flavor adventure but worried you might not love it, serve the sauce on the side, dip a cube of fruit, and taste it before deciding if you want to pour it over the whole bowl.
Sweet and Savory Fish Sauce Fruit Salad
Ingredients:
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1 cup cubed watermelon
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1 peach, sliced
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1 campari tomato, chopped
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1 ½ teaspoon fish sauce
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1 ½ teaspoon fresh lime juice
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1 ½ teaspoon sugar
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A few leaves of torn fresh mint or basil
1. Add the fish sauce, lime juice, and sugar to a glass measuring cup. Stir until the sugar dissolves completely.
2. Add the cut fruit to a mixing bowl. Pour the fish sauce dressing over the fruit and add the herbs. Toss gently until all of the fruit is coated. Enjoy.
Investors Sue Charles Schwab Over Low-Paying Cash-Sweep Accounts
Nine Things Every Adult With Roommates Needs
More and more people are taking in roommates or moving in with other people, and more older folks who might have considered themselves past the roommate stage in another era are living with roommates. The reasons for this shift are pretty obvious: Housing costs and inflation are up, wages are flat, and everyone is making do with less—including less space.
Living with roommates isn’t always a descent into hell, of course, but it does present challenges. People have different ideas about everything from cleanliness to courtesy, so sharing private space with other people inevitably causes friction. Luckily, we live in a consumer paradise and you can buy solutions to many of life’s problems. If you’re going to have roommates, buy these nine essentials immediately and you’ll have a (slightly) better time sharing that space.
Power strip
An unofficial rule of modern life is that you’re not going to have fewer devices any time soon. Even if you get along with your roomies and have the run of a shared space, having a power strip with USB ports is essential. Many apartments just don’t have enough power outlets to begin with, for one thing, and you don’t want to be forced to charge up your devices out in a common area. Outlets often get hidden behind heavy furniture, too, making them inconvenient to use. And if you have your own bedroom or private area in the apartment or house, you’ll want to set it up for everything you need, whether that’s just a relaxing place to binge Netflix on your own or a home office where you can do your Zoom meetings without your roommate wandering into the frame.
Noise management
People have different sleep cycles—and different definitions of the phrase “inside voice.” That makes noise management absolutely crucial to your roommate experience. If your roommates are going to sit up talking right outside your door all night, or play video games at full volume into the wee hours, you’ll be very excited to have the following:
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White noise maker. For general zen and calming, being able to block out the maddening sound of your roommate on the phone with their significant other will be a godsend. You can install apps on your phone, of course, but nothing beats the ambient sound of an actual white noise machine.
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Noise-cancelling headphones. Sometimes you need more silencing power, so headphones are a must. And sometimes you want to crank up your music or your own games and media and you don’t want to be rude about it.
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Earplugs. Since sleeping with headphones on can be difficult (and music may keep you awake), having some good squishy earplugs to jam in your ears might enable you to sleep even when your roomies have guests over late into the evening.
Shower bag
Even if your roommates aren’t the sort to steal your soap, shampoo, and expensive skincare regimen, it’s a good idea to have all your shower supplies in a portable bag. This way, there’s never any confusion about what belongs to who.
Label maker
Yes, it’s passive-aggressive and kind of annoying, but better to have a label maker in case your roommate turns out to have a loose concept of private property. A label maker has a lot of uses beyond preventing food theft, of course. Over time, possessions get shared and mixed together, so marking stuff now will save you a lot of headaches a year or two from now when one of you moves out and you can’t remember who originally owned the spatula.
Mini fridge
Food is always a point of stress in roommate situations. People sometimes innocently “steal” food, especially if you buy many of the same items as your roommate. And groceries bought in a communal spirit aren’t always shared out in an equitable fashion. A small fridge you can keep in your bedroom will allow you to have supplies that your roommates can’t access with the bonus of giving you access to snacks and drinks without having to emerge from your room when you don’t want to interact with anyone.
If you find that your roommates are not as anti-food-theft as you’d like, an alternative is to buy a food locker. As bleak as it might seem, being able to keep your expensive produce in the communal fridge without worrying about it mysteriously vanishing (into the stomachs of your roommates) is well worth it.
Robot vacuum
People have wildly different concepts of what “clean” means. Some people aren’t bothered by layers of dust as long as the place is neat, while some people break out the industrial solvents three times a week and complain bitterly about a single crumb left on the kitchen counters. A solid robot vacuum can find that middle ground—a shared space that isn’t absolutely filthy but also doesn’t require the neat freak of the group to go on the warpath. (Here is our list of the best robot vacuums to buy in 2024.)
A bathrobe
A bathrobe is an essential item not because you should be ashamed of your body, but because it respects a baseline of privacy. If you’re not used to throwing one on any time you’re not fully dressed, it’s a good practice to get into, at least until you and your roommate come to an understanding that involves tolerance of various states of nudity.
Florida State’s fall continues & USC looks like a brand new team | College Football Enquirer
In the aftermath of another brutal loss, Dan Wetzel, Ross Dellenger and SI’s Pat Forde react to Florida State being stunned by Boston College on Monday. They discuss why FSU’s roster building philosophies have failed to produce long term results, and praise BC head coach Bill O’Brien for his early impact. Additionally, they react to USC’s new-look defense that fought off LSU on Sunday night.
Phillies top prospect earns another promotion
Aidan Miller got another promotion before the end of the 2024 season.
A rusty Justin Verlander faces an uphill battle on his quest for 300 wins
The Astros starter, who has said he wants to pitch until he’s 45, could be the last MLB pitcher ever to record 300 career victories.
This 65-inch Sony OLED Smart TV Is Over $600 Off
When it comes to TVs, OLEDs are the cream of the crop, providing a richer image than QLEDs or LCD/LEDs ever have. That quality comes at a price, however, and QLED sets can easily cost multiple thousands of dollars. But if you time your shopping right, you can find an OLED TV at a better price.
Right now the 65-inch Bravia 8 OLED TV (K-65XR80), which came out earlier this year, is seeing a major 24% discount. It’s currently sitting at $1,898 (originally $2,499.99), the lowest price since its release according to price checking tools.
The distinctive feature of OLEDs is their color and contrast. You’ll see color pop more, and blacks will appear more truly black without the washed out backlight that QLEDs and LEDs can lend an image. The tradeoff is that they don’t get as bright as LEDs: The Bravia 8 has 587 nits of brightness, which is not ideal if you’re watching in a bright room, but the deeper blacks can make the image appear brighter than it actually is, so it should still be viewable—and, of course, the image will be superior in a darker environment. If the brightness isn’t an issue for you, this 2024 OLED for under $2,000 is a great bargain.
The Bravia 8 comes with my favorite operating system, Google TV. It’s basically a built-in Chromecast, meaning you can stream to it locally from your Android and iOS devices, Chrome tabs, and Macs through Apple AirPlay and Google Cast. You can also control the TV with your voice using Google’s voice assistant.
Specs-wise, it offers the expected 4K resolution, a nice 120Hz refresh rate, making it great for video games, and support for high dynamic range (HDR) in Dolby Vision, HDR10, HDR10+, and hybrid log gamma (HLG) formats. For gaming, it has an input lag of 4.6 milliseconds in Game mode but no AMD FreeSync or Nvidia G-Sync certifications.
You can read more about the Bravia 8’s specs in PCMag’s “good” review, which dinged the unit for its price—which looks a lot better at $600 off.
How to Add Up the Weights When You’re Lifting With a Barbell
Pop quiz: You want to lift 185 pounds. How many plates do you put on each side of the barbell, and what sizes? If you didn’t immediately answer “a 45 and a 25, of course,” perhaps a little primer on plate math would help.
Yes, you count the bar
Let’s start with the basics. When you tell somebody how much weight you lifted, that weight includes the total poundage that you had in your hands. The bar is part of that.
At most gyms in the U.S., a typical (Olympic) barbell weighs either 45 pounds, or 20 kilograms (which works out to 44 pounds). If the rest of your weight plates are in pounds, go ahead and assume it’s 45. (Nobody ever says “I benched 224 pounds” even if, technically, it was a 20 kilogram bar.)
You’ll know that you’re looking at one of these common barbells if it’s seven feet long, and the sleeves at the end are two inches in diameter. In nearly all gyms, the bars on squat racks and bench press stations will be of this type.
If your gym has multiple sizes of bar, check the end for a label giving the weight, or ask somebody. If your gym has kilo plates, or if it’s a Crossfit box, you should know that Olympic style weightlifting is done with a 20 kilogram bar for men (close enough to 45 pounds), and a shorter, narrower 15 kilogram bar for women—which Crossfitters tend to estimate as 35 pounds, even though between you and me it’s closer to 33. (Why do women’s barbells exist in the first place? There’s a whole story to that, which I explain here.)
Your gym might also have lighter bars, which could be 25 pounds or even 10. Home exercise equipment sometimes uses a 1-inch-wide bar without the wider collars you’ll see on Olympic or powerlifting bars; those bars are lighter, and you should weigh yours or check the package to see what you’ve got.
If you’re lifting with a Smith machine, or any other kind of machine, don’t bother trying to figure out how much the machine or its bar weighs. Every machine is different, they’re almost never labeled, and the weights won’t necessarily feel the same as they would on a barbell. Just write down the total weight you loaded onto it—that’s enough for record keeping purposes.
What about the clips or collars that hold the weight on? Usually they’re not heavy enough to bother adding into your calculations, but if they’re large and you know the weight, feel free to include them.
Here’s the formula to know how much weight is on the bar
This may be obvious, but I want to make sure this information is easy to find: to find the total weight you’ve put on the bar, add up the plates on one end, double that number, and add the weight of the bar.
So if you have a 45 and a 25 on each end, add 25 + 45 to get 70, double that (140), and add the weight of the bar (140 + 45 = 185).
More often, though, you start with a number you’d like to lift, and then have to load the bar appropriately. Start practicing and soon you’ll be able to load a bar correctly without thinking about it too much. Here’s how:
Memorize common weights in pounds
Let’s assume we’re working with a 45 pound bar. You’ll end up using the same combinations over and over, and these numbers will start to look really familiar:
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55 pounds: a 5-pound plate on each side
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65 pounds: a 10-pound plate on each side
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95 pounds: a 25-pound plate on each side
Once you’re strong enough to load full 45-pound plates on either side of the bar, you’ll want to become familiar with multiples of 45. It’s common to describe these weights in terms of the number of plates per side. So if somebody says “I can bench two plates,” they mean two on each side, or 225 pounds. Here are the common numbers in that scheme:
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135 pounds: one 45-pound plate on each side
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225 pounds: two 45-pound plates on each side
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315 pounds: three 45-pound plates on each side
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405 pounds: four 45-pound plates on each side
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495 pounds: five 45-pound plates on each side
As you warm up for a lift, you can do the math as you put plates on. Say you do a set with just the empty bar, then with a 10 on each side (that’s 65), then a second pair of 10s (85), then swap both of those out for a 25 (now we’re up to 95) and you want to do your next set at 100. You know you need five more pounds, so look for a pair of 2.5 pound plates and there you go.
Memorize common weights in kilograms
Some gyms have their plates in kilos instead of pounds. (Some have both, so keep your wits about you!) The principles are the same: count the bar, and memorize common combinations. Bumper plates and competition-style steel plates are often color-coded, so I’ve included the colors below:
On a 15kg women’s bar:
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A pair of 10 kilo plates (green) = 35kg
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A pair of 15s (yellow) = 45kg
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A pair of 20s (blue) = 55kg
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A pair of 25s (red) = 65kg
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Two pairs of 25s = 115kg
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Three pairs of 25s = 165kg
Or, if you’re using a 20kg men’s bar:
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A pair of 10 kilo plates (green) = 40kg
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A pair of 15s (yellow) = 50kg
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A pair of 20s (blue) = 60kg
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A pair of 25s (red) = 70kg
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Two pairs of 25s = 120kg
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Three pairs of 25s = 170kg
If you go back and forth between pounds and kilos, it helps to be able to convert them in your head. Multiply kilos by 2.2 to get pounds, or divide pounds by 2.2 to get kilos. (Kilos are “bigger” than pounds, so the same object will weigh a smaller number of kilos and a larger number of pounds.) Some of the numbers are nicely symmetrical:
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5kg = 11 pounds
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10kg = 22 pounds
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20kg = 44 pounds
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30kg = 66 pounds
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40kg = 88 pounds
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50kg = 110 pounds
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100kg = 220 pounds
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150kg = 330 pounds
I lift at one gym where everything is in kilos, and another where everything is in pounds. Fortunately, I do different lifts in each place, so I just keep my Olympic lifting notes in kilos and my powerlifting notes in pounds. I recommend this approach rather than trying to convert units on every lift as you do it.
If you’re not used to working in kilos, start with memorizing just one number: your own bodyweight in kilos. That lets you make quick judgments like “This is heavier than me” or “This is about half my weight” without having to whip out a calculator.
Apps and calculators help
Yes, there are calculators that will do the job for you. I track my workouts in an app called Strong, and it has a little button that will tell you how to load the bar for your lift. RackMath (free on iOS and Android) looks like a good option for a standalone app.
An online equivalent is this calculator from ExRx. Note that you have to tell any calculator how heavy your bar is, what sizes of plate you have available, and how many of each there are. In a gym the plates may be unlimited, but in a home gym there may be certain numbers you just can’t achieve because you don’t have the right combination of plates.