Captain Aggravated

Another woodworker:

Huge +1 for a bench plane and a shooting board. Even in a mainly power tool shop, you can make things much more precisely square or mitered if you shoot them.

For marking cuts, use a knife not a pencil. When you use a pencil to mark your cuts, you limit yourself to guiding your tools with only your vision, not unlike a Tesla. When you score the line with a knife, you create a reference surface (one of the two sides of the cut, hopefully the one against your square) that has no thickness, and you can feel when a knife or chisel clicks against that surface. For saw cuts, you can use a chisel to pare away a little bit from the waste side to form a knife wall, which forms a little ramp that will guide a saw against your reference surface.

Wax literally everything. Wax your work surfaces, tablesaw top, jointer beds, planer bed, fences, plane soles, bikini lines, saw plates, screw threads…wax literally everything.

Learn how to do most common operations by hand. Square some rough lumber by hand with a bench plane. Chop a mortise with a chisel. Cut a tenon with a backsaw. Make dovetails by hand. Even if you’re a power tool woodworker and you’ve got a jointer and a thickness planer and a table saw and a rapidly growing number of routers, knowing how to do things by hand will help you understand just what it is you’re doing.

Do not suffer a dull tool to live. If your tool is getting dull, sharpen it. Sharpening is kinda personal, I think if cilantro tastes like soap to you you’ll prefer oilstones, if you have that tendon in your wrist you’ll like waterstones, if you can roll your tongue you’ll prefer diamond plates and if you have more money than god you’ll buy a Tormach. They’ll all sharpen a blade. Find the system you like and use it. If your tool is dull, sharpen it. Put it away sharp, don’t put it away dull.

Use your ears. You can tell a lot about what’s going on with a tool by listening to it.

Yeah, that difference is about 8 years.

That’s what the rich used to do.

Look at stuff like Chippendale furniture, or those pineapple newel posts. Once upon a time those were hand carved. Not only would they be made from exotic wood, but you had to pay a craftsman to waste his entire life doing that shit.

The phrase “Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” was coined in a 1957 article by biologist Philip Siekevitz. It apparently rattled around in the English lexicon until 2013, when a tumblr user by the handle apatheticghost posted the following:

what I learned in school

1. I am a fucking piece of shit

2. everybody else is also a piece of shit

3. mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell

This blew up in popularity and variations emerged that replaced the first two items with various social commentary, but always kept the mitochondria line. It stood for a kind of universal frustration students have with school, that a lot of the curriculum feels like memorizing game show trivia answers rather than useful or practical skills applicable to adult life. Loads of us have no idea how the tax system works but we can all parrot biology factoids.

The phrase became one of those catchphrase in-jokes. A bit like how you can’t say 69 without saying “nice” anymore.

My on personal Mandela Effect: I’d swear I’m from the parallel universe where the phrase comes from the Bill Nye The Science Guy theme song, but apparently I’m thinking of “Inertia is a property of matter.”

I want to go on Jeopardy and never use the phrase “who is” or “what is.” “Mitochondria is…what again?”