No; I picked up that expression from here. Betsy, specifically, from whom I also picked up "wossname."

Tell me I'm not the only one who remembers the Sarnia hand gesture.

Oh no. You're not. I think of the gesture, and that conversation in general, from time to time. And, if the last visits I made back to Michigan are any indication, there's a few other people who remember the gesture too. I'm pretty sure Joe and I have talked about it from time to time as well.

Betsy, specifically, from whom I also picked up "wossname."

I picked that up from Terry Pratchett.

Hey, Sean? I drove through Sarnia on this trip. Tell me I'm not the only one who remembers the Sarnia hand gesture.

There's a gesture for Sarnia? (My mom's hometown.)

It's a whole thing, brenda. You had to be there.

Okay, you didn't. I could easily recreate the conversation, and probably make it almost as funny as we thought it was at the time, but I can't reproduce the gesture over the Internets.

I was going to say: dictionary. "Literal" is not a word that should be open to interpretation, unless you are literally illiterate.

Well. The Bible's a big darn book. And as Cindy says, some of the stories are pretty much explicitly stories -- but some people could read those as being literally true, while others could read them as being literally stories... I do think it's more complicated than that.

Sean was being goofy, and we mocked. It happened a lot. Almost as much as my goofiness being mocked, in fact. Though not quite.

Bizarrely, I remember not only the hand gesture, but the room where the conversation took place, the cause for the party, the present I brought to the party, the argument I got into at the party, and the pinata that made the party truly special. What was this, twelve years ago? More?

The science of Mentos and fizzy soda: [link]

The formula is simple: Plop a few Mentos candies into a 2-liter bottle of soda and behold! A fountain of fizz shoots high into the air--with a force and speed that surprises even grizzled chemists.

...

It turns out that Mentos dropped into a bottle of soda provoke an extreme version of the same process that produces bubbles in champagne, a frothy head on beer, and a painful case of "the bends" in unfortunate scuba divers.

It's effervescence -- a gas bubbling out of a fluid suspension--taken to the extreme.

What was this, twelve years ago? More?

Twelve years sounds about right, but so many of my memories of the group tend to run together in my head, so it can frequently be hard to put an exact date on something.

Wow. I've been a peripheral member of the group for ten years. Wow, I say.