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[Shawnee123]

Originally Posted by glatt

I use one of those cork screws with the arms that are up in the air and then you pull down on them to lever the cork out. It might take 2 extra seconds, but no brute force needed. Very civilized.

Those are really easy to use, and I used them at the neighborhood bar, but we weren't allowed to use them at the Cuntry Club. Not dignified enough, I guess. They like grunting and pulling from their servants.

[glatt]

I stopped using the grunting kind of corkscrew after learning from a mistake in my teenage years.

I was soaking a bunch of wine bottles to get the labels off of them. I was saving all these labels as souvenirs of our time in Germany and all the wines we drank. Somebody had put the cork back into one of the bottles, and it wouldn't sink into the bathroom sink. It just floated at the top.

So I got a regular corkscrew and started pulling the cork out. When you are pulling a cork out, you have one arm pulling on the bottle and the other arm pulling on the cork. They cancel each other out until the cork breaks free. If you aren't bracing the bottle against something, it swings suddenly down and smashes apart the porcelain sink. And the cork is just fine, safely contained on the corkscrew in your hand. Your parent's aren't too happy with you, because they have a hard enough time in a foreign country ordering cold cuts at the supermarket, let alone finding a plumbing supply place and finding the exact model of sink needed to match the other sink in the two sink bathroom.