Life hacks learned at the movies

Every time I change a doona cover from now on, I will think of Barbarian.

(In fact, I did this about an hour ago, which is how I know it's true.)

You might call it a duvet. I used to call it a comforter. In Australia it's a doona, so that's the term we tend to use most.

If you saw Barbarian, you probably remember the scene where Bill Skarsgard's character shows Georgina Campbell's character the foolproof method for putting on one of these covers without having to spend all this time stuffing material into elusive corners and generally sacrificing about 13 minutes of your day.

If not, I'll explain:

1) Turn the cover inside out.

2) Put your body inside the hole where the doona goes.

3) Stand up with the cover almost entirely covering your body and hold the inside top two corners one with each hand, kind of like you're a ghost right after an old timey hold-up guy yelled "Stick 'em up!!"

4) Have another person place two of the doona corners into your stuck-up hands.

5) Still grabbing both the cover and the corners, flip the cover up over your head and wriggle it down until the cover is fully covering the doona.

Some life hacks you see in a movie and forget, but not this. I don't know how many doona covers I've changed since I saw Barbarian about seven months ago, but I've never not done this. It works great. 

The other thing is that my kids love it. My younger son is especially tickled by it. The older one, who will be 13 in about three months, doesn't like to show you he thinks anything is all that interesting, but I could tell even he was taken aback by the comic efficiency of it. Suddenly changing his bed linens, which we try to have them do every Sunday night, didn't seem like such a chore.

I've got a second one, but it sort of breaks the theme because it's actually from a TV show.

In the final season of Better Call Saul, there's a throwaway moment involving Patrick Fabian's Howard Hamlin. I don't even remember what the context of it was. But I remember the life hack.

In the scene, a can of soda has gotten shaken up, leading the prospective drinker to moan about how long he or she will have to wait before consuming it. Howard says that's nonsense. He demonstrates that if you just stand the can up on a countertop and rotate it a few times to the left (or right I suppose), it entirely defuses the agitated bubbles within. Only five seconds of can rotations later, you're opening a perfectly calm soda.

I try to live my life without regularly allowing cans of soda to become shaken, but I did try this once too, and lo and behold, it works.

Are there others? Most certainly, but I can't recall them right now. If you can, add them in the comments.