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My husband and I are in charge of cooking the turkey this year for Christmas. We brine it before we bake it, so I emailed the recipe to my mom so that she could buy the brine ingredients ahead of time.

When we arrived at my parents’ house yesterday they took us out to lunch, and in the car on the way home the talk turned to turkey.

“I got a 10-pound bag of ice. Is that enough?” asked my mom.

“Well let’s see. It’s a math problem,” responded my husband.

“Aaarrrggghhh!!!” I yelled, grabbing my head in agony.

“A pint’s a pound the word around,” began my husband.

“Yep, there went my frontal lobe,” I announced.

Eventually-and a long and painful eventually it was-they reached the point in their conversions that they’d been aiming for all along: how many ounces are in a gallon?

“I thought there were 16 ounces in a gallon,” said the accountant.

“No, there are 64 ounces in a gallon,” said the math teacher.

“No-oo,” there are 128 ounces in a gallon,” said the engineer.

“And there goes the temporal lobe. Damn math!”