The latest from the lunatic fringe.

PETA Urges Ben & Jerry's To Use Human Milk

WATERBURY, Vt. -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., urging them to replace cow's milk they use in their ice cream products with human breast milk, according to a statement recently released by a PETA spokeswoman.

"PETA's request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow's milk in the food he serves," the statement says.

PETA officials say a move to human breast milk would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health.

"The fact that human adults consume huge quantities of dairy products made from milk that was meant for a baby cow just doesn't make sense," says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. "Everyone knows that 'the breast is best,' so Ben & Jerry's could do consumers and cows a big favor by making the switch to breast milk."

The ironic part is the Ben and Jerry are both hippie nutjobs in their own right. It's always amusing when you see those liberal wankers try to cannibalize one of their own. I guess that it's unlikely ol' B&J's will be changing their recipe anytime soon. Still, I must admit I do find the imagine of large breasted women hooked up to milking machines sort of interesting. It reminds me of a sci-fi short story I once read. Mmmmm Boobies.

Oh, and in today's HomoNews, it's a shocker. Clay Aiken _IS_ teh Ghey.

Here is info on that short story I was talking about. It's titled 'In the Barn' and is by Piers Anthony.

Writing these recaps is like working on the railroad. No matter how many planks and rivets you hammer into place, the horizon stretches on infinitely. I still have to figure out a way to somehow get my gencon pictures off of the damn camera and onto the laptop. Most of them are still stuck there because of the compatibility issues with Vista. It's going to be a pain in the ass no matter how I resolve it.

( Clip-Clop, Clip-Clop, Clip-Clop..... )

Before I get to the day's recap, I'd just like to say that it's been two weeks since I caught the gamer plague and I'm still coughing away. The other symptoms have more or less gone away but any exertion still brings on coughing that's hard to suppress. I fucking hate summer colds. They take forever to go away.

Anyway, on to the countdown.

( Read more... )

I really have to wonder if the current pain patch I'm wearing is somehow defective. I've had to pop a hell of a lot of codeine today, more than I've taken on any day since starting up the patches. It's usually only taken a pop here or there to keep me pain free but I've been having quite a few issues. I'm probably at or exceeding the amount I'd have taken in a single day before I started using the patches. That's a bit deceptive since I'm not feeling nearly as crummy as I would have back then, but it's like seeing an unwelcome sight just when you had hoped you might have gotten rid of it, if only temporarily. Suffice to say, I have no clue what the hell is going on.

I should mention that today was Bill S's 40th birthday and I spent a chunk of time at their place and also out to dinner with the gang. I had been planning to get there right around noon, but lack of sleep from the previous night combined with other distractions delayed me. Those crazy-ass hippies are persuing wild rumors that Sarah Palin didn't really give birth to her 5th child this past April. The nutjobs claim that it's really her 16 year old daughter's baby and that she faked a pregnancy to cover for her. To 'prove' that this is true, they have some really fucked up photographic 'evidence' where they basically claim the kid has a 'baby bump' in the picture. Of course, what hasn't yet started to filter through to those assholes yet is that at least one of the picture they're using to show this was republished this year, but was actually taken back in '06. Not that there really needs to be much to feed this sort of insanity. If you're curious you can take a look for yourself.

Frankly, I'm cheering these wankers on. A couple of mainstream people have already bit on the rumor including Andrew Sullivan who is now demanding medical records to prove that Palin really was pregnant. It's doesn't get much better than this. I only hope that the storm continues rolling until it hits a crescendo. At that point, I'd love to see Palin come out for a press conference where she says something along the lines of this is what change means under Barack Obama, that his campaign's supporters will attack a teenage girl and try to destroy her just in the hopes they can damage her mom. Man, that would be wonderful. I think the backlash will get across even without the explicit dig, but I figure the dig would score major points.

Anyway, following the tales of the crazy made me even later and I didn't get over there until around 4 pm. I mostly hung around chitchatting with various people while others finished up various board games they were playing. I got to see Matt and Joyce's kid for the first time. He was pretty well-behaved considering that he's only two months old. I remember Madeline doing a lot of screaming at that age. Maybe it is true what they say about boy infants being easier or maybe he's just better tempered in general.

For dinner we went to a Irish pub in downtown Rahway. It was nothing spectacular, but nice general English cuisine. Most people either had the bangers and mash, the fish and chips, or the shepard's pie. I went for the latter and liked it well enough. After dinner was a Carvel ice cream cake, which is always spiffy. Not a cookie puss, I'm sorry to say, but you can't have everything.

After dinner we headed back to the Bill's place and I played a game of Oasis with Randy, Bill S, and girl whose name I can't remember for some reason. Bill edged me out in the last round and I finished a semi-close second. Everyone more or less gathered up to go home after that.

My second day in Chicago started with a tradition that's been around for 3 years. At some point during these visits, John, Melissa, and I, always make a trip down to Hot Doug's. As you might recall from past recaps, it's not your average hot dog joint. It makes a point of serving some of the more unusual meats, things that often don't make it to your dinner table. If you take a look at their menu for this week, for example, you'll see that kangaroo made the list. That wasn't one of the choices I had to pick from when we went, and I have to admit I'm a little disappointed. I am a little curious what Kanga tastes like. In addition to the slightly exotic in terms of meat offerings, Hot Doug's also has Duck Fries on Friday's and Saturday's. These are normal french fries but cooked in duck fat instead of vegetable oil.

So, anyway, that morning John and I swung around in the rental and picked up Melissa from her place and headed on over. The line at Hot Doug's was out the door. This is not an uncommon sight. In fact, it'd be far more startling to not see a line pouring out the front. On this particular day, the line was a good 30 feet long and seemed to be growing at a good clip. We spent most of the time on the line discussing musicals as I recall. I also somehow managed to offend some feminazi standing in front of us at one point. I don't remember exactly the circumstances so maybe john will chime in and add his two cents but the basic lowdown is I made some offhanded remark about how chick flicks were stupid or something and the cow was offended. She glared for a while and then made some angry mooing noises. Frankly, the statement was so mild considering what could have popped out of my mouth in the course of normal conversation that I couldn't figure out what she had even gotten upset about at first.

The line dragged on and on and on. I wasn't having the best of days. It was swap day for the fentanyl patch and I was having some pain management problems, so the standing around was less fun than it would normally be. We finally made it into the door though and made our orders. I decided to go with one exotic item and a couple of traditional favorites. I got the duck sausage with foie gras, a couple of corndogs, and an order of tatter tots. John and Melissa picked up some of the other exotic entries and then we went to snag a table.



Here's John showing off the Dick's Deli sign that he contributed to the decor of the place. You can see it fits right in along with all the rest of the hotdog and sausage memorabilia.

While at the table, I took the opportunity to shoot some video with the flip.





Here's a closeup shot of the hotdog. It looks a bit extra scary thanks to the whiteout from the flash. I guess my main problem is that I never thought of foie gras as something that should be served in disks like it came out of a giant tube of toothpaste. That sort of gave me the willies.

In the end, it didn't taste all that bad. It wasn't exactly great either, which is sort of disappointing. The duck sausage was fine, but I was just expecting more from the foie gras itself. I mean, this is something that people get into fights over and is supposed to be all fru-fru. I just thought it should taste...well...better. Then again, it cost $7 and was on a fucking glorified hotdog. God knows what the hell I'm bitching about anyway.

Oh, and in case you didn't get the fine comment from the video, Chicago's city counsel banned the serving for foie gras a while back. It was deemed to be cruel and inhuman treatment to the ducks which are force fed in order to produce it. Hell, that doesn't sound all that bad to me. Anyway, the hippies won that round and restaurant owners threw a fit. A lot of them ignored the ban at first and then tried sneaky means to get around it when the city made grumbly noises. Some restaurants would 'give away' the foie gras, so that they weren't technically selling it with a meal. Others served it as a free amuse bush. Doug was the only person who ended up ever getting fined for breaking the ordinance, presumably for the duck sausage combo I tried. His customers took up a collection to pay the fine for him and eventually the entire ban was reversed anyway.

After lunch, we dropped Melissa off and John wanted to run a few errands. One of the stops took us to Paulina Meat Market.



Here you can see their innovative numbered ticket dispensing system. I've never actually been to any place with a real butcher before. I'm sure the supermarkets I visit have people who chop up meat and the like, but it's not exactly the same as having a real butcher who can hack you off a chunk of whatever you happen to want. At first, I was sorted tempted to just buy a quart of pig's blood. I had no real use for it in mind, but I figured that with a vat of pig's blood, the possibilities would be endless. Here was my first run through the place.



I ended up buying a couple different types of smoked cheeses. They didn't have gouda which is good-a, but there were a few others. John also picked up some meat sliced thinly that looked a lot like prosciutto. I also snagged a little plastic container full of multi-colored gummy butterflies.

After the errands, we went back to John's place for a while before it was time to head off to see Melissa again. She was going to cook dinner and we were just going to loaf at her place for the night. When we got there we broke out the earlier purchases.



Here is a plate of those smoked cheeses and meat and crackers.




I have no clue what point I'm trying to make here but it might be something like, stay away from my food. At least that seems like it could be what I was trying to express. Who knows.




Here's John playing with his food.




And of course once he started, I more or less had to follow suit.


All this time, of course, Melissa is busy churning away in the kitchen as we goof off out in the living room. At one point I noticed through her open bedroom door that she had a bra hanging on her bedpost. This, of course, immediately became a photo moment.



Here's John giving the ol' thumbs up at the discovery.


Eventually, Melissa's new boyfriend also popped over. I won't say that he's a kill joy exactly, but some of the general merriment seemed to go out of the room. After all, I don't know the guy, and he certainly doesn't know me. Add the fact that he doesn't seem to be the most outgoing of individuals and things certainly slowed down a bit. Also, after days of little sleep, I was also quite tired. At one point, I just sprawled out on the floor in front of the chair I had been sitting in and made like it was hibernation time. I ended up sleeping through the meal and the post-dinner tv watching as well. It wasn't until it was time to go that I got poked awake and John and I made our way back to his place.

I woke up today feeling pretty horrible. I thought the plague had loosened its grip some, but it seems I was wrong. I'm just exhausted and walking about for more than a few feet at a time has me out of breath. I end up wheezing quite a bit anyway since anything approaching deep breathing has me breaking out in fits of coughing. About the only good thing that has happened is that the sore throat has passed. Coughing no longer feels like I'm trying to expel razor blades.

I just downed a few swallows of orange juice after staggering my way to the kitchen. It's probably well past the time for vitamin C to play a positive role, but at this point I'm just clutching at straws.

That said, I want to go on the Michael Phelps diet. Not now, where I don't even want to think about food, but after the plague moves on. I'm sure most of you have seen this, but his diet is absolutely staggering. I was trying to figure out if I could actually eat all of what he does in a day and coming to the sad conclusion that I probably wouldn't make it. Someone reduced it to nothing but Triple Whoppers with cheese and mayo and even then you'd have to eat 8 of them in the course of a day. Though I would save 40 calories since I would have mine without onions. That's pretty insane if you think about it.

Here's his normal daily menu:

Breakfast:
3 fried egg sandwiches with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions, and mayonnaise
2 cups of coffee
a 5 egg omelet
a bowl of grits
3 slices of French toast with powdered sugar
3 chocolate chip pancakes

Lunch:
1 pound enriched pasta with tomato sauce
2 large ham and cheese sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise
1,000 calories of energy drinks

Dinner:
1 pound of pasta with tomato sauce
6 to 8 slices of pizza
1,000 calories of energy drinks

I'm regularly eaten a pound of pasta in a sitting before and I could probably finish one of these meals in one sitting but there's just no way I could imagine doing it for every meal.

Right now, I'm eating a Skippy creamy peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich on white Wonder bread. There's something almost magical about it. It's like I'm returning to a childhood I never even lived in the first place.



(It needs more peanut butter)

I just remembered that I have some of the pictures I took in Chicago already uploaded to the computer. At one point, John had to get a set of pictures off of my camera so he could use them for our Killer Breakfast shtick. While at the local Kinko's, he had them burn a copy of my camera's flash drive to cd and I was able to copy the pictures to my laptop. This bypassed that obnoxious no-vista problem I've been having and means that I can start sorting photos while still down with the plague.

I'm not sure if any of you remember from a while back when I was talking about a piece of beef tendon that looked like a pair of pants? Well, now that I have my pictures, I can finally show you said tendon.



I mean, that looks a lot like a pair of meat pants, right?

I still don't have access to the pictures from gencon itself, but I figure it'll take me a long while just to work through the ones I do have from chicago.

Fogo de Chao was spiffy as expected. The errand running afterwards was less successful though. I had jotted down the addresses of a few restaurant supply stores in the area and they all happened to be out of business. The only one that wasn't was closed for the day, having the daily operating hours of 5am to 2pm. So we just decided to give it up and give it another whirl tomorrow morning before I have to catch the flight to Indy. It's not a huge big deal and, if necessary, john and Melissa could deal with it on their own without me anyway. Upon coming back to John's place, we've been sitting around playing around online. I managed to rediscover the site for Making Fiends and we've been watching episodes. Twisted but funny. A great combination if you ask me. Turns out that it's actually going to be made into a cartoon for Nickolodean starting this fall. Spiffy.

Oh, and I guess I should also mention that the streak continues of people feeling the obligation to share their crazy with me. Some people are just wound way too tight it seems. You can't help but wonder if perhaps therapy shouldn't be mandatory.

I finally managed to get more than three hours of sleep last night and I really could use it too. I ended up dozing off around midnight and slept to near dawn. After taking a shower and being up for a bit, I tacked on another few hours on top of that. I woke up feeling like someone had been beating me with sticks, but the soreness has started to go away with the application of more drugs. Today was also patch replacement day so right now I have two of the suckers on as I'm hoping to smooth out the transition period. I'm still sort of iffy about how how much of the fentanyl in the patch is making its way out and how plasma levels of it fluxate near the end of the three day cycle.

So, yesterday I didn't go out but it was also one of the most pleasant and productive parts of the trip so far. Melissa came over and after John fixed an absolutely fabulous breakfast (smoked thickcut bacon is fantastic. It made me think seriously about just going all no-carb again as long as I could get a pound or two of that stuff a day) and after that we worked out the senario for Killer Breakfast. An idea sparked by one that John had tossed off around 3-4 years ago was what I wanted to do and after discussing it, we managed to work it into a really big and interesting plan. It'll mostly feature me and John, while Melissa helps out on the sidelines. We didn't script Richard in, knowing how flaky he can be, but if he does show up, it's hoped that he could end up being the camera man if nothing else. I'll definitely want video and stills of the event if it works out like we hope. One of the things we have to do today is to go out and buy the last few items we need for props and setup.

Oh, and speaking of today, we're heading out to Fogo de Chao. I'm sure I mentioned the place before at some point since it was practically the last meal I had in chicago before I moved back east. I had taken my mom, grandmother, and sister there and it was a wonderful experience. It's one of those brazillian meat places with all the finest cuts of meat on skewers and an absolutely gorgeous salad bar. I don't usually gush about salad bars, even less often than I eat at them, but the one they've got there was one of the prettiest I had ever seen. I've never seen tomato slices or other seasonal vegetables so big and looking so good displayed out. John has never had a chance to go before and I think it would be his kind of place as a foodie sort of carnivore.

Fuck! There were so many people bitching and moaning when Vista came out. It was amazing how many came out of the woodwork to pan Microsoft, casting dreadful portents of disaster. Nothing would be compatable, it would crash at least once every day, Bill Gates would secretly read your email and sign you up for Viagra spam, etc. I've had this laptop for a few months now and it's been nothing but a joy. I haven't had any problems and the darn thing hasn't crashed once despite the fact I keep it on 24-7 and probably only reboot it once every 2-3 weeks at the most. Well, that rosy picture has now gone to shit.

Earlier today, I was eating some chinese takeout. It was one of those classic 3 dishes + rice for some fixed price. One of the items I had in mine was stewed beef tendon. As I was eating, I found a piece that looked exactly like a pair of pants. I found the idea of eating meat pants sort of humorous so I went and snapped a picture of it before I ate it. Around a half hour ago, I tried to plug in my Cannon G3 camera and tried to upload the picture so I could post it. There were also some images from my grandmother's 85th birthday that I needed to get copies of and a few from Origins to boot. To my surprise, it didn't immediately connect and load up. I've gotten very used to the whole plug and play concept. Still, it wasn't like I could find drivers and install programs manually. I spent some time hunting down the original instillation disk and also went to Canon's site for all the updates. The damn process took forever but finally I had installed just about everything I could think of so I plugged the camera back in. Nothing.

I tried a few more things to try to get it to work, including installing old drivers and hoping that maybe it would recognize something from XP. In the end, I decided to do a google search and see if anyone else had run into the same problem and if there were any solutions. I immediately found a thread where it said that there are no Vista drivers for any of the older powershot cameras and that Canon had no intention of making their products backwards compatible. WTF? I'm pretty pissed about the whole thing since my camera still works just fine and I can't believe that Vista doesn't recognize the thing and Canon is leaving all of us in the lurch by now providing support.

I'm not sure exactly what to do now. Finding another computer with XP and then upping the pictures there only to then send them to my laptop sounds incredibly tedious. Some other people have suggested getting a USB linked card-reader but it seems sort of obnoxious to pick up new technology just to bypass this roadblock. Not to mention that others have mentioned that many cardreaders are currently incompatible with Vista as well. This is just bullshit.

I was digging around in the back of the pantry and found a whole hoard of jello. Since I can't believe that anyone else bought it, I must've stocked up at some point in time and then forgot about it. I took out three boxes of the sugarless mixed fruit flavor and proceeded to make myself a vat. In a bout of daring experimentation, I added bananas and blueberries to it. Woooo. Sure, that's pretty pedestrian but for some reason I've never added fruit to jello before in all the times I've made it. I always figured it'd somehow ruin the set and I'd end up with a sort of jello soup with soggy pieces of fruit floating in it. I'll be sure to report back tomorrow on how it turns out since I know there are those of you out there who would just die with the suspense of it all.

So, what does this puffy, fat fuck have to do with the quality of food in fine dining? To my surprise, apparently everything. I had heard of Michelin stars before, though only vaguely, as a means of measuring the quality of restaurants. What I didn't know before now is how incredibly hard and rare it is to pick up even a single star and that it all comes from the froggy company that makes freaking tires. I had always assumed that they shared a name from simply coincidence. It's like finding out that top quality chefs will kill themselves to get into the AAA travel guide for west virginia. I'm not exactly exagerating either. There's at least one news story about a renowned chef killing himself because of rumors his restaurant was going to lose one of its stars. It turns out that in the whole of the United States, there are only 5 restaurants who rate the full 3 stars. That's pretty remarkable when you think about how many supposedly top restaurants there are.

So why am I looking up obscure facts about tire companies and fine dining? I've been watching Top Chef all day and I'm on the last episode. I've been wiki'ing all day whenever I ran across a funny term I didn't quite get on the show. This means that I've been wiki'ing a hell of a lot of crap since those motherfuckers might as well be speaking a completely different language. Damn pretentious bastards just keep spewing masturbatory culinary lingo and I got sort of curious what they were yakking about.

Anyway, while I was educating myself about Michelin stars, I also stumbled across a fun news article from a little over half a year ago that ties together both my Top Chef and Hell's Kitchen watching. It turns out that in the most recent release of the guide, Tom Coliccio's flagship restaurant in New York city lost its star while Gordon Ramsay's new restaurant in the same city gained two. Welp, so much for Top Chef being way more fru-fru than Hell's Kitchen, right? At least according to the Michelin guide, if these two went head to head, Chef Tom would get his ass handed to him despite the fact that he's the far more 'refined' person on tv. He always seems like a culinary God when he's judging the Top Chef contestants while Ramsay is doing a Scottish impression of the Soup Nazi. It's really sort of interesting when you think about it. Especially when Coliccio is so nit picky about the dishes he tastes and Ramsay is either, I like it, or, I hate it.

Well, I decided to forgo sleep and moved right on to the fourth season of Top Chef after I finished Hell's Kitchen. I was watching and trucking along just fine until the character development kicked up a pace and I identified a few people I loathed and were hoping would get booted. At that point, I couldn't resist peeking at the wikipedia recaps to see just when those obnoxious assholes would get their comeuppance.

Before that happened (at the end of episode 5) I had made a couple of predictions about who would go all the way. My two choices were Dale (who was pretty much a Hung clone) and Stephanie (who just seemed incredibly competent in all the dishes she put out). Turns out, I was right with Stephanie and according to a quick recap I read, Tom Colicio didn't feel that Dale should have been eliminated when he was. I was, however, disappointed that Lisa made it to the final three, that stupid cow. While watching episode 5 it was like she was jumping up and down on my last nerve. It's probably a sad thing when you actually loathe people from tv, right? Anyway, I needed her and Jen to both go. Lisa because she's more of an odious bitch than Tiffany from season 1 and Jen because if I have to listen to her one more time saying how she's going to win it for Zoi and how unfair it was Zoi was eliminated, it was going to make me vomit. Oh, and it turns out they broke up anyway. Hey, I'll bet you just love all that airtime where you waxed on about how wonderful she was, eh? Maybe you should have opened your eyes a little sooner and realized she was talentless deadweight.

So, even knowing how it all turned out, I've still got quite a few episodes to go. I just paused things in the middle of episode 6, which means there's just over half to go. I wonder if I should go out and grab a spot of breakfast first or just continue going. It's probably not worth treking out anyway. It'd just mean more meds and dealing with with crap. On the otherhand, there's not really anything I want to eat in the house right now. Hmmmmm. Decisions decisions.....

---

Just because I know you were all waiting with baited breath, I ended up eating a whole mess of hotdogs.

I'm really beginning to think that I've been given a handful of placebos as far as pain medications and really, what it comes down to, is there are just good periods and bad periods. For the past couple of hours, I've been dealing with some pain issues that meds just don't seem to be able to lock down, and it's been a common occurrence since getting back from Origins. The amount of medication I take doesn't seem to affect things and it seems like there's nothing to be done but to suffer and wait it out. I even tried the whole dissolve a pill under the tongue thing yesterday but there didn't seem to be any real effect. At least the pain isn't completely unbearable, but it's at the level where it's consistently grinding and it doesn't take long before it just starts to wear me down.

I should also mention that we celebrated my grandmother's 85th birthday today. Nothing all that special, just a gathering at my aunt and uncle's place in Middletown. Almost everyone made it there at least for a little while. Connie and Jeff brought Madelaine along and I got to see plenty of examples of her new trick. In the past week or so she's discovered that she has a tongue and ever since has been sticking it out or poking it with her fingers. This new entertainment has quite impressively increased the amount of slobber and drool she generates. I made an offhanded comment that the reason they had gotten Max the drooling Bassett hound was because they knew it would make for good preparation when this day came. She also managed to spit up a buncha spit onto/into my uncle's mouth when he went to give her a kiss. I'll bet he won't be making that mistake again anytime soon.

My uncle has been a vegetarian for at least a decade now and his wife only eats seafood, so it was a pretty lackluster affair as far as food goes. You can grill all the various vegetables you want and then slap it between a hamburger bun but that doesn't make it a hamburger. Just as well I wasn't all that hungry and so I spent my gastronomical efforts on eating a couple Klondike bars. Once more, ice cream saves the day.

It may sound sorta odd, but I'd really like some beef wellington right now. Last Tuesday when I got into Columbus, I spent a good part of the night watching tv. It had actually been the first time I'd turned one on in around 3 months. Anyway, one of the shows I watched was Hell's Kitchen, a Top Chef ripoff which also pits wannabe chefs against one another with a grand prize of a restaurant. Hell's Kitchen is a bit more lowbrow than Top Chef in that the participants aren't actually asked to create their own dishes as much as just be competent cooks and able to follow directions.

Anyway, one of the dishes that they were preparing that night was Beef Wellington. I had heard of it before but never actually knew what went into it. It looked pretty on tv and I made a mental note of it as being something to look up one day. Well, it slipped my mind until just tonight when I finished snagging all of season 1 of Hell's Kitchen and they were once again serving Beef Wellington. It seems that it must be a staple of the show and I took a time out to check out its wiki entry. Turns out that Beef Wellington is a preparation of beef tenderloin coated with pâté (often pâté de foie gras) and duxelles, which is then wrapped in puff pastry and baked. Sounds pretty good to me and I wouldn't mind snagging myself a slice. In a way, it's sort of like a suped up corndog of sorts.



Of course, my chances of actually getting a chance to try this are pretty slim. I almost never get out to restaurants anymore and the kind I would visit is unlikely to serve something like this. Well, not unless Applebees has dramatically altered their menu anyway. I've never been a foodie, but sometimes I think it might be interesting to try some new things. For instance, I've always wanted to give caviar a whirl. Not just any caviar but a little of the good stuff that you always see the neuvo riche raving about. I'm just curious if it could really be so good as to be worth a thousand dollars an ounce. Welp, maybe if I win the lottery one day I can find out.

Sometimes, you've just got to love unintentional design issues.



I tried searching around online, hoping to find a place that sold these gummi lighthouses but no such luck. Pity. They look like they'd have interesting gift giving possibilities.

I want a cupcake.

Microscopic ramen bowl believed to be world's smallest

TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Japanese scientists say they have used cutting-edge technology to create a noodle bowl so small, it can be seen only through a microscope.

Mechanical engineering professor Masayuki Nakao said Thursday that he and his students at the University of Tokyo used a carbon-based material to produce a noodle bowl with a diameter of 1/25,000 of an inch.

The project was aimed at developing nanotube-processing technology.

Nakao said the Japanese-style ramen bowl was carved out of microscopic nanotubes.

Nanotubes are tube-shaped pieces of carbon, measuring about 1/10,000 of the thickness of a human hair.

The ramen bowl experiment included a string of "noodles" that measured 1/12,500 of an inch in length.

Doesn't exactly look appetizing, does it? Besides, to be a real bowl of ramen, shouldn't it have a fishball or something in it?

I just hope all of this has some practical purpose down the line. I'm sure the guiness people are happy to see this sort of thing but it seems a bit ridiculous to me. Besides, the darn thing looks ambiguous enough that I can't help but wonder if they made it first and then tried to figure out what it looked the most like so they could market it to the world. I'm pretty sure CNN wouldn't be carrying the story if the headline was 'Japanese scientists make world's smallest block and squiggly thing'.

Do not buy 'Firey Habanero' Doritos unless you really know what you're getting into. I don't think I've ever run into a chip this spicy. It's almost impossible to eat it's so noxious. I'm pretty sure I can eat just one.