Refried beans make me, well, gassy. Gas, I seem to recall, is lighter than air.
So doesn’t it make sense that if, say, I have tortilla chips with bean dip to the point I get, well, gassy, I ought to be able to stand on my bathroom scale and weigh less?
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For the first time in recorded history, the ocean has wholly consumed an inhabited island.
The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.
As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.
I remember living in our beach house in Hawaii, watching as our shoreline disappeared a little more with each storm. (Some of you will remember that it even made the news there.) By the time we’d left, we’d lost the majority of palm trees that had onced lined our shoreline.
Now, I’m in frequent touch with the couple who bought our old house. Turns out, the erosion only got worse and they had to install sandbags — at great expense — to protect the shore. Of course, the island’s bureaucracy first required them to jump through numerous hoops to get permission, and even now that the sandbags are there, the red tape is nowhere near its end.
Is all this due to global warming, or is it just the eventual alteration of land by the incessant demands of the sea? I, for one, haven’t the slightest idea. But I’m going to do my patriotic part to combat it: I’m going to eat beef.
Found just in time to lie my way out of pass on my regrets that I won’t be able to attend three very drunken interesting holiday parties likely to be broken up by the police much to my sorrow: the Holiday Party Excuse Generator.
Via Lifehacker.
As a parent, I’m aware that I am occasionally over-protective. I just about flipped when my husband allowed my teenage daughter’s boyfriend (who has only had his license for 3 months) to drive her to Homecoming. (Not surprisingly, she never bothered to ask my permission but went straight to him.) I set our v-Chip to block out anything more risque than a G-rating before 10 p.m. just in case my 6-year-old son wanders into the room. I’m even incapable of walking into the house without immediately locking the door behind me thanks to all those awful news stories about kids being kidnapped right out of the own homes. All too often, I find myself thinking “How much easier it was to keep them safe when my kids were just babies!”
Apparently, I’m out of the loop, because all of the truly hyper-vigilant parents are signing their infants up for therapy.
Jean M. Thomas, a Washington, D.C., psychiatrist, recently saw a patient who was struggling with her emotions. She was agitated and couldn’t stop crying. She was recovering from an eating problem and had trouble forming relationships.
She was 11 months old.
Therapists are increasingly moving their treatments from the couch to the crib. While the field of infant mental health — which encompasses the study of children from birth through age three — has been around for decades, new research on everything from brain development to maternal depression is giving it a boost. A widely used mental health and development diagnostic manual for infants was revised last year for the first time since 1994 to include two new subsets of depression, five new subsets of anxiety disorders (including separation anxiety and social anxiety disorders) and six new subsets of feeding behavior disorders (including sensory food aversions and infantile anorexia).
By starting treatment as soon as possible — even before their patients are out of diapers — doctors feel they are helping kids become better adjusted.
Not a bad racket: bill $150 per hour to treat a patient who’s quite likely to sleep through the appointment and can neither tell you what the problem is nor whether the “treatment” is helping.
Throughout the world, depressed masochists (and no doubt some bored sadits) have got to be welcoming this news.
Looking for a good incentive to go on a diet? Well, it turns out, it’s all about the ooooiiiiillll!
Want to spend less at the pump? Lose some weight. That’s the implication of a new study that says Americans are burning nearly 1 billion more gallons of gasoline each year than they did in 1960 because of their expanding waistlines. Simply put, more weight in the car means lower gas mileage.
Using recent gas prices of $2.20 a gallon, that translates to about $2.2 billion more spent on gas each year.
Yeah, that will make it easier to resist those Krispy-Kremes.
The city of Kiev no longer exists. No, this is not a Ronald Reagan mic check: it’s a spelling change, and really, it has nothing to do (Nussing!) with the desire to win over the former Soviet republic by ditching the Russian-preferred spelling.
Now, can someone tell me how Col. Klink spelled “Nothing”?
Finally, there’s something in the fields of Western Kansas besides miles and miles of nothing but miles.
Scientists located a rare meteorite in a wheat field thanks to new ground penetrating radar technology that someday might be used on Mars.
The dig in Kansas Monday was likely the most documented excavation yet of a meteorite find, with researchers painstakingly using brushes and hand tools in order to preserve evidence of the impact trail and to date the event of the meteorite strike. Soil samples were also bagged and tagged, and organic material preserved for dating purposes.
Even before they had the meteorite out of the ground, the scientific experts at the site were able to debunk prevailing wisdom that the spectacular meteorite fall of Brenham, Kansas, occurred 20,000 years ago. Its location in the Pleistocene epoch soil layer puts that date closer to 10,000 years ago.
“We know it is recent,” said Carolyn Sumners, director of Astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, as she surveyed progress on the dig. “Native Americans could have seen it.”
The meteorite was found in the Brenham field and weighs 154 pounds.
No, that’s not a Photoshopped picture. It’s truth in advertising… or at least it was earlier this week in Manhattan Beach, California.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Gas really does cost an arm and a leg in places these days.
This weekend, a Manhattan Beach, California, gas station said the price of regular gasoline was — an arm.
The price of mid-grade — a leg.
The price of premium — your first born.
Steve Grossi’s lease on his Shell station was expiring on Monday so when he ran out of gasoline to sell on Sunday, he put up the tongue-in-cheek sign.(Link)
No word on the lady last seen trying to shove her boyfriend’s thigh into the credit card slot on the premium pump….
SurvivaBalls: what all the Halliburton CEO’s — and Oompa Loompas — will be wearing during the next global disaster.
[Note: Damn. Wish I'd found this before posting this week's Caption Contest!]
Ah, the lure of capitalism — not even the heavenly-minded are immune:
British homeowners wanting to ward off bathroom germs or calm kitchen rows can now call on God - or at least his ministers - for help.
A new service is being offered by vicars in the north of England who give blessings to people moving to a new home.
They will say prayers for each room, calling on divine assistance to protect the home and the health of those in it. (Link).
I wonder how they feel about those last-minute Saturday night calls to bless bedrooms?
Hopeless romantics and alcoholic couples take note: researchers have developed wine glasses that send glowing signals to each other, however far apart from each other they may be.
When either person picks up a glass, red light-emitting diodes glow on their partner’s glass. When one puts a glass to their lips, the other glass glows brightly.
Distance is not a problem as liquid sensors and wireless links have been built in to the glasses. (Link).
Bottoms up, darling.
Animal rights activists just keep getting more and more inventive. This time, they’re not content merely dumping the dead bodies of dogs and cats outside a building in protest. Nope. This time they brought an entire whale.
A huge beached whale has been dumped outside the Japanese embassy in Berlin. in a Greenpeace anti-whaling protest.
The controversial environmental activists hauled the fin whale to Berlin from the Baltic coast after finding it beached on a sandbank.
The dead whale measured 17m (56ft) long and weighed 20 tonnes.
Activists are trying to demonstrate that there is no need to kill the mammals for research - as Japan does - because cadavers can be found. (Source: BBC News.)
I wonder if that’s why this whale seems bent on travelling to London.
Just what is the best wine to serve when your main dish is cell phone? I have no idea, but maybe one of these folks know.
Recent scientific findings support the notion that males who think with their small head do so at the risk of the big brain, and vice versa… at least in the case of bats.
The brainier male bats are, the smaller their testicles, according to a new study. Researchers suggest the correlation exists because both organs require a lot of energy to grow and maintain, leading individual species to find the optimum balance.
The analysis of 334 species of bat found that in species where the females were promiscuous, the males had evolved larger testes but had relatively small brains. In species, where the females were monogamous, the situation was reversed. Male fidelity appeared to have no influence over testes or brain size.
Both brain tissue and sperm cells require a lot of metabolic energy to produce and maintain. The different species appear to have evolved a preference for developing one organ more than the other, presumably determined by which will help them produce more offspring. (Souce: New Scientist.)
You may now proceed to crack your best one-liner.
Liv might want to think twice about her date with the Dominatrix of Hair.
Researchers for L’Oreal in Paris claim they’ve gotten to the root of what causes curls. The answer, they say, lies below your scalp in the hair bulb — which is hook-shaped for curly hair and straight for straight hair.
L’Oreal’s scientists believe those bulbs could be altered using hormones, meaning popping a pill could turn curly hair straight and vice versa.
Dermatologists say it could work.
“I think this could be potentially revolutionary if it actually changed the shape of the bulb within the hair follicle,” said Dr. Diane Berson, a dermatologist at New York Presbyterian Hospital.
L’Oreal said its research could also lead to a pill that changes gray hair back to its original color. (Source: ABC News.)
As someone who’s perennially pissed off at my own hair and threatening to shave it all off, I’m excited about this news. I wouldn’t make nearly as good looking a bald chick as Natalie Portman does.
Once again, EV has scooped the networks on the biggest news item of the day which is not the riots and deadlock at the Americas summit but, rather, the planned Diet Vanilla Coke.
Because it’s the “real thing,” you know.
Are you done with your Christmas shopping yet??? If not, don’t feel bad. I haven’t even started making my list, much less deciding who’s naughty and who’s nice. Evidently, I’m wayyyyy behind.
- As early as mid-October, my local Wal-Mart featured side-by-side displays of Halloween costumes and Christmas ornaments.
- The candles in our jack-o-lanterns will still warm to the touch on Tuesday morning when a Kansas City radio station changed its format to 24/7 Christmas carols. The 80-degree weather that day only heightened my disorientation. Strange to hear about “White Christmas” when I’m once again digging my tank-tops out of storage to avoid heat stroke.
- Last night while the parents on my street stood outside watching our children ride bikes and play tag, two of my neighbors discussed their plans to put up holiday decorations this weekend. There’s a $10 bet riding on who gets their lights up and lit first.
- This morning as I dropped my son off at school I heard one Mommy announce that she finished writing and addressing her Christmas cards last night, much to the envy of the other Mommies who said they were waiting until the Thanksgiving weekend to do theirs. (I’m still deciding if I’ll send cards this year or blow it off and claim that I’m being environmentally-friendly.)
Personally, I’m not buying a darn thing or dusting off a single ornament until Thanksgiving is over. Then again, I don’t have an ex- for whom I’d gladly shop early to ensure their Goddammo arrived on time!
