Oddities and Humor

The bloke's penniless. He couldn't pay $87, I will wager. The main purpose appears to be to keep him from profiting off the story, which I agree with.

There might be other reasons. If he could make millions off his story he could get accountants and lawyers to fix him getting half of it with the other half going to the fixers.

Or do I overestimate human cunning?

As Fats Waller often said, One never knows, do one?

Zack Snyder is a fair and competent director but he isn't that good.

Besides... wouldn't making Superman relevant to our times be counterproductive to Superman's everyman image?

Letty, that croc just wants to give everyone a kiss on the cheek that's all!

I didn't even like the first Christopher Reeve movie, because it was not enough like the original concept. Was uncomfortable with some of the dialog he had with Lois. Did not appreciate Lex Luther coming off like a refugee from the Batman TV series. Didn't watch it to the end.

It started as a gag: spaghetti tacos.

On an episode of the hit Nickelodeon series iCarly, the lead character's eccentric older brother, Spencer, makes dinner one night. Glimpsed on screen, the dish consists of red-sauce-coated pasta stuffed into hard taco shells. What could be more unappealing?

When Julian Stuart-Burns, 8, asked his mother to make the tacos one night, she simply laughed. "I thought he was joking," said Jennifer Burns, a Brooklyn mother of three. "But then he kept asking."

Burns finally gave in and cooked up the punch line for Julian's birthday party.

That punch line has now become part of American children's cuisine, fostering a legion of imitators and improvisers across the country. Spurred on by reruns, Internet traffic, slumber parties and simple old-fashioned word of mouth among children, spaghetti tacos are all the rage. Especially if you're less than 5 feet tall and live with your mother.

Mom blogs and cooking websites are filled with recipes from dozens of desperate parents who have been confronted with how to feed their offspring the popular gag. A Facebook page has sprung up with more than 1,200 fans.

There's a dessert version, made with brownie mix, white frosting and strawberry preserves; a guacamole-covered version, with Mexican-flavored tomato sauce, at Barefoot Kitchen Witch, the website of Rhode Island blogger Jayne Maker; and a recipe available at spaghettitacos.com that uses Italian sausage and peppers.

Ed Dzitko, a dad from Woodbury, Conn., uses oversize taco shells to fit in more spaghetti. Cheryl Trombetta, a grandmother from Secaucus, N.J., makes them whenever her 5-year-old grandson asks. A woman in Lincoln, Neb., posted a meat-sauce version on Food.com in the winter, crediting her 7-year-old son with the idea. And Karen Petersen, a mother of two from Rye, N.H., fries her own taco shells and breaks the spaghetti into thirds to make the strands fit more easily.

"Clearly, it's spread like a virus," said Petersen, who has made them several times for her 11-year-old daughter, Amelia.

After seeing them on the show, Amelia was served the tacos at a friend's slumber party this year and then begged her mom to make them.

"The mixture of spaghetti and tacos is odd," Amelia admitted. "But it's actually pretty good. They're one of my favorite foods. I guess kids like making them because they think it's cool to be like the people from iCarly."

But the real reason, she said, is that "the taste is really, really good."

For those who need to be brought up to speed, iCarly is about a teenage girl, raised by her brother, who creates a weekly show for the Web with her best friends. No one seems more surprised by the vast popularity of spaghetti tacos than the creator of iCarly, Dan Schneider, who invented the gag three years ago.

"It was just a little joke I came up with for one episode," Schneider said. "Then it turned into a running joke. And now it's this thing people actually do."

For Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, the question is not why kids are asking for spaghetti tacos, but why they haven't asked for them sooner.

"This combination seems to be an inevitability, sort of like chocolate and peanut butter running into each other on that Reese's commercial," he said. "The amazement should be only that it took iCarly to bring it into our melting pot of a culture."

Perhaps the nearest pop-culture equivalent — that is, a sitcom artifact that thrives in the real world - is Festivus, an alternative to Christmas introduced on a 1997 Seinfeld episode, Thompson said. Festivus now has a number of real adherents.

Schneider said he came up with the spaghetti taco idea while writing a first-season episode, broadcast on Nov. 10, 2007, in which Spencer finds himself in the kitchen. "Spencer's an artist, a sculptor, he wears socks that light up," Schneider explained. "So he's not going to make a roast chicken for dinner."

The joke resurfaced in five more episodes, but what pushed the dish onto the front burner of parental consciousness was an entire show devoted to it - a cook-off between Carly and a crazy chef named Ricky Flame - which was broadcast in September 2009.

Cammie Ward Moise, a Houston mom who featured the tacos on her parenting site, Moms Material, under the heading "Crazy Dinner Night," said she doesn't just make them for her kids, but also enjoys them herself. Still, she adds: "It's a great thing to make, especially when you're having the food battles at home. It's a fun way to get them excited about eating."

Her children, Taylor, 11, and Myles, 9, love the dish, she said. "It's something their idol is doing," she said. "They love iCarly and would probably eat anything the cast of the show ate."

"Now," Moise said, "we just have to get her to put broccoli in a taco."

The Texas Reaiscance Festival is in town.

Thanks, boomer. I love it.

I liked those bells, edgar. Cast in Bronze was fabulous as well as the spaghetti tacos.

Look out tsar. Here's comes another fanged oddity.



Carnivorous plants and vampire fish found in Mekong

Updated October 7, 2010 13:31:33

Development underway in the Mekong basin poses a threat to some of the 145 newly discovered species.

Some are simply wondrous, others simply frightening. There's a fish with vampire fangs, a lipstick wearing gecko and a seven metre long carnivorous plant not to mention the frog that thinks its a cricket. They're just some of the amazing discoveries detailed in a new report from the World Wildlife Fund.

Concerning the fish, here's the humor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK_wrM8OdGY&feature=fvw

Yep boomer, that was funny stuff.

I know that song best by Kay Kaiser, but that's a cute one, letty.

I don't think anyone would miss those vampire fishes, letty.

Vladimir Lenin, King Tut and the McDonald's Happy Meal: What do they all have in common? A shocking resistance to Mother Nature's cycle of decomposition and biodegradability, apparently.

That's the disturbing point brought home by the latest project of New York City-based artist and photographer Sally Davies, who bought a McDonald's Happy Meal back in April and left it out in her kitchen to see how well it would hold up over time.

The results? "The only change that I can see is that it has become hard as a rock," Davies told the U.K. Daily Mail.

She proceeded to photograph the Happy Meal each week and posted the pictures to Flickr to record the results of her experiment. Now, just over six months later, the Happy Meal has yet to even grow mold. She told the Daily Mail that "the food is plastic to the touch and has an acrylic sheen to it."

Davies -- whose art has been featured in numerous films and television shows and is collected by several celebrities -- told The Upshot that she initiated the project to prove a friend wrong. He believed that any burger would mold or rot within two or three days of being left on a counter. Thus began what's become known as "The Happy Meal Art Project."

"I told my friend about a schoolteacher who's kept a McDonald's burger for 12 years that hasn't changed at all, and he didn't believe me when I told him about it," Davies told us. "He thought I was crazy and said I shouldn't believe everything that I read, so I decided to try it myself."

Some observers of the photo series have noted that the burger's bun appears at different angles, and therefore aired suspicions that the Happy Meal may not in fact be as "untouched" as the project's groundrules stipulate. Davies says there's a simple explanation for the mobile-bun effect. "The meal is on a plate in my apartment on a shelf," she says, "and when I take it down to shoot it, the food slides around. It's hard as rock on a glass plate, so sure, the food is moving."

Davies' friend was the person who should have done the additional research. Wellness and nutrition educator Karen Hanrahan has indeed kept a McDonald's hamburger since 1996 to show clients and students how resistant fast food can be to decomposition.

As for Davies, she said that she might just keep her burger and fries hanging around for a while as well.

"It's sitting on a bookshelf right now, so it's not really taking up any space, so why not?" she said. It ceased giving off any sort of odor after 24 hours, she said, adding: "You have to see this thing."

In response to Davies' project, McDonald's spokeswoman Theresa Riley emailed The Upshot a statement defending the quality of the chain's food. Riley's email also blasted Davies' "completely unsubstantiated" work as something out of "the realm of urban legends."

"McDonald's hamburger patties in the United States are made with 100% USDA-inspected ground beef," Riley wrote. "Our hamburgers are cooked and prepared with salt, pepper and nothing else -- no preservatives, no fillers. Our hamburger buns are baked locally, are made from North American-grown wheat flour and include common government-approved ingredients designed to assure food quality and safety. ... According to Dr. Michael Doyle, Director, Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, 'From a scientific perspective, I can safely say that the way McDonald's hamburgers are freshly processed, no hamburger would look like this after one year unless it was tampered with or held frozen

Here it is at day 180....

Pop it in the microwave and have a feast.

A disturbing story about a dog

Wow! That is heart rending, edgar.

Here we go again.



A mysterious shiny object floating high over Manhattan's West Side set off a flurry of reports and wild speculation Wednesday that a UFO was flying over the city.
Police and the FAA said they began getting flooded with calls starting at 1:30 p.m. from people reporting a silvery object hovering high over Chelsea.

Now the humor. I learned to do the child's tap dance to this one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7WvVPMCmrM

East Side West Side is such a wonderful song, letty. Had not heard it in ages.

That UFO doesn't look important to me.

I....I think I see the Virgin Mary in those french fries!