That which does not kill me . . .

Apparently the US Department of Agriculture has a set of guidelines on when it's ok to eat moldy food. I thought I'd heard somewhere that things like this used to be published in news papers during the depression to help folks extend their food budget further.

Here 'tis:

Click image for entire article.

Via Boing Boing, via Make, via the USDA.

Lining Your Nest

From ABC News and the Associated Press:

A mouse found inside an automatic teller machine . . . had thoroughly torn up two bills and damaged another 14 to line his nest. Employee Millie Taylor says she screamed and slammed the machine's door shut.

The bank replaced all the money that wasn't extensively damaged, and the ATM has continued to work just fine. The mouse also got a reprieve: He was evicted from his nest but set free outside the station.

Those Darn Plums In The Icebox

Click image for more legible version.

(And of course the relevant poem.)

Roles Hodgman Would Have Dominated

John Sellers of True Slant writes:

[John Hodgman] is also one of my personal friends, and has been for quite some time . . . so when he became a national sensation a few years back, it was only natural that I would spend many late nights at bars with some of his other old friends discussing the various ways that it’s bizarre to know someone who has suddenly become overwhelmingly famous.

And we’d sit around and play The Roles John Hodgman Would Have Dominated game.

The object of the game is to come up with the many parts that seem to have been written specifically with Hodgman in mind, even those that predate the onslaught of Hodgmania . . . Also, it’s important to remember that this game isn’t about finding Hodgman look-alikes; it’s about finding Hodgman act-alikes. And so none of this Dr. Bunsen Honeydew nonsense.

7 good examples following the link.

Via Boing Boing.

Ashton Kucher eat your heart out.

(Click image for full comic.)

Rare Book Collecting Sneak

Those crazy 19th century antiquarians and their sneaky, sneaky ways. I love the image of all these sworn enemies sitting in an obscure tavern railing about how they've been wronged.

Best read this article:

The Fortsas Bibliohoax


More here.

Play Hard - Sleep Well

Sophie Ramsey, Consumer Reports:

It makes sense, after all, that kids will be more tired and ready for sleep if they've been physically active during the day. Now researchers have done a large study published in the medical journal Archives of Disease in Children to put these parental observations to the test.

The study included 519 healthy 7-year-olds from New Zealand, who each wore a device called an actigraph for 24 hours. An actigraph records movement, providing an objective measure of a child's activity level and sleep time. Parents also noted when their child went to bed, which allowed researchers to calculate how long after bedtime children actually fell asleep.

The researchers found a wide variation in how quickly children fell asleep, with some taking as little as 13 minutes and others needing more than 40 minutes after going to bed. Within this range, there was a close relationship between the onset of sleep and daytime activity. On average, children took an extra three minutes to fall asleep for every hour they weren't moving about. Also, the children who fell asleep faster slept longer overall.

Thank heavens ours runs around like a nut all the live-long day.


Via Boing Boing, Via Consumer Reports, via Archives of Disease In Children.