IKEA Monkey

Here is an update on the top secret:

Less than an hour after the first secret was posted Sunday, Reddit volunteers had identified the exact location on the postcard. Reddit moderators then self-censored their site to ensure that the information would not wrongly implicate someone in a crime. The Chicago Police were notified multiple times and investigated. They searched the site and found nothing unusual. I continue to be in contact with the Chicago Police.

This was reported in The Chicago Tribune.





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Mayor Rahm Emanuel will recommend reappointing Joseph Ferguson to a new four-year term as the city’s Inspector General last Friday but he could be gone as early as next summer if he can complete a laundry list of outstanding business and investigations. [ more › ]

 Oh my God, you guys. There are some days when I desperately wish we were all hanging out, collectively, like in a villa on Lake Como, so that when a photo like this came through on the wire I could just rip it out of the fax machine (don’t ask me WHEN we’re all living) Read More ...

Holy crap, Gina Gershon playing Donatella Versace in a Lifetime movie is genius casting. And she looks amazing.

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The music video for “The Fox” is going to be the Internet’s new favorite thing, so now’s the time to get out ahead of the “have you seen this?” buzz and watch it below. The totally wacked out song and clip is from Ylvis, a Flight Of The Conchords-esque Norwegian duo that has its own variety show and has recorded songs wondering, for example, what’s up with Stonehenge. Still, with its whoops, toots, and dozens and dozens of animal costumes, “The Fox” is definitely worth watching, then forwarding to friends, and then singing for the rest of the week. Consider yourself warned.

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Johnson & Johnson has revealed a new bottle cap design for Tylenol products sold in the U.S. which will warn consumers in bright red lettering that the medication contains acetaminophen. The labels will alert users to the potentially fatal risks of taking too much Tylenol, which is an unusual step for a company to make.

It’s an unusual step, surely, but not unprompted, notes the Associated Press: The federal government is pushing for better labels as lawsuits are cropping up and consumers are increasingly taking too much of the popular pain reliever. Tylenol would be the first product — out of many that contain acetaminophen — to expressly warn users of the dangers associated with it.

The alerts will start showing up on new bottles of the Extra Strength product starting in October, and on other Tylenol bottles soon after. They read: “CONTAINS ACETAMINOPHEN” and “ALWAYS READ THE LABEL.”

Acetaminophen, though widespread, is not just a tame, everyday drug: Overdoses linked to the medication send 55,000 to 80,000 people a year to the emergency room and kill at least 500, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.

But plenty of us take acetaminophen on a regular basis, and it’s in more than 600 over-the-counter and prescription products.

“We’re always looking for ways to better communicate information to patients and consumers,” says Dr. Edwin Kuffner, vice president of McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the Johnson & Johnson unit that makes Tylenol.

Company tries new cap to curb Tylenol overdoses [Associated Press]

[Photograph: Lindsey Howald Patton]

I've spent the last few weeks sampling ceviche all over the city for an upcoming feature (stay tuned!), and while this one didn't make the cut, it is worth talking about. Plus I'll take any excuse to hang out in the Publican, even if the escolar ceviche ($17) wasn't ceviche at all, but a textbook Italian crudo.

The sliced raw fish was very lightly sprinkled with citrus juice; dotted with the freshest-tasting olive oil on earth; and arranged with pieces of grapefruit, avocado, and slim circles of a deseeded Fresno chile. The flavors of cracked black pepper, grapefruit, and olive sang beautifully together, but nothing took the spotlight away from the Monterey Bay escolar, which was melt-in-your-mouth rich and silky (there's a reason it's sometimes called the "butterfish").

The Publican's menu is ephemeral, but when another take on ceviche—however loose with the term—crops up again, I'm willing to bet it too will be a beautifully balanced dish.

The crew got their orders from the bank: a house was getting repossessed, and it was their job to clean it out. They did. What they didn’t know was that they had the wrong house. The real target was a home on a street with the same name in a different town. Who screwed up? The repo crew? The bank? The person who named the streets?

Yes, the repo crew went to the wrong house, but local TV station WSAZ reports that they got the wrong address from the bank in the first place. They did a great job of cleaning out her stuff, though, and took everything except for a few very heavy pieces of furniture, to the dump.

It wasn’t just random junk that they removed: good furniture disappeared, along with personal papers, professional certificates and, well, everything. “Living room furniture, my [college] diploma, my high school diploma, my pictures — my history,” she told the TV station.

She has retained a lawyer, who plans to get compensation for the woman’s loss just as soon as they figure out who is ultimately responsible for the error. Her homeowner’s insurance had been canceled after she had the audacity to make claims following severe vandalism and a fire.

As far as we know, Bank of America is not involved.

Woman Loses Everything When Wrong House is Repossessed [WSAZ]
Foreclosure on the wrong house [Logan Banner]

There was a time when who handled what on a date was fairly straight forward. However, modern dating conventions have led to shifting mindsets, as one study shows.

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A depressing thing about being a human is that, in most cases, the only place on your body that has breasts on it is your chest. Even worse, none of those breasts possess nipples made of the finest diamonds, nor are they made of 18k rose gold. Ugh, what is the point of even being alive? CURSE THIS FILTHY PRISON OF FLESH.

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Rihanna is known for many things: Singing, dressing provocatively, designing terrible-looking clothes, rocking the hell out of a bikini. What she is not known for is her acting. Still, word on the street is that she's been cast to play Joséphine Baker in a new biopic.

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Have you ever thought you need a vacation after your vacation? Studies show the stress of a trip can leave you worse off than if you didn't take one in the first place. Because we have so little paid time off in America we try hard to make our vacations count, but we need to do that without sacrificing our well-being.

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From Drinks

[Photograph: Naomi Bishop]

The last science class I took was commonly known as "Rocks for Jocks" (The Geology of New England) and I chose it because it had field trips. This impressive preparation left me a little nervous as I stepped into the Pike Place Market office of online cooking school ChefSteps to learn how their laboratory-style techniques could help me (and you) make better cocktails at home.

Grant Lee Crilly

Luckily, Grant Lee Crilly, Chris Young, and Ryan Matthew Smith—guys whose name you might have heard in conjunction with a little book they helped develop, photograph, and write called Modernist Cuisine—are able to break down their techniques into friendly, easy advice to improve cocktail flavor, including basics on ice, ratios to use if you're improvising a cocktail, and essential tools to have at home.

ChefSteps is their free online cooking school, where you can learn how to apply the kinds of techniques and ingredients seen at, say, WD-50 or Alinea to your own home bartending.

Carbonated Celery Gimlet

Nine on a Wednesday morning seemed as good a time as any to begin drinking, so Crilly started by making the group's version of a Celery Gimlet. It's a drink that might surprise you with its intensely savory celery flavor—nothing like the watery, stringy vegetable your mom smeared with peanut butter back in the day. It goes down like an alcoholic Cel-Ray that drank a Mountain Dew, with a marked salty side, and a vibrant green color (preserved with the addition of some sodium bisulfate.)

Crilly uses a centrifuge to juice the celery, explaining that the juicing technique he uses for the drink came from Wylie Dufresne (of WD-50 and Alder): "Wylie loves celery." If all celery tasted like this gimlet, I'm pretty sure everyone would love celery.

The carbonation process that caps the drink is quick and easy, using an iSi cream whipper. "It makes carbonation more approachable," he says of the tool, which he uses constantly in our quick cocktail session. He tells me that an iSi would be the first tool he'd recommend to someone looking to take his or her basic home bar to the next level. They sell for under $100 and allow you to infuse liquors quickly (using pressure), and to carbonate. Carbonation is forgiving, he adds. "If you screw up, you can just pour it back in and try again."

In fact, one of the most frequently asked questions they get on the site about carbonation is from people who forgot to charge the liquid twice and want to know why their drink isn't fizzy. The first CO2 charge clears out the air that remains in the canister, so it's important not to skip this step, says Crilly.

Another benefit to the iSi? You can make batch cocktails for parties, then just pour them in and carbonate to order. I was sold.

Byrrhgroni Cocktail

Moving on to the second cocktail, Crilly stressed the importance of controlled dilution whenever you're making drinks. The ChefSteps approach to cocktails includes measuring all ingredients that will dilute a drink—like the ice and any water—by weight to ensure consistency in every rendition.

With a scale to weigh your ingredients every time, cocktail making becomes more predictable, and you can begin to improvise with different ingredients in the same ratios, combining different spirits, liqueurs, citrus, and water or ice. With the right ratios and good ingredients, Crilly says that it's difficult to make a bad drink. His go-to ratio for home mixers: two parts liquor, one part liqueur, half a part citrus, and one to two parts water.

In the Byrrhgroni, the alcohol in the combination is Old Tom Gin, mixed with bitter Campari, Byrrh, a French wine-based aperitif, and Punt e Mes, a rich, bittersweet vermouth. Crilly says that the carbonated final result reminds him of an Italian bitter orange drink called Chinotto. And that's a very good thing.

Churchill's Breakfast

The flavors of coffee, whiskey, and cigars serve as the basis for an original ChefSteps cocktail they call Churchill's Breakfast. The inspiration for the drink comes from a desire to use the cold-brew coffee they make in the office using the iSi whipper. Instead of a 24 hour brewing process, the iSi method takes just two. (As if he hadn't already sold me on the tool before.) While the coffee finished up brewing, Crilly lit a cinnamon stick and captured it under an inverted glass to line the glass with smoke. The visual effect is impressive.

The cocktail, made with Michter's rye, retained the hint of smoke, with a strong but smooth coffee flavor completely married into the whiskey. Once the ChefSteps folks had come up with the coffee-and-whiskey concept, they needed something to bring the two ingredients together. Angostura bitters was selected not only for its flavor, but also because dissolved solids in the bitters (as well as the coffee) cause the drink to foam up when shaken, giving the cocktail a pleasantly silky texture.

If you are interested in making any of these cocktails or want to take lessons on spherification, making your own fresh juice sodas, or lots of other techniques, check out the ChefSteps site.

About the author: Naomi Bishop is a Seattle based food and travel writer. Find her wandering through words and worlds on her blog, TheGastroGnome, where she claims that being a GastroGnome is not about sitting idly on the front lawn of culinary cottages. Follow her explorations of cooking and culture around the world at @GastroGnome. Get restaurant suggestions and locate local eats in the Northwest from her app, Unique Eats of the Northwest.

[Photograph: Robyn Lee]

As a newcomer to California, I thought the tiny avocados being sold at fruit stands at 10 for a dollar were perfectly normal. What does an East Coaster like me know about avocados? But as it turns out, there's something funny going on with this year's avocado harvest. The avocados are unusually, suspiciously, and dramatically small— smaller, perhaps, than they ever have been before.

NPR reports that many experts are seeing the smallest avocados ever this season. Farmers are attributing the shrinking fruit to low rainfall in early 2012, irregular bee activity, and cooler temperatures throughout the year. Resulting fruits are clocking in at around 3 to 6 ounces, when typical avocados usually weigh a heftier 8 ounces. This means farmers could see lower prices for their crops.

Low rainfall has been a consistent problem for farmers in the past few years. The drought has extended further south into Mexico as well, where farmers are already making plans to adapt to future climate irregularity. The majority of avocados imported from Mexico and grown in California are Hass avocados, and farmers are beginning to seek out other more durable breeds that may do better in low water conditions.

Bee activity has also been irregular in the past year, as we've covered, along with many others following agricultural news. Bees help to pollinate at least 30% of the world's crops. While bee populations may eventually rise again, changing climate conditions will likely continue to threaten the status quo of agricultural production.

Luckily, this year's Hass avocado harvest in California will still bring in about 400 million pounds of fruit. The quality of the smaller fruits is just fine, and next year's harvest will likely result in larger fruits. For now, consumers will have to do with peeling and pitting a bit more for their guacamole.

About the Author: Leah Douglas loves learning about, talking about, reading about, and consuming food. Her other work can be found at her website.

I'm pretty sure that if I ever met Tim Gunn my tear ducts would start blasting like two tiny firehoses and wouldn't stop until the pair of us had to swim out the window clinging to ethereal chiffon flotsam. Then Tim Gunn would become my NEW DAD and we'd travel the land scolding internet trolls and eating cheddar bay biscuits and snapping photos for each other's #OOTD posts. I'm like 90% positive that's what would happen.

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It's time, once again, to name and shame the week's biggest pussies.

Cry-Baby #1: Tim Donnelly

The incident: California passed a bill that will allow transgender children to use the correct bathrooms. 

The appropriate response: Probably nothing. Maybe using a different bathroom, if this law applies to you. 

The actual response: A Republican state lawmaker is pulling his children out of school. 

On Monday, California's governor signed bill AB 1266 into law.

The law, which will go into effect on January 1 of next year, gives students in California schools the right "to participate in sex-segregated programs, activities, and facilities" based on the gender they identify with, rather than their birth gender. 

Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, who lives in Twin Peaks, California, wrote a letter to conservative website WND voicing his outrage over the decision. 

In the letter, he said: "Allowing teenage boys and girls in the same locker room, showering side by side, is a bad idea. In fact, AB 1266 is a recipe for disaster. This will take the normal hormonal battles raging inside every teenager and pour gasoline onto those simmering coals. The right to privacy enjoyed by every student will be replaced by the right to be ogled."

Tim claims that his 13 and 16-year-old sons are "horrified" to learn that they might have to share a restroom with "a member of the opposite sex." 

He claims that many parents he'd heard from had "literally pulled their kids out of public schools and have enrolled them in homeschool and private-school programs." And that he intends to do the same with his kids. However, none of the parents who he'd spoken with that had pulled their kids out of school were willing to speak publicly about it. But I'm like, totally sure they exist, guys. 

Tim also thinks that this law will have a negative impact on the amount of funding schools receive, "the decline in attendance and enrollment is likely to negatively impact K-12 public-school funding given a good portion of it comes from the ADA federal grant that pays the schools proportionally for attendance." Which suggests that Tim is massively overestimating the amount of total dickholes who currently have children enrolled in the California school system. 

Tim is hoping to run for governor next year... :(

Cry-Baby #2: Jeffrey Wright and Alexis Longo

via Gawker.

The incident: A Dunkin' Donuts worker gave a customer the wrong coffee.

The appropriate response: Complaining.

The actual response: The customer pistol-whipped the staff member with a loaded gun. 

Earlier this week, 27-year-old Jeffrey Wright and his 22-year-old wife Alexis Longo ordered a vanilla iced coffee from the drive-through of a Dunkin' Donuts in Lauderhill, Florida. 

According to Jeffrey and Alexis, their order was fucked up, and they were actually given a CARAMEL-flavored iced coffee. 

Outraged, Jeffrey and Alexis got out of their car and went inside the Dunkin' Donuts, where they got into an argument with the man who served them, Rajay Hall. 

Eventually, Jeffrey started throwing punches at Rajay. Then, upon realizing that this wasn't punishment enough for messing up their coffee order, he pulled out a loaded Taurus Slim 9mm handgun, and started beating Rajay in the head with it. 

According to witnesses, Alexis told Jeffrey to shoot the manager multiple times. 

Jeffrey and Alexis were both arrested and booked into Broward County jail. They were charged with a felony for aggravated battery and a misdemeanor for battery, respectively. 

Rajay is reportedly "doing fine."

Which of this lot is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll #democracy

Who is the bigger cry-baby?  

Previously: A couple who threatened to sue their neighbors over a wheelchair ramp Vs. A family who almost drowned because they hate gays so much

Winner: The wheelchair ramp haters!!!

@JLCT

Generations of American cooks are wrong. They learned their wrongity wrongity wrong habits from their parents, or from public television’s Julia Child. Their terrible, filthy habit is rinsing poultry before cooking. Public health experts estimate that as many as 90% of Americans do it, and they want us to cut it out.

Poultry-washing makes intuitive sense: you don’t know where that bird has been or what kind of bacteria are crawling on the outside. Julia Child herself admitted that washing a chicken before roasting it felt cleaner, even if the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the government agency in charge of making sure that our meat doesn’t kill us, said that there are no bacteria on the outside of a chicken that roasting won’t kill.

Yet she went ahead and did it anyway. Yet rinsing in plain cold water doesn’t do anything to disinfect your chicken. What it does help do is blast a fine spray of bacteria-laden mist across your hands, arms, counter, body, and anything unfortunate enough to be within 3 feet of the sink. See the illustration above.

Trying to get the word out, food-safety researchers have produced fotonovelas (like comics, but with photos) and mini domestic dramas spreading the message that washing chicken is bad and shouldn’t be done.

Should you wash your hands after you handle raw poultry and get it in to cook? Yes, definitely, with hot water and soap. But don’t worry about bathing the chicken.

Wash your Hands …Not your Poultry [University of Wisconsin] (PDF download)
Julia Child Was Wrong: Don’t Wash Your Raw Chicken, Folks [NPR]

LONDON - Britain’s only female giant panda is most likely pregnant and could give birth within the next two weeks, zookeepers in Edinburgh announced Monday.

In early August, Harold and Ruth Knapke died on the same day, just before what would have been their 66th anniversary. If a movie along those lines hadn't already been made starring some of the most aesthetically desirable humans on the planet, some scribe in Hollywood would be furiously writing it now.

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Conservatives are very upset that a Wisconsin school district has reasonable guidelines for answering elementary schoolers' questions about masturbation without shaming them or sticking their fingers in their ears.

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The global recession has made it more challenging for people in Italy to cheat on their spouses, according to the Daily Beast. This is a big deal because, as noted by the World Atlas of Sex, Italy is the most cheat-happy country in the world.

Jobless rates in the country have reached near-record highs, with youth unemployment hovering around 38 percent, but more important than any of that is the fact that men and women can no longer subsidize their infidelities the way they used to, apparently:

The government’s austerity measures and tougher tax regulations have also put a damper on things. Hiding a hotel bill from a romantic getaway by claiming it as a business expense is no longer tacitly accepted. Even the reintroduction of Italy’s property tax on second homes (abolished by Silvio Berlusconi but reinstated by Mario Monti) affects the love life of the Italians by making it tricky to keep that crucial pied-a-terre for midday trysts.

“Giancarlo” who doesn’t want to use his real name for obvious reasons, is a 48-year-old married tax lawyer who recently was forced to rent out his bachelor pad in Rome because of the new tax burden. “It really messed up my romantic life,” he told The Daily Beast. For more than six years, he had met his lover, a 46-year-old woman who is also married, at the apartment for long romantic “lunches.” Without the apartment, he said, “we couldn’t find a way to hide a hotel bill, and it gets very old to try to keep up an amorous relationship in a parked car—especially at our age.”

The two eventually split up.

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Following Miley Cyrus' psychosexual appropriative nightmare VMA performance, we citizens of the world are left scrambling for answers: Why did this have to happen? Did I really just watch a young woman gyrate against a man in a Beetlejuice costume immediately after using the bodies of black women as sexualized props? Why didn't my parents prepare me for this? Will I ever be okay again?

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Americans as a society generally don’t take vacations. While many of us would love to travel, we live in an economy where job security is rare and most of us live in fear that if we take any time off work, our job may not be waiting for us upon our return. We live on part-time and temporary job contracts where we don’t always know where our next source of income will come from. Our work culture prevents us from taking long vacations abroad and instills within us a sense of guilt for seeking the simple pleasure of time away from the office.

Moreover, America is the only developed nation that doesn't legally guarantee any paid vacation time for its workers. In a recent study, The Centre for Economic and Policy Research, found that in the absence of government standards, almost one in four Americans have no paid vacation (23%) and no paid holidays (23%) and the average worker in the private sector receives only 10 days of paid vacation per year. Contrast this with European countries where most employees are legally entitled to at least 20 days of paid vacation per year.

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Issa Rae did her due diligence today. Inspired by a tweet she saw about Sunday night's MTV Music Video Awards that compared Kanye West's dancing during his "Blood on the Leaves" performance to the woman who dances during the opening of the 1990s sitcom Living Single, Rae made that mashup happen. That is all, go about your day a happier human.

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Siouxsie And The Banshees influenced multiple genres in their more-than-twenty-year career, and everyone from LCD Soundsystem to The Weeknd has payed homage to the band. So how does one express herself and show appreciation to such a prolific entity? Clogging. More specifically, clogging mixed with belly dancing. Naomi "I'm not really a belly dancer" Merchant posted an adorably fascinating video of a Bollywood-inspired clog dance to "Kiss Them For Me" from Siouxsie's 1991 album Superstition. There's really not much more to say. Just watch.  

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A 144,000 acre wildfire continues to ravage northern California. Over 3,400 firefighters spent the weekend fighting the blaze, which is remains only 7 percent contained.

The so-called Rim Fire first began on August 17, but the extremely hot and dry conditions have caused it to become one of the largest wildfires in California's history, and a new peak of what's already been a destructive season for the Western United States.  While at least 12,000 acres of northwest Yosemite have been destroyed, a spokewoman for the U.S. Fire Service told CNN, there's been little impact on the more popular tourist areas. A more pressing concern, the Associated Press reports, may be the mountain communities north of the park, dried out from two years of drought and to which the fire is quickly approaching. So far, there have been no deaths or injuries and only minimal property damage; the focus right now is on protecting the state's natural and energy resources:

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From Serious Eats: New York

Editor's Note: Welcome to a new episode of 1 Minute Meal, a series of video snapshots documenting the places, people, and foods that make New York a vibrant food community.

Pupusas on the grill at El Olomega, an elder states-vendor at the Red Hook Ball Fields. [Photograph: James Boo]

At the moment, no one can guarantee that the Red Hook food vendors will return next summer to the park they've cooked at for nearly 40 years. The Vendors Association recently completed a proposal process that was first enacted in 2007, and the city's verdict on who will win the rights to vend at the Ball FIelds is still out.

No doom-and-gloom sentiment, however, has swayed Marcos Lainez, whose family has run the city's best pupusa business (and just announced Vendy-finalist) for decades. Serving 18 variants of the Salvadoran staple (including one joyous rendition made from mashed sweet plantains), El Olomega personifies the Red Hook Vendors—a family forged in food at the edge of a soccer field.

Previously on 1 Minute Meal

Lechonera La Piraña in Mott Haven »
The Arepa Lady of Jackson Heights »
The Indonesian Food Bazaar in Astoria, Queens »
The Lemon Ice King of Corona, a Queens Classic »
A Day in the Life of The Baoery, a Pop-Up Restaurant »
Khachapuri, a Georgian Bread Baked into South Brooklyn »
David's Brisket House, the Jewish Deli Run by Muslims in Brooklyn »

About the videographer: James Boo has been a Serious Eats contributor since 2010. Working as a freelance journalist, he is also the founder of Real Cheap Eats and a documentarian. Check out his food-and-travel blog, The Eaten Path, for more journeys to the real meal.

VIEW SLIDESHOW: Staff Picks: Our Favorite Late-Night Snacks

[Photograph: Kenji Lopez-Alt]

You know the drill: it's after midnight, and you probably already ate dinner, but your body doesn't care. Maybe you're up working, out dancing, our just plain can't sleep—you can't help yourself; you're hungry. Again. What's a serious eater to do? Well...eat. Some late-night cravings are specific (all nachos all the time), while others are broader, bordering on the random (veggie lasagna, anyone?). Here's a look at our favorite late-night snacks. What do you crave in the wee hours? Tell us in the comments below!

For the 2013 Halloween season, General Mills is resurrecting all five of their Monster Cereals —Count Chocula, Frankenberry, Boo Berry, Fruit Brute and Fruity Yummy Mummy — for a limited time. Get out your running shoes, because I'm about to buy allll that corn-syrupy Boo Berry goodness.

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