IKEA Monkey

A Florida man was in custody Friday on charges of threatening to kill President Barack Obama and the entire local sheriff's department, authorities said.The man, Stanley Scott Viner, 48, of Lehigh Acres, was held on $200,000 bond in the Lee County jail after his arrest Thursday, court records showed.Viner is accused of having sent a long, expletive-filled email message to sheriff's deputies threat...

Heiress and professional rich person Tamara Ecclestone is very much wants to be like Marie Antoinette. Last year, she spent £1m on a crystal bathtub sourced from the Amazon. From the AMAZON. Could you be any more of an fabulous colonialist when you send a batch of your minions to swoop into the Amazon and seize precious chunks of crystal just so you can bathe in them?! That is some impressive shit. More »

bradofarrell:

nigerianscams:

Lmfao Ray J is wild

She might move on to rappers and ballplayers
But we all know I hit it first.

I had her head going North and her ass going South
But now baby chose to go West

fuck

Ew, Jeremy Irons. Ew. Remember the other month when he waxed all creepy about how ladies should really just chill out and let men rub us on our bottoms whenever they feel like it? Well, now Monsieur Humbert is grappling with another social conundrum: Just what is up with gay guys!? Hold on to your butts (especially you, women, where Jeremy Irons can see)—it's about to get weird. More »

From Slice

Uh oh! Put down your Farm Rich Mini Pizza Slices and Stuffed Crust Pizza Dippers! And any of these other products. They're kind of gross (and you totally know it). Also, they may be contaminated with a rare, potentially lethal strain of E. coli.

NBC reports that a whopping 10 million pounds of Farm Rich and Market Day products have been recalled due to potential contamination. That's a big jump from their initial product recall last week, which accounted for fewer than 200,000 lbs.

Luckily, 'only' 3 million of those pounds have actually hit marketplaces—the rest are tucked away at the warehouse, where they can fester away in peace and quiet. So far, there have been 24 reported cases related to Rich's frozen snack products, spread across 15 states. Hopefully the recall will prevent any further incidences.

If you're concerned about a product you've purchased, you can view the full list on the Rich Products Corporation website.

About the author: Niki Achitoff-Gray is the editor of Slice and a part-time student at the Institute of Culinary Education. She's pretty big into pizza. Also, she likes offal. A lot.

Things stock photographs of scientists get right (sometimes): glassware, lab coats. Things stock photographs of scientists get wrong: pretty much everything else.

Chickens, face magnets, a complete lack of labcoats (and clothing, in general), lingerie, drinking concoctions from oversized snifters, etc. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Also hilarious. Jacks of Science has a very amusing roundup of stock images that pop up when you search stock photo sites for "experiments." Here are some of our favorites.

Former Baltimore Ravens linebacker and outspoken gay rights and marriage equality advocate Brendon Ayanbadejo announced on Thursday that he is "in talks with a handful of players" who are considering coming out together.

In an interview with the Baltimore Sun, the former Ravens linebacker said that the NFL may see its first openly gay player "sooner than you think," adding: "There are up to four players being talked to right now and they're trying to be organized so they can come out on the same day together. It would make a major splash and take the pressure off one guy. It would be a monumental day if a handful or a few guys come out."

Being the first male professional athletes to come out would be a historic distinction, but the decision has not come easy to the men he is in talks with, Ayanbadejo said:

Of course, there would be backlash. If they could share the backlash, it would be more positive. It's cool. It's exciting. We're in talks with a few guys who are considering it. The NFL and organizations are already being proactive and open if a player does it and if something negative happens. We'll see what happens.

Continue Reading...

Lol by: Unknown (via Tastefully Offensive)

Tagged: laser pointer , get it , Cats Share on Facebook

Grumpy Cat turns one today and she couldn't care less. Happy Birthday, Grumpy!

Lol by: Unknown (via Grumpycats)

Tagged: birthday , Grumpy Cat Share on Facebook

Unmarried couples who cohabitate are staying together longer than they used to, much to Patti Stanger and your grandma's dismay. According to the first federal data on the issue, out today, more of them are having children, too, even without paying a shit ton of money to walk down an aisle first. More »

A Fresno City College instructor and former city council member is on paid administrative leave after body-slamming a 5'1, 101-pound teenage student for telling him to "piss off, asshole." Based on the half-dozen students and substitute instructor who support the student's account of her attack, this guy should never teach or hold any position of power ever again. More »

From Drinks

[Photo: Liz Clayton]

If there's anything my morning or afternoon biscuit break's been missing it's a nice hot cup of pseudo-vegetable broth, and Numi tea has answered the unspoken (indeed, likely unconscious) prayers and fears of many (if any) with the introduction of their new line of, that's right, savory, vegetable-flavored, decaffeinated teas.

What's that you say? You've never thought of tea and soup as having such a fine line between the two? Guess again, as you, like us, become surprised at how not totally weird a cup of tomato-mint green tea can really be, in the right mindset.

Numi's 'Garden Sampler' box of savory teas (though you can buy the teas individually as well) contains a panoply of vegetable "tea" flavors: Carrot Curry, Spinach Chive, Broccoli Cilantro, Beet Cabbage, Fennel Spice and Tomato Mint. They're herbal infusions—just like the sicktime Lemon Ginger flavors you may favor—and despite the concept still feeling a bit shocking, still, this is less weird to me than pina colada flavored water.

Using decaffeinated black or green teas as the base, Numi claims these veggie infusions are "not quite a soup"; they're basically being sold as light soup alternatives. More than once the box refers to the infusions as a "snack" (have I ever eaten soup as a "snack"? Isn't that crackers' job?) as well as a "great companion to keep at your desk" (well, I have been lonely...) and a "savory way to mix up your tea routine". Yes! Let's mix it up! On with the mixing!

I started off with Fennel Spice, which seemed the least controversial flavor for early-morning um, snacking. Though it's easy to picture this being sweet, like other fennel teas, the ingredients in this particular tea are decidedly savory: dill, onion, celery root. It's light-drinking (despite the 10-minute steep time) and pleasant enough, its savory tones warming, even. But would they get weirder from here?

Yes. Beet-Cabbage. Looks like rooibos...tastes like...soup! I love beets passionately, and would do nearly anything for them, but mix them with cabbage and drink them is not one of them. In a possibly even more disturbing twist, there is a pronounced clove note in here. Let's move on.

Tomato Mint: Totally drinkable, pleasant and surprising. You like gazpacho, right? What if you accidentally let it warm up? Makes sense, right? Spinach Chive is also drinkable, but prominent onion flavors in my tea-snack will take time to come to terms with.

What else is in the box? Broccoli Cilantro: Cilantro's divisive enough if you don't put it in a broccoli tea infusion. This is a strong one, again heavy on the onion...and garlic!

Carrot Curry? Why yes, it is! My brain and my flavor-brain still hurt, but this one isn't too bad either. You could easily convince yourself it's medicinal and restorative, once you get past the drinking-curry-broth hurdle.

Overall, the execution's right: none of these herbal-vegetal infusions is played with too heavy a hand, and, in the right frame of mind, I could see them growing on the drinker with little hard work. Will it convert a person from soup? Or from tea, for that matter? As with many matters of drastic innovation, this one's too early to call. But for now, we'll be over here in the corner with our tomato-mint drink-snack, contemplating the future.

About the author: Liz Clayton drinks, photographs and writes about coffee and tea all over the world, though she pretends to live in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently compiling photographs of the best coffee in the world to be published by Presspop this spring.

Samples provided for review consideration.

In the April 4 “Doonan,” Simon Doonan wrote that the girlfriend of a Tallahassee, Fla., gunman forgave him from her deathbed for shooting her in the head. According to the New York Times, the father of the woman only “felt” her speak of forgiveness.

From Chicago

Save stomach space for meals at Mabenka Restaurant & Banquets in Burbank—you'll need it for the combo plate. [Photographs: Jennifer Olvera]

"Rib-sticking" only hints at what's in store at Mabenka Restaurant & Banquets in south suburban Burbank, a bustling Polish and Lithuanian diner serving its whole, heaping, heartwarming menu morning through night. 

It's a worthy destination for many reasons, but none more indisputable than its golden-crusted potato pancakes ($7.25). Shatteringly crisp on the outside, they're light and creamy inside—all without a hint of excess grease. Slather them with full-fat sour cream and sweet applesauce for the full experience.

Better yet, get them as part of the create-your-own combination plate ($12.25 for three selections), pairing them with comforting Lithuanian sausage and lightly smoky Polish sausage.

 

Consider, too, its heaven-sent pierogi ($7.95). The plush, doughy pillows come with a dozen per order. They're stuffed with a choice of seven fillings, from saurkraut and mushroom to fruit or sweet cheese. Go the savory route and get them sidled by crispy nubs of bacon and sour cream. The potato and cheese are tasty, but the unidentified, sausage-like "meat" filling wins best of show.

All entrees come with coffee and bread, including a sweet, fruit-specked varietal. Some entrees also include a side, like sauerkraut, though you can substitute kugelis, bread dumplings, or potato pancakes for $1.50 more.

While you wait, pass the time over a bowl—not a cup, a bowl—of soup. Yes, it's included as well. The house-made, noodle-like dumping is a find. Served in simple chicken broth with a sprinkle of parsley, these dumplings are the stuff of childhood dreams.

Mabenka Restaurant & Banquets

7844 S. Cicero Ave., Burbank, IL 60459 (map)
708-423-7679
mabenka.com/mabenka.com

About the author: Jennifer Olvera is a veteran food and travel writer and author of "Food Lovers' Guide to Chicago." Follow her on Twitter @olverajennifer.

Two men who police said were arrested with Samurai swords outside the home of British singer-songwriter Joss Stone in 2011 were found guilty in an English court Wednesday of plotting to murder and rob her.

More »

Here’s what you need to know about the Rhode Island Rumford Hunting and Fishing Club’s annual meat feast: it’s not for outsiders. This manbash is for swinging dicks. It’s for straight white men with beards and guns and shirts that read "PETA: People for the Equal Treatment of Tasty Animals." It’s for men who wear backward baseball caps with polarized Oakleys resting on the bill, like they’re watching you, and the rest of this country, with the eyes in the backs of their heads.

It’s also not what you think. This particular gun club, which was founded in the 40s, has been doing the game-dinner fundraiser for 30 years. Among other outdoorsy items, they raffle off rifles, guitars, and kayaks. But the main attraction is the feast—for 30 bucks, you can sidle up beside a bearded, suspendered man and dig into 150 pounds of venison, or 120 pounds of goose, shot by one of the fellows themselves (plus 100 pounds of store-bought rabbit, for good measure). The profits go to cancer programs, food banks, and scholarship funds, but most definitely not to PETA, and of course not to anybody interested in infringing on the Second Amendment. They are interested in “lobbying to protect the gun rights of Rhode Island residents,” according to their website, which features plenty of cheery photos of strung-up deer carcasses and animated geese flying serenely over their lifeless bodies.

My friends seemed a little alarmed when I first scored a ticket to the meat dinner, though it was never clear if that’s because I am a slim, bespectacled man or a transsexual one. But as a masculinity expert, I can’t pass up the chance to embed in the dark, hairy, grunting underbelly of the type of man who kills for sport.

I was invited to the dinner by a literature professor with whom I have a mutual friend. “Those guys will probably talk to you,” he told me nerdily, “as long as you agree to hate Obama.” The professor, like the hunters, does not know I am a transsexual man, but it’s pretty safe to assume the entire room would think I was a gay one. Just that morning, I had a confusing encounter with a middle-aged Rhode Island wise guy with a big gut and a cigar outside a coffee shop in Providence. He’d leaned into my car chummily and asked a series of strange questions I tried to field politely, until I realized what he was getting at. “My wife,” I began, and—as if I’d broken a magic gay spell—he disappeared with a wave of his jewel-encrusted pinkie ring.

So I’m a guy with a precise haircut and fitted jeans, a guy who happens to not have a dick to swing. I’d learned long ago that the scarier the stereotype, the more likely the dude would be cool. I’ve spent an eternity in a men’s-room stall at a truckstop in southern Maine, scared shitless by the boots of dudes who seemed to be waiting for me, only to discover that they were patiently standing guard over their children in the stalls on either side. I’ve read about that gang of bikers that escorts children who’ve been abused to and from court hearings, just to help them feel safer.

I’m not easily threatened—not anymore, anyway. I’m a man who wants to believe in other men. The truth is, some of my favorite interactions over the last two years, as I’ve become more comfortable in my squarer, scruffier body, have been with men’s men. I’ve sparred with bros at boxing gyms and sat in comfortable silence with old-school barbers. My pug-like boxing coach calls all of us, very homosexually, “baby,” and does not mean it homosexually.

So, my in was a buddy’s buddy, and it turns out he’s been going to this meat market (I couldn’t help myself) for years. He’s not a hunter, but he worked in a kitchen a while back with one of them, a nice guy who invites the professor and his Game of Thrones friends to the big event every spring. I don’t want to screw up his chance to gorge on deer and goose and rabbit until he can’t shit for days with too many descriptors, but let’s say Professor looks like he’d be way more at home at a cosplay convention than a duck hunt.

I parked my hatchback among the muddied pickups and tried not to pay much mind to the strung-out Easy Rider guys with the hairy eyeballs.

“These are proper men,” the professor’s friend said once we were inside and seated among the utilitarian plastic tables. The point was to eat, to help the kids with cancer, and to enjoy some Budweiser and manly spoils.

The guy looked nervous. I’ve often wondered about the phrase “real men,” the strange, implied binary of it, but I could see its origins here. He realizes he doesn’t pass, I thought. His masculinity is invisible here.

“I couldn't kill anything,” one of the guys at our table said proudly, as if announcing a tribal affiliation. He shoveled steaming venison chili into his mouth. “Not a hornet, not a deer, not a child.”

“I think I should be able to kill whatever I eat,” I offered, though I’m not sure I could, and that niggles at me—not because it’s not masculine, but because it’s cowardly.  

The guy leaned forward confidentially. “Sometimes I think I'd kill a deer and get blood lust,” he said. “And maybe I’d never stop.”

As I considered that, Professor’s hunt-club buddy swung by with extra sausages (yes) and told us a long, harrowingly graphic story about chasing a wounded deer for so many hours that when he eventually found it, he was so mad he slit its throat.

A silence descended over the table. The day before, over breakfast, a friend told me he’d killed a rabbit with his BB gun when he was a kid. He’d left it in the woods, shocked at himself but determined to pretend it never happened. At dinner he was too overcome by guilt to eat, and it only took one “What’s wrong?” from him mom to bring him to tears.

His wife said the same thing happened to her little brother. “I wonder if all boys have that moment,” she said.

I didn’t have a boyhood, so I couldn’t say. I know the man who raised me loved a shotgun, knew it was the only memento he had from his childhood hunting game in the backwoods of South Carolina. He was a violent man who felt powerless, a straight, white man who hadn’t inherited the earth.

“Are you afraid of these guys?” one of the nerdy professor's friends asked. She was one of the only women in the room. I’m not, I wasn’t, but I knew what she meant. I knew I didn’t pass as one of them and that I never would. I knew that the crucible of the “sensitive man” is made here, among fathers and brothers and classmates much like these guys, and that the challenge for men like me was to learn to respect them and help hasten their decline simultaneously.

The friendly throat-slitter showed back up with some Styrofoam containers like a mom sending us on our way. We piled in the goose stew and the venison cutlets as he regaled us with a final story, a manly parable.  

So there was this rogue cow last summer that escaped a ranch and barreled through backyards and golf courses around our guy’s land. The cow’s rancher gave the town permission to shoot it on sight, so our trigger-happy host went out one mosquito-thick night with his shotgun and got it done. “Perfect shot,” he said, with pleasure, “right between the eyes. But then I’m looking at 1,400 pounds of steer and thinking, What the fuck am I going to do with this?”

So he called his buddy, and they loaded the cow up somehow on the flatbed of a truck. Then the story took a pretty gross turn involving carving knives and a bone saw and so many mosquitoes.  His butcher friend finally agreed to help him cut up the cow, but he told him to keep it in a storage fridge for a few days, some sort of safety protocol. So our hero did as he was told, but when he went back to check on the meat a week later, it had gone to rot.

“Imagine that,” he said, “1,400 pounds of steer, wasted!”

“So what happened to the cow?” someone asked.

He ignored us, his mind back to that buggy day. “That was a perfect shot,” he repeated.

We all smiled indulgently at each other, and I got it. His point was that none of us would’ve done that dirty work; we’d not bloody our hands, not bonesaw a corpse; hell, we’d not have the balls to kill that cow in the first place.

The moral, for all of us, was that he was right.

Previously by Thomas Page McBee - I Am a Masculinity Expert

@ThomasPageMcBee

A video released by ESPN shows Rutgers University's head basketball coach shoving players, kicking them, hurling balls at their heads and yelling what appears to be homophobic slurs and profanity.

In the first three months of 2013, the city recorded 70 homicides, down from 120 homicides in the same span of 2012. [ more › ]

VIEW SLIDESHOW: The Food Lab: The Crabbiest Crab Cakes

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

It's time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he'll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook or follow it on Twitter for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments.

After only two months on the wagon, my wife has renounced her once purely vegetarian ways. The food that made her come back to the sentient side of the food chain? Crab cakes.

Now before I go on, I trust that you Serious Eaters will not be giving my wife any lip about a lack of will power. I don't want anyone asking her how the desire for tasty crustacean comestibles somehow trumped her health and ethics, or asking her if there are any other promises she's made that she plans on breaking in the future. We'll have none of that, ok?

Thing is, I don't blame her. I love crab with an undying passion. Sweet and tender, with the aroma of the ocean and a tenderness that lobster only aspires to. And in cake form—warm and tender with a buttery aroma and just a touch of tartar sauce, it's even better. At least, is should be better.

The sad truth is that most crab cakes stink. Literally. The vast majority out there are made with canned, pasteurized crab meat which instantly takes them out of "sweet and succulent" territory and into "fishy and please god take that smell away from me" land.

Then we've got those crab cakes that are more cake than crab, packed with pasty binders and bland fillers. Or you may run into the kind that's so heavily coated in bread crumbs that they may as well be called vaguely-crab-scented-croquettes.

If my wife is going to break her vows, it had damn well better be for the best possible crab cakes out there. I made it my mission to make them.

Getting Good Crab

The first problem with most crab cakes is the crab itself. It's easy to find picked blue crab meat (the only crab variety for crab cakes!) in pasteurized tubs, but the stuff is fishy smelling, wet, and already overcooked. Without good crab to start with, you can't make good crab cakes.

What you want to look for is fresh-picked lump or jumbo lump crab meat. Crab season on the eastern seaboard runs from spring through late fall, and on-season, it's relatively easy to find crab at a good seafood retailer, or to order it online from a number of sources. Off season, it's not quite so easy, but a good retailer should be able to order you some from South American sources.

Your best bet? Just hope that you don't get a hankering for crab cakes in the off season.

Binder Blues

Tackling the issue of binders in crab cakes is not easy. Unlike, say, ground beef, fresh-picked crab meat does not want to bind with itself. You can rub it and knead it and press it together all you want and all you've succeeded in doing is turning it into pasty mush that still doesn't want to stick together. What you need is some form of un-coagulated protein to make every stick together. The classic choice is egg, which not only adds protein, but also adds moisture and some degree of leavening power.

But a simple egg and crab mixture is impossible loose, nearly impossible to form into cakes that stay in shape—they simply sag and spread out like a deflated jellyfish.

Saggy cake

In order to solve this problem you generally add some sort of starch binder. The more of these binders you add, the easier it is to form cakes and maneuver them in a pan, but the worse the finished texture of the dish.

Low-binder crab cakes easily fall apart.

Binders are usually applied in one of two methods. The first is to add eggs and flour along with some mayonnaise creating an almost batter-like consistency. The mayonnaise adds fat to the lean crab meat, as well as a bit of acidic tang.

Crab Batter

As the cakes cook, the batter sets up, while the eggs help leaven it slightly. You end up with a crab cake that is vaguely pancake or fritter-like in texture. Not terrible, but not what I'm going for.

Alternatively, you can add eggs and breadcrumbs in some form, whether they're regular or panko breadcrumbs, or crushed up saltines or oyster crackers.

Crab Paste

This method is preferable to me, as the breadcrumbs create a more irregular texture in the cake, as well as adding some level of flavor on their own, but even better would be to be able to go with no extra starchy binders at all.

Eliminating starchy binders and instead going with a strict egg-and-mayo base can work if you're willing to have your cakes look more like lumps and if you're ok with only broiling them as opposed to sauteeing in butter. It's better than no solution, but still I think we can do better than compromise.

The Freezer Aisle

Back when I worked at Toro, a Spanish tapas restaurant in Boston (and soon to be New York), I learned a neat little trick for making cod croquettes with impossibly tender innards: Make a very soft, barely-bound filling, then partially freeze it before coating in bread crumbs and frying. The crumbs form a seal that keep the filling from falling apart as they fry, resulting in a croquette with a crisp exterior and interior that literally melts in your mouth.

Would a similar technique work for my crab cakes?

Pasty Patties

I tried it, forming patties bound with just a touch of mayo and an egg, freezing them, then breading them and shallow frying in some butter and oil in a cast iron skillet.

The crab cakes were great—the best yet—but the thick coating of bread crumbs was distracting. For my next attempt, I made a new set of patties, this time shaping them into neater, tighter cakes by forming them inside ring molds (I also tried forming them in rings made of aluminum foil, which worked just as well) before freezing them.

After frozen, I popped them out and breaded just one side in bread crumbs. That way, I figured, I'd get the best of both worlds: the bread crumbs will add some crunch and keep the cake from completely falling apart as it cooks, while the rest of the cake will be naked crab.

Frozen Fun

Everything seemed to be going fine as I slipped the breaded cakes into the skillet bread-side-down, but as they slowly thawed, they gradually fell apart. I was left with lose crab meat sauteed in butter along with an intact disk of fried breadcrumbs. I tossed it with pasta and called it dinner, then got back to work.

My final plan: Why bother removing the aluminum foil rings from the cakes after freezing them? I made a new batch of crab mixture, froze it in foil rings, then breaded one side of the cakes without removing the foil before slipping it into the hot butter in the skillet.

Only after the crab cakes cooked long enough to hold themselves together did I then carefully peel off the foil. I held my breath as I watched them cook, then mentally* high-fived myself when they did.

Foiled Again!

That is, they did until I tried to flip them. Even with a gentle metal fish spatula, turning them without breaking them apart turned out to be a tough task. Not impossible, but tough.

*ok, physically

Butter Up!

The solution turned out to be using a hybrid cooking method: Starting the crab cakes in a hot skillet with butter to crisp up the bread crumb layer, carefully peeling off the foil, then spooning some of the browned butter over the top of the crab cakes to lubricate them and baste them before popping the whole thing under the broiler.

Golden Delicious

With the aid of the browned butter, the broiled side of the crab cakes brown beautifully, while the bread crumb layer gets ultra-crisp as it continues to cook as the tops brown.

Crisp and Crunchy

The cakes that emerge from the oven are everything I want in a crab cake. A crisp, golden layer of crunch that doesn't overwhelm the crab underneath, and a crab filling that is really made of crab—absolutely no starchy fillers at all. All of this with the buttery, golden crust you get from the best naked-pan-fried crab cakes.

One Last Trick

The only issue with the recipe is that if you plan on making more than a few cakes, it can be a bit tedious to for all of the little foil rings and stuff them with crab. Mush more efficient is to use the method that Heston Blumenthal uses to form his hamburger patties: Form the crab mixture into a large log wrapped in aluminum foil, partially freeze the whole thing, then slice it into disks with a knife.

Slice'em All

After slicing, the disks stay nicely intact with perfectly fitted foil liners, ready to bread and fry.

Nothin' but Crab

Crab cakes good enough to at least tempt the staunchest of vegetarians and meatatarians alike.

And what's that you say? You've never had Eggs Chesapeake?

Crabs Hollandaise

In that case, may I suggest that you get your butt into the kitchen immediately and find a solution for that problem? Here's a foolproof way to poach eggs to get you started.

What are you waiting for? I said go!

Get The Recipe!

Get the recipe for The Crabbiest Crab Cakes here »
See a full step-by-step slideshow here »

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

Every recipe we publish is tested, tasted, and Serious Eats-approved by our staff. Never miss a recipe again by following @SeriousRecipes on Twitter!

Get the Recipe!

On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal published a controversial op-ed from Pittsburgh high school senior Suzy Lee Weiss, who was very annoyed she had not been accepted into her dream college, even though she had wanted to be accepted into her dream college. More »

If you’re undecided about how to take your eggs this morning, the decision just got made a bit easier. Scrambled Hard Boiled Eggs combine a few different techniques. First, scrambled….The preferred method of the boring and lazy. And hard-boiled… For those who need their eggs stinky and portable.

The result is a scrambled, stinky, egg on-the-go. And it’s all yellow, so you can really freak your friends out. Please watch this…

[link, via Gizmodo]

Justin Bieber has been a household name since before he was old enough to drive. We listened as his voice changed and watched him trade in his purple hoodies and signature swoopy hair for low-riding pants and a more voluminous 'do.

Squee! Spotter: Unknown (via The Frogman)

Tagged: easter , bunnies , happy Share on Facebook

As Christians mark Easter weekend, what may be the most famous religious relic of them all, the Turin Shroud, will make a rare TV appearance.

The newest trailer for Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby is out and it promises more of the same — which is to say absolute art deco gorgeousness from beginning to end. Break out your jeweled headbands and dust off those old bottles of champagne, baby. May 10th is right around the corner and we're headed to petting pantry! More »

From Drinks

[Photograph: Clay Larsen]

Big is beautiful, right? Oversized margaritas, yard-long beers, shots the size of punch bowls? If you went large last night, chances are you're going to need a morning-after breakfast that's just as bulky. Bar Amá, the dinky downtown TexMex space that's helping to expand the chef Josef Centeno empire one puffy taco at a time, is just the place for you. You may have to request a four-top table to squeeze in you and your outsized hangover, but there's one breakfast item on the menu that will make you shudder in its shadow: the sausage breakfast taco.

Make no mistake, this thing is a monster, and not in that lurching, slow-moving way. The sausage breakfast taco is a Danny Boyle-style zombie, in your face and unexpected. It may not conform to traditional expectations of what a breakfast taco should be, but this is a new time we're living in, folks.

There's a lot to love about the sausage breakfast taco ($6), that's for sure. This thing is curvy, a half moon of thick hand-patted tortilla, blistered and spotty in all the right places. Instead of trying to button itself up inside the weighty tortilla, this chunky concoction spills hefty yellow nuggets of softly scrambled egg all over the place. You can't stop the breakfast taco; you can't even contain it.

Scrambled in with the egg is a small farm of meat, dairy and vegetables. Warming red salsa, fistfuls of melty cheese and a patch full of shredded lettuce give the pretense of a balanced meal, but that's about it. You'll also find chef Centeno's breakfast sausage tucked under the hood, a snappy series of well-seasoned pork bites that are pressed to the point of almost resembling a kielbasa.

Good luck picking this taco up off the plate. The tortilla is warm and pliable, but that certainly doesn't mean it's sturdy. Instead, go big with a knife and fork. Or, if you're feeling contrarian, shrug off the haters and dive in with two hands to feed your hangover beast. There's nothing subtle about your $6 breakfast taco, so why stop now?

One taco should be more than enough to satisfy a normal human, but ordering up two wouldn't break your weakened bank account and might help you sleep off your hangover for oh, say the next six months. No matter how many tacos you choose to order, or what your method of getting said taco(s) into your face is, you'll be sure to find a smile etched on your lips in no time. A wide grin, falling off the edges of your cheeks like a half-moon tortilla. After all, bigger is better these days.

Bar Amá

118 West 4th Street, Downtown Los Angeles 90013 (map) bar-ama.com

A Sheriff's Office in Florida recently learned that a phone number it has been handing out to victims of domestic violence and sexual assault actually leads to a phone sex line. More »

As Christians worldwide prepare for Easter, a time of reflection on Jesus’ death and a celebration of his resurrection, many seem to be looking forward as well.

The next time you chop up a head of romaine lettuce for salad, hang on to the very bottom. The "heart" can be placed in a pan of water and with a little time, will eventually sprout a whole new head of lettuce, ready to harvest, eat, and repeat the process. More »