pileofcrapola

To save money at the supermarket, you don’t have to spend hours clipping or printing coupons, then loading your cart with as many free items as possible. You’re liable to end up with a year’s worth of mustard, Gatorade, or Hamburger Helper—but nothing substantial to eat for dinner.

Heather Clarke, the owner of QueenBeeCoupons.com, promotes a more sensible approach. She shares her secrets with ShopSmart for saving money at the grocery store and using free coupons wisely.

Find the best deals on groceries. “I have my favorite stores, but I’m not store- or brand-loyal. I’m driven by where the best prices are for things I want for that week,” Clarke says. She checks her weekly newspaper circulars and posts the best deals from all of the grocery stores in her area on her blog. “I’ll start with that sale list, gather up my coupons and head to the store,” she says. To get the biggest savings, “I like to wait for the perfect storm: a sale, a manufacturer’s coupon or store coupon, and maybe a rebate,” Clarke says.

Save big on cosmetics. Using this tactic is especially useful with toiletries and beauty products, which tend to have high-value coupons and big promotions. “Avoid any splurge or impulse purchases,” Clarke says. “Get your deals and get out. The longer you’re in the store, the more you’ll spend,” she says.

Convert deals to meals. As you’re making your weekly grocery list, have an idea of where those foods will fit into your meal plan. Every Sunday, Clarke posts a weekly meal plan online to help readers turn deals into meals. “Meal planning is a huge part of saving money,” she says.

If it’s not on sale, don’t buy it. Pay full price for food? Never. “I only buy what’s on sale every week,” Clarke says. Deals have 12-week cycles, so if your favorite cereal, for example, isn’t on sale this week, wait until it is and stock up on it at the rock bottom price,” she says. Your cheapie food stash can save you cash over the long run. But it’s a gradual process.

“It takes about three months to build up that stockpile,” Clarke says. The gist? If your family is big on, say--tacos, you might buy flour tortillas on sale one week for $1, and purchase ground beef another week when it’s on sale. That’s how you can make a taco meal for your family for $5, Clarke says. Your stockpile can also tide you over between sales. “Some weeks, the deals just aren’t great and instead of paying full price at the grocery store, just eat from you stockpile and pick up some fresh items,” Clarke says, buying produce that’s in season or on sale, of course.

Using grocery coupons enabled Clarke to quit her job after her first child was born six years ago. “We cut our income by 60 percent,” she says. She now has a 3-year-old daughter, too. “You have to make sacrifices with couponing, but we never feel like we do without. And when we want things that are more meaningful to us as a family, like travel, we can focus on putting our money there,” she says.

Unless you live in a city with really fantastic public transportation, you probably spend a good amount of time in your vehicle. Why not spruce it up a bit and make it more enjoyable? Here are some of our favorite tricks and upgrades to make driving extra awesome.

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Drug stores are everywhere, and the biggest among them want you to stop in for everyday goods like food, gifts, household products, and more. However, not everything inside is a worthwhile buy. Marketwatch looked into it, and found a number of things—including prescription drugs—are just cheaper elsewhere.

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Who's your best friend? This guy!

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Laser printers used to be expensive, but now you can pick them up for the same price as a low-end inkjet. On top of that, you rarely have to replace toner and even the low-to-mid-range models come with nice features like Wi-Fi and duplex printing. But you can print vibrant color on a monotone laser printer, which means no photos and a variety of other creative projects. So which do you prefer? Which is the better buy? Or have you moved past printing altogether?

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Everybody hits creative roadblocks throughout the day. Over on LinkedIn, IDEO CEO Tim Brown suggests you start just drawing ideas out to see what happens.

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When your phone runs out of battery, it helps to have a good external battery around for charging it. But then, eventually, you have to charge that external battery as well and your phone separately. Solar batteries can remove one plug from that equation by harnessing the power of the sun. The Poweradd Apollo does that on the cheap.

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Flu season is in full swing, and whether you're battling a sickness or trying to prevent it, here are a few things you can do to get through it like a champ.

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Chrome/Firefox: Ever hate how when you first open a GIF, it loads super slowly with choppy animation? It kind of ruins the GIF experience. But GIF Delayer is an easy fix that stops the animation from playing till the image is completely loaded.

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We know that millions of pounds of beef that came through a California slaughterhouse and meat processing plant have been recalled because the plant “processed diseased and unsound animals.” Well, okay, but what does that mean? We don’t know that for sure yet, but the Village Voice talked to one rancher whose entire 2013 output is part of that massive recall.

Hannah Palmer Egan wanted to know: what “disease” did those animals have? What, exactly, made them unfit for human consumption?

Bill Niman of BN Ranch used the plant, Rancho Feeding Corp., for the slaughter of his cattle, and has spoken to other local people in the industry. He points out that Rancho happens to process retired dairy cows, which tend to be older and thus sicker than the relative youngsters raised for meat. One disease that’s obvious to inspectors and should be obvious to farmers is ocular squamous cell carcinoma. Simply put: cancer eye. (Click here for pictures, but don’t say you weren’t warned. You’ll see why these tumors should be obvious to farmers before they send the cows for slaughter.)

This cancer exists in a variety of animals–people get it, too–but is common in certain breeds of cattle for some reason that farmers would really, really like to figure out and prevent.

Niman wonders whether dairy farmers sent over cows with cancer eye, and the proper procedure wasn’t followed. A USDA veterinarian is supposed to check whether the cancer has spread and how far, and determine whether the cancer-free parts of the cow’s body can still be butchered and sold. A longtime USDA inspector told Egan that if the process isn’t followed precisely, that renders the whole carcass “unfit for human consumption.”

Other experts–who, for transparency’s sake, are small-scale butchers and farmers–point out that while the huge recall figures make us picture Dumpsters full of beef heading for the incinerator, most of the meat in these recalls has already been distributed and won’t be recovered.

The “disease” could be ocular cancer, or could be something else. We don’t know, because the USDA won’t elaborate yet, Rancho’s lawyers quite understandably won’t let employees talk to the media.

The recall probably won’t hurt Nestlé so much in the long run, but Niman says that losing all of his 2013 beef could destroy his business. Rancho handled slaughter for many small-scale meat producers in the Bay Area, who will have to haul their animals to more distant slaughterhouses if the facility shuts down.

Rancho Feeding Recall: Why Sick Dairy Cows Might Be to Blame [The Village Voice]

How many times do we have to go over this? When someone enters a business with a dog and says, “This is my service dog,” the correct answer is not “You aren’t blind!” Yet a Texas Marine veteran says that he was asked to leave a restaurant because he brought his service dog in training into the establishment.

By federal government definition, a service animal can only be a dog (although guide horses are a thing) and the animal has to perform a physical function, not just provide emotional support. Some services are highly specialized and dogs train in puppyhood. Others, like supporting and redirecting a person with post-traumatic stress disorder, are things that a dog can be trained to do later in life. People can train their own dog if they have one, or adopt one from a shelter.

The dog’s breed or size isn’t important, which seems to lead to much of the confusion in these cases. PTSD dogs aren’t necessarily the familiar German Shepherd Dog or Golden or Labrador retrievers that work as guide dogs that most people are used to. They can be teeny terriers or muscular pit bulls, but they’re all able to behave themselves in public. In this case in Texas, the service dog is a Doberman, and is still in training.

His owner is a Marine veteran who served in the Gulf War, and says that the dog helps him to go out in public in spite of his post-traumatic stress disorder. (Many of the news stories about incidents like this feature combat veterans, but civilians can experience severe PTSD and benefit from service dogs, too.)

The Marine says that at the restaurant, a man emerged from a back office and kept asking whether he could see. He was then asked to leave because of his “attitude.”

If a person enters your establishment with a service dog, you can ask what task the dog performs for the person. You cannot ask what the person’s disability is, or why they require a service dog.

ADA Requirements: Service Animals
Restaurant refuses to seat Marine veteran because of his service-dog-in-training [Marine Times]

General Motors recently recalled nearly 800,000 vehicles over concerns about possible ignition switch failures; a defect that may have resulted in multiple deaths. But a recently discovered report shows that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was informed about the possibility of a problem back in 2007.

The New York Times has a copy of a crash report filed in 2007 by a NHTSA investigator tasked with looking into the cause of a crash that took the lives of two teenagers in a 2005 Chevy Cobalt.

In the accident, the Cobalt ran off the road and into a clump of trees. Both the driver’s and passenger’s seat airbags failed to deploy “as a result of the impact with the clump of trees, possibly due to the yielding nature of the tree impact or power loss due to movement of the ignition switch just prior to the impact,” explains the investigator in the report [PDF]. The passenger was killed in the accident and a second passenger in the back seat of the vehicle during the crash later died at the hospital.

The investigator’s hypothesis is in line with GM’s recent explanation for the mass recall, which stated that the use of heavy key rings could cause the cars to turn off and thus prevent airbags from deploying.

As part of the report, the investigator looked at information stored on the Cobalt’s Event Data Recorder (aka EDR or “black box”) that keeps track of the vehicle’s various systems while in operation.

When the investigator got to the time of the actual accident, the information on the EDR “indicated that the vehicle power mode status was recorded as ‘accessory,’” indicating that the ignition switch was not in the “on” position at the time of final impact. “It is possible the ignition switch could have been knocked to the ‘accessory’ position by the driver’s leg or knee at the time of the vault. This investigation revealed that inadvertent contact with the ignition switch or a keychain in the 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt can in fact result in engine shut-down and loss of power.” (bolded for emphasis)

To back up this statement, the investigator cited and attached an existing GM service bulletin from 2005 titled, “Information on Inadvertent Turning of the Key Cylinder, Loss of Electrical System.”

“The bulletin indicates that there is a potential for the driver to inadvertently turn off the ignition due to low ignition key cylinder torque/effort,” reads the 2007 report. “The bulletin indicated this was more likely to occur if the driver is short and has a large and/or heavy key chain attached to the ignition key. The bulletin indicated the condition was documented to occur when a driver’s knee contacted a key chain while the vehicle was turning and the steering column was adjusted all the way down.”

Additionally, the investigator says that a search of the NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation “revealed at least six complaints… relating to the engine shutting off and loss of power in Chevrolet Cobalts when the ignition switch or key chain was contacted by the driver.”

While the report cautiously admits that none of this is conclusive evidence that the keychain or some incidental contact with the ignition switch resulted in the airbags failing to deploy, a safety consultant who formerly worked as NHTSA’s senior enforcement lawyer tells the Times that the report “should have raised all kinds of red flags… It seems pretty poor that they didn’t put two and two together.”

For its part, NHTSA responds that “The special crash investigation report did not determine the cause for the air bag nondeployment or that the failure to deploy was the result of a vehicle design defect or noncompliance with federal motor vehicle regulations.”

Former NHTSA chief Joan Claybrook says that the purpose of crash investigations and reports isn’t to determine whether there is a defective part in a vehicle, but to provide information up the food chain so that others can digest the data and decide how to act.

Claybrook, who ran the agency in the late ’70s and early ’80s, says that a well-researched and detailed report like the one involving the Cobalt crash should have been a “gift” to NHTSA, but that it looks like this wealth of information “fell into a deep hole… It is outrageous that they did nothing.”

Once again, someone is amazed (astounded! mind-blown!) by the fact that a McDonald’s Happy Meal, if left untouched and exposed to the air for a few years, will not rot or become overrun with mold. This time, it’s a chiropractor in Nebraska who thinks that displaying an ancient cheeseburger and fries in his office will help convince people that fast food is bad for them. Except he’s wrong, at least about why the Happy Meal still looks recognizable after all this time.

“We have it on a glass platter so everyone can see it,” the chiropractor tells Omaha.com. “Its been exposed to the air, and it’s still intact. There are so many preservatives in these processed foods that it will never mold.”

Never? Ever? Shocking!

We’ve covered these “oh my gawd, McDonald’s doesn’t rot!” claims before, and everything we’ve learned over the years is that the intact appearance of ancient fast food burgers isn’t the result of some miraculous anti-rotting preservative or food chemistry voodoo, but the shape and size of the food, along with how it’s stored.

See, the mere passage of time doesn’t cause old food to rot and grow mold. For that, you need to throw in bacteria, spores… and perhaps most importantly, moisture.

Each of the food components in a Happy Meal — the beef patty, the fries, the bun — are reasonably dry to begin with, and they all have a lot of surface area through which any remaining moisture can evaporate.

If you then keep these same items in a dry area and away from creatures (including humans) that might try to eat them, chances are they will just keep on being dried-out versions of the foods they once were.

People expect the bread to get moldy because they have probably seen countless old half-finished loaves of sliced bread turn green in the bag. But that plastic bag is probably keeping moisture inside the slices, allowing for mold to grow. Put a hamburger bun in the open air for a few weeks and you could end up with a bread hockey puck that is inedible but which isn’t overrun by fuzzy mold.

Back in 2010, the folks at SeriousEats put several burger-related hypotheses to the test by allowing both McDonald’s burgers and homemade burgers age under various conditions — stored on a plate in the open air, no wrapper; homemade bun; toasted bun; stored in the fast food wrapper; no salt added; etc. — and spent 25 days monitoring the sandwiches for rot and mold growth.

None of the beef patties turned rotten during this time period. Some of the larger burgers showed evidence of mold growth on the patty, but the smaller patty — the kind you’d see in a Happy Meal — did not grow mold because it dried out much faster than the larger patties.

In fact, the only way the SeriousEats testers could get the burgers to grow mold like one would expect was to store them in plastic sandwich bags. That resulted in moldy buns after about a week.

NBC, the TV network with the exclusive rights to air the Olympics in the United States until about 500 years past Ragnarok, has a secret weapon as they cover the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. That amazing secret is a secret, free, staff-only Starbucks.

Here’s the thing with coffee at the Olympics: since McDonald’s is a sponsor, they’re the only company allowed to sell cups of coffee. McDonald’s coffee is nice and all, but it’s not the same if you’re an espresso addict. So we hear.

The mysterious Starbucks is deep inside NBC’s offices in Sochi. At the beginning, NBC employees (there are 2,500 of ‘em in Sochi) were able to smuggle drinks out to their friends who work for other media outlets. NBC set up the coffee stand, flying in baristas from the new Starbucks outlets in Russia, all of which are hundreds of miles away from Sochi. They could freely carry their green-and-white cups around the area, inspiring envy. Then it all stopped. Well, the coffee kept coming, but the Starbucks went on lockdown.

Was there some kind of terrorist threat? No. lockdown is to protect the rest of Sochi from learning that there’s a Starbucks at all. After the Wall Street Journal published an article about the secret shop, though, baristas began to crack down on coffee for others…and coffee smuggled out of the NBCplex for non-employees. The Wall Street Journal stuck with this story, letting the world know that customers were no longer allowed to take their cups out of the Starbucks area, and baristas ordered them to either consume their drinks on the premises or pour them out. Harsh.

Now employees who want their drinks to go can walk around with them in a more generic cup: the coffee clearly isn’t from McDonald’s, but not advertising Starbucks, either.

Here’s a picture from inside the Starbucks, original source unknown:

NBC’s ‘Secret’ Starbucks Goes on Lockdown [WSJ]

While going about my daily rounds on the Internet, there are constantly new and surprising little tidbits popping up, usually unrelated. Which is why it’s kind of nutty to hear that two separate car theft cold cases have suddenly been solved this week, decades after the cars were stolen, with both vehicles reappearing far from home.

The car version of Homeward Bound stars not fuzzy little pets wending their way across the great American countryside, but a 1957 Chevrolet and a 1965 VW Beetle.

First, Sir Beetle The Lost: This 1965 Volkswagen was reported stolen from Tennessee in the 1970s, reports ClickOnDetroit.com, and has shown up now in — you got it — Detroit. Because the source link, see?

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said officers in that city were checking documents on the car while it was being shipped from Michigan to Finland, and realized it had been reported stolen in 1974.

“Part of safeguarding our nation is to make sure that all exports are legitimate and lawful,” said Acting Port Director Marty Raybon. “Recovering a vehicle reported stolen 40 years ago is a testament to the vigilance and attention to detail on the part of CBP.”

The car and its parts for restoration have been seized by CBP, and it’s unclear if anyone is in hot water for this 40-year-old crime.

Then there’s Mr. “I Once Was Lost But Now I’m Found” Chevy: This 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air has a history of being pilfered, reports the Santa Rosa Press Democrat — it was stolen twice in the early 1980s and is one of the most droolworthy cars among collectors.

This week, after 30 years away and four other owners, it’s finally home in Northern California after being rescued from a container bound for Australia. And as a bonus, it’s been fully restored since the last time it was stolen in 1984.

“Somebody put a whole lot of work and money into that car,” the owner, its owner, a 65-year-old told the paper. “It was all disassembled and put back.”

The California Highway Patrol notified the man a few weeks ago that U.S. Customs inspectors had found the hot wheels at the Port of Los Angeles, bound for Down Under.

And oddly enough, its vehicle identification number was on file with the National Insurance Crime Bureau, so it’s mystifying how the Department of Motor Vehicles has allowed it to be passed from one owner to another without any red flags being raised. The CHP says it’d been through four owners during its time away.

The owner said he’d long given up being reunited with his vehicle — he couldn’t spot a mid-50s Bel Air on the road without wincing, the Press Democrat says.

But it sounds like having it back in all its newly-restored glory is going a long way to ease that past pain.

“There’s all kinds of chrome added under the hood,” he said. “The headers look brand spankin’ new. The tires, they look like they haven’t even been around the block.”

“I imagine somebody in Australia must be awful upset,” he added.

Stolen VW Beetle found in Detroit after 40 years [ClickOnDetroit]
Stolen Chevy returned to owner 30 years later [Santa Rosa Press Democrat]

No one wants to be in a position where calling 911 is necessary, but if the situation does occur we’d all like to think first-responders could easily find us. But that’s just not the case now that more consumers are using cell phones to make emergency calls. Especially when those calls are being made indoors, out of the view of GPS satellites.

Of the 400,000 emergency calls made each day, nearly three-quarters are made with a cellphone. While it’s easy for 911 dispatchers to locate someone outside on a cellphone, pinpointing the location of someone inside a tall office building is more difficult, if not impossible.

The Federal Communications Commission recently announced a proposed requirement on wireless carriers and 911 dispatchers to improve indoor location accuracy, The Washington Post reports.

Currently, mobile devices can pinpoint a caller’s general location, but if you’re calling from a multi-story building there’s a chance first-responders are wasting time looking on other floors.

The proposed requirement aims to ensure that during the first 30 seconds of a 911 call dispatchers can pinpoint a caller’s location within 50 meters. Officials are hopeful that 80 percent of all wireless 911 calls will benefit from the new location capabilities in five years.

The FCC is looking at two ways to determine a caller’s precise location.

Wireless companies could use assisted GPS, which combines GPS location information with data from the cellular network. Another option is to use AFLT, a new technology which triangulates your position on the basis of your distance from multiple cell towers.

While the proposal would make significant progress in improving standards for indoor 911 calls, it has drawn criticism from regulators and the wireless industry.

FCC commissioner Michael O’Rielly is worried about how the proposal would affect consumer privacy. During a recent FCC meeting he said citizens should not have to worry about being tracked by law enforcement or other government entities in non-emergency situations.

Additionally, wireless carriers are pushing back, saying the FCC deadline of five years is impossible to reach.

New FCC proposal would require pinpoint location accuracy for 911 calls [The Washington Post]

A new, unpublished study is turning the spotlight onto a chemical that was banned in the United States 35 years ago, but is still present today in everything from yellow clothing, to yellow paper and other consumer products using yellow pigments. Researchers say traces of polychlorinated biphenyls — or PCBs — are leaching out of everyday products found around the globe.

But if PCBs are banned, how can this be possible? That’s because PCB-11, the form of the chemical found in yellow dyes, inks and paints, is an unintentional byproduct of pigment manufacturing, explains Scientific American, and therefore is exempt from U.S. laws regulating the compounds.

PCB-11 showed up in almost all samples of paper products sold in 26 countries and clothing sold here in the U.S., the researchers say in the study, which is undergoing peer review and is expected to be published this year.

Although it doesn’t accumulate in the human body or waterways like other PCBs, it’s still a matter of concern, the study’s authors say.

“It’s out there in levels that are worrisome,” said Lisa Rodenburg, an associate professor of environmental chemistry at Rutgers University and senior author of the study. “Even at the parts per billion levels, if you find it in almost everything you test, that means people are in almost constant contact.”

There are no studies on the health effects due to coming into contact with trace amounts of PCB-11, unlike the old, banned PCBs which have been linked to reduced IQs, cancer and suppressed immune systems.

However, because it’s showing up in so many products used by people, that seems to indicate that people are constantly exposed to PCB-11, which allows for it to show up in tests. The study found that all 28 samples of non-U.S., ink-treated paper products, including advertisements, maps, postcards, napkins and brochures, contained PCB-11 in the parts-per-billion range. U.S. paper products had PCB-11 in 15 of the 18 paper products tested.

Furthermore, all the 16 pieces of clothing tested that are sold in the U.S. contained PCB-11, mostly kids’ items bought at Walmart but manufactured overseas.

“PCB 11 is ubiquitously present as a by-product in commercial pigment applications, particularly in printed materials,” the authors say in the draft of the new study.

Federal regulations “recognize that some products (e.g., pigments and dyes) contain inadvertently generated PCBs,” an Environmental Protection Agency spokespersons said.

These compounds can be excluded and aren’t regulated “as long as they are reported to EPA and the PCB concentrations do not exceed specified limits,” she said, adding that the EPA is looking into any potential risks from PCB-11.

The study’s lead researcher notes that while we still don’t know what effect there could be, if any, from PCB-11 exposure, the fact that it appears to be everywhere is a cause for concern.

That idea is echoed by Dr. David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany-SUNY.

“Everyone has ignored the lower chlorinated congeners, primarily because they are not persistent and are relatively easily metabolized in the human body,” he explained to Scientific American, adding that it’s a “very real and important issue.”

“If they are in the air and one breathes them in every day, there will be continuous exposure to what I suspect are very toxic substances,” he explained.

Meanwhile the paint industry is paying attention, says the vice president at the American Coatings Association, which represents paint manufacturers.

“We’ve been aware of it and we’ve alerted the pigment manufacturers, but as of right now, it’s an unavoidable byproduct in these pigments.”

You can follow MBQ on Twitter if you want, PCB-free: @marybethquirk

Yellow Pigments in Clothing and Paper Contain Long-Banned Chemical [Scientific American]

Kids should always listen to their parents when they talk to them about drugs. And in the case of one 13-year-old Girl Scout who’s probably racking up cash for cookies, it’s a good thing she listened to her mother when she suggested she set up shop outside a San Francisco medical marijuana clinic this week.

Because the movies tell me that when people smoke “the reefer” they sometimes get a little hungry and want to “munch” on things, the idea of drumming up business where there will surely be many marijuana users is pretty darn smart.

The business savvy mom says that her two middle-school-aged daughters have sold Girl Scout cookies outside California medical marijuana dispensaries before, though this is the first time she’s helping with her 13-year-old’s stand outside this particular business.

She set up shop this week, reports Mashable, and the patients have been coming out in force: She sold 117 boxes of cookies outside the clinic just on President’s Day, which is about 37 more boxes than she sold during the same time period outside a Safeway the next day.

And for any naysayers out there railing against her parenting methods, the mom says she usually has her girls try selling cookies at different spots around San Francisco so they can learn about new areas while they peddle their wares. She adds that it’s a good way to start the conversation with her kids about drugs, and explain that some people use marijuana as medicine.

“You put it in terms that they may understand,” she says. “I’m not condoning it, I’m not saying go out in the streets and take marijuana [...] It also adds a little bit of cool factor. I can be a cool parent for a little bit.”

The dispensary is all for it and gave permission to the group as soon as the mom called to ask permission.

“It’s no secret that cannabis is a powerful appetite stimulant, so we knew this would be a very beneficial endeavor for the girls,” a staff member at the clinic told Mashable. “It’s all about location, and what better place to sell Girl Scout cookies than outside a medical cannabis collective?”

And lest any fellow Girl Scouts are wondering how these girls are getting away with it, the Girl Scouts of Northern California are totally fine with it.

“Girls are selling cookies, and they and their parents pick out places where they can make good sales,” the director of marketing and communications for Girl Scouts of Northern California explained. “The mom decided this was a place she was comfortable with her daughter being at.”

“We’re not telling people where they can and can’t go if it’s a legitimate business,” she added.

Funnily enough, it’s a different story in Colorado, where marijuana is legal for recreational use now as well. When a Photoshopped pic of three scouts selling cookies outside a medical marijuana clinic supposedly in Colorado surfaced, that state’s Girl Scout organization put the kibosh on the idea.

https://twitter.com/GSColo/statuses/433636022375567360

The Girl Scout and her mom will be back to selling Thin Mints outside the clinic tomorrow afternoon.

You can follow MBQ on Twitter if you don’t mind her wishing constantly that there were Girl Scout cookies outside her place of business too: @marybethquirk

A Savvy Girl Scout Is Selling Cookies at a Cannabis Clinic in San Francisco [Mashable]

Following the lead of New York City’s former health cowboy — err, mayor Michael Bloomberg, two Western states changing how wild the West can be for anyone under 21: Colorado and Utah are both considering raising the legal age to smoke tobacco from 18 to 21. Meanwhile down in Florida, legislators are proposing banning e-cigarettes for minors.

Both Colorado and Utah voted favorably on proposals yesterday to treat tobacco like alcohol, reports the Associated Press, in an effort motivated by new research about how early smokers start smoking.

“By raising the age limit, it puts them in a situation where they’re not going to pick it up until a much later age,” said one Utah resident who testified in favor of the idea there.

A similar show went down in Colorado, where testimony stated that it would make it harder for teens to get into the habit and then perhaps lead to fewer adults smoking.

“What I’m hoping to do is make it harder for kids to obtain cigarettes,” said Rep. Cheri Gerou, a Republican who sponsored the measure.

There are still more votes that will need to happen before either proposal becomes law. But this is a big move — they’d be the first states that have gone this far to cut down on smoking rates. New York City’s council voted last fall to up the smoking age to 21, but that is only a citywide rule.

FLORIDA TO BAN E-CIGS FOR MINORS?
Traveling back east and south to Florida, state lawmakers are making moves to keep electronic cigarettes out of teens’ hands. A Senate panel approved a proposal yesterday that wouldn’t allow anyone under 18 to buy the devices.

“We don’t allow minors to buy cigarettes,” Sen. Lizbeth Benacquisto, R-Fort Myers, said, reports the Miami Herald. “We should certainly not allow minors to buy these products, as well.”

The bill has already done well in two other committees, winning unanimous support, so it could be among the first proposals heard on the Senate floor when the legislative session begins March 4.

Some municipalities have already outlawed the sale of e-cigarettes to minors, with Miami apparently headed that way as well.

“We became aware of the issue and felt we needed to start the discussion now, rather than waiting on the state,” Miami Commissioner Francis Suarez said. “Nicotine is an addictive substance.”

E-cigarettes are starting to earn a certain cachet among teens, apparently, perhaps partly because celebrities are often seen taking a toke off them. A recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that the amount of middle and high school students using e-cigs had more than doubled in just one year, from 2011 to 2012.

“We think it’s time now that we drew the line in the sand, so children could not have access to those products and not develop those habits down the line,” Benacquisto said.

COLORADO, UTAH MOVE TO HIKE SMOKING AGE TO 21 [Associated Press]
Proposed Florida law would ban sale of e-cigarettes to minors [Miami Herald]

Parents fight decision to cut recess W*USA 9 A decision to make up for snow days by cutting back on recess time is upsetting families in Prince William County. Loading… Post to Facebook. Parents fight decision to cut recess on WUSA9.com: http://on.wusa9.com/1buxK1a. Incorrect please try again. and more »

- Indonesia is now the world's largest sanctuary for manta rays, after officials were persuaded by evidence that the gentle giants known for delighting tourists are worth more alive than dead.

- Countless pedestrians near Philadelphia's main train station walked by a snow-covered sedan with dark windows and a slew of parking tickets before police this week found the body of a young mother inside.

- One person has died and three newborns have become ill in an outbreak of listeria linked to Hispanic-style cheese.

- Two women who left two dogs in back of a rental truck in Fredericksburg in 80-degree weather have been banned from owning a companion animal for three years.

- For the first time, federal regulators on Friday ordered four tobacco products pulled from U.S. shelves that the company says it hasn't sold in years.

- Five District of Columbia firefighters were aware that a man needed medical attention across the street from a fire station, but none of them went to help the man, who later died, according to an internal investigation released Friday.

David Silverman, who's been collecting pinball machines for more than 35 years, has decided to sell his massive collection.

- The police in the island nation of Seychelles say autopsies will be performed next week on the bodies of two former U.S. Navy SEALs found dead on a ship,

If there's a spa for snowy owls, it sounds like D.C.'s famous bird has landed there.

2 sought in road rage incident in Manassas W*USA 9 MANASSAS, Va. (WUSA9) -- Manassas City Police are looking for a driver who followed another driver and her passenger who pulled open another driver's door during a road rage incident last week. According to police, on February 12, a driver told them he ...