pileofcrapola

With spring right around the corner and summer hot on its heels, vacation sounds tempting. However, if you're planning to take some time off during the warmest season, you might find yourself more swamped than you would be at work.

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We've talked about why you should have more than one cooking oil in your kitchen, but this graphic breaks down the differences between them nicely. It shows you smoke points for common oils, and their most popular uses, all in one good-looking chart.

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When you are introducing your baby to solid food, you don't yet know what he or she will be allergic to. Petit Organics founder Michelle Muller-Marinis shares a way to figure that out: it's called the 4-Day Wait Rule.

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Lard produces perfect crispy fried chicken, but everyone has probably warned you about it being a bad health choice. Surprisingly, lard is healthier than other frying options if you heat it to the right temperature, the Food Network says.

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iOS/Android: Instead of a messy whiteboard to keep track of chores, a fridge notebook to list groceries and a spreadsheet to track bills, make life easier for yourself and your roommates with HomeSlice, a free and cross-platform app.

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From coffee filters and baking soda to throwing them in the freezer, we have suggested several ways to get the stink out of your funky smelling shoes. But Redditor zwei2stein, who claims to be nicknamed "smellyfeet" since he was 13, says pure alcohol is the best way to de-stink your shoes and feet.

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Even if you're a Windows (or Mac) user, knowing how to use Linux is a valuable skill, and it can run a bunch of awesome things in your home—even if it isn't your main desktop OS. Here are 10 ways you can use Linux even if you're not ready to go full Ubuntu.

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In a recent post, Dr. Phil (yeah, I know) argued that you should stop fighting in front of your kids. He's right, but he misses an important point: having regular arguments in front of your kids can teach them a lot.

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When you send a YouTube video to a friend, they'll pretty much always have some context about the video before they even watch it. At the very least, they'll get a title, some ads, or a view count. Suprise.ly strips all that away and lets you share just the video.

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Many of you are experienced enough to cook off the cuff and out of the cookbook. But don't go swapping just any ingredient in a recipe for any other. Every edible element plays a role. SAJ14SAJ, an expert cook at Stack Exchange, lays out some helpful substitution guidelines.

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Warts are most typically caused by the human papilloma virus. They can cause your skin to dry up, itch, even hurt. But mostly, they're just ugly. One of our favorite wart-removal remedies involves duct tape, but there are other things you can try, including green tea.

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Getting candle wax on your carpet is no fun. Even when you do get the wax itself up, you're often left with a stain that's hard to deal with. But, follow these three steps and your carpets will look like new again.

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If you have the Gmail "Smartlabels" (or Smart Labels) lab enabled, the next time you log in, you'll see more options to automatically categorize your emails. Now new emails can be auto labeled as purchases, travel, and finance—in addition to the social, promotions, updates/notifications, and forums labels already in place.

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- A 24-year-old man accused of injuring a kitten by throwing it against an apartment building, then uploading a video clip of the act on his Facebook profile is being prosecuted for animal cruelty, officials said.

- It's a story that almost defies belief: A man leaves Mexico in December 2012 for a day of shark fishing and ends up surviving 13 months on fish, birds and turtles before washing ashore on the remote Marshall Islands thousands of miles (kilometers) away.

The second annual MRE Cook-Off was held on Saturday at the Marine Corps Museum.

More than 60 dogs will compete at Puppy Bowl X in New York City on Sunday.

Known as Punxsutawney Phil, this prognosticating groundhog is wheeled out every year, but really, what do we really know about him and about Groundhog Day?

If you commit a felony in Virginia and you are sentenced to jail, your must serve your time consecutively. Now, there is a push in the state Senate to change that.

- A District of Columbia fire lieutenant who commanded a station where a man collapsed across the street and didn't receive care has submitted her retirement papers.

- Gov. Terry McAuliffe wants to scrap Virginia's letter grading system of the state's public schools.

A furniture store in Houston has to give $7 million worth of furniture away to its customers after losing a bet on the Super Bowl. Don’t feel bad for the store owner, though: from his point of view, this is a good thing. Not because he’s a terrible business owner, but because the promotion got customers in the door, got the store’s name in the news, and just might create long-term customers.

“We’re trying to create customers for life and make the store relevant and fun,” store owner Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale told TV station KHOU. Free furniture is super fun.

Here’s how the promotion worked: the store owner picked a team by flipping a coin. That team was Denver. Customers who spent $6,000 or more on furniture before Sunday evening would receive their purchases for free if the Seahawks won. They did.

Of course, that $7 million figure isn’t quite true: that’s the retail cost of the free couches and mattresses, not what the store originally paid for them. It’s the profit and overhead that the local chain will forgo, in exchange for lots of goodwill and good publicity. You’d think that McIngvale would have learned his lesson: most shoppers chose either the Broncos or the Seahawks to win their respective division championships when the store had a similar promotion a few weeks ago. For that sale, customers could choose which teams they wanted to bet on, and win their furniture if they were right.

Mattress Mack Refunds More Than $7 Million to Customers for Lost “Super Bowl Bet” Promotion (Thanks, Rachael!)

You might’ve think you’ve heard about an intense, high-speed police chase, but you’d be wrong. Or at least you thought you knew what intense was, before reading that one particular police showdown had deep fryers flying out the back of a suspect’s truck. Deep fryers! Flying!

It’s too much excitement to bear on a Friday, but let’s forge ahead, shall we?

KHOU.com has the story out of Houston, where four men were allegedly part of a team that burgled a kitchen supply store late Wednesday night. Perhaps there was a dire need for cutlery or a lot of fried chicken, because witnesses say the men were loading equipment into a U-Haul truck at the front of the store.

By the time cops showed up on the scene, the getaway vehicle was already going about the business of getting away, and the suspects refused to pull over. Instead, the chase was on.

Things soon got of control, as high-speed chases often do, and the driver of the truck smashed into a traffic light, a bus stop and a fire hydrant. Somewhere along the way, the truck’s rear door came open, launching several deep fryers willy-nilly onto the street.

Police caught up with the suspects after the crash, sending all four suspects running. Two of the men were eventually arrested and charged with serious injury to an instrument that brings delight via deep-fried goodness. Only the first seven words in that sentence are true.

Stolen deep fryers fly from truck during HPD chase [KHOU.com]

No on likes salmonella in their peanuts or listeria on their cantaloupe, or in any of their food for that matter. While contamination can occur in just about every step of the food production process, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is taking the final steps to make sure the transportation of food isn’t the problem by setting new criteria for the transport of food.

Domestic and international motor and rail vehicle shippers, receivers, and carriers would be required to take steps to prevent contamination of human and animal food during transportation by following criteria on properly refrigerating food and adequately cleaning vehicles between deliveries.

The Rule would not cover shippers, carriers, and receivers engaged in food transportation operations that have less than $500,000 in total annual sales. Additionally, it does not apply to the transport of fully-packaged, shelf-stable food.

Discussion on the proposed rule will take place at three public meetings: Feb. 27 in Chicago; March 13 in Anaheim, Calif,; and March 20 in College Park, Md.

The proposed regulation is the final major rule in the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act’s framework aimed at building preventative measures across the food system. The FSMA was established in 2011 to shift focus from responding to contamination to preventing it.

FDA proposes rule to prevent food safety risks during transportation [U.S. Food and Drug Administration]

The World Wide Web is a valuable thing, indeed. Without it, how would we know that all the rules we’ve learned about eating hamburgers have been wrong, so wrong? Now we know, and from this moment on, you can save those delicious burger fixings from squirting unceremoniously out the back when you take a bite.

Our former siblings over at Kotaku cast their eyes all the way over to Japan, where a TV show called Honma Dekkai!? looked very seriously into the squirty-burger-stuff conundrum.

Researchers in fluid mechanics, engineering and dentistry came together in a scientific mind meld to solve the problem and came up with what seems to be a pretty easy solution (after four months of what we can only imagine was constant burger scarfing): It’s all in how you hold the burger.

Using 3D scans of burgers that showed how particles interacted in the eating process, researchers said that the usual hold — having just your thumbs on the bottom of the sandwich while the rest of your digits rest on top — will result in topping spillage.

So all you need to do is send your pinky fingers downstairs to help the thumbs, and voilà! Intact eating experience. That placement divides the burger into equal parts, allowing it to hold itself together better.

A potential downside? Once you’ve got the hands in the right position, you might not want to take them off your burger to say, grab a fry. Because you just don’t mess with perfection, unless you want a mess of burger insides on your plate. No one wants that.

The Perfect Way to Hold a Hamburger, Proven by Science [Kotaku]
ホンマでっか！？TV [FujiTV]

In a current ad for Old Spice shampoos, a man’s hair charms a female co-worker, and she writes down her phone number. One viewer of the ad noticed something strange about that number: it was toll-free. More importantly, why didn’t it use 555 for the first three digits like most fictional phone numbers do? There was only one thing to do: call the number and find out.

What he found out was that it wasn’t just a real, connected phone number. It was part of an Old Spice promotion. A woman answered the phone, and he explained why he had called the number. The woman on the other end had a completely unexpected proposition for him.

“Well, I’m glad you [called],” she said, “because if you’re interested, I’d like to give you two Super Bowl tickets.”

He says that he didn’t believe her at first. She gave him the phone number of a colleague, who works at Old Spice’s advertising agency.

Out of about 12,000 people who called the number in the ad yesterday, there have been two ticket winners. In other news, 12,000 people called a random toll-free number that they saw in an online Old Spice ad.

The best coincidence? The winner doesn’t have to travel very far. He moved to New York City from Philadelphia just last week.

Man Calls Number in Old Spice Ad, Gets Huge Surprise [ABC News]

When Pizza Hut failed to brings its oft-discussed pizza perfume to full retail reality, it seems a space was created in the eau de food space-time continuum, waiting for some other product to waft in and fill the void. So of course, one company did, and thus we have $20 1-ounce bottle of pizza perfume on the market.

The company’s website admits that it’s a “departure” from its usual fare — despite the fact that Demeter also sells dirt, bourbon and earthworm as scents — and this one stretches “the boundary of the concept of wearable fragrance.”

“But we had to try – tomato sauce, creamy mozzarella, a touch of oregano – perfectly balanced for the adventurous.”

Yeah, or for the hungry who just can’t be eating pizza all day, every day because some people in society frown on that. Stupid society.

Anyway, Gothamist checked out a bottle of it and it sounds like the reviews are a bit mixed. On the one hand, pizza! On the other, smelling like you rolled around in pizza!

“It’s like what living with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles must smell like,” one staffer notes.

And another: “Crust. Slightly burnt. Few days old. The job is getting you down but you persevere. You haven’t tasted anything but mozzarella and tomato sauce in months. You’ve forgotten what the ocean smells like. The line between thin crust and thick crust seems monumental. Life is what happens when you’re too busy smelling like pizza. Fin.”

I don’t know if I’m intrigued, scared or hungry. Or all three. Someone hold me. And bring pizza.

Pizza Perfume Is Here To Seduce That Mutant Turtle Jailbait You Long For [Gothamist]

The good news is that Walmart has set their prices to encourage customers to buy larger quantities of water. The bad news is that they’re also giving us price incentives to drink more Dr Pepper. Mmm, sugar water.

Adan spotted this soda display at his local Walmart. It’s hard to see in the photo, but the regular Dr Pepper bottle on the left is a 1.5 liter bottle, and the on on the right is a 2-liter bottle.

Soda makers keep trying to bring the 1.5 liter bottle back, and somehow it’s never caught on. Maybe pricing shenanigans like this are the reason why.

Homer noticed this odd Dasani pricing and sent it along. “I noticed that Walmart really wants us to drink more water,” he writes. “I’m comforted by Walmart’s concern for my hydration.”

Want to play with LEGO bricks but you’re at work? Or sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s? Or maybe you just don’t own any LEGO sets anymore. If you’ve got Google Chrome, you could be building virtual, blocky worlds without having to deal with the hassle of cleaning up (or the horror of losing) all those tiny plastic pieces.

Build With Chrome is a joint venture between Google and LEGO that does exactly what you think it would do — let you place various LEGO bricks on a surface to build stuff on your computer.

Alas, it’s not as easy as it might sound just yet. My attempts to monkey around with Build With Chrome were more than a bit glitchy and the navigation — especially in the “explore” mode that is supposed to let you see what others have built on a worldwide, LEGO-ish Google map — is kind of a nightmare. For example, any attempt to add an “extra” piece (door, window, etc.), resulted in my building plot vanishing from the screen.

That said, it did just launch so we hope it improves because this is exactly the kind of thing we all need to be doing on our laptops and phones during boring conference calls.

UPDATE: Some readers have written in to point out that Build With Chrome wants to use your location so you can, in theory, build a LEGO structure on the very site you’re currently occupying, then share that creation with the world. Some are concerned that this location-based aspect may unwittingly be sharing users’ real addresses with the public. This is especially a concern when it comes to children. You can deny the site access to your location and you can also change the Google+ settings so that your structure is shared only with certain people on Google+ or with no one at all.

Prince William County calendar, Feb. 2 to 8, 2014 Washington Post Sunday, Feb. 2. “Operation Urgent Fury: Invasion of Grenada,” photographs and artifacts chronicling the invasion of Grenada. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily, National Museum of the Marine Corps, 18900 Jefferson Davis Hwy., Triangle. Free. 877-635-1775. Dale City ...