When baking some gingerbread men or Christmas cookies for the holidays, they can tend to break when transferring onto the pan. To avoid armless gingerbread men and trees without tops, Fine Cooking's Nicki Sizemore shares a great technique: removing the dough around the shapes.
    
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Mixing salt and baby powder is a great way to make some fake snow for your Christmas trees, but if you want the easiest solution, grab a tub of lightweight spackling paste from a hardware store and a stiff paintbrush. It's all you need for DIY fake snow, says EPBOT.
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Tablets seem to be all the rage right now, but some of us are still trying to figure out why we'd even want one. Well wonder no more: here are ten worthwhile, clever uses for tablets, whether it's an iPad, Android, or Windows device.
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Getting solid pictures at a holiday party is often hard enough as it is, but when that party's in your office, with it's glowing overhead fluorescent lights and horrible beige carpet, things get really tough. Wired has a few tips for getting better holiday party photos and the most important is learning to work with those terrible overhead lights.
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Here's a quick and simple tip for game night: Keep dice in place with a toy container you get from those quarter machines.
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Whether you're a guy or a gal, buying quality clothes requires checking a lot of seemingly minor details. One of these, for pants in your suit, is the waistband seams.
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We all know that our personal data is very valuable to marketers and other agencies—and that it's collected and sold by data brokers. StopDataMining.me is a master list of opt-out links to stop these data brokers from collecting information about your online and offline activities.
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Like one of those horrid ABC reality dating competitions where spurned contestants from previous seasons come back to get their “chance at love,” T-Mobile is once again being pursued by a moneyed suitor with unlimited data. Will the wireless company find true romance with Sprint or will the spoilsports in D.C. ruin these wedding plans like they did for AT&T?
According to the Wall Street Journal, Sprint is the latest company to pronounce its deep affection for T-Mobile, and is doing the mergers-and-acquisition version of talking to a potential spouse’s parents by making the regulatory rounds before popping the question.
The deal would require the thumbs-up from the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Dept., both of whom ended AT&T’s hopes of living in wedded bliss with T-Mobile (and thereby eliminating a pesky, low-cost competitor from the market).
Part of the reason that T-Mobile is in constant talks for takeover is the fact that parent company Deutsche Telekom really wants to unload it, like a parent whose kid won’t move out unless he/she gets married to someone with more money.
T-Mobile did do a little acquiring of its own in recent months, picking up upstart wireless provider MetroPCS. Similarly, Japanese telecom biggie SoftBank recently invested billions in Sprint, getting 80% control of the company in return.
But would a combination of T-Mobile and Sprint be too big for regulators to approve? With around 53 million combined subscribers, a merger would still leave AT&T and Verizon Wireless as the two largest players in the market with 72 million and 95 million subscribers, respectively.
Some have argued that the only way for either Sprint or T-Mobile to survive in the long run is for them to combine forces, that the only way AT&T and Verizon will take them seriously as a competitor is if they have enough of the market to effect change on their own.
We would contend that T-Mobile, in spite of being the smallest player among the four remaining nationals, has still been able to change the wireless market. Earlier this year, it did away with phone subsidies, breaking out the cost of a new device from the monthly cost of a customer’s data and voice plans.
While none of the others have followed suit so thoroughly, AT&T did recently lower prices on plans for customers who own their own phones, or who are part of the AT&T Next upgrade program. Either way, this is the second-largest wireless provider encouraging customers to pay for their own phones, something we doubt would have happened if T-Mobile hadn’t done it first.
Would a combined T-Mobile and Sprint keep this competitive mindset, or would it be tempted to test the waters and see if its customers are willing to pay the premium prices charged by AT&T and Verizon?
This is all very premature, but it’s the kind of thing you have to think about when you start to consider an America with only three major wireless players.
(gblahe)
It’s much like when parents punish a kid by telling him he’s not allowed out of his room, where he has unfettered access to his computer, TV, phone, and Super Nintendo. Things are no different, but the parents feel like they’ve done something.
The Wall Street Journal writes about how the farmers and ranchers of America — the industry that buys 80% of the antibiotics sold in this country — are happy with the FDA’s guidance because, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, they don’t really force-feed their animals large amounts of unnecessary drugs.
According to the Journal, “Many in the industry say they are cautious, providing the medicines only as a measure to prevent or treat illness,” while reps for the American Meat Institute say it “supports the prudent and judicious use of antibiotics in food animal production under the care of a veterinarian.”
And yet farm animals consume nearly 30 million pounds a year in antibiotics, more than four times the 7.9 million pounds prescribed annually to humans. Caroline DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest points out that only a small fraction of the antibiotics given to farm animals (about 5%) is unique to livestock. The rest of the drugs being fed to these animals is also used to treat disease in humans.
So either farm animals are incredibly sick all the time and need these drugs to get well, or the meat industry no idea what the words “prudent and judicious” mean.
The industry is ignoring (or maybe just hasn’t gotten around to reading; they are awfully busy) all the scientific evidence showing that overuse of prophylactic antibiotics ultimately results in drug-resistant pathogens, like the ones that make more than 2 million Americans ill each year. This is why, DeWaal adds, “we don’t generally use antibiotics to either prevent disease in classrooms or promote growth in our children.”
Avinash Kar of the Natural Resources Defense Council says that all of this talk from the industry about using antibiotics preventatively is just “hiding the problem in plain sight.”
“Preventive use is use on animals that are not sick, to prevent diseases often associated with crowded and dirty conditions on many industrial farms,” adds Kar. “That’s a big category of use.”
He points out that many antibiotics are already approved for both growth promotion and disease control uses, so the drug companies and farmers are correct when they say that the FDA guidance won’t have much impact, but only because it does little to change which drugs are actually being provided to the farm animals, just the stated use.
And this prediction is effectively confirmed by drug biggies Eli Lilly and Zoetis, which both tell the Journal that they don’t expect to take much of a hit in sales because of the FDA guidance.
“If the policy has no impact on the use of these drugs in animal production, then consumer and public health advocates have lost,” says DeWaal.
“Producers could simply continue to use the antibiotics the same way as they always have for ‘prevention,’” Kar explains.
“There’s still going to be blanket overuse of antibiotics for prevention purposes, which are just-in-case uses,” says Laura Rogers from the Pew Charitable Trusts. “Antibiotics should always be the last option in food production.”
One farmer quoted in the Journal story claims, “These guidelines are not going to change the way I do anything with the beef cattle on my farm.”
Counters Kar, “That’s precisely the problem.”
‘Tis the season — to be terrified, angry or just disapproving of mall Santas everywhere if you’re a kid sitting on some stranger’s lap. Last year we had 24 pretty solid examples of our readers’ kids reacting negatively (for lack of a better word) to Santa Claus, and we’re ready to do it again for 2013.
Here’s what we want: A photo of your kid on Santa’s lap with a look that would make one think that Santa is firmly on that child’s naughty list. No, we don’t want your kids to burst into tears, not ever, but if he or she does it while on Santa’s lap, why not share it with the world?
To send in your photos (the larger the better), here’s how you go about it:
1. Attach it in email with the subject line SCARY SANTA
2. Include your child’s name and age in the body of the email, along with any anecdotes about the experience.
3. Send it to tips@consumerist.com.
Please note, you need to be the child’s parent for your photo submission to be published, or we’ll have to get permission directly from the parents if you’re someone’s uncle or aunt. Gotta prove that stuff.
We’ll round them all up and post them closer to Christmas, so we can really get into the spirit of the holiday. Because no adult in costume is more frightening to kids than Santa — besides clowns. Clowns are just… wrong.
For example! Here’s Teddy (in a nice, big photo size), 11 months, and his dog Bandit — his mom Naomi (a friend of Consumerist) says this is the closest they could get to him smiling. He appears unimpressed.
Get. Me. Out. Of. Here.
Looking at the offerings of American fast-food eateries abroad is a double-edged sword. It’s fascinating. Some of these items might show up on menus stateside, and others might never come here.
It’s unlikely, for example, that the emmental cheese bites and hot dessert waffles (with ice cream, in the United Kingdom) that Burger King is offering for the holiday season will make it stateside. On the European continent, this festival is called “Cheesemas.” In the U.K., it’s “Whopper Wonderland.” No matter where you are, it’s delicious.
I am going to start celebrating Cheesemas right now. Maybe as the day before Festivus.
Meanwhile, in Singapore, Pizza Hut is building pizzas to the skies. Kind of. The Double Decker pizza starts with a regular stuffed-crust pizza, since that’s apparently Pizza Hut’s thing now. Then they top that pizza with another pizza. The top pizza is an exotic one, with Edam cheese, tomatoes, zucchini, and mango-flavored mayonnaise.
As always, we learned about this breaking international fast food news from Brand Eating.
What makes a good gift for a child? Toys, clothing, the occasional pair of novelty socks, and then more toys are what most families go with. Then there’s this Christmas-themed Band-Aids commercial, which encourages us to give first-aid supplies as gifts.
Maybe there is a particularly accident-prone and practical child out there with a favorite cartoon character. Maybe there are many of them. It’s probably cheaper to buy plain, off-brand bandages, and then cartoon character stickers for your child to plaster on everything, though.
“Talk about desperately trying to capitalize from the holidays, because no, no, no, and no. Bandages DO NOT make good holiday gifts,” writes tipster Kelso. He imagines the scene when children return to school after Christmas break.
“Hey kids, what did you get for Christmas?”
Carrie: I got a bicycle!
Joey: I got a puppy!
Michael: I got a computer tablet!
Annie: I got a box of Band-Aids. big tears well up in her eyes and roll down her cheeks
At a Meijer store in Michigan, it appears that where there’s fire, there’s an employee claiming he got fired. A store greeter says he lost his job for leaving his post, which is against the rules, but he only walked away to help a customer put out a van fire in the parking lot.
He says he figured he was doing the right thing last month even though he knew that he was violating company police, reports UpNorthLive.com, but that the customer came first in this situation.
“When the guy came in and said his dashboard was on fire I grabbed the fire extinguisher and I followed him outside and sure enough his dashboard was on fire,” he explained, adding that they were able to put out the fire quickly and he returned to his post.
As quick as that was, he claims he was called into the store director’s office later where he was suspended for his actions, and was fired later that week.
“The one supervisor told me that my heart was in the right place, but my brain wasn’t,” he said.
Meijer didn’t comment on personnel matters, instead simply saying in a statement:
“The safety of our customers and team members is a top priority at Meijer. We have a very specific protocol in place for our team members to follow when emergencies occur and we can’t allow any deviation from the policy that could put our customers or team members at risk.”
For the guy whose truck was on fire, it’s all very confusing, as his truck would’ve been completely burned if the fire had kept going, he said.
“I just think it’s ridiculous why should you be penalized for being a good Samaritan,” he said of the helpful employee. “I thought that was what we were supposed to do, you know you have somebody that is in need, don’t you help them, but I guess not.”
Though this wasn’t the first time the worker was suspended for leaving his post — he chased a shoplifter several years ago — he says he doesn’t understand how you could lose your job over such a thing. He’s currently looking for a new job.
Employee fired after helping put out van fire [UpNorthLive.com]
I don’t know who was the first to do it, but I once saw a skeleton corset and loved the idea of an X-ray of what the corset was doing. I started drawing the costume. In the comic, the bone structure will change with the perspective.
D.C. police have arrested a man who they say burglarized the Salvation Army in Southeast.
The Culpeper County Jail was evacuated for about four hours after a fire that started in a clothes dryer.
Smithsonian's National Zoo has released a safety report following last month's incident where a zebra seriously injured a zoo keeper.
Manassas City Police have arrested a man for distribution of child pornography.
