pileofcrapola

Nobody wants to walk up a flight of stairs to put away every little thing. Craft blog Sew Many Ways suggests giving every member of your family a "crap basket" to put their stuff in.

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We've featured a few toolsthat make it easierfor you to find a great beer, but this massive chart puts most of them to shame. Organized by type and and specific sub-categories, it'll help you find a great beer based on the ones you like, and also show you pick the perfect glass to enjoy it in.

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Apartment hunting can be stressful, and living in an apartment isn't always a picnic either. From noisy neighbors to horrible landlords and tight spaces, things can get dicey. But with the right tricks up your sleeve, living in an apartment can be awesome. Here are ten ways to make that happen.

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Just because something breaks doesn't mean you have to throw it away. A lot of DIY projects can take materials from a broken item and turn it into something functional and new. This weekend, check out a few of these projects and see if you can give your broken crap new life.

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Everyone knows raising a kid takes a lot of work. While we have a lot of technology to help us out nowadays, we don't want to remove the human element of parenting too much or we're not really parenting at all. What technology do you use to help you parent, and how do you ensure it helps more than it hurts?

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Extra coarse, coarse, medium, fine, and extra fine—you know that for different coffee brewing methods you need a different grind. But what exactly do the grinds look like? This photographic guide can help.

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When you need help with a task or two, the first "No" you receive can feel like a brick wall. A study out of Stanford suggests you may have more luck the second time around.

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The Benjamins are coming, the Benjamins are coming! And they’re all new, these fancy $100 bills that had been expected back in 2011. The Federal Reserve had to delay the new currency over creasing problems during the printing process, which left blank spaces on the bills. But now they’re on their way, finally.

The government shutdown can’t stop Benjamin Franklin’s new look from rolling out, notes CNNMoney, because the Fed’s budget isn’t tied up in the current congressional appropriations standoff.

These new hundreds come with security features that will make it easier for the general public to tell that they’re real, but are trickier for counterfeiters to fake. There’s a blue 3-D security ribbon and ink that shifts from copper to green when the bill is tilted, both in a large “100″ on the back of the note and one of the “100″ designations on the front. There’s also a new image of an ink well on the top side of the bill

Benjamin Franklin still peers out from the money like he does on the $100s around now, but he won’t be nested in a dark oval, unlike the other new bills out there in recent years.

While you might not have a plethora of hundos on hand at any given time, the $100 bill is second in popularity only to the $1 bill, outdoing the $20 bills and all other denominations in circulation popularity.

Don’t go throwing your $100 bills out the window any time soon — not that you would because that would just be insane, and if you do please let me know where to be and when — as the old bills will still be legal tender and are likely to stick around for a while. New bills will only be issued in the new design starting tomorrow, however.

New $100 bill to debut Tuesday [CNNMoney]

While being inside a Costco after hours might seem like an awesome setting for a movie montage — binge eating in the candy/cookie/nut section, trying on every piece of clothing on the tables, offering free samples to yourself, chugging mayonnaise — a California woman was not so thrilled to find herself locked inside her local warehouse store.

The woman was not a shopper at the Costco in El Centro, CA, but works for a vendor with a kiosk inside the store. That explains why she was there long after the store closed at 8:30 on Friday night.

According to the Imperial Valley Press, she says she spoke to a security guard around 11 p.m. that night, but then he shut off the lights and locked her inside.

She eventually pulled the fire alarm, which brought both the local fire department and store management to the building. Ultimately, she spent about two hours locked in the store.

Police say she was “upset that they did not apologize or were sympathetic for what had happened to her.”

The law is the law, but there are times when you simply have to disobey the rules and hope those charged with enforcing the law will make an exception. Alas, the parking-industrial complex is so jaded that not even a tale involving a bee attack and a possible hive in your vehicle can get you out of trouble.

A Reddit user posted the above image of a note spotted on the windshield of a car parked in a restricted lot at their university.

It reads:

“I was trying to leave camps when bees started attacking me while driving. There may be a hive in my car! I’m not joking! Please don’t write me up!!!!!!”

Perhaps the parking enforcement officer was skeptical of bees who could simultaneous attack the driver and drive a car. Regardless, the same Reddit user says that, 30 minutes later, the note was still there, along with a parking ticket:

This story reminded us that it’s been a while since we watched Nick Cage freak out about bees in The Wicker Man, so enjoy… the bees!!!!

Why walk somewhere when you can drive? That was apparently the thinking employed by a United States Postal Service worker who drove over a customer’s front yard instead of walking up to the home’s porch to deliver a small package. And the whole thing was of course, caught on video, or we’d be none the wiser.

Because the thorough folks at Reddit notice everything, commenters are pointing out that not only is this a really great way to damage the grass and probably not allowed under USPS rules for employees, but that USPS drivers aren’t supposed to back up the vehicles — which the woman does on her way back to the street — making the whole thing an incident the higher-ups would definitely not approve of.

Really, it’s just mind-boggling why anyone would do such a thing. Even the worker’s fellow postal workers are shocked, with one commenter writing: “As a carrier who walks 12 miles a day, this is appalling.”

*UPDATE* A spokesperson for the USPS tells Consumerist that she is “obviously very disappointed” in what she saw in the video:

“We are very sorry for the conduct of this letter carrier. This behavior is obviously not acceptable and is being addressed.”

She adds that “the majority of our employees are incredibly hard-working individuals who go above and beyond the call of duty daily through all sorts of weather and obstacles to deliver our nation’s mail and packages. We are all saddened by this video.”

Full disclosure: I despise hashtags. They’re visually distracting and over-deployed, to the point where many Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook posts now look like someone got drunk and passed out on his keyboard’s number pad. Even worse, the jerks in marketing have grabbed hold of the hashtag, desperately slapping a “#” before their brand names, all for the purpose of tracking public sentiment and creating really neat-looking graphs and charts to justify spending more money on hashtag-based marketing. To misappropriate a quote from The Thin Red Line, “This great evil. Where does it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from?”

WSJ’s Digits blog has the answer to that question, and like many evils, the hashtag started innocuously enough.

Back in 2007, Chris Messina, then a user experience designer at Google, dubbed the “hashtag godfather,” asked his Twitter followers, “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”

He says he was inspired by channel tags used on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and elsewhere to create a “better eavesdropping experience on Twitter… Every time someone uses a channel tag to mark a status, not only do we know something specific about that status, but others can eavesdrop on the context of it and then join in the channel and contribute as well.”

Thus, the distinctiveness of the # sign allowed people to easily search for and follow conversations and topics that they might not have been included on.

He tells Digits that when he brought the idea to the folks at Twitter, they were not receptive.

“[Twitter] told me flat out, ‘These things are for nerds. They’re never going to catch on,’” Messina recalls.

“Maybe 20 years from now hashtags will seem quaint, but they’re solving an important problem today, allowing people to express more about the content they share in order to connect with more people,” he continues, presumably while cackling in delight at all the annoyance he’s caused people like me.

To clarify, my problem isn’t with the idea of the hashtag, but rather with the implementation (and overuse) of it.

While the “#” might have been a quick shorthand six years ago when Twitter didn’t have the ability to track tags, it could easily have been replaced by allowing users to click a button that would tag a word or, heaven forbid, an entire phrase, thus removing the “#” and not requiring people to squish phrases together into a single hashtagged word.

It would serve the same exact purpose without turning social media into a garble of cleverly collided verbiage and Shift-key symbols.

Messina, who I’m sure is a decent human beings and does not pull the wings off butterflies, claims that the continued and expanded use of hashtags “really makes the conversation that much richer and that much more diverse.”

I’d counter that it only further contributes to the decline in meaningful interpersonal communication by seeking to classify and categorize every shared sentiment. But that’s #justme.

To everyone who just came to the post wanting to watch that Jimmy Fallon/Justin Timberlake hashtag video, here you go:

Have you always secretly dreamed of making your own dessert tacos at home? …No, neither had we, until Taco Bell turned it into an option available to every consumer, right on our grocery store shelves. Since today isn’t just Friday but also National Taco Day, you can celebrate by picking up this kit. But do you want to?

Only you can answer that question for yourself, but we checked in with some of our favorite online junk food experts: the people who fearlessly taste new food products that everyone else on the Internet pretends that they never eat.

Junk Food Guy dove in first, a month ago. He was disappointed to note that aspiring taco-makers must bring their own ice cream, but that’s probably to be expected when the kit only costs $3 and makes six tacos.

How’s the nutrition? As Junk Food Guy points out, “The Taco Bell Chocolate Taco Dessert Kit says that once the taco is prepared, it only has 260 calories. Well, not if you stuff in 4 scoops of ice cream, like I plan to…”

Good features:

• It’s a taco shell you can stuff ice cream into. And sprinkles.
• Ice cream.
• Ice cream.
• Designing your own choco taco is fun.

Problems:

• The shell tastes kind of weird on its own, since chocolate and mass-produced corn taco shells don’t necessarily go together intuitively. There isn’t much chocolate flavor to them, but what flavor you can detect is weird.
• The shell is incredibly fragile. This makes assembly difficult unless you have the hands of a surgeon, and…
• …They’re messy to eat. The Impulsive Buy’s review warns to be careful unless you want to eat chocolate nachos instead, and to eat over a plate, “or sneak into a stranger’s house where you don’t have to clean up after yourself.”

• You have to buy ice cream and whipped cream to reproduce the taco on the box.

Could you choco your own tacos? You could probably melt fine chocolate in a double boiler, coat a regular taco shell with it, and sprinkle it with your favorite toppings. That would probably be even more fun, but for food items like this, the mess they make is proportional to their deliciousness.

If you’re looking for a quick and fun Taco Night dessert and are already in Walmart, though, this might work for your family. Otherwise? Spend the $3 on some more interesting toppings.

Review: Taco Bell Chocolate Taco Dessert Kit & Potential Hiatus on the Horizon?? [Junk Food Guy]
REVIEW: Taco Bell Chocolate Taco Dessert Kit [The Impulsive Buy]

We miss a lot of the fun food fights going on elsewhere in the world sometimes, so it’s always refreshing to hear that U.S. companies aren’t the only ones battling it out over what may seem to be silly points. But purple is a very serious business across the pond for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate bars.

The company had been trying to keep its competitors away from the hue, like Nestle, but a court overruled an October 2012 decision that had said Cadbury (part of Mondelez International) could keep purple as its distinctive color.

The UK Court of Appeal ruling now allows not only Nestle, but anyone else, to sell chocolate products with that same colored wrapping.

Cadbury first used a mauve hue in 1905 and made the move to purple and gold in 1920, reports Bloomberg. By the time 2008 rolled around Cadbury tried to apply for a color trademark, which is when Nestle was like, “Nope. We want to use purple too, by golly.”

The trademark applied for “lacks the required clarity, precision, self-containment, durability and objectivity to qualify for registration,” the judge said in today’s ruling.

Cadbury is going to consider whether or not to appeal, said the company.

“Our color purple has been linked with Cadbury for a century and the British public has grown up understanding its link with our chocolate,” Cadbury said.

Cadbury’s Purple Reign Ended by U.K. Court in Nestle Appeal [Bloomberg]

Here’s the thing: We know why the United States Department of Agriculture took its site down — like many other agencies during the government shutdown, it’s closed for business. But while other agencies have opted to simply stop updating their sites and keep information available, the USDA is making it awfully hard to find any of its information on safety and recalls.

The bad news is that it’s not easy to find what you’re looking for — it’s not every consumer, after all, who knows to type in “FSIS” for Food Safety and Inspection service. Especially when faced with this unhelpful message on the USDA site:

Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available.

After funding has been restored, please allow some time for this website to become available again.

The site doesn’t redirect users to where one might find any of the USDA’s info from before the shutdown began on Oct. 1, and only includes links to available government services, the White House’s contingency plans and a message from the President.

The good news is that the information is still there to be found (although if a batch of meat is discovered to be bad right this minute, there’s ostensibly no one to update that information):  For information you might actually want or need, head to the FSIS site which is not being updated but still has info consumers might need.

There’s a list of key contacts on the FSIS site, but no one is picking up the phone at the listed numbers, and the Meat & Poultry hotline has a recording letting callers know that the agency is on hold. That recording at least directs consumers to the FSIS.

You can also check out recent recalls and alerts at the FDA site here.

It’s not like we’re entirely shocked — after all, there are two different agencies ruling over open-faced and regular sandwiches — but we’ve got to question the USDA’s decision to post a political message instead of redirecting people somewhere they could actually get valuable information.

USDA turns off entire website, claiming shutdown woes [The Hill]

If you were a parent of school-age children and saw “TEACHERS PHONE” come up on your landline caller ID, wouldn’t you pick up the phone? If your kid’s teacher is calling you up, something must be very wrong. When they pick up the phone? A prerecorded sales pitch for “Card Services,” a classic robocall.

The problem is that we consumers are defenseless against robocallers. They don’t honor the Do Not Call list, the numbers they provide on Caller ID are false, and they’re relentless. All we can do is hang up and refuse to give them our personal information or give them any of our money.

Recipients of the “TEACHERS PHONE” call have found each other online and swapped stories. The call claims to be from your credit card company (it isn’t) offering a great new rate on your card.

“How mean, to call a home shortly after [parents drop] kids off at school. Parents will panic and answer,” said one call recipient, who also happens to be consumer reporter Bob Sullivan’s sister.

You can report robocalls to DoNotCall.gov when the federal government isn’t shut down, as it is when we posted this story. Don’t press any buttons, even if the call says that’s how you can get off the company’s list. It won’t work.

New telemarketer dirty trick — impersonating teachers, calling parents during the school day [Bob Sullivan]

RELATED:
What To Do If You’re Still Getting Calls From “Rachel At Cardholder Services”
Please Don’t Press Any Buttons When You Get A Scammy Robocall

So you’ve received an e-mail from Comcast saying you’re $25 late on your cable bill and that if you don’t resolve the issue ASAP, you could be arrested. First, that’s simply not true, and second, that message isn’t from Comcast.

KGW-TV in Portland (the one in the upper left portion of the map) has the story of an area man who was baffled when a message from Comcast ended up in his e-mail inbox.

“I got one from Xfinity that said we owed $25 or they were going to send the police after us if we didn’t pay it,” the customer, who says he was not even behind on his bill, tells KGW.

First things first, the age of debtors’ prisons is long gone, so not only will you not be arrested for owing your cable company a few bucks, it’s against federal law for a company to even claim you could be put in jail for owing a debt.

So either the nation’s largest cable and Internet company has decided to break the law in an effort to collect a few bucks, or it’s a phishing attempt trying to get the customer’s financial information.

“The tip-off of the common phishing scam is that at some point they’re going to ask you for your password and for your bank account information number and/or instant cash,” a rep for the Dept. of Justice explains to KGW, while also saying that the e-mail received by the Portland man was “fairly convincing-looking.”

Comcast confirms that it did not send the e-mail in question and that the company never asks for customer passwords or billing information via e-mail.

The customer says he didn’t fall for the scam, but even so, these sorts of notices can be an annoying disruption.

“We’ll have to make these phone calls, you know, do we really owe this? Do we? Do we?” he says.

He’s asking for Comcast to send out a warning letter to customers about being on the lookout for scam notices like this, because not everybody will be savvy enough to see through the phishing attempt.

“We live in an environment of corporate bullying anyway and to be stalked like this,” he explains. “I thought, boy, there’s a lot of people out there that are vulnerable.”

Chicken nuggets remain a source of mystery for many fast food customers (who often don’t hesitate to chow down after briefly pondering why that one piece looks like a boot), as they generally don’t come from unprocessed cuts of white or dark meat. And so researchers at the University of Mississippi Medical Center performed an “autopsy” on some nuggets to see what they came up with.

For their paper, published in the American Journal of Medicine, the doctors bought some nuggets from area fast food chains (they do not identify which ones, though they did describe chains as “national”), dissected and stained the materials contained therein to see if they could tell muscle from fat, blood vessels, internal organs, skin, cartilage, bones, and nerves.

One chain’s nugget contained about 50% muscle tissue, the other had even less meat, at only 40% muscle.

“What has happened is that some companies have chosen to use an artificial mixture of chicken parts rather than low-fat chicken white meat, batter it up and fry it and still call it chicken,” one of the researchers tells Reuters. “It is really a chicken by-product high in calories, salt, sugar and fat that is a very unhealthy choice. Even worse, it tastes great and kids love it and it is marketed to them.”

A rep for the National Chicken Council, which sounds more like a gag from an Aardman Studios film than an actual thing representing a very real industry, contends that “Chicken nuggets are an excellent source of protein, especially for kids who might be picky eaters.”

The NCC also took exception to the admittedly small sample size of the study. Though, given the fast food industry’s consistency compulsion — wanting to ensure the customer has the same experience at all stores — it isn’t completely out of the realm of possibility that the samples were representative of the whole.

The researchers admit that, nutritionally speaking, all the information that the consumer would need to know is on the labels of chicken nugget products or available from the restaurant chains, but “We just don’t take the time to understand basic nutritional facts.”

Just what is in that chicken nugget? [Reuters]

MedStar Washington Hospital Center says a worker died after he was overcome by fumes and at least four others were treated.

Eighty-one names are being added to the National Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Emmitsburg, Md.

The Fairfax County public school system has stopped serving all-beef hamburgers in response to complaints from students.

A tiger tore the arm off a woman working at an exotic animal park in Oklahoma on Saturday morning, local officials said.

 A 71-year-old man who spent more than four decades in solitary confinement in Louisiana died Friday, less than a week after a judge freed him and granted him a new trial.

Animal Rescue Corps says it is transporting 40 dogs rescued on from a puppy mill to adoption partners in Maryland.

The Fairfax County public school system has stopped serving all-beef hamburgers in response to complaints from students.

Z-Burger representatives say they gave out 15,840 free burgers to furloughed federal workers during its shutdown giveaway.

Mayor Vincent Gray says workers will remove at national parks in the District during the federal government shutdown.

The female cub has the cutest little roar you've ever heard!