Noun: Lighthearted unconcern.

Source: m-w, via Mark Steyn

Louisiana has one of the most notoriously corrupt and ineffective state governments, and not a lot of what comes out of LA surprises me.

However, this did.

Behold, an X-rated “tribute” to Halle Berry, “performed” (albeit poorly) on the floor of the Louisiana House. Hurricane Chris is the MC at the Mic…

Full lyrics and more info here.

None for me, thanks…

Lin Zongxiu, from the southwestern province of Sichuan, heard in 2008 that soup made with a man’s head could help cure her daughter who had suffered from psychiatric problems for years, the Chengdu Commercial newspaper reported.

Mom and Dad hired a guy to murder a drunk passerby, and then mom made a nice soup out of the man’s head and some duck.

No word on if the daughter’s “psychiatric problems” have in fact improved. I’d guess after mom and dad killed a hobo and fed it to her, they probably got worse.

Noun – harmony or agreement among components.

In music, the opposite would be dissonance, or discordant.

I’ve never cared much for Steve Wonder’s music… it’s just not my cup of tea, as they say. But I might just have to go buy an album after reading this story:

My wife works at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta on the AFLAC Cancer Center. One of her patients is Leo, an 18-year-old kid with terminal cancer, and his dad told her early on that Leo is a huge Stevie Wonder fan.

Beth (the wife) works with Rock Against Cancer, and through their local volunteer and the Atlanta NBC station, she got in touch with Stevie’s management ahead of the concert he played here last night. Leo and his family got to meet with Stevie before the show, and not only did Stevie walk out and dedicate the show to Leo, he brought the kid out onstage, sat him down on the piano bench next to him, and kept him there the entire show. We were up on the lawn (the Ampitheater at Encore Park in Alpharetta), and you could literally see the grin on the kid’s face from way back there. They also had dinner together after the show.

Wonder also hung out with the kid after the show. What a class act.

Oh, and don’t worry, I’ve contacted the writer about his illegal use of The Wife^®, which as you can see, is a registered trademark of mine.

via NRO.

Also passed away today is Farrah Fawcett.

Best known for her haircut; second best known for her 1 year run on Charlie’s Angels.

She was “roasted” by Betty White when Betty said, “Farrah Fawcett. We have a lot in common. Right now I’m in my 80′s, which is funny, because that’s the last decade you mattered in.”

She didn’t do nude scenes in the 70′s and 80′s, but then did a shoot in a 1995 Playboy, which went on to be the best selling issue of the 90′s.

And then she died of anal cancer.

Source: Same as always

Update (Jeff): I’m going to have to disagree with you on this one. I think she was most famous for this:

Sadly, those bastards at Comedy Central don’t have that part of the roast available. But trust me, it was hilarious.

Oh, and apparently anal cancer exists. It sounded fake so I had to check. Sounds horrible.

The king of pop, Michael Jackson, died today.

I was all set to add lots of interesting MJ trivia, but turns out, he’s so popular, I already knew most of it.

One thing that stood out is that he only released 5 solo albums. I was sure it was a lot more then this. Despite the low number, he is credited as one of the most successful entertainers of all times, earning 13 Grammys, and 13 number 1 singles.

In no particular order, he did the Moon Walk, he did the Thriller, he married Lisa Marie Presley, he lit his hair on fire, he was Captain EO, he got accused of sexual abuse a few times, he dangled his kids out the window, and he bought the rights to the Beatles back catalog. And today, he passed away.

Source: Wiki – which updated his DOD REALLY fast…

Miracle fruit (formally known as Synsepalum dulcificum) is a red berry native to West Africa. It contains a protein called miraculin that has the odd effect of making foods taste good.

[...] When miracle fruit is consumed, the miraculin in the berry binds to the taste buds on the tongue. A person has receptors on their taste buds that identify sweet, sour, bitter and savory tastes. Normally, if you were to eat a lemon, your sour receptors would start firing. [...] Under the influence of miraculin, however, the sweet receptors start signaling and suppress the sour tastes. The miraculin rewires the sweet receptors to temporarily identify acids as sugars.

[snip]

Then, for about an hour, the miraculin modifies sour foods to taste sweet. Sweet foods will taste about the same, if not overly sweet, and other flavors remain unaffected. Because miraculin is a protein, heat will destroy the effect, so the berry can’t be cooked, and heated foods won’t taste any differently. Eventually, saliva washes away the miraculin, and your tongue returns to normal.

Read on for more, including a neat conspiracy theory involving foul play at the FDA that explains why we don’t have this miracle fruit here in the US.

h/t Z.

Everyone Poops. But Birds don’t fart.

It’s not that they can’t, you see. It’s just that they don’t need to.

Generally speaking, their bodies don’t produce the bacteria that is responsible for the gas in other creatures.

If, however, you are a bird owner, and you think your bird is guilty, you’d better get said bird to the vet ASAP. Gas in a bird’s intestinal system is a big problem.

Cats and Dogs, on the other hand, fart often. This I know from unfortunate personal experience.

Source: Nerdular Nerdance

This happened when I was very young, so I obviously don’t remember it, but many of the effects of the crash explain some of the things I saw when I was a young gamer.

In the late 70′s and very early 80′s, console gaming was becoming popular. There were way more competitors then I was aware of, including: Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Bally Astrocade, ColecoVision, Coleco Gemini, Emerson Arcadia 2001, Fairchild Channel F System II, Magnavox Odyssey2, Mattel Intellivision and Intellivision II, Sears Tele-Games, Tandyvision, and Vectrex. Many of these had next-generation systems planned too (like the Atari 7800).

There was also stiff competition form the personal computer world with such competitors as: Atari 400 and 800, Radio Shack’s Color Computer, and Commodore VIC-20 and C64.

Each of these systems had its own game library. On top of this, there were issues with game programmers wanting more credit and more money. Activision spun off from Atari in 1979 to create their own games to sell for the Atari. There was a court case, but Activision won, and was allowed to continue. This spawned dozens of clones. Dozens of major companies (including Quaker Oats… I wonder if they got Brimley to do the commercials?!?) created video game divisions who were all creating 3rd party games for all the above-listed systems. They created such nightmares as Chase the Chuck Wagon (which was created in partnership with Purina dog food. Trade in your dog food UPCs for a copy of the game!), Skeet Shoot, and Lost Luggage… which were all TERRIBLY low quality games (go figure).

Then there was the E.T. debacle. Atari produced a video game version of E. T. The Extra Terrestrial, which they overproduced expecting high sales, but rushed to come out, leading to a [FAIL]ure of a game. It had terrible sales, due to word of mouth of it’s crappiness, and since they paid a fortune for the marketing rights, they lost a ton of money. It’s believed that Atari dumped hundreds of copies E. T. cartridges in an Arizona (or New Mexico, depending on your source) landfill.

They even made terrible ports of Pac-Man (which is a practice that continues today). The Atari port led to Atari celebrating “Atari National Pac-Man Day, on April 3rd, 1982″ – an event I’d like to celebrate every April 3rd from now on. Atari manufactured twelve million cartridges and sold seven million units. Ouch.

The market was completely saturated with dozens of competitors creating terrible games. The stores were taking heavy losses from returns of bad products, and the distributors didn’t have any money to return to them. Retailers were selling $30 games (that’d be like an $80 game today) for $5 on clearance… just to get SOME money back.

The bottom fell out, and the whole industry crashed.

Years later, Nintendo came on scene. It met serious resistance from retailers who considered video games a “fad.” They renamed Famicom to the NES, and made wording changes so that it wasn’t a “console,” it was an “entertainment system.” ROB the robot was added to marketing so it was more like selling a toy.

The other big difference was that Nintendo fought against 3rd party game creation. They used a control chip so that only Nintendo licensed games (the Nintendo Golden Seal of Approval) could play on the NES (except for that crazy Quattro Adventure game). I basically understand it like a region code on DVDs. They also limited 3rd parties to 5 games per year, and made them pay for manufacturing up front, so if the game bombed, Nintendo wasn’t at a loss. They got around competition laws by saying they were doing it to protect the quality of the games.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Source: Where else.