Growing up, my brother thought it would be hilarious to pull the old plastic wrap over the toilet bowl April Fool's prank. My mother went into the bathroom, noticed it immediately, and went and brewed a weak pot of tea. She brought it back into the bathroom and poured it over the plastic wrap, so there was yellowish…

I wholeheartedly second this as someone who has first-hand experience with MSF. So proud of what they are doing right now, especially with regards to this outbreak.

WARNING: Sad dog story ahead.

This is an actual phenomenon? Jesus. I had a puma for a best friend for a month, working at a legitimate animal sanctuary. We worked pretty closely with our cats, but the whole point was to give the animals the best quality of life possible. They were pretty much all going to be spending the rest of their lives in…

Ha, probably, although he wasn't actually all that bad in the four or five hours I spent with him. Very entertaining fellow overall. As he put it, he decided that Alberta wasn't going to get one more cent out of him, and damnit he stuck to that.

Robert S. reminds me of a guy I got a ride with when I spent a few weeks in Alaska. When he found out that I was Canadian, he told me a story about how he was driving through Edmonton back in the 80s, and stopped at a diner for lunch. He asked for a glass of water with it, and when he got the bill, saw that he'd been…

Artesian Toast? Does that come out of a well? Because I gotta tell you, I'd be pretty smugly satisfied myself if my toast came from a pure, all-natural, untouched Toastifer, deep under the ground.

No, they can't, they are super tough little bastards. Prions are definitely not something you want anywhere near your food, but at least this article shows that the USDA takes even potential contamination seriously!

Just to clarify a bit:The dorsal root ganglia is considered a risk material because it would likely harbor harmful prions in a cow that is infected with BSE. If it (and other nervous system tissue) is not properly dealt with during slaughtering, you do risk contaminating the meat itself. This is especially true with…

Exactly! Our family gatherings are the same. Jesus, sometimes alcohol is the only thing that gets me through them.

I had no idea it was so contentious! Growing up my parents would often have a beer with dinner, and us kids would beg to be allowed to drink the foam off the top. They would mostly let us have quick sip, even at a very young age. It seems to me that treating drinking like some secret, shameful adults-only thing would…

Wait, are you not supposed to drink in front of children? Is that a thing?? I'm honestly asking, it has never crossed my mind that that would be not cool (as long as you weren't getting roaringly drunk, I suppose.)

I actually had a similar situation unfold on my Facebook. A friend (well, high school acquaintance) is a Starbucks barista, and she posted about a customer who came into her store to get a coffee, and left her sleeping infant in his carseat in order to do so. It was a very mild October day in Vancouver, so definitely…

But humans have not been born unattended for hundreds of years. Assisted birth is the norm for humans across pretty much all cultures. We are a species that are considered to engage in "obligate midwifery" due to the tradeoff between having large-brained neonates and constraints to maternal pelvic dimensions as a…

Perhaps it is a federal offense, but our mail carriers are too polite to actually call anyone on it.

Right? I didn't believe that this could be true, but having looked it up the internet tells me that a mailbox is considered federal property from the moment that it is installed and ready for use as a mail receptacle. The owner is effectively 'leasing' it to the Postal Service in order to receive mail. Weird.

My goal is to get through all of Star Trek. I looked it up just recently, and all five series plus the movies add up to just over 550 hours of viewing. So you could watch nothing but Trek for 23 straight days. I finished my TNG rewatch and am like 95% of the way through Voyager, and just that has taken me MONTHS. I…

It's good to read this from someone who knows the science! I just had some facebook friends complaining about common core, and posting examples of the "ludicrous" and "impossible" math questions that their grade-school children have to deal with. All I could think was, holy shit, these people are upset that their kids…

That hacker would owe me a new BABY, because I would just leave the old, haunted one out in the woods somewhere.

That's fair, thanks. I would still argue that the fact that women with other pathologies can be misdiagnosed with endo doesn't mean that it meets the classical definition of a "garbage can" but I guess that's a problem of semantics (and possibly my own bias) and doesn't reflect how doctors use the term in the real…