Whenever my dad grilled, he’d snack on pieces of raw beef. It horrified me, but he got me to try it once...and it was delicious! Granted, this was Korean kalbi (short ribs), so it was marinated and didn’t taste like raw meat so much as beef-flavored mochi. My dad never got sick from it, and I wonder if it’s because…

I was doing some reading on pathogens in meat recently, and ran across this Modern Farmer article about how (at least some) pastured, small-farm chicken can have higher levels of harmful bacteria than factory farmed chicken. Possible reasons include poor composting practices (farmers using unused chicken bits for…

The advice that I think needs to be consigned to the “myth” category...or at least “myth-ish”...is to avoid looking at your phone in bed. The blue light issue is no longer relevant now that phones have night mode. I believe the actual problem with using your phone before sleep is not the phone itself, but the content.…

I think her outraged response is a little bit disingenuous. She may well have sole credit on the majority of her songs, but most of her biggest hits have been co-written with hitmakers like Max Martin. And it’s been an issue since pretty much forever that artists will make trivial revisions to a song they didn’t…

Your comment raises an interesting (well, to me) question. Is a cheeseburger actually better if the cheese is hot/melted? My reflexive answer is yes, and that’s how I cook them at home, but now that I really think about it, I’m not sure. Melted cheese on a burger patty tends to make it all kind of meld together, so…

I was just thinking this the other day about a “check this out, Beanie Babies used to be a thing!” article I read. Some stories seem to get exhumed every few years and presented as if it’s a brand new discovery. I tend to assume it’s a young writer. No wonder elderly people are so cranky. 

Ha! Well, the burger was always going to be lukewarm at best, but at least the veg would be in decent shape.

The examples that come to mind are all food-related, like the “Bubble Yum contains spider eggs” rumor that I heard as a kid, or the recent “chicken wings are actually rat meat” story. It seems like people side with corporations when their products actually are dangerous (booze, ATVs, self-driving cars) and turn…

Yup...our choices are largely driven by emotions, and even smart people aren’t immune. Everyone likes to think of themselves as super-rational consumers who make logical spending decisions, but we’re all swayed to some extent (whether positively or negatively) by brand associations, marketing, and trends. I imagine…

Man, I miss the McDLT (not the packaging, though). The idea of separating the patty from the cold veg was great, at least for takeout orders. IIRC, the hot side didn’t actually stay all that hot, but I liked how the lettuce didn’t get steamed and wilted by the time you got the food home. 

Update: Javier Bardem has been sued for not dressing up as Ana de Armas.

I get why people find Wordle sharing obnoxious, but to me it hearkens back to the early, comparatively wholesome days of social networking, before everything became as ugly as it is today. I like the community-building aspect of sharing an experience with online friends in this casual, harmless way, that doesn’t…

It’s the new “is a hot dog a sandwich” controversy!! To me, “nugget” implies a higher degree of processing and molding than a boneless wing, but admittedly I’m thinking of McNuggets and similar nuggets that are made of ground-up chicken, and I believe Chick-fil-a nuggets are cut from whole muscle. So maybe “nugget”…

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I have to wonder if people who buy into rumors like this have looked into factory farming at all. The U.S. alone produced 44 billion pounds of chicken in 2020. Even if there is a chicken wing shortage—which can’t be all that severe given that I just bought a 10-lb bag of wings from the supermarket last week, and the…

N95 masks can be reused, given a few days to dry out. Depending on how often you need to wear one, you could probably make a three-mask rotation work, although a supply of 5-6 would be better.

Ah, I avoided seeing Vice entirely for health reasons. (It sounds like a joke, but I have an inner-ear condition that causes intense nausea and vertigo if I become overly enraged...the last time it happened was when I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 and ended up vomiting for four hours straight! Worst superpower ever.) But yeah,…

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more it bothers me how incredibly petty Whedon was to slam Fisher like that. Completely unnecessary and tells you everything about the truth of the allegations against him. 

I agree. A lot about the character and how his storyline is presented didn’t work for me, but I thought Fisher gave the role 100%.

I loved The Big Short and wish McKay had just made a similar movie about climate change, instead of wrapping his subject in a needless metaphor that distracts from the real topic and isn’t even a great fit as an allegory.