In the same week Chicago came in at number four on the list of America’s most toxic cities, we read in the Tribune that Illinois ranks dead last in school breakfast participation. Given what’s on offer, though, that might not be totally bad for the kids:

The 10-year-old boy sat grinning at the colorful cellophane wrappers piled in front of him.

Moments earlier they’d held three warm doughnuts. Now the treats were in the fifth-grader’s belly — along with 600 calories, 18 grams of fat and 36 grams of sugar.

Sure, these reduced-fat doughnuts were nutritionally fortified, but they were still doughnuts, and along with a cup of sweet juice, they made up the Chicago public school student’s entire breakfast.

This year for the first time, the Chicago Public Schools are offering free universal breakfast to nearly every student, which is happy news for those who have urged schools to expand breakfast programs. Research has shown kids learn better when their stomachs aren’t empty.

But some nutrition experts warn that the sugary processed foods city schools feed to children are setting them up for unhealthy habits and other problems.

City schools allow students to choose three items for breakfast — one of them can always be a doughnut at the schools served by the district’s main provider. Three doughnuts may be unusual, but recent visits to schools showed most students pairing them with Frosted Flakes, syrupy French toast and juice.

Chicago schools’ food service director Louise Esaian defended the breakfasts, saying: “All of the menus served in Chicago Public Schools meet the requirements established by the (U.S. Department of Agriculture). In the majority of our schools, students are offered a choice at breakfast.” She, however, did not mention that those choices include sugary pastries.

In fact, Chicago parents could be forgiven for not knowing doughnuts are ever served in school. That’s because the word doughnut never appears on any city school breakfast menu the Tribune examined. Instead, the menus say MVP Breakfast, the product’s brand name.

City school officials did not respond to questions about why they use such an unrecognizable term on the menu.

But Kimberly Schwabenbauer, dietitian and marketing manager for the manufacturer, Pittsburgh-based Super Bakery, made it clear that she doesn’t like to use the d-word when referring to her company’s product: a round, sweet, cakey pastry with a hole in the middle. When she absolutely had to say “doughnut,” she prefaced it with “quote unquote.”

Schwabenbauer, however, doesn’t take the douche cake in this story. That would go to whoever wrote this statement on behalf of CPS’s main caterer:

But city schools main caterer Chartwells-Thompson defended the brand promotion, saying in a statement that it highlights products from “all of our manufacturing partners. … Students today are more brand savvy, and we feature the brands to let our customers know that they are enjoying the same foods in school that they are familiar with and may enjoy at home.”

I think I just got a rash from reading that paragraph.

Tags: breakfast, Chartwells Thompson, Chicago, Chicago Public Schools, CPS, doughnuts, MVP

Dear America’s children,

You are a bunch of fat fvcks. No one wants to do it with you. Nobody even wants to hold your hand. And now, to make matters worse, Uncle Sam thinks you might be too oogy to serve in our foreign wars. Hey, it’s a true story:

WASHINGTON (Nov. 3) — Are America’s youth too fat, dumb or dishonest to die in illegal foreign warsdefend the nation against its enemies?

The latest Army statistics show a stunning 75 percent of military-age youth are ineligible to join the military because they are overweight, can’t pass entrance exams, have dropped out of high school or had run-ins with the law.

So many young people between the prime recruiting ages of 17 and 24 cannot meet minimum standards that a group of retired military leaders is calling for more investment in early childhood education tomake sure that their arms manufacturer stock options keep their value combat the insidious effects of junk food and inadequate education.

“We’ve never had this problem of young people being obese like we have today,” said Gen. John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

He calls the rising number of youth unfit for duty a matter of national security. “We should be concerned about how this will impact this overstretched Army and its ability to recruit.”

Count me down for doing anything to raise the health and fitness standards of America’s fugly couch potatos. Unless not doing anything about it will decrease the number of young Americans available to commit war crimes in other people’s countries. In which case, here, Timmy, have another deep-fried banana split waffle sandwich.

Tags: army, fat fvcks, Gen. John Shalikashvili, overstretched army, T-shirt, tee shirt, tshirt, Uncle Sam

You read the headline and the opening graph, and you think you know where the scientists are going with this:

Chimp who threw stones at zoo visitors showed human trait, says scientist

The loutish behaviour of a stone-throwing chimpanzee at a zoo in Sweden has challenged scientists’ beliefs about human beings.

From there, you wonder. Did the Swedes really think we were the only louts on earth? But of course they didn’t, and anyway it gets better:

Santino, a 31-year-old male at Furuvik zoo, may be the first animal to exhibit an unambiguous ability to plan for the future, a behaviour many scientists argue is unique to humans. Forward planning takes considerable cognitive skills, because it requires an animal to envisage future events it will have to deal with.

Santino would get agitated when the first groups of visitors arrived at his enclosure in the morning, and would start hurling stones at the spectators. When the zookeepers investigated, they found that, while the zoo was closed, Santino had been busy making piles of ammunition, and returned to them to resupply.

…

“Forward planning like this is supposed to be uniquely human; it implies a consciousness that is very special, that you can close your eyes you can see this inner world,” he said. “Many apes throw objects, but the novelty with Santino is that he makes caches of these missiles while he is fully calm and only throws them much later on.

“We are not alone in the world within. There are other creatures who have this special consciousness that is said to be uniquely human.”

So, of course, the zoo welcomed Santino the chimp to the family of forward-planning beings with a uniquely human gift:

The zookeepers recently decided that an operation was the best way of controlling Santino’s behaviour.

“They have castrated the poor guy. They hope that his hormone levels will decrease and that will make him less prone to throw stones.”…

Tags: chimpanzee, Furuvik Zoo, loutish, people do the darndest things to animals, Santino, Sweden, T-shirt, tee shirt, tshirt

Some of the best times of my life have involved a frisbee — which sounds extremely goofy, now that I see the words on-screen, but it’s true — and I’ve been feeling a little long in the canine teeth myself lately, so I totally get where Harry the dog is coming from:

In his old age, Harry had transformed his walk into a simple process of elimination—a dutiful, utilitarian, head-down trudge. When finished, he would shuffle home to his ratty old bed, which graced our living room because Harry could no longer ascend the stairs. On these walks, Harry seemed oblivious to his surroundings, absorbed in the arduous responsibility of placing foot before foot before foot before foot. But this time, on the edge of a small urban park, he stopped to watch something. A man was throwing a Frisbee to his dog. The dog, about Harry’s size, was tracking the flight expertly, as Harry had once done, anticipating hooks and slices by watching the pitch and roll and yaw of the disc, as Harry had done, then catching it with a joyful, punctuating leap, as Harry had once done, too.

Harry sat. For 10 minutes, he watched the fling and catch, fling and catch, his face contented, his eyes alight, his tail a-twitch.

Seriously, that sh1t made me cry when I read it.

I kind of don’t get the owner, though. First he says dogs are capable of nostalgia, then he mentions how one of his previous pets had even picked up some basic physics while playing with a water bottle. But then he denies dogs’ capacity to sense injustice or entitlement. That’s just wrong, man. Dogs can be jealous, spiteful little fvckers when they want to. We just don’t like to acknowledge that side of dogs because we’re so anxious to find some decency among the chaos, hostility, and murder of the universe, even if it sometimes poops in the house.

Tags: frisbee freeks, Gene Weingarten, Harry, Michael S. Williamson, old dogs, T-shirt, tee shirt, tshirt

Does having a “baby face” “benefit” black business leaders? Oh, god. Sure. Why not.

A common problem afflicting modern psychology is that it’s mainly based on experiments with middle-class white people, often from North America or Europe. Open up the field of inquiry to other cultures, social circles or ethnic groups and different trends come to the fore.

Take the effects of a baby-face. Decades of studies have found that rounded, smooth, young-looking faces engender trust and sympathy. People adorned with such youthful looks tend to be treated with more sensitivity and patience, receive more lenient sentences, and make better spokespeople during PR crises. But these disarming faces come at a price – they’re also associated with weakness and incompetence, which can harm those striving for positions of authority. Indeed, previous studies have shown that baby faces are rare among the highest echelons of business.

But these studies have only ever been done in white men. Robert Livingston and Nicholas Pearce found that the opposite is true for black men. Baby faces are more common among black chief executive officers (CEOs) than their white peers. Not only that, but there was some suggestion that men with such faces tend to command larger salaries and lead more powerful corporations than those with sterner countenances.

…

Livingston and Pearce repeated the experiment with 106 new students. This time, they trained the volunteers on the features of a baby-faced appearance and used several photos to illustrate that these features aren’t specific to any race, gender or age. When it came to assessing the CEOs’ faces, the volunteers also rated them in terms of attractiveness, age and skin colour.

Even after this training, the volunteers’ judgments were the same as those of the first group and it didn’t matter how attractive the students found the CEOs, or how young they thought they actually were. They also deemed the black CEOs to be more baby-faced than the white ones, and the ratings for warmth and competence were nearly identical to the first group. When asked to guess the salaries of the people in the photos, the students assigned the highest salaries to the white CEOs, but they thought that the baby-faced black men would be better paid than those with more mature faces.

Livingston and Pearce sum it up by saying, “These studies indicate that the success of black male leaders is linked to facial cues of warmth in a way that the success of white male or female leaders is not.” These cues could help to neutralise feelings of resentment or anger among white colleagues, who may feel threatened by powerful black men.

“Warmth” ratings? Huh? What? Oy.

But hey, these guys are already on to the kinks in their inquisitions:

For their future research, Livingston and Pearce plan on studying other potentially disarming traits including dressing smartly, speaking eloquently, having a goofy appearance, or even having a mixed racial background.

“Potentially disarming traits”?

Double oy.

Tags: Malcolm X, Nicholas Pearce, psychology, racism, Robert Livingston, T-shirt, tee shirt, tshirt

Thanks to a couple of gravedigging goofs who grabbed a souvenir skull in 1981, a Florida man and his family are only now discovering that they’ve been living a lie:

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Mark Keaton visited his aunt’s grave for years, never suspecting her skull had ended up as a memento in a former gravedigger’s bedroom.

“There was nothing that could possibly get us ready for this one,” said Keaton, whose aunt Ruth Keaton died in 1948 at age 34 while having her appendix removed.

On Thursday, detectives and forensic anthropologists exhumed Ruth Keaton’s remains and determined the skull was hers – capping a bizarre tale that began in 1981, when workers at the Royal Palm Cemetery in St. Petersburg were preparing for a burial at the plot next to Keaton’s.

The employees told police that Keaton’s grave collapsed as the men dug nearby. A gravedigger named Bobby Anderson took her skull, and they put the rest of the remains back in her plot. Anderson later gave the skull to fellow gravedigger Gary S. Thomas.

…

On Oct. 3, Pinellas County deputies were called to Thomas’ home on an unrelated call. Thomas wasn’t home but deputies noticed a human skull on a table in a bedroom as they talked with the caller. They called in homicide detectives and crime scene investigators.

Another gravedigger, Robert Carpenter, 48, who had seen Anderson take the skull, helped guide the lead detective, John Spoor, to Keaton’s burial plot.

Through St. Petersburg Times archives, vital statistics and wedding announcements from the 1940s, Spoor was then able to find Keaton’s nephew, Mark.

“Just, ‘Wow,’” Mark Keaton said of his initial reaction to the news. “How can you describe that? I don’t have words to describe what my feelings were. It’s unfortunate.”

I think Keaton is laying it on a little thick, but I’m not big on bones and don’t really understand visiting cemeteries or (or why anyone would choose to have her corpse stored in one — I’ll take cremation, thank you). At the same time, though, Thomas’s reaction to being found out is a little too shrugged-shoulder even for me.

“I just thought it was kind of neat,” Thomas said in an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday. “I was probably pretty nice about it. I always took care of it. I didn’t let anything happen to it. I guess I did my part and just kept her, kept her safe.“

Thanks, model citizen!

Finally, what the hell is up with Pinellas County, Florida?

“Skulls comes through the ME’s (medical examiner’s) office all the time that likely were robbed from a grave and end up in people’s homes,” [forensic anthropologist Erin] Kimmerle said.

All the time? Actually, now that I think about it, Florida –  though widely known as the Sunshine State — has a surprisingly influential death-metal scene, perhaps even constituting its own genre of death metal. Not that Strange Cargo wants to play the game of “Blame the satanist!” But if the Morbid Angel fits …

Tags: Bobby Anderson, Gary S. Thomas, gravedigger, graverobber, Mark Keaton, Pinellas County, Robert Carpenter, Ruth Keaton, Satan Saints, skull

Here’s are two business tips from Strange Cargo: (1) Don’t ban your employees from going by their given names at work. (2) Forbidding your employees from speaking languages you don’t understand, while possibly good at preventing them from talking sh1t about you in front of you, really only encourages them to talk even more sh1t about you behind your back. You won’t necessarily fall into financial ruin if ignore this advice, but there’s a chance you’ll end up in the news if you don’t:

Larry Whitten marched into this northern New Mexico town in late July on a mission: resurrect a failing hotel.

The tough-talking former Marine immediately laid down some new rules. Among them, he forbade the Hispanic workers at the run-down, Southwestern adobe-style hotel from speaking Spanish in his presence (he thought they’d be talking about him), and ordered some to Anglicize their names.

No more Martin (Mahr-TEEN). It was plain-old Martin. No more Marcos. Now it would be Mark.

Whitten’s management style had worked for him as he’s turned around other distressed hotels he bought in recent years across the country.

The 63-year-old Texan, however, wasn’t prepared for what followed.

His rules and his firing of several Hispanic employees angered his employees and many in this liberal enclave of 5,000 residents at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, where the most alternative of lifestyles can find a home and where Spanish language, culture and traditions have a long and revered history.

“I came into this landmine of Anglos versus Spanish versus Mexicans versus Indians versus everybody up here. I’m just doing what I’ve always done,” he says.

Dude — if there’s an explosion and you find yourself with a grenade pin dangling from your middle finger, we’re probably not talking about a “landmine” that you innocently “came into.” Just sayin.

Tags: Emiliano Zapata, Larry Whitten, New Mexico, T-shirt, Taos, tee shirt, tshirt

Christopher Lee — whom my grandmother thinks is Greek, but it turns out the dude only speaks it — has played some of the best villains ever and in some of the biggest movies of all time. Dracula. Frankenstein. Francisco Scaramanga. Count Dooku. Saruman. Jesus! (That last one’s actually just me exclaiming how impressed I am with Lee’s resume. Jesus is not a cyborg pirate ninja, and even if he was, he would show at least a little mercy.) But if you ask him which of the hundreds and hundreds of movies he’s starred is the best, you might surprised to find out that it’s … Wicker Man. No, really:

His more recent film credits include the menacing Saruman in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and fallen Jedi knight Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequels.

But he considers 1973’s “The Wicker Man” “the best picture I’ve ever done.” The role was written for him and remains his favorite.

“They didn’t have to look for me to play the part; they wrote the part for me,” which doesn’t happen very often, he said.

Um, OK. Less surprisingly, Lee is not a big fan of ultragraphicviolent modern horror films.

The 87-year-old, who helped Britain’s legendary Hammer studios breathe new life into the horror genre in the 1950s, says he rarely watches horror films.

“I find it quite nauseating what they do,” Lee told CNN. “The blood is all over the screen like an avalanche — the mutilation — dreadful things, and I just don’t enjoy that.”

The veteran actor, who played Count Dracula and Frankenstein in a series of Hammer movies from the 1950s until the 1970s, says it’s “obscene” how much is displayed in horror films today.

“What you don’t see is far more frightening than what you do see,” said Lee, who considers Roman Polanski’s 1968 supernatural thriller “Rosemary’s Baby” the scariest film he’s ever seen.

That may explain his attraction to upcoming psychological chiller “The Resident,” his first Hammer film in more than 30 years.

Starring Hilary Swank and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, the movie is about a young doctor whose landlord develops a creepy obsession with her.

I don’t like the whole torture porn scene either. Lots of people don’t. But you know what else lots of people don’t like? Hilary Swank movies. Just sayin.

Sadly, Strange Cargo only carries Bela Lugosi Dracula T-Shirts, but they’re spooky as hell and make great accessories to last-minute Halloween costumes.

Tags: blood, Christopher Lee, Dracula, Halloween, Hilary Swank, horror films, T-shirt, tee shirt, tshirt

Why is a story about how people with mustaches make more money datelined Chicago? Strange. Anyway, here are the details:

CHICAGO (Reuters Life!) – Maybe American men should skip a day of shaving, especially when interviewing for a job.

Sporting a mustache may improve your chances of landing a higher paying job, according to a study commissioned by financial services provider Quicken and the American Mustache Institute which admittedly represents people opting for facial hair.

The study found that mustached Americans earned 8.2 percent more on average than those with beards and 4.3 percent more than the clean shaven.

I think it’s interesting that the study (as described by Reuters) compared not mustached men to non-mustached men but rather “mustached Americans” to other Americans without regard to gender. It makes me wonder how much of the gender pay gap is due not to discrimination based on sex but rather discrimination based on facial hair. Is it possible that women could achieve something close to wage parity by simply growing some ’staches? I mean, if mustached Americans make more than non-mustached Americans, then all you have to do to bring home a few bucks more a week is to keep that razor off your upper lip. You hear that, grandma?

For those of you women (and men) who aren’t quite ready to drive an actual mustache, Strange Cargo offers these totally hot Mustache Rides T-Shirts, which are 100 percent guaranteed to increase your wages.

Tags: American Mustache Institute, Hans Menjou-Bartchen, mustache rides, mustaches, Saving and Spending Patterns of Mustached Americans, T-shirt, tee shirt, tshirt

Why am I not surprised to learn that a country that likes its fish chemically burned also likes its fuel to to be made from burned bunnies?

Stray rabbits are getting a raw deal in Sweden. Thousands of them living in the center of Stockholm are being culled, deep frozen and converted into biofuel for heating homes. Wildlife campaigners have criticized the practice.

Thousands of rabbits, some of them pets abandoned by their owners, are being shot, deep-frozen and burned in a heating plant in Sweden, a professional hunter who works for the city of Stockholm said on Tuesday.

The center of the Swedish capital is being plagued by thousands of rabbits, some of them wild and some of them stray pets, and 3,000 have been culled this year, down from 6,000 in 2008, Tommy Tuvunger, who hunts rodents for the Stockholm city administration, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

“We are shooting rabbits in Stockholm center, they are a very big problem,” said Tuvunger. The rabbits are eating their way through the city’s central parks. “Once culled, the rabbits are frozen and when we have enough; a contractor comes and takes them away. ”

Tuvunger said it was normal for animal carcasses to be processed for fuel. “The contractor doesn’t just pick up rabbits, he also picks up cats, deer, horses and cows,” said Tuvunger.

The frozen bunnies are shipped to a heating plant in Karlskoga in central Sweden which uses them as biofuel and incinerates them to heat homes, media reports said. A spokeswoman for the plant declined to comment. The plant’s supplier, Konvex, a company that produces biofuels from animals, could not immediately be reached for comment.

Well, shit, with that many bunnies to burn, who has time to answer the damn phone?

Strange Cargo Bunny Rabbit T-shirts — despite being hot as hell — are designed, manufactured, and shipped without so much as one burned rabbit.

Via Scientific American.

(Title lifted from classic Bugs Bunny cartoon.)

Tags: bunny rabbits, fuel, Kill the Wabbits, lutefisk, Stockholm, Sweden, T-shirt, tee shirt, tshirt