Happy Earth Day

Japan Gets the Best of Everything

Tomatoes and carrots are no longer reserved for your salad. Häagen-Dazs will be unleashing two new vegetable flavors in Japan on May 12, Rocket News reports. The new ice creams are part of a “Spoon Vege” series that includes Tomato Cherry and Carrot Orange.

While the flavor combinations may perplex you, they aren’t too different from the juicing mixes here in the States. The Tomato Cherry blends tomato’s subtle sweetness with cherry’s distinct sweet-sour taste, while the Carrot Orange delivers citrus notes to the savory carrot flavor. Both flavors will contain 8.5 percent milk half, just over half of Häagen-Dazs usual milk fat content.

For those in Japan looking to try these the veggie desserts, they’ll be available in 100 ml servings for 284 yen (US $2.77). If you’re a bit dazzled on what you’d top these with, try reaching for the vinaigrette.

I would totally eat the carrot orange ice cream. That sounds amazing.

Amuck Amuck Amuck

Private joke via Hocus Pocus, 1993. One of the best terrible movies from my childhood ever.

A Little Late.....

Little hard to read, but click and see the wonderful results. Also, I am really bad at updating my blog anymore.

Falafel Waffel

They do exist! In their completely horrific manner, they exist.

Altering how we taste our food

What can you taste when you swirl a mouthful of malt whisky around your mouth? Peaty flavours, honey, sea salt? Talk to any whisky drinker and they'll be happy to discuss at length.

But it turns out that not all you are getting is down to your taste buds - or even your nose.

If you drink a glass of single malt in a room carpeted with real grass, accompanied by the sound of a lawnmower and birds chirping, and all bathed in green light, the whisky tastes "grassier".

Replace that with red lighting, curved and bulbous edges and tinkling bells and the drink tastes sweeter.

These studies are intriguing. On one hand, I am expecting the large food companies like Nestle to start just advertising the pizza on the box with only a shake of the cheapest chemicals possible inside. On the other, it pretty much is like brain synesthesia for your mouth without your knowledge. Sit back and just let it happen.

This is a Trent Reznor song

Earlier this year, comedian Freddy Scott released the Nine Inch Nails parody track, "This Is a Trent Reznor Song," encapsulating frontman Trent Reznor's penchant for odd percussion, eerie pianos and shifting vocal dynamics ranging from hushed to screaming. Now, he goes one step further, releasing a music video lampooning Reznor's mid-Nineties Lynchian-meets-Victorian visual style.

Love on NPR

You are at a table for two, sitting with your girlfriend or boyfriend, when, for no good reason (you can't help it, you didn't mean to do it), you yawn. It's a big, gaping, jaw-extending, embarrassing yawn and because you didn't cover your face, oh, God, she/he sees it. A second or two goes by, and then ... something doesn't happen. Your girlfriend/boyfriend doesn't yawn back.

Should you be alarmed?

Walmart Prices vs. Living Wages

In the series “The Secret Life of a Food Stamp,” Marketplace reporter Krissy Clark traces how big-box stores make billions from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka food stamps. What’s more, the wages of many workers at these stores are so low that the workers themselves qualify for food stamps—which the employees then often spend at those big-box stores.

This video crunches the numbers on how much Walmart, the single biggest beneficiary of the food stamp economy, might have to raise prices across the board to help a typical worker earn a living wage.