Gummy Bears: Still cool after all these years

“Is it just me, or is your chandelier melting, and does it not taste delicious?” Artist makes chandeliers (and very creepy doll onesies like the one here) out of Gummy Bears.

Food News: Hot dogs meet Skywalker, frog legs endangered, George Bush hates Roquefort cheese, etc.

• Roasting hot dogs at frat parties just got better. Who wouldn’t want a Star Wars jet fighter hot dog roaster? Or the dick-on-a-stick?

• The damn Frenchies are going to eat frogs into extinction before you get up the nerve to try one. Between France, the U.S. and Asia, up to 1 billion frogs are harvested to taste kinda like chicken every year.

• George Bush hates foodies. After setting a 300-percent tax on Roquefort cheese (which pretty much means buy-bye Roquefort in the US), he’s also jacking up the prices  of Swedish foodstuff (say goodbye to those killer, authentic IKEA food sections). Apparently the EU won’t buy any American cows because they’re all jacked up on hormones. And these last-minute food taxes are Bush’s punishment for not buying our hor-cows.

• All that leftover grease from restaurants? They’re turning it into designer soap! Which, I propose, should be used by the restaurants in their bathrooms. Alberto’s handwash!

Obama’s Pimp New Robo-Caddy

I’ve had some tough cars in my day. I had a Honda that somehow didn’t rot despite the fact I left soaking wetsuits in the trunk for dozens of hot days (smelled pretty rank, however). My Civic survived my total incapability of sticking to the service program as set forth in the anal-retentive manual. My Dodge has survived me texting while eating hamburgers and passing slow grannies on the freeway. But none have been as tough as Obama’s pimp new ride. The features, in addition to a few cup holders, I’m sure (thanks, WIRED):

–Weighs between seven and eight tons (14,000 and 16,000 pounds).

–It’s a diesel.

–Military-grade armor as much as 8-inches thick on the doors.

–Each door weighs as much as a cabin door on a Boeing 747.

–Windows are ballistic glass five-inches thick.

–Probably a woven Kevlar mat covering the floorboard that protects the car from blasts.

–The cabin is believed to have a sealed air recirculation system to protect the Prez from chemical attacks.

Conspiracy Alert: Did SPAM Sabotage Peanut Butter?

It’s official: 2009 is already an awful fu**ing year for peanut butter. Today pretty much every food story is about Kelloggs and Clif Bars and every other company recalling their PB products. Salmonella sucks, man.

I smell a SCANDAL! Corporate subterfuge!

This happens right when sales of peanut butter and jelly were going gangbusters. A newly poor America was buying buckets of the oily brown-goo. PB&J was the new hot dog and apple pie. PB sales dudes were driving Porsches and snorting Columbian coke and inviting Puff Daddy to penthouse parties full of happily shitfaced peanut farmers.

Who would hate to see peanut butter become the choice of penny-pinching Americans? Who would stand to gain if cash-strapped moms stopped buying peanut butter? Oh, that’s right—OTHER recession foods! I’d do some hard digging through the interoffice memos of Nissin Top Ramen and Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese executives. Maybe even those weird-meat connoisseurs at SPAM! I bet one of their undercover agents bathed in raw chicken juice every morning for months before reporting to his or her job on the assembly line at Smuckers.

Even if they’re not behind it, I bet some douchebag with the faint smell of chicken bouillon is sitting in front of a framed oil painting of Cup O Noodles, smiling real big. And silently wondering if he can take out mac ‘n’ cheese, too.

I have absolutely no proof of this. But, hey, that makes me as credible as CNBC!

Digest: Paternity test boom, Boy George just another fat guy in jail, another S.D. artist tapped by Obama

• Am I the last human to realize that Boy George now looks like a bodyguard for a hood-ratted pop-punk band on their first Warped Tour? Or like a Camaro-driving donut enthusiast? Wow. Aging is life’s only true democracy.

• “Honey, I’ve lost my job and caring for you and Junior is no cheap date. Would you mind taking this paternity test?” Or, alternately, “Yeah, doctor, the current one I’m with just lost his job and I’m a fan of food and shelter. Plus, Junior’s blue eyes remind me of the stripper at my bachelorette party.” Paternity tests BOOM now that everyone’s broke.

• Local artist Rafael Lopez should listen to his wife more often. His painting was also used by the Obama campaign, and now he’s at the inauguration as the Prez’ Latino inspiraiton.

• Got a GPS system in your car? So did this man, and that’s how thieves were able to use the Mercedes they stole from him to find his Porsche and steal that, too.

FOOD NEWS: Jamie Oliver’s recipe for his wife’s placenta, drive-thru sushi, free Krispy Kremes’ subliminal abortion message, etc.

• Yes, the goofy uterus-police are claiming that a vote for free donuts is a vote for “baby killers.”

• I don’t think this would work out so well in my family because few of us can cook. “Human placenta with macaroni and cream of mushroom soup-sauce” just doesn’t sound as appetizing. I still doubt I’d eat Jamie Oliver’s wife’s baby supply sack, no matter how gourmet his “chicken liver pate with placenta” sounds.

• I like to think that the sushi chef handles raw fish in slow-motion, carefully, as if it were a miniature god, important origami or a finicky pipe bomb. I do not want “fast, fast, faster!” associated with hamachi. Who would eat at a drive-thru sushi joint?

• I dunno. I could imagine worse foods. A t-bone steak. Sea urchin. Lobster. Abalone. Flaming-hot cheez whiz. Twerpy teenager on drugs Kid arrested for attacking mom with taco.

• Yet another reason why socialized medicine is awesome (or fails miserably). You think you drink too much Coke? Move to Sweden where health insurance will help you kick the Big Gulp.

• I’d love it if all of my favorite food places did this. Like, “first 50 people to get down here right now get free order of fried chicken, some slaw and a box of Fruity Pebbles.” Fresh ‘n’ Easy stores start using Twitter.

• INVENTION: This wouldn’t work in America. Mostly because our busstops smell like urine, and we prefer not to touch them with exposed areas of skin. But interactive food games are the new bus-stop gimmick.

Digest: Scientists link orgasms to income, plus Obama, Shepard Fairey and the FDA

• You managed to find that “little man in the canoe” before your 35th birthday. Now all you need to do is get a job. Scientists link a man’s income to a woman’s orgasm (the wallet to the woah).

• Ten things you probably don’t know about the inauguration. The last one about the dead pigeons falling from the sky during Nixon’s motorcade is awesome.

• Former San Diego artist Shepard Fairey is being credited with getting Obama elected. Yeah, I know he’s in L.A. now. And I know he was in Seattle or some place before coming here. But it was in SD that he came up with OBEY. That broke, which in turn broke Shep.

• Once in the White House, Obama’s team will be forced to use the presidential carrier pigeon system and get to and fro on tall, three-wheeled bicycles. The lawyers ban instant messaging and Twitter in the House.

• In “you learn something new about your own city every day” news. The Apache warrior painted on the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park is covering up a bony guy chasing the dragon. From the Union-Tribune:

Geronimo, painted by San Diego artist Victor Ochoa, was a later addition in the early 1980s. The famous Apache warrior covers an image that some found objectionable: a skeleton injecting drugs.

• Forget spending billions on magic wands at airports. America’s got a bigger terrorist vulnerability—tainted food. From the Huffington Post:

An examination of government records earlier this year showed FDA inspections down by more than 75 percent. In 2006, FDA estimated that it had inspected only one percent of 8.9 million incoming foreign food shipments… Food-borne illness sickens one in six Americans each year. Resultant hospitalization, medication, and missed work days costs tens of millions. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 5,000 people die annually from food-borne diseases; fatalities in large part attributable to illness caused by tainted produce.

Americans: Walking Corn Chips

• We are basically walking corn chips.
• I don’t want my plants hanging out with those cows. They’re a bad influence. Druggies.
• Your Starbucks coffee beans can be turned into some awesome bioidiesel fuel. The article’s a little wonky, but all you chem. majors might get a kick out of it.
• Planning a lengthy illegal migration through the hot desert this summer? Bring a solar-powered fridge!
• Don’t know why it took someone so long to come up with this. The radiator coffee mug! No more grandmas suing McDonald’s over hot coffee.

Sushi chefs to burglar: “Death becomes you. Vice versa!”

As a general principle, men who work with knives and dismember animals for a living are not to be messed with. Sushi chefs filet would-be robbers.

Obama to Ben’s Chili Bowl lady: “Naw, we straight.”

OK, I’m guilty here of contributing to the Cult of Obama. But I get a certain gleeful pride and cool-envy watching the President of the United States tell the cashier at a DC chili joint, “Naw, we straight.” And then give the coolest presidential handshake/chest-bump ever at the end of the video. The only thing that could make this encounter go straight through the Cool Roof is if Obama would’ve gotten jokey and asked the clerk to pour some soda in his hand.