Cloyingly sweet and nutritionally empty. Those are just some words that we can use when describing soda.
Sodas have now become increasingly subject to taxation. This started in 2015 on Berkeley, California. Now, over 35 countries, as well as 7 cities in the U.S., impose a tax on soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages. Several more places are also considering the same thing.
Public health researchers and organizations such as the American Heart Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics see these taxes as low-hanging fruit in the battle against obesity and the health problems such as diabetes that often come with it. In the United States, nearly 40 percent of adults are obese, which adds $147 billion to the nation’s annual healthcare spending, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The problem is complex, but the widespread consumption of foods packed with added sugars — which add calories but no essential nutrients — plays a major role, and beverages account for nearly half the added sugar in the American diet.
Seven friends from Nebraska planned their Halloween costumes around the various roles played by Ben Stiller. From left to right, you'll recognize Stiller's role in Starsky & Hutch, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, Zoolander, Tropic Thunder, The Royal Tenenbaums, Heavyweights, and Happy Gilmore. Yes, these are the same seven women who dressed as various Tom Hanks roles last year. And Bill Murray in 2016. And Robin Williams in 2015, Will Ferrell in 2014, Jim Carrey in 2013, and Johnny Depp in 2012. You can see the group year-by-year in an enlargeable gallery here, and images of each individual costume here. Redditor aubra_cadabra is second from the right, and she answers some questions about the tradition at reddit.
Your bag, pocket, or car: the final frontier. These are the voyages of your on the go medication. They will travel with you in a handy container as you seek out new life and civilizations. They will boldly go with you to places that they have never gone before.
Humans may find that having the Star Trek Mr. Spock Live Long And Prosper Pill Box is as pleasing as wanting. Embrace the utility and beauty of the pill box. It is only logical that you should prefer to house your on the go medication in such a unique vessel.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more great Bath & Body. New items arriving all the time.
Don't forget to stop by the store to see our large selection of customizable bags and apparel. We specialize in curvy and Big and Tall sizes. We carry baby 6 months to adult 10 XL shirts. We know that fun, fabulous, and Star Trek loving people come in every size.
Since 1990, Andy Gregg has made unique and luxury pieces of furniture out of old motorcycle and bicycle parts. He takes wheels, tires, pipes, and handlebars and turns them into tables, chairs, and couches.
Gregg feels a mission to give new life to old trash. He explained to Eluxe magazine that:
I’m glad that environmentally friendly materials have been growing in popularity, and there are many designers like me who think some trash is just too good for the garbage. I am trying to make playful, modern, sometimes even elegant pieces from bike parts. Sometimes I also use train and automobile windows for tabletops, or surplus automotive seat-belt webbing for seating upholstery.
Why Tom BetGeorge (previously at Neatorama) selected an eight-year-old dubstep song for his 2019 Halloween light display is anyone's guess, but the resulting show is quite mesmerizing. The light show is a fundraiser for McHenry House, a local family shelter in Tracy, California. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Picture this for a moment. A lone actor in Nigeria deceives women and teenage girls into downloading malware which enables the man to monitor and record their activity. He can use this as blackmail in the future.
The hypothetical scenario written above was given by Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum in their book The Future of Violence.
The real story involved a California man who the FBI eventually caught and sent to prison for six years, but if he had been elsewhere in the world he might have gotten away with it. Many countries, as Wittes and Blum note, “have neither the will nor the means to monitor cybercrime, prosecute offenders, or extradite suspects to the United States.”
To put it simply, technology allows criminals to target anyone anywhere, and get away from their crime.
That’s how Pixel Buds 2 can be described, a new version of the two-year-old Pixel Buds headphones, which Google has announced last Tuesday. Now that the new version has ditched its fabric-covered cord which used to connect the two earbuds (on the original Pixel Buds), the new version now makes a better contender against Apple’s AirPods, the Samsung Galaxy Buds, and others. But how they sound or how they work, we won’t know until 2020.
But what we can talk about right now is their design and fit, which is more important to some consumers than even sound quality, and just how much competition they already have right now.
Design is crucial when it comes to wireless earbuds. A lot of these earbuds, because of their poor design, cause inconvenience to the user.
A lot of wireless earbuds are unattractive, can sometimes fall out of people’s ears, and may involve tons of tinkering to keep them snug and comfortable.
Perhaps the reason AirPods have been a hit is because of its acceptable look, and it fits well for most users, despite the drawback in audio quality. If Google is to have a fighting chance against Apple’s AirPods, they’d have “to hit many of the same comfort and style marks”.
Check out The Verge as it compares the various wireless earbuds.
Andri Ragettli is a champion Swiss skier. He has lately been developing training routines inspired by parkour. Absolutely precise balance is necessary. Watch him achieve the impossible while just showing off by adding juggling into the mix.
This is Peggy. She works at a library. She smiles.
We librarians smile a lot. We're taught to. We're supposed to be friendly and welcoming, no matter what you crazy patrons do. Although we disapprove of you (yes, even you), we never, ever show it.
At librarians' professional conferences, we informally share crazy patron stories. And now Peggy Goforth of the Madison County Public Library in North Carolina has one to top them all. From the Citizen-Times newspaper:
“Another patron kept noticing the bag and she told us she was going to have to leave because a man’s got a bag with a snake in it,” the library’s interim director and administrative manager. The woman, Goforth remembered, spoke in the singular. “She said, ‘A snake.’”
There was not a singular snake, but, in fact, plural snakes. Many plural snakes:
After approaching the card-carrying library patron, Goforth asked him about the bag. “He said, ‘My pets are harmless. Here, let me show you.’ And he poured them all out on the front desk. They just wriggled everywhere.” [...]
"He probably had a dozen snakes in that bag. They were all different kinds. He had pythons and boas and he was just very proud of his snakes. He had to pick each one up, tell me their names and how long he had them. It was almost like listening to a person talk about their children.”
A dozen snakes.
Dumped right on Peggy's service desk.
This is not the first time that the library staff has told a patron to remove their pets from the library. Or even the first snake:
Goforth said another man with a snake wrapped around his arm had been asked by staff to leave on multiple occasions. After walking back into the library, still with the snake on his arm, he tried to claim his pet was a "seeing-eye snake."
"I just looked at him," Goforth deadpanned. "He looked at me and said, 'I don't think that'll fly, will it.' And I said, 'I don't think so.' He said, "Well, I guess I should take my seeing eye snake back outside."
Anyway, after so many pets have entered the library, Library Director Peggy Goforth asked that the County Board of Commissioners change the rules to prohibit seeing-eye snakes and the like from entering:
Under the new rules, only service dogs “individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of an individual with a disability” are allowed inside Madison County libraries. The policy specifically states that all other animal species are excluded, including animals used for “emotional support, well-being, comfort or companionship.”
Although I've never been caught bringing a snake into a library, a rule was created at a library that I worked at as a result of my actions.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: Paul Moon/The News-Record & Sentinel
Matt Alt has thoroughly explored Japan, as he owns a business that translates and exports Japanese media to the US and Europe. Nonetheless--or, perhaps, we should say, as a result--he is frightened of what might result by turning this dial on to one of the two apparent on positions.
Early August 2019. A government over 500 years old assembled to talk about its constitution. The meeting may perhaps be one of the most solemn meetings that ever happened.
The gathering was not held in a glittering, white, neo-classical Capitol propped up by columns crowned with Corinthian ornaments. The proceedings did not take place on a hill, or in a city, or within the boundaries of a capital district. The ceremony did not begin with a thunderous, patriotic anthem. The constitution was not read from archival parchment or legislative text. In fact, the constitution was not read at all. The speakers did not stand before a podium in the chambers of Parliament or halls of Congress. They did not prepare soundbites. If you had searched Twitter, you would not have found a single hot take about it. No chanting agitators came to protest. Minutes were not taken. Few beyond the attendees even knew it happened.
But for Julian Brave Noisecat, despite its obscurity, the meeting was a historic milestone. It signalled the return of a good government — an Indigenous government.
The Slashstreet Boys presents their serial killer version of "As Long as You Love Me" by the Backstreet Boys, complete with '80s neon windbreakers and soft focus cinematography. This is from the Merkins. If you like it, you'll love their song from last Halloween, "I'll Kill You That Way." -via Geeks Are Sexy
When he was three months old, Ryan Le Blanc had his first dose of opioids, after surgery for a unilateral cleft palate. Now in his late 20s, the English-as-a-second language teacher has been subject to about 15 more surgeries with varying severity. With each operation that he underwent, Le Blanc was introduced to a new painkiller.
At age 14, Le Blanc started buying illegal opioids for fun. Two years later, at age 16, he would be injecting heroin, a habit that he would be carrying from high school through college graduation.
As a teenager, Le Blanc came across Bluelight.org, a drug forum now more than 20 years old. He read post after post — innumerable lines of text and images about the substances he was taking, how to take them safely, and how to quit.
Today, as the opioid epidemic worsens and claims about 130 lives daily in 2018 and in the United States alone, drug forums such as the one mentioned above are no longer just an area of interest for the forum users alone. Researchers have also taken an interest in drug forums, in hopes that they will know how to tackle the topic of drug use better.
...a cadre of researchers is looking for solutions to addiction and overdoses in the sprawl of drug forums. The researchers say that drug forums on the dark net — a catch-all for internet hubs that are often encrypted or unavailable through regular search engines — along with more mainstream counterparts like Bluelight and drug-related threads on the website Reddit, might be a medical or research tool in their own right.
The humans erected an invisible wall, and the cats are completely bumfuzzled. If anyone tells you that cats don't have expressive faces, you just show them this video. They eventually find their way through, but they appear to remain confused even then.
