Love Cinnabon? Who doesn't? This 5 Yummy Facts about Cinnabon post is the perfect article to read while you munch on the cinnamon-y goodness of a freshly baked cinnamon roll. Hmm, BRB. Going to the mall to get me some!

1. From Hooters Waitress to CEO

Kat Cole (@KAtColeATL), Cinnabon's current President, has an interesting career path. Cole got her start at a Hooters restaurant in Jacksonville, Florida. She told Jenna Goudreau of Forbes:

I had a single parent—a mother who worked three jobs and fed us on $10 a week—so I started working as early as the law would permit. I sold clothes at The Avenues mall after school before I was recruited to be a Hooters hostess. By 18, I was a Hooters girl and loved it. When the cook quit, I learned how to run the kitchen, and when the manager quit, I learned how to run a shift.

I went to college at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, planning to get an engineering degree and then go to law school. When I was 19, I got the opportunity to go open the first Hooters restaurant in Australia. I’d never been on a plane. I didn’t even have a passport. I realized that in Miami you could get a passport in one day, so I flew to Miami, got a passport and flew to Australia the next day.

I was in Sydney for 40 days, came back and within 10 days was asked to open the first restaurant in Central America. Then ones in South America, Asia, Africa and Canada. By the time I was 20, I’d opened up the first Hooters on most continents outside the US and was failing school. So I quit to become the head of Hooters corporate training. I’m a college dropout.

She moved up the management chain and became the vice president of Hooters at the tender age of 29. She went back to school to get her MBA, got a job at Cinnabon, and soon after became the president of Cinnabon at 32. (Image: CBS News)

2. The "Gut Bomb"

Cinnabon's most popular item is the Classic roll. It has 880 calories (that's 330 more than the Big Mac), with a whopping 36 grams of fat and 59 grams of sugar. That's more than 14 teaspoonful of sugar. No wonder that the Cinnabon Classic has been called the "Gut Bomb."

This is what 14 teaspoonful of sugar looks like. Photo: Robyn Mackenzie/Shutterstock

But wait, that's not the most calorific item on the menu. That honor belongs to the Caramel Pecanbon, which comes in at 1080 calories and 76 grams of sugar (18 teaspoonful of sugar, if you're counting). [Source]

No apologies from Cole, however. She said "It's almost pornographic. It's just so over-the-top, it's a sensory experience" when asked about Cinnabon's indulgences. She went on to explain to Bloomberg Businessweek that she thinks people are allowed to have "discretionary calories" to treat themselves every now and then to Cinnabon rolls.

3. Cinnabon Has $1 Billion in Annual Sales

That's a whole lot of cinnamon rolls!

Actually, only half of that revenue comes from the sale of 100 million cinnamon rolls each year from Cinnabon's 1,100 franchised stores. The other half comes from licensing deals that brought us Cinnabon-flavored everything:

4. First American Chain to open in Libya

Cinnabon in Tripoli - photo: Bloomberg Businessweek

Forty two years after Libya's dictator Muammar Qaddafi came into power, the Libyan people got their first taste of American cinnamon decadence. In July 2012, Cinnabon became the first US franchise to open in Libya after the fall of Qaddafi.

5. They're Not Made from "True" Cinnamon

True cinnamon (L) and Indonesian Korintje cinnamon (R) by Antti Vähä-Sipilä/Wikipedia

After all this time, you'd be surprised that the cinnamon in Cinnabon rolls is actually not "true" cinnamon, rather a related "cousin".

True cinnamon or Ceylon cinnamon is a spice made from the inner bark of the Cinnamomum verum tree. It has a citrusy fragrance and complex yet mild taste without the "bite" we associate with the spice.

The "cinnamon" found in Cinnabon (and in kitchens everywhere) is actually cassia, derived from Cinnamomum burmannii, a tree native to Indonesia. Of all the Cinnamomum species, this form of cassia (known as Indonesian cassia or Korintje cassia) has the lowest oil content and is therefore the cheapest. In the United States, there's no labeling requirement to distinguish cinnamon and cassia, so we know them all as just cinnamon*. Cinnabon trademarked their supply of Korintje cassia as "Makara Cinnamon."

*Blogger LogoVida of Seasonality has a neat explanation on the differences of the types of cinnamons that you can check out if you're interested.

Hello, college graduates. It's October already, and you've been out of school for some months now. How's the job search going? Did you land that dream job yet? If they haven't already, your school loan repayment requests will start rolling in.

Artist Leon Reid IV doesn't think much of your college degree. In this art project, aptly titled "College Degree" (via Krause Gallery), he custom printed a roll of toilet paper.

For hundreds of thousands of newly-minted grads, Reid's sentiment is spot on. The Wall Street Journal reported a few months ago that 284,000 American college graduates with bachelor's degree and 37,000 holders of advanced degrees could only find jobs paying minimum wage in 2012. While that's down from the peak in 2010, it is still 70% higher than from a decade earlier.

It's no wonder that since the start of the Great Recession, more and more people have been beating the anti-college drumbeat. Venture capitalist and finance writer James Altucher said, as quoted in New York Magazine, "When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that?" :

To Altucher, higher education is nothing less than an institutionalized scam—college graduates hire only college graduates, creating a closed system that permits schools to charge exorbitant ­prices and forces students to take on crippling debt. “The cost of college in the past 30 years has gone up tenfold. Health care has only gone up sixfold, and inflation has only gone up threefold. Not only is it a scam, but the college presidents know it. That’s why they keep raising tuition.”

Instead, Altucher proposed 8 alternatives to college, including starting a business, writing a book and traveling the world.

On the other hand, consider the graph above by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For adults 25 years and older, the data is clear: college and advanced degrees correlate with higher earnings and lower unemployment rates. Those with a high school diploma earn, on average, only $652 a week and has over 8% unemployment rate in 2012. Those with bachelor's degrees earn almost double ($1,066 a week) with half the unemployment rate.

Remember the viral "I Quit" video by Marina Shifrin, who quit her job at the Taiwanese animation company in style? She submitted her resignation video showing her dancing to Kanye West's "Gone". She claimed that her boss only cared about the quantity of pageviews the videos she produced got, not their quality.

Well, her boss over at Next Media Animation has just responded ... by posting a video response, of course, and a Q&A over at Gawker. Watch:

We can't wait till this gets a full Taiwanese animation treatment!

The 50th anniversary of Doctor Who is coming up next month, and what better way to celebrate than rounding out your collection of nifty Doctor Who items? We've got them on sale on the NeatoShop - save up to 40% on Doctor Who merch. Hurry, before the sale is EX-TER-MI-NATEd.

What are you waiting for? Go to the NeatoShop now. Allons-y.

Links: Doctor Who on the NeatoShop | Sale & Clearance

Tom Clancy, author of bestselling spy thrillers including The Hunt for Red October, Clear and Present Danger, and The Sum of All Fears, died yesterday, October 1, 2013, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Clancy, a former insurance agent turned writer, has penned 28 books and also helped create the popular video game series Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell.

His debut 1984 novel, The Hunt for Red October was adapted into a Hollywood blockbuster. When the novel was first published, a lot of people suspected that he must have had inside information from US intelligence about Soviet's secret military communications. Navy Secretary John Lehman asked him, "Who the hell cleared it?"

"That's a load of crap," Clancy replied in an interview as reported by AMC. Instead, he attributed the meticulous details from interviews with a former submariner who worked in a power plant near his home in Maryland, as well as reading several hundred military books including those with dry titles such as The World's Missile Systems, Guide to the Soviet Navy, and Combat Fleets of the World.

The Hunt for Red October was published by the US Naval Institute Press - it was their first fictional works ever published and still their most successful. A woman who read the novel loved it so much that she gave a copy to all her friends. One of that friends happened to be President Ronald Reagan, who was spotted stepping off Marine One helicopter with the book tucked under his arm. When a reporter asked about the book, Reagan complimented the book as "a really good yarn." The publicity helped propelled Clancy into stardom.

Clancy's writings, which are famous for detailed portrayals of military tactics and technology, gained him a loyal following within the armed forces in the United States and abroad. That, in turn gave him insider's access that he later spun into story plots. Regardless, Clancy was always careful. He insisted that despite of his friendship with many high-ranking military brass, he never asked for classified information.

"I hang my hat on getting as many things right as I can," Clancy said as reported by The New York Times, "I've made up stuff that turned out to be real - that's the spooky part."

Tom Clancy was 66.

(Photo: IMDB)

Jill and John love s'mores so much that I almost call a s'more intervention. Almost.

Instead, I decided to join in on the fun, now that I found this bacon weave s'mores over at Nick Chipman of Dude Foods. He made the s'more square the same size as half of a Hersey's Chocolate bar. That ended up being three pieces by two pieces of bacon.

Why bacon? Nick said, "I'm a huge fan of salty and sweet combinations, so combining little squares of bacon along with Hershey's Chocolate and marshmallows was really a no-brainer to me."

Now that's a piece of s'more I'd try in a heartbeat!

Photo: Samantha Dempsey

Extinction is forever, and so is a tattoo, so why not combine them together?

Design student Samantha Dempsey noticed that it's pretty difficult to get humans to notice extinction of animals that aren't cute or charismatic (it's much easier to raise awareness for, say, the giant panda, versus some measly insects). "It's upsetting that, though other animals are just as importnat to our genetic diversity as a planet, no one pays attention to them," she said to The Smithsonian.

So, she devised a clever and hip solution: a set of temporary (bah! Still cool though) tattoos to commemorate the extinction of the oblong rocksnail, St. Helena giant earwig, and the Pasadena freshwater shrimp.

In the project called, Extinction Empathy Tattoos, Dempsey created a set of posters featuring digitally tattooed models as well as temporary tattoos as giveaways. From the Smithsonian:

For this first foray into temporary tattoo production, Dempsey chose animals that, in her eyes, had at least one redeeming physical quality despite their otherwise homely appearances. For the Pasadena freshwater shrimp, it was its curly antennae, and with the St. Helena giant earwig, it was the sweeping shape of the insect’s pincers. “I tried to find what was beautiful about each of the ugly animals,” she says. Guided by this endearing feature, Dempsey determined the overall layout of the tattoo.

“Because they were extinct, there aren’t a lot of photographs of them, or the photos are hard to find,” Dempsey explains. Some of the tattoos are drawn directly from images but others are a blend of scientific illustrations she could find of both the particular species and of modern animals related to it. “It was a little bit of sleuth work,” she says. “There is slight artistic interpretation as well, because it had to fit into the tattoo style.”

Read more over at Dempsey's official Extinction Empathy Tattoos project page.

Photo: Christopher Austin/Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science

Mr. Spock, the green-blooded Vulcan on Star Trek, would've said himself this is fascinating. Louisiana State University biologist and NatGeo explorer Christopher Austin studies a species of lizard, the Prasinohaema skink, that has green blood.

Actually, the skink, found almost exclusively on Papua New Guinea, not only has green blood - it has green bones and tissues as well. It's even got a green tongue, Austin remarked in this news article over at National Geographics. But why? It turns out that the animal has an unusually high concentration of the bile pigment biliverdin.

Biliverdin is a pigment that results from the breakdown of hemoglobin, which gives blood its red color. In humans, they're the reason that some bruises are green in color. Too much biliverdin is toxic and gives humans the disease called jaundice, so it's a mystery how the reptile could survive.

Photo: Christopher Austin/Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science

Austin speculated that the high level of biliverdin in the skin could actually be beneficial:

“It’s surprising because at these concentrations of bile pigments in the blood, [the skinks] should be completely jaundiced, if not dead,” Austin said.

Austin hypothesizes that the lizard evolved to tolerate the biliverdin because it may provide protection against a group of parasites called Plasmodium.

Best known for causing malaria in humans, Plasmodium also causes malaria in reptiles and birds. Austin believes that the presence of toxic biliverdin instead of hemoglobin may make it harder for Plasmodium to infect the skinks.

Carrie Arnold of National Geographic has the rest of the story.

Wanna play the drum but don't got no, well, actual drums? That's not a problem for the women of the Baka people of Africa. As long as they've got the river, they've got drums:

Water drumming - via metafilter

Add yodels (by "yellis," Baka women yodellers) and forest harp (a "ngombi" made out of raphia palm) and you get beautiful Baka music. Like this one from the album "Baka in the Forest," from Orchéstre Baka Gbiné:

Emily Bear/Official Photo

This. Is. Phenomenal.

Emily Bear is an accomplished pianist and composer. She's composed over 350 pieces for the piano and six albums - including one produced by jazz legend Quincy Jones that hit number 3 on the Billboard Traditional Jazz Chart - and performed at the White House and Carnegie Hall. And she's only twelve years old!

Andrea Bear, Emily's mother, said that the girl showed extraordinary musical talent from the cradle. "As a baby, she would sing back lullabies to me in perfect pitch. By 18 months, she was experimenting constantly at the piano. At just past 2 years, my mother thought it was my [older] son playing. She was composing tangible pieces since she was 3. By the time she was 4, she was having pieces published and distributed by Hal Leonard."

The wunderkind's list of achievements goes on. At the age of 5, she had her concert debut, and one year later, she was invited to play at the White House. Then, at the tender age of 9, Emily made her Carnegie Hall debut, performing her own orchestral composition with a 110-piece orchestra and a 220-voice choir.

Emily's first appearance on the Ellen Show in 2007 (she's only 6 at the time).

Chart: Keith Collins, Jennifer Daniel and Karen Yourish/The New York Times

So. The government of the United States of America, the world's largest superpower, has shut down due to political bickering between the Republicans and the Democrats largely over Obamacare.

You didn't need us to tell you that. That much you already know.

The topic, as you'd expect, is everywhere on the news and Internet. But we'd like to know how this government shutdown - the first in 17 years (the last one was back in 1995 and 1996 when Newt Gingrich-led Congress feuded with President Clinton) - affected you. Government shutdowns are quite rare, and the last time it happened it wasn't as doom-and-gloom as people thought it would be.

But that doesn't mean that the shutdown does not have terrible effects on some people. How about for you? Does the US government shutdown affect you badly? In what ways?

Photo: J. Gallego/Macroinstantes - via Why Evolution is True

Spanish photographer J. Gallego of the Microinstantes blog captured the eye-popping pictures above of the larva of a species of lacewing or thread-winged antlion (of the tribe Crocinae) with an extremely elongated prothorax and fearsome jaws.

Now, this probably reminded you of the iconic scene in Alien 3 where Ripley came face to face with the Alien xenomorph.

Image: Twentieth Century Fox

Not only that, the insect is also like the Sarlacc, which inhabits the Great Pit of Carkoon, from the movie Star Wars.

Image: Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi

Why Sarlacc, you ask? Here's why. An antlion larva digs sand pit trap and buries itself in the center of the pit with its jaws just below the surface, waiting for an unsuspecting ant to wander in.

An ant that steps into the loose sand of the pit would slip to the bottom, right to the waiting jaws of the antlion. A quick snap of the long mandibles not only captures the ant, but also injects into it a cocktail of digestive enzmes to liquify the content of the victim's body.

Escaping the trap isn't easy - if an ant tries to climb up the wall of the pit, the antlion would start throwing sand and pebbles at the insect to make it fall back (the sandy wall of the pit is also prone to collapse, thus sending the victim back to the maws of the waiting antlion).

(Entomologist Gil Wizen has a fascinating photo of the Crocinae larvae emerging from its sandy death trap)

Here's a video clip of how an Antlion pit works from the Discovery channel's Monster Bug Wars:

Cookin' with Chemistry by Winter Artwork

What better way to build your empire than to do a little cookin' with chemistry? Winter Artwork helps us celebrate with this methtastic T-shirt design.

Check out Winter Artwork at his official Facebook page, Twitter, Tumblr, Behance and deviantART, then visit his NeatoShop page for more super neat designs.

View more designs by Winter Artwork | More Funny T-shirts | New T-Shirts

Fire up the Jagwagon, Alfred. We're going to to the shop! Apparently, that's what you get when a Volkswagen and a Jaguar fall in love and have a baby.

The People of Walmart featured this pink awesomeness-on-wheels parked at an Arkansas Walmart earlier this month. A commenter on that site said, "I’m from Arkansas and have seen this car…at a gas station in Benton…and the girl who drives it also has a pet monkey who wears diapers….wish i could find the pics I took of them all together posing with the car…"

We'll keep you up to date if pics of the driver and her pet monkey appear on the Web.

We've been a huge fan of Nick Bertke AKA Pogo here on Neatorama since we featured his remix of Alice in Wonderland way back in 2008. Since then, he's released remixes and samplings of Mary Poppins, Snow White, Scooby-Doo, The Wizard of Oz, Monsters Inc., The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, A.I., and many more (most of them featured here on Neatorama).

Last summer, Bertke released his first "about Pogo" video clip, in which he explained how he did what he does so well. In that clip, Pogo explained what he looked for when he selected audio clips to mix. Watch the wizard at work:

YouTube Clip - via Gizmodo

In the past couple of weeks, Pogo released a few new clips that you can enjoy below: