May 2008 Archives

Have you ever heard of edible cake jewels? It sounds a little weird (and prissy!), but they exist and are available in multiple colors to look like various gemstones. They make regular sprinkles or colored sugar look very "blah".

These would be perfect for Lil Jon's blinged out birthday cake! Lil Jon would be walking around with his diamond-covered chalice (oh, I'm sorry, I meant Pimp Cup) of CRUNK energy drink in one hand and a plate of jeweled birthday cake in the other. What a beautiful mental picture.

Princess wannabes around the world probably rejoiced when these were invented. And their moms were bummed because these cost more than sprinkles and will have to be placed on the cake one by one! You don't just dump cake jewels on a cake!

A package of about 84 assorted cake jewels costs $13.00. But for some parents, that's a small price to pay if it will satisfy a whining kid with the most perfectest birthday cake ever. Plus, if you put more than 84 of these on a cake, you have probably flown right past "nicely decorated" to "utterly tacky".

All kidding aside, I do think these have potential to look pretty neat on a cake. If you were really talented you could use these to make a stained glass image on a sheet cake.

Just as we humans have freaks in our ranks, the plant kingdom has plenty of plants that are incredibly strange. Below, we've profiled a few of our favorites:

1. Wolffia plants, aka watermeal - These tiny flowers look like floating specks, but they're actually the tiniest flowering plants in the world. They'd make adorable bouquets and corsages for little ants and bees.

2. Welwitschia mirabilis, a plant whose nicknames sound just as foreign as its scientific name (and thus, are not listed here) - The welwitschia is an incredibly strange desert plant that can live for hundreds and possibly even thousands of years. Each one has two leaves, a stem, and roots. That's it. As they get old, they just get more and more tattered.

3. Makahiya, the bashful mimosa - These mimosas are much like all the other mimosas, with one key difference. They fold up their leaves when you touch them.

4. Amorphophallus Bulbifer - These strange plants get their name from the greek amorphos, "without form, misshapen" and phallos, "penis". It's also said to smell like dirty socks.

5. Solanum Mammosum, aka "Cow's Udder Fruit" - Just because people refer to them as fruit, that doesn't mean you should eat them. They're poisonous.

Did you ever have to take keyboarding class in school? It was really boring and you wanted to slap your teacher when she came to your desk and held a folder over the keyboard so you couldn't look at your hands. The class would have been more fun (and I use the term fun loosely here) if you could play games while improving your super fast typing skills.

TypeRacer lets you race against other users. Keyboarding class would've been better if you were racing against your friends (and enemies). Ultimately the nerds would prevail, and then the cool kids would decide to make it uncool to be a fast typer. Life's rough.

As you type out sentences (watch out, punctuation matters!), your little car moves further along. When I tested it out, the sentences ended up being quotes from a movie, and of course, there's a link to buy the movie. No harm in trying to make a little money in exchange for providing a silly typing diversion, right?

I flew past my competitors at 83 wpm. I don't think that is very good, but user Cody came in last at 32 wpm. Cody is probably an 8-year-old, but a win is a win!

You can also do a speed test at 10 Fast Fingers. This is a no frills speed test. No cute little cars. No odd movie lines. No competitors. However, you do get a ranking among the hundreds of thousands of people who have played.

74 words

Speed test

In my defense of that score, they randomly threw in one capitalized word "Indian". Out of no where I had to use the dang Shift key. My pinkie was totally unprepared to make that move.

See how fast (or slow) you type and leave your score in the comments. If you get caught by your boss, he can't get mad at you. It improves your on-the-job skills!

Ask any two people what constitutes tacky behavior and you'll likely get very different answers. For some, tacky means excessive lawn ornaments, a dozen cats, and farm animal-themed toaster cozies. For others, it's driving a car with bumper stickers or letting your bra straps peek out from underneath a tank top. And then there are those types who think you're tacky if you wear white after Labor Day or butcher the pronunciation of "foie gras" in a restaurant.

Regardless of your standards, I think most of us will agree on the tackiness of the candidates below.

10. Richard Simmons - I think he's awesome, but look at the man - the shiny (waxed?) legs, the hot pants, the spirit fingers?? That's enough to earn the #10 spot on the list.

9. Bret Michaels - As the lead vocalist of Poison and star of the reality show "Rock of Love", there's no denying that this guy is exactly what fathers fear most when raising daughters.

When was the last time in your adult life that you thought "Oh no, I can't possibly finish this banana. I cannot waste it and I wish I had a protective clip that looked like a weird beak so I could save it for later". If you've actually had that exact thought, then I am in the wrong career and should be a psychic.

The Nana Saver is a little plastic cap/clip that keeps a half-eaten banana fresh. I can't vouch for how "fresh", seeing as I'm not cool enough to have tested the Nana Saver out. In my opinion, unless you are a small child, you should be able to finish off an entire banana in one sitting. I'm not trying to encourage people to eat more than they should, but come on, saving half of a banana? Ludicrous. You should have 5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables a day, according to the USDA Food Guide Pyramid, so eat up the rest of that banana.

Even funnier is that you have to make the decision ahead of time that you are only going to eat half of the banana since you have to leave the peel intact. Premeditated wussiness.

For those of you who enjoy eating bananas (whole bananas), may I recommend the Banana Bunker? There's no slicing or saving involved. It simply protects your banana wherever you decide you need to bring a banana along. If you don't eat the entire banana, don't even think about putting it back in the Banana Bunker, as its exposed end will certainly get brown and gross. The Banana Bunker is not suited for those who can't handle a banana in its entirety.

As you can see, the Banana Bunker has a very mature style. (Oh please, like you didn't already think something dirty about its ribbing and the word "banana".)

Obviously, the Banana Bunker is much cooler than the Nana Saver and also serves a better function. Plus, the Nana Saver folks didn't make a video of someone playing the drums with bananas while wearing a Viking helmet now did they?

Few activities are as enjoyable and deeply satisfying as a meal with an entertaining dinner companion. Even the worst food be ignored if the conversation is good enough, and I'm pretty sure the people below could make me overlook dog food as a main course.

10. Vlad Dracula, aka Vlad the Impaler - Aside from being the reputed inspiration for Count Dracula, Vlad was known for being a less than hospitable dinner host. He's said to have been directly responsible for the deaths of 40,000-100,000 mostly innocent people, which is quite a feat when you consider that he lived in a time where you had to do those things by hand (or stake, or boiling, or by nailing hats to their heads...). Just don't complain to him about the food.

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9. Michael Jackson - Hollywood has created a lot of stars who make you wonder where things went wrong, but few are as eccentric as The King of Pop. The Moonwalk, the one glove trend, the private zoo and amusement park... the child molestation charges. Oh, and his nose fell off. On second thought, it might be difficult to eat across from that...

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According to the Salt Institute, there are nearly 14,000 documented uses for salt. Personally, I was just tickled at the fact that something called the "Salt Institute" actually exists. The idea that it might have compiled a list of over 10,000 ways to use salt was just mind-boggling.

If you want to check out a fairly detailed list, you can visit the Salt Institute's page on consumer uses of salt. Their page was fairly long and the colors made it a little unpleasant to read, though, so I've posted some of the highlights here:


Testing egg freshness - Place the egg in a cup of water to which two teaspoonfuls of salt have been added. A fresh egg sinks; a doubter will float.

Cleaning stained cups - Rubbing with salt will remove stubborn tea or coffee stains from cups.

Reducing eye puffiness - Mix one teaspoon of salt in a pint of hot water and apply pads soaked in the solution on the puffy areas.

Removing dry skin - After bathing and while still wet give yourself a massage with dry salt. It removes dead skin particles and aids the circulation. Note: This is so much better than buying a Ped Egg.

Drip-proofing candles - Soak new candles in a strong salt solution for a few hours, then dry them well. When burned they will not drip.

I have seen my fair share of crazy piercings and strategically placed tattoos, but this is a whole new level of body modification. The Eyeball Piercing.

Imagine having something in your eye that you can't get out. Now, imagine that all the time. That is how I envision life with an eyeball piercing. It's not normal, it's not right. I can barely stand getting a cat hair in my eye, let alone inflicting this sort of pain on myself.

So when I saw this, I began to wonder... how do you go about getting an eyeball piercing? Apparently, you need to insert a 0.13 inch wide piece of special jewelry, like the heart in the picture above, into the eye's mucous membrane. Oh, and all the anesthesia and cutting and junk.

I've never seen anyone with this type of eye-wear in person, but if I did, I'd have to admit I'd freak out a bit. Okay, ALOT. Gross.

Let me just tell you that I will not be in line to get this done. I enjoy my vision, and plan to keep my eyeballs just the way they are thank you.

Although I spent just a few hours with my predecessor here at Vat19.com, I'm pretty sure that he and I wouldn't have gotten along.

It's not that he wasn't a nice guy. He was both enthusiastic and polite, rare qualities in someone who's preparing you to take on his job. It's not even like he looked at me funny or unknowingly insulted something I like. In fact, I didn't even realize my dislike for him until a couple of weeks after his departure.

One afternoon, though, as I was searching through a pile of his old faxes, I realized that he and I never would have gotten along. He consistently stapled his pages at the very edge of the paper.

That flagrant disregard for the permanence of the paper-to-paper union was enough to counteract everything else I knew of him. In an instant, I decided that he was unreliable, careless, and generally unlikeable.

I'm not the only one with these silly issues, either. A friend of mine refuses to go out with any man who owns a plastic watch. It doesn't matter if he's an outdoorsy sort who uses it while mountain-climbing and deep sea diving; she's out the door the moment she finds out.

Even my parrot has an irrational hatred - phones. The size, shape, and style are unimportant. If it's a phone, or if you're a person carrying a phone, she attacks.

A brief survey around the Vat19 offices revealed that pretty much everyone has at least one strong, irrational hatred:

• People who wear braided belts
• People who wear pantyhose with open-toe shoes
• Creative I-dotters (Though I must confess to agreeing with this one. Why are they wasting so much effort on circles, stars, and hearts? The collective wasted efforts of the creative i-dotters could have cured world hunger by now).
• People with ribbon magnets on their cars
• People named Holly.


Do you have any completely irrational beliefs? Would you switch jobs to avoid working with a guy who has salt and pepper hair? Would you duck behind doorways to avoid making conversation with a co-worker who drives a Volkswagen? Leave your irrational dislikes in the comments.

If I gave you a list of product names, without photos or descriptions, would you be able to correctly determine which ones are children's toys and which ones are sex toys?

Let's find out:

• Wet Head


• Hot Spot


• Wizard Stick


• Little Taps


• Round Beaver


• Screaming Octopus


• Wormie


• Rev 'N Ride


• Red Hot Idol Costume


• Kitty In My Pocket

Continue below to see the answers.