World Toilet Day recently took place. Did you celebrate?

Last week, we offered By the Numbers: Turkey Thursday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. To this list we'd like to add 72 lbs. — the weight of a Minnesota man's Thanksgiving turkey this year. (Source: USA Today)

Credit: flickr - agilitynut

Moving on...

Slightly More Than 72 Lbs.
Adult obesity rates in the United States appear to have leveled off — at least temporarily — according to a comprehensive survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday.

Obviously, these researchers are unaware of the new McDonald's breakfast burritos. Ahem ... Burritos. For. Breakfast.

Preschool Toys: The Next Generation
According to The New York Times this week: "Cell phones, laptops, digital cameras and MP3 music players are among the hottest gift items this year. For preschoolers."

On Wednesday, six of the nine bestselling toys for 5- to 7-year-olds on Amazon.com were tech gadgets. Toy makers and retailers are filling shelves with new tech devices for children ages 3 and up, and sometimes even down. They say they are catering to junior consumers who want to emulate their parents and are not satisfied with fake gadgets.

"The bigger toy companies don't even call it the toy business anymore," Jim Silver, editor of Toy Wishes magazine and an industry analyst for 24 years, told the NYT. "They're in the family entertainment business and the leisure business. What they're saying is, 'We're vying for kids' leisure time.'"

What happened to kids playing with manual toys?
Credit: Educational Toys Mart

Today's Mission Statement
From the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator:

We strive to competently leverage others' excellent opportunities to exceed customer expectations.

Deadliest Jobs, Revisited
Forget fishers and flight engineers. According to a report from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), men in routine jobs "die earlier."

PA News (via Fark) reports:

Men working as bus drivers, car park attendants and labourers (sic.) are almost three times more likely to die prematurely than chief executives of large firms, it has emerged. Those aged 25 to 64 in "routine occupations" have a far worse fate than men in more professional jobs... .

Figures for men aged 30 to 34 in routine jobs — which includes bar staff and road sweepers — showed they were 4.5 times more likely to die than officers in the armed forces. For men aged 25 to 29 in routine occupations, they were 5.1 times more likely to die than men working as doctors, lawyers and architects.

Aaaay, Milwaukee!
A bronze Fonzie sculpture is expected to be unveiled in downtown Milwaukee next fall, with two-thirds of the funds raised for the project, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

A nonprofit group that promotes the city for tourism and conventions says it has raised $57,000 of the $85,000 needed to commission a life-size sculpture of Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli, from the long-running Happy Days TV show circa the 1950s and early 1960s.

OK. This "news" item was for me. And I propose erecting a statue of Richie's older brother, Chuck Cunningham, who one day left to shoot hoops and never returned. (I always blamed Chachi.)

Someone call the Nobel Prize Committee
We have next year's winner: a college student's invention that turns warm beer icy cold in seconds.

According to InventorSpot.com:

A young 22-year-old inventor, by the name of Kent Hodgson, has found a way to almost instantly chill a beverage without using any ice. His relatively simple idea uses liquid CO2 to turn a warm beverage into a cold one within seconds.

The portable gadget, which Hodgson calls "Huski," has a cooling capacity almost four times that of regular ice with the advantage that it doesn't water down your drink.

To the New Zealand Herald, the inventor explained the rapid cooling beverage process he mastered as being "extremely simple:

You have plastic cooling cells which are pressed down into the dock which houses the liquid carbon dioxide. The liquid CO2 expands and is pressurised (sic.) into dry ice in the base of the cooling cells ... in a moment. You then pop it into your drink and then proceed from there as you normally would.

The usefulness of such a device is endless.

Aerial Firefighting Could Become Child's Play
William Cleary, a Boeing engineer, has started working on a system to use giant water balloons to put out wildfires. Cleary has a shared patent, the support of two Fortune 500 companies and a small team of designers and engineers at his disposal on a project that could change the way fires are fought from the air: with waterballoons.

The basic concept is simple, the Associated Press reports:

Biodegradable plastic balloons four feet in diameter hold 240 gallons of water; they are enclosed in cardboard boxes that are torn open by the wind when pushed out the back of a cargo plane; the balloons burst in midair, making it rain in the desert. With the use of GPS coordinates and wind-speed calculations, the balloons could be dropped with precision from a safe altitude high above the flames, the developers say.

The balloons, which have not yet been tested on a real wildfire, would be used in addition to typical aerial firefighting equipment such as air tankers and helicopters with water buckets.

Nucleus of Galaxy Centaurus A

Credit: E.J. Schreier (STScI) / NASA


Cheers.