M.L. Nestel, writing for thedaily.com, reports that Tide detergent has become the hot new item targeted by thieves. He calls it a "Grime Wave." Nestel writes:

 
According to Nestel, Tide has become a form of currency on the street, where it's known as "liquid gold." People trade it for drugs. A recent drug sting turned up more Tide than cocaine.

Apparently, thieves brazenly go into supermarkets, load up shopping carts full of Tide, and then dash out the front door, into waiting getaway cars.


Nestel's story has been picked up by lots of other news outlets. So far I can only find one, NPR, which is doubtful about it. Their reporter, Jacob Goldstein, asks, "is this for real, or is this a ginned-up trend story?"

If it is a ginned-up trend story, where did Nestel get the idea for it? One source is an article that ran in the Twin Cities Pioneer Press on Feb. 16, about Patrick Paul Costanzo, who's been accused of stealing $25,000 worth of Tide from Walmart. It wasn't the only thing he was stealing, but it was the most unusual. Police Lt. Matt Swenke was quoted as saying, "Obviously, somewhere in our Twin Cities area there was a market for that (detergent). No one can use that much detergent."


And back in Dec. 2011, the gazette.net (Maryland community news) reported the theft of $15,000 worth of Tide from a local Safeway. But again, this article noted that Tide was just one of a number of common consumer products that were being stolen in large amounts. Other products popular among thieves included razor blades, infant formula, and diapers.

So there's two legitimate sources for Nestel's story. In other words, he's not making this up out of whole cloth. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say there's a crime wave targeting common household products, rather than a crime wave targeting Tide specifically.

Update: Looks like the Great Tide Crime Wave was a ginned-up trend story, as many suspected. According to an article on foxnews.com, theft of Tide has long been a problem in the retail industry, and there's nothing new about this. Nor has the problem been getting worse recently.

Lt. Shannon Smith of the Somerset Police Department explains that thieves steal Tide, because it's a widely recognized brand-name household product, and then they sell it to small retail stores for half-price. This has been going on for ages.

Apparently it's true that the internet never forgets. Seven years ago I posted about a company claiming to rent midgets for parties. In that post I didn't say I was renting midgets. I simply said there was a business claiming to rent them. In fact, I thought the idea sounded so odd that I had some doubts about whether the business was real. (And I probably shouldn't use the term 'midget.' I think 'little person' is now the preferred term.)

Anyway, soon after making that post, I started getting email queries from people interested in renting little people. In 2008 I first noted I was getting these strange emails, and I'm still getting them today, at the rate of about one every two months. Here's the latest I received, from a dental office in Atlanta:


I don't know what there is in that seven-year-old post that makes people think I'm running a little-person rental service. Check back in another seven years to find out if I'm still getting the emails.

Perhaps everything tastes like chicken because the chicken you get in supermarkets has a little bit of every other animal in it. This is a BBC documentary, but I'm sure what they talk about holds true for every other country in the world.

Infant learning and development is a field full of dubious theories, because there are so many desperate parents willing to try anything that might give their kids a slight edge-up in life. So the stage is set for Baby Yoga, aka "dynamic baby gymnastics," aka 'swinging your baby around your head.' Its practitioners claim that if you're not doing this, then you're depriving your child of an important developmental opportunity.

Check out the video below which shows Elena Fokina demonstrating some Baby Yoga moves. Warning: if the sight of kids being swung energetically around might disturb you, then you probably want to skip the video. Previous videos of Baby Yoga posted on youtube have been banned because they caused such an outcry. (See this BBC News story from Feb 2011).



Anticipating that this video might also get removed from youtube, here's a few screenshots of Elena in action.


According to the video, the practice of Baby Yoga originated in Russia -- its founder being Igor Borisovich Charkovsk, who also advocates the health benefits of dunking kids in water over and over again. More info: anorak.co.uk.

As one would expect, mainstream pediatricians warn that swinging your kid around like a rag doll could be very dangerous if you lose your grasp on the kid.

The following photo and caption has recently begun to circulate online. It's all over Facebook.


I haven't been able to figure out where the photo originally came from, but it definitely doesn't show Alvaro Munera's moment of epiphany during a bullfight. Munera is an ex-bullfighter who's become an animal-rights activist. But (as described in an article about him on open.salon.com) his career ended not from a moment of zen communion with a bull, but rather in 1984 when a bull caught him and tossed him in the air, resulting in a spinal-cord injury that left Munera paralyzed.

I've seen another version of the photo and quotation that attributes the words to "Fabian Oconitrillo Gonzalez". But I have no idea who he might be. If he's a bullfighter, I haven't been able to find out anything about him.

Three years ago, Rebekah Speight of Dakota City and her kids were at McDonalds, where they ordered some Chicken McNuggets. One of the McNuggets went uneaten, but just as she was about to throw it out, Rebekah noticed that it resembled George Washington. So she took it home and kept it in her freezer.

And just a few days ago, this decision paid off when she managed to sell the GWCM for $8100 on eBay. But she's not keeping the money. It's all going to a charity to send children to summer church camp. Where they'll spend their time looking for the face of Jesus in tree stumps and the Virgin Mary in water stains.

Actually, I can definitely see the resemblance between the McNugget and the former president. Though is it that the McNugget looks like George, or George looks like a McNugget? (link: telegraph.co.uk)

Back in November 2011, Time magazine ran an article titled "The Man Who Invented Email." It was about V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai who, in 1978 as a 14-year-old kid, wrote and copyrighted a program called EMAIL. This article led the Smithsonian to recently acquire various documents related to Ayyadurai's 1978 program, in order to immortalize its contribution to American life and culture. In late February, the Washington Post added to Ayyadurai's growing fame as the creator of email by writing a piece about him titled, "Smithsonian acquires documents from inventor of EMAIL program.'


All this has led to outrage in the tech community, with many people pointing out that Ayyadurai in no way created email. Nor did he even play any kind of significant role in its development.

Sam Biddle has posted a detailed debunking of Ayyadurai's claims over at gizmodo. He notes that Ayyadurai has been playing up his claim as the inventor of email by registering numerous domains such as InventorOfEmail.com, DrEmail.com, and EmailInventor.com. But, according to Biddle, this is the reality:


Ayyadurai's one legitimate claim to fame is that he may have been the first person to use the abbreviation 'email' in place of 'electronic mail'. Or, at least, an earlier use of the term 'email' hasn't yet been found.

A few times when I've done interviews about April Fool's Day, I've been asked whether the tradition of foolery on April 1st is dying out because, despite the day's popularity online, most people don't celebrate it.

My answer is that April Fool's Day has always been ignored by the majority of the population, but the influence of the celebration can be seen in what people don't do on April 1. Even people who have never played a prank in their entire life, will nevertheless acknowledge the tradition by not scheduling important events, such as weddings, on the day. Also many businesses avoid making major announcements on April 1.

A case in point this year is Chrysler, which has announced it's going to push back the production launch of the Dodge Dart until after April 1 in order "to avoid being jinxed" by an April Fool's Day launch

But Coors Light has decided to ignore the April Fool's Day Jinx, and has announced it will debut Coors Light Iced T on April 1. Even though this immediately makes people wonder if the product is a joke -- which apparently it's not.

The most famous example of a company that decided to ignore the April Fool's Day Jinx is Google, which chose April 1, 2004 to launch Gmail. This led to widespread speculation about whether Gmail was a joke, but the speculation worked in the company's favor because Google had a history of April 1 jokes, and the timing of the launch got people talking about how Gmail seemed too good to be true (because it offered 1GB of storage space, which was unheard of at the time).

I posted a brief description of the Australian legend of the Nullarbor Nymph back in 2004. This is what I wrote:


Now filmmaker Matthew Wilkinson has brought the legend to the screen. ABC News quotes him as saying:


The film just premiered. Based on the trailer, it looks like an instant classic.

Italian artist Anna Utopia Giordano (great name... can that be the name she was born with?) has created a series of works that comment on the media obsession with photoshopping models to look thin and flawless. She's taken famous classical nudes and made them thinner. So Botticelli's Venus gets slimmed down for the beach, as does Francesco Hayez's Venus. The New York Daily News quotes her as saying: