Fiona rocks, rugby fan freaks... RATS!

Sometimes when things like, say, work and life and bills and small paychecks get me feeling a little sadistic, I like to seek out stories of those more unfortunate than me, just for kicks. Such a scenario brought me to this story about a gentleman who was playing "hide the polska" with someone other than his wife, and was tattled on by a parrot who is clearly more intelligent than he. I imagine that was quite a blow... to the marraige, you perverts.

A completely unrelated story also currently posted on Ananova describes how some Russian men were eating a large bag of potato chips and discovered a whole dead rat at the bottom of the bag. Apparently the rat had been cooked and seasoned like a chip and had somehow made it into the package. Even with cooking and seasoning, I imagine the rat was still unappetizing enough to put them off chips for a while and onto another potato-based Russian staple: vodka. I say the rat may have done them a favor. Vodka beats chips any day.

Rats in food are no good -- and either I'm a magnet for rat-in-food stories or this happens more than we'd like to imagine. I have a colleague who swears she found clumps of rat hair in a Subway sandwich and has since refused to eat at the establishment. She actually bit in to the sandwich, chewed and swallowed before she noticed that there were what looked like clumps of brown rat hair baked into the bread.

And peanut butter, according to my junior high school biology teacher, is FULL of rat feces. This is really sad news for me, as PB is a staple in my diet. The long and short of the story is that peanuts are approximately the same size and shape as the doo of the rats that crawl around on, eat, and doo in, the piles of peanuts in the field before they're transported to the processing plant. So I guess the doo falls in the crusher/baker/blender along with the shelled nuts. No wonder it's so high in protein...

Gross. Subject change.

I saw Fiona Apple at the Moore Theatre last week. My seats were the worst in the house. No, really. I was up at the veeeerrrrry top --exactly 3 rows from the highest seat in the building. This was painful for me, as I had initially been under the impression that a friend of a friend of a friend was going to be able to get me in early and put me in one of the front rows. But although my seats nearly gave me vertigo (it really was scary way up there), the concert was flawless. That woman is just fantastic, even if she is a little eccentric. You absolutely MUST download/buy Extraordinary Machine. Listen it to three times in a row, suspending judgement until the third. You will love it if you have any taste in music at all. If you don't, you should probably pull a Van Gough because you're worthless. Click below for a sampler:


I have never understood crazy, violent rugby or soccer fans. This is just another (painful, unbelievable) example of why.