Salon’s article about McDonald’s and mad cow disease really turned my stomach. For the past year and a half I’ve been congratulating myself on not giving in to paranoia and fear (I bought some hamburger just last night to make chili… yum!), but even I begin to crack when faced with phrases like “mechanically recovered meat.” Tell me again why I should be a vegetarian, Brigita?

No free taco. My dad will be disappointed.

My dad e-mailed me raving about some Taco Bell promotion to give everybody in the United States a free taco if Mir hits a target in the South Pacific. I figured he’d picked it up from some bogus e-mail forward. Turns out I was wrong. Now I wonder, how do they determine who’s eligible for this? Is it everybody physically located in the U.S.? What about tourists? What about illegal immigrants? In other words, how do I (theoretically, of course) get my taco??

How well do you know your chocolate? This site shows you cross-sections of various sweets and candy bars and asks you to identify what they are. Some are harder than you think. (And at least one goes by the British name, but if you can’t recognize that it’s really an M&M, you probably shouldn’t play anyway.)