Two years ago the world discovered what happens when you feed melamine to dogs and cats. The results weren’t pretty. China now continues it’s grand experiment in non-regulation to find out what happens when you feed melamine to babies. The results are equally not pretty. I remember the pet food recall all too well, and I remember wondering at the time if this problem wouldn’t eventually make it into the human food supply. It was one of the major motivating factors for us to start eating fresh and local foods as much as we possibly could and to avoid anything, edible or not, that comes from China (which is almost impossible). China may not mean to kill us all, but if they don’t start keeping an eye on their manufacturers, they may very well end up doing so all the same.

Someone in NYC is bottling and selling NY tap water, and apparently people are buying it for $1.50 a bottle. Look, people, tap water in most of the USA is perfectly fine for human consumption straight out of the tap, and it’s way, way cheaper than bottled water. We use thousands of gallons of water a month, and our water bill hasn’t been over $15 a month ever … not even when I was watering the lawn twice a week for a couple of hours. If the water in your area has a “flavor” to it that you don’t like, there are innumerable ways to filter that out. Paying someone else to filter tap water and put it in plastic bottles that are likely leaching crap into it is, in short, stupid.

A restaurant in Switzerland has put human milk on the menu. Not glasses of the stuff, but they cook with it. I find myself not knowing what to say about this except that I don’t like the idea. Seems like if the idea catches on, as ridiculous things like this tend to do among the rich and silly, it could be just one more way people are exploited. Yup, don’t like the idea at all.

On the road to Web 3.0, a semantic map has been created and is now being sold to anyone with enough cash. It claims to give computers a vocabulary ten times that of a US college student. Judging from some of the college students I encounter in my daily life, having a vocabulary ten times larger isn’t really saying much. Some of them seem to only know three words: OMG, SRSLY, and PRON. Oh … and LOL.

And closer to home: When I came in to turn off the furnace and close the windows, both cats, which had been wandering aimlessly around the house looking sad and pathetic when I stepped out onto the porch, were stretched out on their backs, belly up and spread eagle, directly under the heating vent in the bedroom. I guess I wasn’t the only one who thought it was feeling a little chilly in the house.