Wednesday, December 16th

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Not so busy here at work today.......

Here is some stuff I saw on the internet today...

Today is National Chocolate-Covered Anything Day,

Ex Kurt Cobain wife Courtney Love has lost custody of her 17-year-old daughter, Frances Bean. Frances wants to live with her grandmother.

Ben Bernanke has been named Time Magazine's 'Person of the Year.' - YAWN!

The book returned to the New Bedford Public Library in Massachusetts this week wasn't overdue by a week, a month or even a year. It was nearly a century overdue, and the fine came to $361.35. The overdue book fine was a penny a day in 1910. But Dudek wasn't asked to pay it. The library plans to display the book in its special collection...

A 13-year-old teen was probably in hot water with his father after running up a cell phone bill of nearly $22,000. Ted Estarija said he was expecting his bill to be higher this month after adding his son to his plan, but wasn't expecting a bill of $21,917 in data usage charges. The Hayward man said his Verizon Wireless bill soared after his son apparently downloaded about 1.4 million kilobytes of data last month. Estarija said after the first media reports, Verizon said they would credit his account for the entire amount. He has also suspended his son's account...

A man who spent 28 years behind bars for a rape and murder he said he didn't commit walked out of a federal prison in Arizona on Tuesday with $75 and a bus ticket to Ohio after DNA testing showed he was innocent. The conviction of Donald Eugene Gates, 58, was based largely on the testimony of an FBI forensic analyst whose work later came under fire and a hair analysis technique that has been discredited. Later, at a stop in Phoenix, Gates said he wasn't ready to talk about his conviction, his years in prison or the justice system. He did say he wanted to see America's countryside on the bus ride home. "I'm going to go back to my family and start my life over," he said

I WAS THAT LITTLE BOY!

Police: Dad leaves boy and goes into strip club

INDIANAPOLIS – A man was arrested after police said he left his 5-year-old son in a tractor-trailer while he ducked into an Indianapolis strip club to drink. The 39-year-old was arrested at 1:15 a.m. Tuesday on child neglect and public intoxication charges after calling police to report his truck stolen and his child missing. Police said the man was too drunk to remember where he had parked.

They found the boy inside watching cartoons on a television inside the cab. The keys were in the ignition, and the doors were unlocked.

Police said the suspect put his son in jeopardy by leaving him exposed in a high crime area.

The man was taken to the Marion County jail, where his wife picked up him and the child

Americans Toss Out 40 Percent of All Food

Americans Toss Out 40 Percent of All Food
Thu Nov 26, 9:46 am ET

While many Americans feast on turkey and all the fixings today, a new study finds food waste per person has shot up 50 percent since 1974. Some 1,400 calories worth of food is discarded per person each day, which adds up to 150 trillion calories a year.


The study finds that about 40 percent of all the food produced in the United States is tossed out.


Meanwhile, while some have plenty of food to spare, a recent report by the Department of Agriculture finds the number of U.S. homes lacking "food security," meaning their eating habits were disrupted for lack of money, rose from 4.7 million in 2007 to 6.7 million last year.


About 1 billion people worldwide don't have enough to eat, according to the World Food Program.


Growing problem


The new estimate of food waste, published in the journal PLoS ONE, is a relatively straightforward calculation: It's the difference between the U.S. food supply and what's actually eaten, which was estimated by using a model of human metabolism and known body weights.


The result, from Kevin Hall and colleagues at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, is about 25 percent higher than similar estimates made in recent years.


Last year, an international group estimated that up to 30 percent of food - worth about $48.3 billion - is wasted each year in the United States. That report concluded that despite food shortages in many countries, plenty of food is available to feed the world, it just doesn't get where it needs to go.


Previous calculations were typically based on interviews with people and inspections of garbage, which Hall's team figures underestimates the waste.


Related problems


ScienceNOW, an online publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, reports that food waste occurs at the manufacturing level and in distribution, but more than half is wasted by consumers, according to a separate study earlier this year by Jeffery Sobal, a sociologist at Cornell University.


Meanwhile, Hall and colleagues say a related and growing problem, obesity, may be fueled by the increased availability of food in this country and the incessant marketing of it. All that extra food is bad for the environment, too.


Addressing the oversupply of food in the United States "could help curb to the obesity epidemic as well as reduce food waste, which would have profound consequences for the environment and natural resources," the scientists write. "For example, food waste is now estimated to account for more than one quarter of the total freshwater consumption and more than 300 million barrels of oil per year representing about 4 percent of the total U.S. oil consumption."