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He will be sadly missed, but his influence will live on.

Here is a good tribute and summary of his work, also, here is Neil Gaiman’s tribute.

In the first review of school lunches in 15 years, Congress has backed down from insisting that a pizza needs to have half a cup of tomato paste to be called a vegetable (compared to the current two tablespoons):

Corey Henry, a spokesman for the American Frozen Food Institute, said the proposed rules simply did not make sense, especially when it came to pizza.

The industry backs the current rules which say that about a quarter-cup of tomato paste on a slice of pizza can count as a vegetable serving. The Agriculture Department proposal would have required that schools serve more tomato paste per piece of pizza to get a vegetable credit, an idea the industry thought would make pizza unappetizing.

Apparently adding more tomato to a pizza would make it less tasty, and if an impartial judge like the American Frozen Food Institute believes this then who are we to argue?

“It would basically be swimming in tomato sauce,” said Corey Henry, vice president of communications at the American Frozen Food Institute. “No school kid in his right mind would want to eat that.”

(source)

We’ll ignore for a second that tomatoes are actually fruit, and that the tomato paste on pizzas has a massive amount of added sugar in it (around one and a half teaspoons of sugar for a pizza’s quarter cup of paste), and just look at the simple truth here: pizza is not a vegetable. It is dough, a thin spread of something vaguely derived from tomatoes, with melted high-fat solidified dairy produce on top. I love pizza, I really do, but I’ve got no illusions about them.

Calling pizza a suitable source of vegetables for growing children is not only a lie, it is harmful to their health, their future wellbeing and relationship with food, and evidence of corruption by politicians bowing to industrial pressures. That’s just one small choice that we know about. At what point is good sense going to kick in and fix this, how long will it take?

I’m all for sport being a unifying activity, but I’m still a bit surprised that Iranians are interested enough to get involved. Nonetheless, there they are.

Sadly, there is no actual flying; instead the players run around with a broom between their legs. There’s a promotional video for the 2011 World Cup here.

Unlike the snake defence, which possibly might not be completely accurate, this actually exists. If you’ve ever thought to yourself ‘I wonder how someone might express Mechanisms for Maintaining Ploidy in Somatic Cells in the form of rhthymic movement’, then you’ve come to the right place.

[Thanks again to Val for the link/]

There were many complications with the treatment; the consequences of radiotherapy are not trivial, but he is recovering slowly from those with good support and it is likely he will return to a relatively normal life.

This is not the cure for everyone, but it is a major step – curing one person shows that it can be done.

This is either one of the most specific fetishes I’ve seen, or perhaps the most memorable kiss those two people will have in their entire lives. I’m not sure if it can quite be classified as ‘romantic’ but it’s definitely got style (and it’s a superb photo too).

For a person who has studied the Bible so closely, you think he might have read the Gospel of Mark. In chapter 13, verse 5, Jesus starts talking:

Jesus said to them: “Watch out that no one deceives you.

In verse 31 to 34 Jesus says:

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard! Be alert! You do not know when that time will come.

So, Harold Camping thought that he could name the day of Rapture when Jesus himself explicitly said he didn’t know it and that certainly no man could. Whether or not you believe in the Bible, this is clearly a case of a person using only the parts of his holy book that agree with his views.

This Rapture fuss has brought him a lot of attention and likely made him a lot of money, but it is also clear evidence that he has ignored the teachings of his own spiritual leader. If he, and others, were content to accept this blatant falsehood as being the truth, it is sad to think of the chances of more controversial subjects being resolved in our lifetimes.