In the town of Varallo, Italy, the mayor has announced that overweight residents will be paid to lose weight.  Men will get $70 for losing 9 pounds in a month and women will get the same amount for losing 7 pounds.  If they keep the weight off for 5 months, they will get another $280.

This is what America needs to do!  I’ll lose 9 pounds, and then I could lose another 9 pounds the next month, and keep them both off.  I could probably do this a few times, and if I kept it all off, I’d bring in over $1000.  That would be good motivation.  Somebody should make this happen here.

I just heard about a new product called Bacon Salt.  You add it to your food to make it taste like bacon.  I glanced at their website, and their motto is : “Everything should taste like bacon.”  Well, that’s an interesting premise.  They’ve also said, “We’ve on a quest to make everything taste like bacon.”  Hmm…  I really like bacon, and there should be more dishes that include bacon, but everything?  That might be a little extreme.

However, there is a catch to this innovative new product.  Check out one of their product descriptions, which at first sounds good, but there’s obviously a flaw in the slaw : “Bacon Salt is a zero calorie, vegetarian, kosher certified seasoning salt that makes everything taste like real bacon.”  How is bacon vegetarian?  And how is it zero calorie?  The concept of bacon taste with zero calories sounds great, no doubt, but this goes against conventional wisdom.  Typically, what makes foods good is that they are unhealthy.  If there are no calories and there is no meat to this product, how is it good?

But I will not pass judgment at this time, for I have not tried this product.  I would like to, though.  I looked for it in the spices section of Walmart the other day, but didn’t find any.  (To the makers of Bacon Salt, if you donate me a package, I’ll gladly write a review of it.)

What happens when you mix animals with radioactive ooze?  If you’ve done any kind of research on such things like I have*, you will realize this is dangerous.  You tend to end up with mutants.  And these mutants might be evil, difficult to stop, and causing widespread destruction.  Apparently some scientists have not realized this, because there is a nuclear power plant near Miami, Florida, called Turkey Point, which maintains a wildlife preserve around its twin reactors.  And this is not just some casual “I’m saving an acre of the land I’m building on to make us look enviro-friendly” wildlife preserve — no, it’s twenty thousand acres.  They maintain seventeen endangered species (which doesn’t seem to me like the best place to keep them, but what do I know?), but the scary part is that they are particularly interested in breeding crocodiles.  They’ve released over three thousand into the wild so far.  The crocodile is quite a dangerous animal naturally, with its armor and incredible strength, but mixing it with radiation seems like a bad idea.

How did the scientists not put this together?  This just goes to show that you need to take a break from studying to watch TV and movies.  If they had kept up with what’s being documented in some of the popular movies of the past few years, they would’ve realized this is a bad idea.  I just hope we can stop this before it’s too late…

* I’ve watched X-Men and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as well as some B-movies along these lines.

July is “National Ice Cream Month”.  I appreciate ice cream year-round, day in and day out, so I don’t necessarily need emphasis on it.  But it might not be a bad thing to emphasize.  Maybe it means we should eat ice cream each day this month.  Or perhaps we should define a single day to focus on ice cream, where employers supply free ice cream to their employees that day.  That sounds like a good idea to me.  It would boost morale…