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Here are some wacked out penguins having a little fun.  Could this be a Walk of the Penguins II?

Courtesy of PhotoShopContest.com

An Iranian court has ordered a man to buy his wife 124,000 roses after she filed a complaint against her “stingy” husband to claim her dowry, a press report said on Monday. “After 10 years of marriage Hengameh had decided to claim her dowry of 124,000 red roses to punish her very stingy husband,” the Etemad newspaper said. “Shortly after marriage I realised that Shahin was very cheap. He even refused to pay for my coffee if we went to a cafe or restaurant,” said the woman, identified only by her first name Hengameh. But Shahin told the court he could only afford five roses a day and complained that it was “her billionaire friends who had put such ideas in her head.”

The court has seized his apartment worth 600 million rials (64,000 dollars) until he has bought her the entire 124,000 roses. A long stemmed red rose costs 20,000 rials (about two dollars) in Tehran. Under Iranian law, a woman can claim her dowry or mahr, which is a gift pledged by the man at the time of marriage, at any time during married life or when getting a divorce.

It is common in Iran to offer gold coins, or property as mahr and the number of gold coins (worth about 260 dollars) could vary from 14 to even hundreds or thousands. An Iranian man can end up in jail over dowry debts and there has been a judicial debate whether it should be adjusted according to the man’s financial status. This story is yet another reason to fear the ‘logic’ of Iran.

All you double-dippers, back away from the chip dip bowl - Now.!  Seems the famous Seinfeld episode was right - double-dipping does transfer mouth microbes from bitten chips or vegetables into the dip. After multiple double-dippers, what might look like an enticing snack may actually be a microbial soup, a new study suggests.

The research, by food science students at Clemson University in Clemson, S.C., found that for every time a bitten cracker went back into the bowl, hundreds, even thousands of bacterial cells went in with it.  The research was done under Clemson’s creative inquiry program, which teaches undergraduates how to conduct research while encouraging outside-the-box thinking.

Teams made up of students at various points in an undergraduate degree set out to explore interesting ideas, often producing scientific journal-worthy results in the process.  An earlier effort by Dawson’s students tested the five-second theory - the notion that no significant transfer of germs occurs if dropped food is retrieved immediately. Their conclusion? You may move fast, but microbes move faster.

This latest project was inspired by the famous Seinfeld double-dipping episode, where George blithely turns a chip dip into a Petri dish, to the revulsion of a fellow party-goer.  Not quite, maybe, but the research Dawson’s students performed suggests a dip bowl will acquire much more than salsa chip crumbs as a social event progresses.
The average human mouth is teeming with bacteria, though to be honest that’s not as nasty as it sounds.  Still, that doesn’t mean there aren’t unpleasant germs you might pick up from fellow dippers who break party etiquette and go back for seconds with a bitten chip.  While it might seem that the more acidic salsa would harbour fewer bacteria, in actual fact it contained more in the double-dipping experiment the Clemson students conducted.

However, when the students let inoculated dips sit at room temperature for a couple of hours to see whether passage of time influenced concentration of microbes, they found the salsa’s bacterial count declined, putting it on about a par with the chocolate and cheese.  The double-dipped dips contained about 400 to 500 bacterial cells per millilitre - which is a tiny amount of dip, far less than would coat the average dipped chip. The team did not type the bacteria, so they don’t know what dippers were leaving behind.

The students also didn’t test heated dips. But Dawson suggests hot dips might provide ideal conditions for microbial growth. And he notes that as a party goes on and the amount of dip in a bowl declines, the microbe content of what remains would be expected to rise.

All this new-found knowledge has made Dawson approach the practice of dipping with a new level of caution. He might share a dip in a restaurant, where he can keep an eye on the people he’s eating with. But at a party? That’s another matter.

This guy is really impressive, as he plays down the ‘racial card’ that has seemed to get folks all riled up after Hillary Clinton makes remarks concerning Dr. King.  Many African Americans were offended when Hillary Clinton told an interviewer in New Hampshire, “Martin Luther King’s dream became a reality when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” 

Some say she seemed to suggest that it took a white politician to fulfill a black man’s dream. “I don’t think it was in any way a racial comment,” Obama told ABC News.  “That’s something that has played out in the press.  That’s not my view.”

But, he said, the comment was revealing about her political character.  “I do think it was indicative of the perspective that she brings, which is that what happens in Washington is more important than what happens outside of Washington,” he said.  My personal view it that Obama could not really capitalize on this issue because he would turn off too many undecided white voters but he definately scores points for staying level-headed.

Winter Cheer or should I say Winter Fear…

This guy is definately not PC but funny as heck!