Mystery Meat: The Mystery Deepens

I have bad news, and possibly-less-bad news, about domestic American meat products.

And the bad news comes with bad news and worse news.

The bad news: fast food retailers are extending their regular ground beef, with all its attendant horrors, with a product known cheerfully within the trade as "pink slime": beef leavings mixed with ammonia in the hope that this will kill the bacteria that swarm in it, as well as the bacteria already present in ordinary ground beef.

The worse news within the bad news: purchasers complained about the latrine stench of pink slime, so the manufacturers reduced the quantity of ammonia, thereby reducing the (possible) bacteria-killing effect.

But despair not, there is some hope for your meat habit: there has been recent progress in culture-growing animal muscle tissue. True, it's squashy and low in protein, but no animals suffered in growing and harvesting it, and it will be a lot cleaner than meat from a slaughterhouse (provided the vats the cultures grow in are kept sanitary, and surely that will be the case).

We still aren't vegetarians in this house, but news like this isn't helping.

Besides, we know where this sort of thing can lead.

Irresistible Igor

John, David and Tom absolutely adored the character roles of Dwight Frye such as Fritz, assistant to Dr. Frankenstein (and yes it was Fritz, not "Igor" -- that was another assistant to another Frankenstein) and Renfield, servant of Dracula. We impersonated Frye so often that when Tom was cast as Renfield in a high school production of Dracula, it must have been the easiest part he ever had to rehearse for.

The Case of the Kidnapped Corpse

Good to hear that Rumanians are keeping up with the old traditions, like bodysnatching.

Watching the Tube

First thing in a long time that's tempted us to watch broadcast TV:

http://io9.com/5409972/grafitti-green-lantern-sandman-in-a-gas-mask-its-your-first-smallville-absolute-justice-tease?autoplay=true

We gave up the cable a long time ago (can't get reception in Corvallis without it), and haven't missed it really. It seems that we can get most things we want to watch from the library, and the rest from the video rental places.