Goose, what's sauce for the

Readers may have seen that oft-forwarded image of Disney's 7 Dwarfs/Dwarves titled "The Seven Dwarves of Menopause." At ENN (It's Off to Work We Go) we believe strongly in equality. So, in the spirit of parity of esteem, we present to you the "Seven Dwarves of Manhood," a graphic created by the men and women of ENN (We Rock) and The Great Hungarian Conspiracy (Paprika Rocks).



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Mssgs, sndng txt

Try the voice feature, it's awesome

By now pretty much everyone in the US has a cell phone with text capabilities. These are small phones, and getting smaller with each passing model. Soon they're going to be half the size of Zoolander's phone and will easily fall into a pore and float aimlessly around the circulatory system, ringing out in loneliness. Anyway, these phones have a screen, and people send text messages to one another. So here's what I don't get: why send a text message, which is really cumbersome given the size of the buttons, when you have a phone in your hands? Why not just call the other person? And while we're at it: must you be in touch with everyone in your circle all the damn time? It's gotten to the point where almost everyone at school is walking and chatting on the phone. I'm starting to feel like Wesley Crusher in The Game. Clearly there's something wrong when I actually know the title of a Star Trek episode.

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Veritas, in vino

Nature's Rite Aid

Time and time again scientists find that red wine is actually good for you (duh). Just recently, researchers at Harvard Medical School and the National Institutes on Aging reported that a substance found in red wine, resveratrol, appears to offset some of the negative effects of a high-fat diet. The mice in the study were fed high fat diets and also given resveratrol. They gained weight, but their livers were normal, and so were their glucose and insuline levels. It is a little early to rush Burger King, though. Remember that about a decade ago, medical researchers were going gaga over the hormone leptin, which caused mice to lose a whole bunch of weight in a very short time. It had no effect on humans at all.

Still, there's the French Paradox (the French eat fatty foods but don't suffer from a lot of the consequences), which might be related to resveratrol. So there may be something in all of this. A tiny technicality, though: to get the same amount of resveratrol that turned the mice into happy, healthy fatties, a human being would need to drink between 1,500 and 3,000 bottles of wine a day. So, what are you waiting for? Time's a-wastin'!


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Attack, when vegetables

Giant killer tomatoes invade the countryside.

Vegetables tend to be benign, rarely if ever attacking people who handle or eat them. Even an uncooked vegetable will offer no resistance. Try that with a cow and you may get stomped to death. Instead of being openly aggressive, vegetables have evolved to adopt a subtle mode of attack that affords them some measure of revenge against their predators: team work. By pairing up with tiny bacteria, they can bring down dozens, sometimes hundreds, of potential enemies.



In Canada, carrot juice has forged an alliance with a renegade group of Clostridium botulinum. The latter, angry at the exploitation of its numbers by the cosmetic surgery industry, agreed to lie in ambush in perfectly innocent-looking bottles of carrot juice. The operation took down at least two unsuspecting members of the planet's dominant species. Not a huge number, but this is only the beginning.



Recently in the United States, contaminated spinach caused massive panic, and people are still frightened by the sight of greens in supermarkets. Even baby greens strike fear in the hearts of shoppers, something that has strengthened the resolve of the vegetable hordes.



The latest episode of this war of terror comes from tomatoes. And as most of you know, tomatoes are rabidly aggressive. In 2004, they formed an axis of evil with terrorist salmonella strains and infiltrated Sheetz. This led to at least 400 cases of infection in nine states. And now, they're baaaaaaaack! The latest guerilla attack is apparently over, but we know the war is not. And more vegetables may join the cause. Loyal reader and professional stair-surfer Leslie made ENN (Our Silos Overflow with Vegetables of Terror) aware of the fact that turnips may have a role in causing goiter. Our research team has found this to be true of kale and cabbage as well.


The moral of of all of this is: don't mess with the environment. When you're mean to Mama, Mama's mean to you. And she's much more powerful.

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