English steak with sugar coated baked apples. And Deacon.

The children most likely to walk or cycle to school live in urban areas, with a single parent, and in an economically disadvantaged home, according to survey results that were published in Pediatrics today by Dr. Roman Pabayo of the University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre and the…

(Source: fuckyeahquebec)

F5, F5, F5, weep, F5

The marshmallow is a confection that, in its modern form, typically consists of sugar or corn syrup, water, gelatin that has been softened in hot water, dextrose, flavourings, and sometimes colouring, whipped to a spongy consistency. Some marshmallow recipes call for eggs.^[1] This confection is the modern version of a medicinal confection made from Althaea officinalis, the marshmallow plant.

- That’s right, “marshmallow plant”

- A dish of ‘March Mallow’ was a Roman delicacy 

- Marshmallows are not vegetarian, kosher, or halal

- The French made the first artificial marshmallows using gelatin and modified corn starch

- There are two recorded Chubby Bunny related deaths

- Kids love marshmallows

I stand corrected. The town’s clearly gone downhill. 

Still the Standard, 1860. Happy to see that my hometown was always as exciting as it is now

The best thing I’ve read all week. Also from the Fort Atkinson Standard, 1860

I’m researching possible paper topics by sifting through old Fort Atkinson papers. This comes from the Fort Atkinson Standard, circa 1860

Just announced: Entire film will be in IMAX resolution. Who’s in?

I was browsing through Netflix (I wrote “netflicks” 4 times) Saturday night and I stumbled on a movie from my childhood that I’d completely forgotten about. Which is strange, because this movie was groundbreaking. Seriously. Fantastically thought provoking, tear jerking, Oscar worthy shit. That movie was Congo. 

From the ages of 7 to 10, I probably watched Congo at least 50 times. My babysitter had a monstrous VHS collection but us kids insisted on watching the same 10-15 movies all the time, and Congo just so happened to be one our favorites. If my 8 year-old self wrote a review of it, it would probably look something like this:

Today we watched Congo and it was good like the last time we watched Congo and it was good. In the movie Congo the scientist wants to bring Amy the gorilla back to the jungle and a lady wants to go to the jungle to find diamonds. Amy can talk because of computers. They go to the jungle and get in lots of gun fights with the jungle people and Amy meets other gorillas but they don’t like her. Then they find an old jungle kingdom and a bunch of diamonds but big, grey mean gorillas are guarding the diamonds. The grey gorillas kill a lot of people but Amy saves every one by talking to them with her robot arm. Then the lady uses the diamonds to fire her diamond powered laser gun at the grey gorillas and they start running away. Then there’s a volcano eruption and lava is everywhere. The grey gorillas jump into the lava. That’s my favorite. It’s funny. Amy takes off her robot arm then the nice gorillas like her. I would give this movie an A+. I really want to train gorillas like that one day. That was a very well trained gorilla in the movie. 

So when I find this gem on Netflix, you bet my gorilla loving ass I’m watching it. Here. We. Go. 

God dammit, it’s terrible. First things first, 8 year-old Levi, the gorillas were fake. Amy drank a martini, for Christ’s sake. But you sat there thinking, “This is amazing, that gorilla’s riding on a plane, drinking out of a glass. She even asked for an olive.” 

But seriously, the premise of the movie is almost exactly as my 8 year-old self would have described it. Meaning, a primatologist wants to release his sign language knowing gorilla, Amy, back into the wild because she’s having nightmares. Amy has a device hooked up to here hand translates her signing into a creepy but oddly adorable computer speech. At the same time, our female antagonist wants to set off to Africa to find her ex-fiancé who was attacked on a live satellite feed while on an expedition n Africa to find diamonds for his father’s company - a communications company in desperate need of a new energy source for their…laser guns. A weird Eastern European guy played by this (below) maker of nightmares offers to finance the trip in exchange for tagging along. 

So off they go, to Africa. Along the way they get shot at. A lot. Luckily, they know that shooting flares out of the side of the plane will defect any incoming heat seeking missiles.

The rag tag group of adventurers finds the abandoned ‘city of Zim’ and the following events unfold just as ridiculously as my 8 year-olds re-telling. Grey apes attack, talking ape interferes, people apes come in with their diamond powered laser guns and clear everything up. And our antagonists fall in love.