The internet is composed of about 75% cat pictures and 20% unbelievable stories to amaze your friends.* So it’s no wonder Oscar, the cat who predicts death, captured the imagination of cyberpace last week. Oscar lives in a nursing home, and only curls up with patients who die within the next few hours. You can read the entire report in the New England Journal of Medicine, or the shorter Associated Press story we linked here.

There are many theories about how Oscar knows who is going to die, and some (mostly joking) remarks about how he may be causing the deaths. Those who work with him consider him a hospice hero. But that’s not what I’m posting about. This is about the immediate and predictable flood of art and humor inspired by Oscar’s story.

More “death cat” images after the jump.

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Not sure how many acoustic guitar players we have reading the blog, but did you know that Greenpeace is teaming up with Fender, Gibson, Martin and Taylor to help protect the Sitka spruce tree and some tropical woods like like mahogany, ebony and rosewood, which are starting to become scarce? Yes, it seems guitar makers are finally wising up to the simple fact that if we go on logging as we have, there won’t be a future for them.

Martin, for example, has been around for 175 years. Clearly they want to be around for another 175, which is why they’re starting to change tactics.

Sitka spruce trees (that’s Sitka, Alaska, by the way, home of the new Chabon novel), used to make the soundboards in acoustic guitars that produce the richest tone, have to be at least 250 years old. If present logging conditions continue, the last of ‘em will be gone in 7 years. So, in order to ensure that doesn’t happen, Greenpeace wants logging companies to apply for certification by an environmental organization that would require the adoption of different practices. In addition to the guitar makers already named, surprise, surprise, Sting and Dave Matthews are lending their names to the effort, as well.
I’ve owned many acoustics over the years, but for some reason, my favorite is still the very first one I bought in junior high: a Canadian Seagull.

What’s your favorite?

This post is the start of a new occasional feature: my favorite documentaries. I’m a huge documentary fan, and will share some of my favorites with you, perhaps once every week or two. If you have a documentary suggestion, please post it in the comments!

First up, Sherman’s March by Ross McElwee (1986). This film carries the rather long secondary title: “A Meditation on the Possibility Of Romantic Love in the South During An Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation,” and that begins to give you an idea of its scope. The basic gist is that Ross McElwee set out to make a film about the lingering effects of General Sherman’s March to the Sea during the Civil War (read about it at Wikipedia). However, as soon as McElwee began shooting, his girlfriend dumped him, and his preoccupation with women took over the film.

(Much more after the jump.)

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I’m not sure how many of you out there were proximal to the NYC steam pipe explosion, but I from what I hear it was pretty traumatizing. The damage it effected of course drew morbid parallels to other, premeditated explosions, but since I grew up hearing engine room horror stories, I wasn’t surprised to learn the cause attributed directly to a phenomenon I’m sure many of you have heard attacking your household pipes: water hammer. Sprinklers and toilets notoriously suffer from it, but any closed system with a valve is vulnerable, as wisegeek explains:

Water hammer is a very loud banging, knocking or hammering noise in the pipes that occurs when the flow is suddenly turned off. It is caused by a pressure or shock wave that travels faster than the speed of sound through the pipes, brought on by a sudden stop in the velocity of the water, or a change in the direction. It’s also been described as a rumbling, shaking vibration in the pipes.

If you’re concerned about some complicated and/or aged pipes in your vicinity, LMNO Engineering has a calculator that allows you to determine the piezometric pressure (representing the marriage of pressure & weight) in each pipe. I’m not sure what the stats were for the pipe in question, but I don’t envy Con Ed, especially now that the law suits are surfacing.

By now you’ve probably heard of Oscar, the magical Rhode Island cat who can smell death coming hours away. Just in case, here’s an excerpt from CNN:

“The 2-year-old feline was adopted as a kitten and grew up in a third-floor dementia unit at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The facility treats people with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and other illnesses. After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He’d sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.”

This is one of those slightly morbid yet fascinating topics that’s perfect for a virtual cocktail party like ours. Maybe your pets have never been harbingers of death, but I’ve heard amazing stories of dogs and cats predicting hurricanes, sniffing out cancer and becoming serene around just-barely-pregnant women. We’ve yet to see anything like this from Bailey, but she’s not even two and always very busy.

Do your pets have magical powers? As always, this is just a jumping off point. The conversation will go where you take it.

With hurricane season almost upon us, it’s time to start stocking up on bottled water, extra batteries and canned food. But why stick to just beans and corn? Here’s a look at some more exotic (read: disugusting!) canned foods we found.

Pork Brains in Milk Gravy

On Heroes, serial killer Sylar gets his powers by eating people’s brains. A while it’s not clear whether eating pork brains will give you superpowers, eating them will almost certainly give you a heart attack. One serving of the brains contains 1,170 percent of your daily cholesterol intake. It only gets worse if you follow the recipe on the can, which calls for the brains to be served with scrambled eggs. Another serving suggestion on the Internet is to fry the brains in butter and serve with toast, but that’s not going to help clear your arteries any more.

Fried Dace

If pork brains don’t appeal to you, but you’re still looking to ruin your body, fried dace is a good alternative. The fish is popular in Hong Kong, but also contains plenty of salt, especially when served with black beans. The delicacy might be hard to find now, though; in 2005, the Hong Kong government banned foods with malachite green, a dye used to protect the fish from parasites.

Simmenthal Jellied Beef

Simmenthal is the canned equivalent of mystery meat. The most definitive information out there is this enigmatic statement from the label: “Does not contain meat from Simmenthal cattle.” The beef apparently comes from Brazil, rather than Simmenthal, the Alpine region where the stuff is canned. So, what exactly is in the stuff? The cans contain strings of beef in a clear jelly, recommended to be served with olives and cheese on pasta or salad. Other than that, your guess is as good as ours.

Fungus-infected corn, fiddleheads, and assorted weeds all after the jump!
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Solar ovens aren’t a new phenomenon, but with the worldwide interest in alternative energy growing, new attention is being focused on them. NGOs are distributing them to impoverished villages where deforestation and desertification are a problem, and they’re also popular in places where fire risk is extremely high (for instance, with campers inside particularly dry national parks). One interesting fact about solar cookers is that many of them use the greenhouse effect to cook food: solar rays are reflected and concentrated inside a glass box, which traps increasingly hot air inside. As the temperature builds, your food cooks, and even the humblest of solar ovens can reach 350 degrees in about 30 minutes. The main problem with these contraptions is that they function best during the hottest parts of the day — when people are the least likely to want a hot meal. But a Colorado company has found an ingenious way to use the midday cooking power of the sun to their advantage: by roasting coffee.

Solar Roast Coffee has invented (and continues to refine) a specialized array of focusing mirrors, which swivel to follow the arc of the sun during the day, and can roast a drum of coffee beans at up to 600 degrees Fahrenheit. (You can watch it in action here.) The beans may be brown, but this is one green coffee.

Jason had a great post earlier this year about his experience with his cell phone provider’s customer service dept. But because we all have to suffer through these kinds of experiences on a weekly basis, I felt enough time had passed that we could revisit the subject.

Now I’ve had horrible experiences in the past, too. In fact, my DMV story, which went on for—are you strapped in to your seatbelts?—4 years! was so pull-your-hair-out awful, I was almost driven to tears (seriously). And I’ve heard my fair share of customer service rat-a-tat from the cable company, as well as the local gas company.

But they were all ultimately resolved in my favor; I may have lost sleep and hair, but at least I didn’t lose the battles. That is until now.

My land-line phone company, an Internet phone company called Sunrocket.com seems to have up and rocketed off into the sun and disintegrated. One day I was chatting on the phone to my mom and POOF! – the line went dead. When I called customer service from my cellphone, these are the words I was greeted with from the company whose motto is (no lie) “the no-gotchya! phone company”: (click here for a recording of the actual recording I heard).
Now I ask you: what am I supposed to do with that? Oh, and you should also know that with these Internet phones, you have the option to prepay for the whole year, which lowers the monthly cost. As it turns out, I recently paid up for another full year!!!! So I guess I’m just out a couple hundred and now have to get a new provider.
Feel free to empathize/sympathize or start your own rant below, especially if you, too, have had your phone line cut by sunrocket. And whatever you do, DON’T believe a word customer service tells you. Ever.

It’s with a fair amount of chagrin that I admit I’ve never been inside a limo. I’ve loitered on the hood of one, briefly, for reasons completely devoid of interesting subtext, and I’ve stopped next to one at a red light, been simultaneously harassed and cajoled by the passengers teeming out of the sunroof. But when I read reports of limos being beached, I’m a) amused, saddened, and, as a fellow driver, empathetic b) plagued with the urge to ride in one already! I missed the boat at my prom–I sailed in on my Buick Regal. And, well, I guess every other occasion limos could ever be summoned. What are all the occasions, anyway? Weddings and formals, any red carpet hoe-down, I get. But what others? Kids I knew who grew up in NYC used to save up (okay, or not) and rent them just to have a place to hang out away from their parents’ pads. Am I in the minority for never having been on one of these joy rides?

Ouch! I had an inkling he was cooler than me, but seeing it in print is rough. Personally, I think it’s the ridiculous hair that did me in.

GOOD Magazine founder Ben Goldhirsh made the list too (it’s a terrific publication if you haven’t checked it out), along with 27 other pretty interesting people. Click here to read the full Inc. Magazine list.