Hooters Japan

​Headed to Japan this week? Hooters Tokyo location is offering a Valentine's Day special through next Tuesday: Two promotional ice cream desserts called the Volcano of Love and the Rock of Love, and the first 1,000 customers to order either will get a collector's edition pin of Hello Kitty as a Hooters girl.

We're not sure what's more effed-up: the idea of spending Valentine's day with your honey at Hooters, or the notion of Hello Kitty dressed up in shiny orange ass-shorts and a snug tank-top. If you roll with the premise that Hello Kitty has hooters, wouldn't she have six or eight or however many nipples cats have?

The bigger, ¥2400 Volcano of Love (snicker) works out to almost US$32 worth of ice cream parfait. For that kind of money, you'd really have to covet that limited-edition tschotske to add to your fanatic's collection of items with Miss Kitty's likeness, like the lawnmower, the cleverly-named HK-47 assault rifle, and the chainsaw.

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Flickr/cookbookman17

It's better if you use raw, semi-frozen bacon instead of cooked.

​Oh bacon, is there no end to the blessings you bestow? Stuffing raw bacon up your nose stops uncontrollable nosebleeds, according to research recently published in a respected medical journal. What other medical cure smells so delicious?

Four doctors at Detroit Medical Center in Michigan treated a child who had a rare hereditary disorder that causes prolonged nose bleeding by using what they called a "nasal tampon" made out of "cured salted pork," the Guardian reports. The so-called bacon tampon "stopped nasal hemorrhage promptly, effectively, and without sequelae [negative consequences]," they write in the January 2012 issue of the Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology. "To our knowledge, this represents the first description of nasal packing with strips of cured pork for treatment of life-threatening hemorrhage in a patient with Glanzmann thrombasthenia" (a platelet disorder).

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thingiverse user cunicode

An 8-Handle Espresso Cup Made By A MakerBot 3-D Printer

​If you own a 3-D printer (lucky you), you are probably already halfway to a drawer full of printable forks and spoons. If like us, you had no idea you could buy a 3-D printer for less than the price of dinner for four at The French Laundry, well, let the hamburger patty press printing fun begin.

MakerBot, the Brooklyn-based company behind the Thing-O-Matic ($1,100) 3-D printers, showcased their just-released Replicator ($1,750) printer model (touted as the first 3D printer that retails for under $2,000 and also does two-color printing) at the Affordable Art Fair over the weekend. That means you can now make your own 3-dimensional loaf of bread "sculpture" complete with a brown crust encasing that white bread interior (as this is food art, there's no need to go all out whole wheat).

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Flickr/tudor

salt shakers

​Happy Friday the 13th. For some, this is a reason to avoid cats, errant ladders, chopsticks, stray moving vehicles and not-as-random-as-they-seem numbers and letters. But unless you're a baseball player, in which case you have every reason to be superstitious (that's a joke, unless maybe you're James Loney), days like today are not really about OCD behavior as much as they are reasons to release utterly crappy horror movies.

Food superstitions, however, can be amusing. Maybe because they're so benign -- throwing salt over your shoulder, eating garlic before Twilight premiers -- or maybe because food is so idiosyncratic anyway. When you don't like eating scrambled eggs because they look weird or you refuse to eat chicken because of a recurring dream or you think _____ makes you fat for no scientific reason whatsoever, then throwing whole grains at happy people seems perfectly normal.

So what are your favorite food superstitions, assuming you have them? (Make something up, for chrissakes. It's the Friday before a long weekend; you're not doing any work anyway.) We got a few via Twitter:

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A. Scattergood

bread and butter at The Tasting Kitchen

​There's a lot going on in the world as the year steams towards a close. In North Korea, Kim-Jong-Il is dead. In Pakistan, military leaders and government officials are wrestling for power. U.S. troops have finally left Iraq. There's also a butter shortage in Norway, the world's third-richest country, a nation with a population nearly half the size of Los Angeles's. You may have heard about it on The Colbert Report.

In the mind of one Norwegian YouTube pundit, the smirking reactions swirling around the so-called "crisis" -- whether Colbert's warnings about butter "mules" smuggling sticks into the back alleys of Oslo or the finger-wagging in Matthew Yglesias's business column for Slate -- loom large enough to warrant a 4.5-minute tirade.

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​"[William] Shatner is shameless when it comes to his acting and his public persona," wrote Pat Jordan in a September 2010 New York Times Magazine profile. "There is little he will not do, no humiliation he will not embrace, to make his fans laugh. He once boasted that he did 'not let things like dignity' hold him back." If anyone doubted that this was true, the actor's latest achievement in hammy self-portrayal comes in the shape of a State Farm-sponsored PSA entitled Eat, Fry, Love, The subject? The dangers of reckless turkey-frying. Turn the page for the video.

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Daily Mail / Cascade News

The preserved Victorian stove is just one piece in a huge kitchen hidden for decades in the basement.

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To all those who own estates in North Wales, try rummaging through your basement. You might find a perfectly intact Victorian kitchen from the 1830's, complete with a cooking range, pots, pans, antique fire extinguishers, a spit for roasting pigs and enough tables and benches to seat a team of twenty servants.

According to the Daily Mail, Archie Graham-Palmer and his wife Philippa discovered the hidden kitchen when looking through the home they had inherited and moved into earlier this year. The basement had become a dumping grounds to store family junk, and these belongings quite literally piled up, blocking the door to this cavernous kitchen.

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Gendy Alimurung

What did your cat eat today?

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Does your cat eat better than you do? Some of these kitties at the recent Santa Monica Cat Show do. I asked their respective humans what is the fanciest, tastiest, nommiest thing they feed their cats. Keep reading to learn what they said, or 10 Cats Who Eat Better Than You.

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Maynards Canada

A sample submission.

​If JibJab isn't cutting it for holiday laughs (if you somehow aren't aware, you can transform you, your spouse, your baby, and your Pomeranian into a crew of shufflin', shades-wearing elves), try to go edible. Enter yourself, a pal, family member, or partner in a new contest promoted by candy company Maynards Canada.

First, as with most things these days, you have to log on to Facebook and "like" the company. After doing so, upload and trace a suitable head shot. Once judges comb through the submissions (you'll have to pull a good candy-eatin' face and craft an eloquent 140-character blurb), you'll be in the running. The pay-off? Potentially, your grill (or that of a loved one) in a face-on collision with Sour Patch Kids, Fuzzy Peaches, Sour Cherry Blasters or Swedish Berries.

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Courtesy Kimberly Berg

​Those little scraps of paper with prophetic statements like "You will always be surrounded by good friends" are fun to read after polishing off a plate of lo mein (with or without "in bed" at the end.) But no one really takes the fortune cookie for the cookie. Like a daily horoscope, fortune cookie wisdom should be taken with a grain of salt. Unless it's a mini psychic reading created specifically for you by local psychic, Kimberly Berg.

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