Apparently, eating honey doesn’t alleviate allergies. Eating pollen might help.

Apparently, eating honey doesn’t do shit for allergies. Eating pollen might help.

ABC News:
Allergy Myths Revealed
(Courtesy of Matt Friedlander)

Kosher Village Off To A Bad Start

You may recall that the location formerly known as Chickpea, a falafel house off of St. Mark’s Place, was holding a contest to name their restaurant.

Well the winner was announced yesterday. They emailed all contestants that they will now be Kosher Village!

Yeah, I thought that was a pretty lousy name as well and decided to respond to the email and let them know. What happened when I hit respond was that I noticed that the email was addressed not to a ghost list but, rather, contained the email addresses of all the other contest participants. (Ed: The list, by a quick count, appears to contain 3,000 email addresses.) Read more »

Own Your Own Island Nation

Have you grown tired of the status quo? Do you dream of having a private island of your own? Maybe a special little place to start your own cult? Just need a place to get away from it all?

Well, PrivateIslandsOnline is just the site for you, search through hundreds of private islands to buy and call your own.

I know, this sounds totally ridiculous. In fact, I was a hater when I first read about the site. I figured it was just another site for the uber-rich to throw away their money buying things that us pleebs could only ever dream of. Then I actually clicked around the site a bit.

This is going to sound strange, but PrivateIslandsOnline has a wide range of islands available in almost anyone’s price range. Yes, some islands, especially the gorgeous tropical ones are in the millions and tens of millions, but you can pick up a nice 170 acres in Tennessee for about the cost of a 1 bedroom apartment in New York City. Or there are 20 acres in Grenada for $6.5 million.

They even have listings of private islands for rent if buying isn’t your thing.

Pretty interesting stuff (and maybe something to consider for your next vacation… Though you may want to have some knowledge of how to steer a boat). So what are you waiting for? Go and start that new country you have always wanted or become the Bond villain you always dreamed of being.

Rescuers Fail to Find Priest Carried Aloft by Party Balloons

The headline says it all for this one.

Sometimes I love having a blog, my friends email me a ton of stories, some worth posting, some not so much, some so random that I really have no other choice but to post*.

A Roman-Catholic priest in Brazil was trying to set a world record, you’d think it would be like holiest man or most confessions heard in a day or something, but no, he wanted to break the record for longest time in the air by way of party balloons (the helium variety of course). This wasn’t his first time either, on January 13th, he had done the same thing. At the time he had spent 4 hours in the air. You’d think that this is so random he would be competing against his own record right? Nope apparently the record holder was aloft for 19 hours (I would tell you who that was but it isn’t the easiest thing to find on the internet) so he had quite aways to go. Read more »

US Economy ≠ Recession

From today’s New York Times:

The gross domestic product grew at a 0.6 percent annual rate in the first quarter, the Commerce Department said on Wednesday, holding steady from the last three months of 2007.

The expansion, however slim, came as something of a relief to Wall Street, which had been bracing for a contraction. Many analysts have labeled the current downturn a recession, but the economy appears so far to have avoided the informal definition of two consecutive quarters of contraction.

No matter how much the FT and the Economist think they can editorially will this nation into recession, the numbers betray slowing growth, not a recession. At this point, given the 0.6% growth in GDP in the first quarter, the earliest the U.S. economy could actually hit “recession” would be September 30, 2008.