Cause if you don't, you're going to want it after watching this:

Praise the Lord that someone is out there funneling millions of advertising dollars into something that's not actually killing our kids. Or getting them doped up on the Internets. Even if it is making them hit the puberty by, like, second grade.

Here's an interesting tidbit -- it seems that an expectant mother's diet may influence the sex of her baby. From the UK's Daily Mail: "mice with low blood-sugar levels--a good indicator of a sugar-rich diet--produce more female than male offspring."

For a University of Pretoria study, researchers gave 20 female mice a steroid called dexamethasone, which kept their blood-sugar levels low. Mmmm, sweet steroids. I believe this is now referred to as the Marion Jones diet. The sex of these mice's litters was then compared with those of 20 mice on a regular diet. Those eating normally produced offspring that were 53 percent male. But those on the steroid produced litters that were only 41 percent male. (For the record, I am 77 percent male.)

So, basically, this confirms what we already knew: sugar and spice and everything nice, that's what little girls are made of. Boys, according to the Daily Mail piece, come from a diet of "red meat and salty snacks." Puppy dog tails are red meat, right? Snails are salty snacks, aren't they? Makes perfect sense to me. But, wait, what does a perfectly balanced diet predict? Confusing!

And what if, as in the case with my very own spousemouse, the expectant mother in question is eating ... nothing? Because nothing will stay in her stomach. What does a diet of partially-digested almonds, Gatorade, grapefruit and toast predict!? I fear that our second born will have the genitalia of a Ken doll (don't click on that link ... but first don't think of an elephant).

Whatever our child looks like, I will love herm anyway. Probably.

I know all of you are like "hey, Brian, we're dying to have some maps up in this blog!" With a little help from World Mapper, I am more than happy to oblige. Here is the world resized proportionally according to the number of elderly people living in it today:

 

 

Here now is the world proportionally resized, this time according to the number of children living in it:

 

 

 

And because I, for one, believe the children are our future, here's the overall world population in 2050.

 

Aaaaand, last but not least, today's world resized according to preventable deaths:

 

 

Now. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Now this is a cook book I can get behind! Whose kitchen wouldn't be improved with a little more Pooh in it? I wonder what, exactly, this book recommends you sneak into junior's dinner ...

(props to BoingBoing)

 

And as long as we're being incredibly immature, let us now flash back to the 2002 legal battle that Stephen Slesinger Inc., which owns some of the, er, rights to Pooh, got into with the Walt Disney Co. Here's an excerpt from a breathtakingly brilliant entendriffic article that the Times of London ran on Jan. 30 of that year (please, please note the quote by lawyer Bonnie Eskanazi, which I have helpfully italicized for you):

     Legal documents filed by Disney in California estimate that Pooh earned up to one quarter of its revenues, or about Pounds 4.2 billion, in 2001.
     The family of Stephen Slesinger, the New York agent who bought the rights to the Winnie the Pooh name from A. A. Milne in 1929, is suing Disney, claiming it has cheated them out of millions of pounds of Pooh-related revenues since 1983.
     Lawyers acting for Mr Slesinger's 80-year-old widow and her daughter are seeking the termination of Disney's contract to exploit Pooh when the case goes before a jury this year.
     "Pooh is very, very lucrative. Children live with him every day. They sleep with Pooh on their sheets, they wipe their faces with Pooh as they get out of the shower," said Bonnie Eskenazi, a lawyer representing the Slesinger family.
     Disney acquired the rights to merchandise Pooh products from Mr Slesinger in 1961.

 

 

With her bestselling new cookbook, "Deceptively Delicious," Jessica Seinfeld has been in the press more than her husband lately. But a story in today’s New York Times attempts a takedown of the celebrity mom by exaggerating claims that her cookbook is a bit too similar to one that came out last spring. "I suppose it’s possible it’s a coincidence," Missy Chase Lapine, author of the unheralded "Sneaky Chef," tells the paper (emphases, mine). Both books advise parents to resort to icky-sounding tactics to get kids to eat their veggies (hide pureed spinach in brownies; mash avocado into chocolate pudding).

The story takes pains to contrast Seinfeld’s "have" status with Lapine, the supposed "have-not." Jerry’s wife has a "hot best seller," is a celebrity and has appeared on Oprah, the ne plus ultra of fabulosity. Lapine, meanwhile, "is not a celebrity," and her book, which had been rejected twice by Seinfeld’s publisher, has reached the lowly No. 9 slot on the paperback advice, How-To and Miscellaneous list. The Times reports that Lapine felt "uncomfortable" seeing that the same "unusual [culinary] combinations that I thought would brand me as a lunatic showed up here, too."

What kid doesn't want a bowl full of toasted lice cereal? Mmmm, sign me up.

The above spooktastic riff on the breakfast brand we all know and some of us love (and others of us prefer in marshmallowy cube-treat form) was cooked up by animator Wayne Harris and is included in a forthcoming "coffin table" book called Cereal Killers. (Tip of the blog to BoingBoing)

Almost just in time for Halloween, the good Doktor Viktor von Kreep (no, really) of Kreepsville Industries assures me via e-mail that "some of the biggest names in the animation industry who have their own shows on Cartoon Network including Maxwell Atoms (The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy) and Craig McCraken & Lauren Faust (The Powerpuff Girls, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends) will also be featured in the book." With a release date of around Christmas, it sounds like a perfectly ghastly stocking stuffer.

But if cereal killers is a little too silly for you, dear reader, let me point you in the direction of KILLER CEREAL!! This sad-funny short video--which I can't embed here because this is a family, work-safe blog--is brought to you by the good people at the brilliant hip hop site Oh Word? It might make you think twice before you pour yourself, or your kid, another heaping bowl of your favorite sugar-coated breakfast fuel.