I saw this article on The Independents website about packaging on food. The article suggests that consumers are annoyed about the amount of packaging used by supermarkets and that if the supermarkets were to cut down on packaging it would increase customer loyalty and satisfaction. Personally I find excess packaging really irritating. Everything you buy in the supermarket seems to include plastic wrapping and as there is no way of recycling this, it all goes straight in the bin. We remove from our waste all the items to be recycled and all the waste that can be composted. The remaining waste is made up almost entirely of plastic packaging from the Supermarket.

An interesting article on Quasi Fictional about the word "geek". The article looks at the origins of the word and asks why we use the term "geek girl" but not "geek boy". On reading the article I have concluded that sadly I must be a geek.

An illustrated guide to shopping trolleys has won the booker international prize for oddest title of the year. Unfortunately the guide currently only covers trolleys in North America, so won’t be much help to those keen trolley spotters out there. Perhaps someone will release a UK version soon.

An illegal beaver has finally been apprehended in Perthshire. He was tracked down after trees began disappearing in the nearby area. It is not known whether there are more beavers still on the loose.

Driving a lorry can be tricky at the best of times but driving a lorry whilst three times over the legal alcohol limit and cooking sausages, well that’s a challenge. One German lorry driver did just that and managed to set fire to his lorry when the gas hob he was using fell over. 

Have you ever wondered what a Tyrannosaurus Rex would taste like? Well the chance is it would taste like chicken. Scientific analysis of a fossilised T Rex thigh bone showed that it was very similar to chicken protein suggesting a T Rex would have a similar taste. That’s a whole lot of meat.

Want to make a shiny ball out of mud? Well now you can, a Professor has come up with a way to make the perfect shiny mud ball such as the one below. It involves a long process of packing the mud into a ball shape and polishing it for several hours. You can see the full instructions here and before long you too could have a mud ball of your own.

Orangutans at a zoo in Atlanta have a touch screen monitor on which they can draw pictures and play games. The games are part of a study to see how they process information and could help scientists to better understand them, so they can do more to conserve the dwindling numbers of orangutans left in the wild.

Pierrepoint the cat had a lucky escape after she crept into a vans engine. She was spotted after the van had travelled 15 miles and although she was suffering from shock had no other injuries.

I found this humorous article entitled 8 important lessons learnt from 80's cartoons. It includes such gems as "communism works" learnt from The Smurfs and "trust no one" as we all learnt from watching Scooby Doo.

Pippa the cockatoo has been trying to hatch a bowl of Cadbury's cream eggs. After two weeks there is still no sign of any chicks.

This underwater restaurant is in the Maldives. I'm not sure why it makes me think of Jaws, something to do with all that glass maybe.

Why put penguins on a treadmill? To monitor their heart rate of course. As part of an experiment to see how much energy penguins use to find food a group of scientists first monitored ten penguins progress on a treadmill, so that their heart rates could be calculated. The penguins were then released complete with monitors so they could be studied in the wild. I feel sorry for the penguins, they don't look very happy.

How many Post-It Notes does it take to recreate a scene from Donkey Kong? 6400 apparently as these students found out.

An interesting article here about why George Bush is actually a genius. Among the reasons are that he has contributed more new words to the English language then anyone since William Shakespeare. We really shouldn't "misunderestimate" him.

I came across this interesting article where a guy tries using Wii Sports as part of a fitness programme. After 6 weeks of using the Wii as his only form of exercise he has now managed to lose 16 pounds. This seems like a good excuse to play more computer games.

I found this article on The Daily Mail website about a cat that has learnt how to use a bus. The cat waits for the 331 bus a couple of times a week and uses it to travel to the next stop before jumping off. Very Cute.

As yet no one knows the cats name. He looks a lot like my cat Ollie.

We all know that science is really useful; after all without science so many important things would never have been discovered. With this in mind a group of innovative scientists have spent more than 1,000 hours researching how to create the perfect bacon butty. After trying out different types of oil, various cooking techniques and different cuts of bacon the scientists discovered that the bacon should be cooked under a preheated grill for seven minutes at 240C and should then be placed between two slices of bread each of which should be 1 to 2cm thick. Well it’s good to know that in a world that still hasn’t discovered the cure for so many life threatening diseases we can at least enjoy the perfect bacon sandwich.

Want to turn your Wii Remote into a gun? You need the Wii Sharp Shooter. Basically it’s a device that connects your Wii Remote and Nunchuck to make them into a gun. I don’t have one of these for my Wii yet but it certainly looks really cool.

I found this funny post listing 27 things computers are able to do in movies. My favourite is “All computers are connected. You can access the information on a villain’s desktop computer even if it’s turned off."

I remember playing hopscotch when I was a child. Whilst most people would see this game as innocent fun, it appears playing it could mean you get a visit from the police. That’s just what happened to one little boy according to an article on The Telegraph’s website. Ryan and five of his friends had just marked out a hopscotch court and were enjoying their game, when two policemen arrived at the scene acting on a tip off from a neighbour. Apparently, the children in using chalk on the pavement were creating graffiti. Obviously this is an incident that requires a rapid response; I’m surprised the police force didn’t feel it necessary to send out a swat team and a helicopter. Later that day it rained and the “graffiti” was no more. I can’t help thinking police time could better spent catching real criminals. 

Want to see if your website is blocked in China? On the greatfirewallofChina you can check your url to see if its blocked or not. Thanks to crooked Brains for the link.

Quark has a handy function which allows you to create interesting effects with text. With the text box option there are only limited options. You can apply colours to the text but the “text to box” function enables the use of blends. To use it first create a text box and type your text in the size and font that you wish to use.  This example I have Apple Chancery. From the style menu choose the text to box option. A duplicate of your text is created.  The difference is that the created text is no longer treated as text but as a picture box and now has all the functions associated with this. You can now delete the original text and apply colours and blends to your picture box. In this example I have applied a linear blend of blue and red.