Day: June 13, 2013

Hot on the heels of National Doughnut Day and the launch of Dunkin’ Donuts’ Glazed Doughnut Breakfast Sandwich, a Krispy Kreme Sloppy Joe debuted at the San Diego County Fair last weekend. Chicken Charlie’s is dishing out ground beef topped with melted cheese, all sandwiched between two halves of a Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut until the fair ends on July 4.

The hearty sandwich is just the latest artery-clogging fair food to make headlines, following in a long tradition that includes everything from Kool-Aid pickles to corn dogs. In fact, this particular vendor – a mainstay at California fairs – has also served up deep-fried Twinkies, Girl Scout cookies, even frog legs.

(LIST: Top 10 State Fair Foods)

Krispy Kreme had nothing to do with this particular incarnation, however, so you won’t find it in a nearby franchise. “I don’t foresee the inclusion of this type…

Consider the cliché: a darkened room, a bleary-eyed middle-aged man collapsed into a couch, beer in hand, TV-flicker illuminating his sallow stubbled face, and a stomach threatening to escape from his pants like a giant mutant amoeba.

(MORE: This Exists: The Hoodie Neck Pillow)

Blame that belly on the beer? Not so fast. According to University of California Davis food science professor Charles Bamforth, the colloquial notion of the beer belly — that beer somehow uniquely targets the gut — doesn’t jibe with medical science.

“The beer belly is a complete myth. The main source of calories in any alcoholic beverage is alcohol,” Bamforth told Popular Science. “There’s nothing magical about the alcohol in beer, it’s just alcohol.”

Alcohol doesn’t have V.I.P. dibs on abdominal fat in other words (any more than spot exercises like sit-ups burn stomach chub), it’s just another ingredient in your caloric regimen, though…

It’s not an exaggeration to say Republicans have bet their future on the disaster they expect from Obamacare. “The implementation of the law over the next year is going to reveal a lot of kinks, a lot of red tape, a lot of taxes, a lot of price increases,” RNC spokesman Brad Dayspring told The New York Times last month. “It’s going to be an issue that’s front and center [in 2014].” GOP intellectuals see Obamacare as the centerpiece of the party’s strategy even well beyond then. “Republicans are likely to seize on every sad [implementation] story as justification for dramatic changes—and in 2016, mount campaigns designed to replace the system in whole or in part with plenty of material to use in their cause,” the conservative wonk Ben Domenech wrote approvingly in March.

And, of course, the party’s base is completely, unremittingly, obsessed with the issue. The…

CNN’s Brooke Baldwin talks with former mobster and author John “Red” Shea about the Whitey Bulger trial.

Brooke Baldwin talks with the CEO behind this expensive rifle and the director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

You know those people who are always posting deep thoughts on Twitter and dumb jokes, pet photos, and the mind-numbing minutiae of their daily lives on Facebook? If a new study from researchers at the University of Michigan is to be believed, oversharing is the least of their problems. Published in Computers in Human Behavior, the paper found that college students who post relatively frequently on Twitter are more narcissistic than their peers who post less often. In contrast, adults with certain narcissistic tendencies favor Facebook as the virtual venue of choice for their humble brags.

Why the disconnect? “Middle-aged adults usually have already formed their social selves, and they use social media to gain approval from those who are already in their social circles,” said Eliot Panek, one of the study’s authors, in a press release. College students, by contrast, are “trying to broaden their social…

Some Americans may believe we live in a color-blind society, but they’re probably not stand-up comedians. In fact, one aspiring sociologist believes that stand-up comedy is only going to get more racial. Race is still a huge issue in America, says University of California, Irvine’s Raul Pérez. But if it’s less acceptable to talk about race in public places, that increases the workload of comedians who can tackle taboos on stage.

For his new study in the journal of Discourse & Society, Pérez spent seven months in comedy classes. Based on more than 200 hours of fledgling routines and guidance from instructors, the doctoral student outlined techniques jokesters use when trying to make race funny in a “post-racism” world. “The novice comic and the professional comic alike need to invoke these strategies,” Pérez says. “Otherwise you get Michael Richards,” i.e. a reputation-wilting act that yields more empty tables…