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As you clean out your ‘fridge:

• How do you tell if mushrooms are moldy?
• Can Limburger cheese spoil?
• What do you call sour cream well past its “sell by” date?

Update: I would really like the name of the fool that decided that New Year’s Eve required fireworks and gun shots.

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Keep telling yourself that their corruption is now in the open. They can no longer pretend that they don’t know Abramoff. They can’t pretend they aren’t using borrow and spend as a financial model. They can’t pretend they believe in the rule of law.

The coming year will be a mess as their collapsed edifices have to be bulldozed from the scene, but we will be returning to our foundations on which to rebuild.

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The mayor of Topeka, Kansas was surprised to learn that his city has a snowball ban. You can be jailed or fined up to $500 for throwing snowballs in the city. He is moving to have the ban removed.

In Germany, the police had an easy time tracking two criminals who left their footprints in the new-fallen snow from a crime scene to their apartment.

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The Cold is becoming blogdemic:

Mustang Bobby, TBogg, Steve Bates, and Lab Kat are all in various stages of recovery.

A more serious problem is making the rounds: clostridium difficile. Essentially it provokes extreme diarrhea leading to dehydration. Normally seen among hospital patients, the use of antibiotics and the powerful, new antacid medications are causing problems for an ever wider circle of people.

The microbes live in your intestines, held in check by other organisms and stomach acid. When you take an antibiotic, it kills the protective microbes allowing the resistant clostridium difficile to multiply. When the anti-heartburn medication reduces the stomach acid, there is no check on the microbes and diarrhea occurs.

If you start having diarrhea after taking an antibiotic, you should check with your doctor, if possible. You definitely need to increase your fluid intake, preferably with something like Gatorade or pedialyte to keep hydrated. If you are taking one of the antacids, you might want to stop to see if it helps. This can cause a hospitalization or kill you, so don’t ignore a prolonged bout of “the runs”.

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