Upon first seeing this old turn of the century diet ad, I thought, “wow, interesting – its funny that people accepted this as a weight-loss technique at one time.” Then I found this paragraph on a current dieting website and now I’m kinda freaked out:

The first thing that dieters must know is that tapeworm importing or selling is illegal in the United States. Consumers who want to attempt this diet will have to travel to Mexico to do so. Once you arrive at the location for treatment (quite possibly a slaughterhouse), you will be provided with beef tapeworm cysts that have been identified microscopically as such. The reason this is so important is that some cows may have been infected with a pig tapeworm, which is much more dangerous than the parasites found in cows. The cysts are consumed, and a tapeworm will grow inside the digestive tract. Dieters can expect to lose one to two pounds a week as long as the tapeworm is inside. Once the target weight loss is reached, an antibiotic is given and the tapeworm is killed and expelled.

Certain individuals here at bunchofnerds claim that I “hate the future” because I often don’t see the point in useless new technological devices. But this I love! De Dietrich has put this new ultrasonic dishwasher on the market – similar to what your dentist or piercer uses to clean their instruments – and if I wasn’t content with washing dishes by hand, I’d buy one. Save water and detergent while annoying your pet.

Via Gizmodo

A book detailing the follies of the Bush Administration from an insider’s perspective came out today. Matt Latimer, former speechwriter for George Dubya, has written Speech-less, forcing the ex Administration to shudder and call the author a traitor.

Here’s some of the book’s highlights:

Bush on Jimmy Carter: “If I’m ever eighty-two years old and acting like that have someone put me away.”

While Karl Rove was appearing on Fox News and writing op-eds as an independent political analyst, he was privately smearing Democrats. “Karl spread rumors through the White House that one of Obama’s potential vice presidential running mates — and a United States senator — had beaten his first wife.

‘Karl says it’s true,’ the president assured a small group of staffers.

Then, knowing Karl, the President quickly added, ‘Karl hopes it’s true,’” reports Latimer.

Donald Rumsfeld had to be talked out of editing his own entry on Wikipedia, which he referred to as “Wika-wakka.” He was a Drudge Report reader and used to watch YouTube clips that made fun of his press conference performances.

Bush, when told that Idaho Sen. Larry Craig had been the latest GOPer to be caught in a sex scandal involving boys or men: “What is up with all these Republicans?”

As Bush traveled to Egypt to promote freedom, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “adamantly opposed” any reference to jailed Egyptian dissident Ayman Nour. She won.

Bush, it turns out, is like millions of Americans: “I haven’t watched the nightly news one night since I’ve been president,” he said.

Under-Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith had rejected a speech from his writer.

“His own writer had failed miserably at drafting some upcoming testimony to Congress,” Latimer said. “Feith was so incensed by the speech’s first line that he read it aloud to me. ‘Mr. Chairman, thank you for inviting me to testify today.’ ‘Thank you?’ Feith snapped, as if he couldn’t believe it. ‘For inviting me’?'”

General Tommy Franks famously called Feith “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.”

Latimer also discusses the Administration’s idiocy with regard to putting whoopee cushions on people’s chairs in the West Wing as well as Bush’s famous “we’re buying low and selling high!” in response to the government’s purchase of worthless mortgages and securities.

Via GQ, Reuters, and Huffington Post

The new Flickr app is available here from the iTunes store! No more uploading photos to Flickr via Email from your iPhone! Now Flickr has their own app (from Yahoo actually) making everything seamless and snappy with a Flickr coherent interface.

Here’s what Techcrunch had to say about the GUI:

The main screen is a fairly mesmerizing slideshow of photos from your contacts on Flickr. There is an upload button that is easily accessible right on the main page, and the upload process is nice and easy. You can obviously name your picture and give it a description, but you can also easily manage what set to put it in, and what tags to give it. And the privacy settings are very clearly displayed on the upload page.

Looking for more apps? A review of the 50 most essential iPhone apps this season can be found here.

Stores like Wal-Mart, Target and Meijer attract a wide-range of individuals, some of whom wear stunning outfits, bringing one to ponder how they got to where they are and what they consider when dressing themselves. A brand new website – peopleofwalmart.com – displays the best of the best in down-home fashion and nuttiness that really can only be found in the states. From Tony the Tiger to shopping goats, from Wal-Mart weddings to hog-tied naked guys, I laughed for an hour straight (partly due to the absolutely hillarious captions they’ve included for each photo).

“The beautiful trail in the sky looked like a mysterious celestial event,” says space.com. Actually, it was Discovery emptying their toilet before returning to Earth. 150 lbs of waste water collected over 10 days was dumped, creating an arc shaped glowing trail. According to astronauts, waste water freezes into a cloud of thin ice droplets upon ejection. In May, astronauts made a toast to the space station’s new urine/water recycling system by drinking their recycled piss. The water recycling system cost about $250 million and will be used daily to recycle urine and wastewater back into potable water suitable for drinking, food preparation, bathing and oxygen generation.

Alright, I’m not a fan of pets doing cutie things, but I laughed out loud several times while watching this cat try to slide into tube-shaped cartons. The way his back legs feather out on the floor like a baseball player sliding into home plate as he tries to squeeze into two cartons at once…makes me wanna have a pet again.

This hive of honeybees lifts a laptop covered with honey into the air and flys around (hovers actually).

Yes, the Critical Theory department at Occidental College is offering course 180. STUPIDITY.

The course description claims stupidity to be “those operations and technologies that we conduct in order to render ourselves uncomprehending…the double of intelligence rather than its opposite.” Stupidity has been redefined and “dumbed down,” the department says, and can be “felt in political life ranging from the presidency to Beevis and Butthead.”

Interestingly, “Beavis” has been misspelled in the Stupidity course description. Was this intentional, maybe just to see who’s paying attention? Or is the show really too stupid to be thoroughly analyized by the department? Wait, that wouldn’t count as stupidity either since they’re looking at it from a philosophical perspective.

Via Occidental College

A Russian professor says the United States of America will disintegrate within the next year due to a fiscal meltdown. For ex KGB and Russian national security advisor, Igor Panarin, this claim is nothing new as he first made it in 1998 when the US economy was doing well. But now, due to the world economic crisis and the possibility of Japan transferring their monetary reserves from US dollars into another currency, his prediction has garnered new attention (surprisingly enough, even from the Wall Street Journal).

Panarin says that the US is in such great debt, that it will, by 2010, no longer be able to remain sovereign. His map indicates which parts of the US will be absorbed into which countries. Thank goodness the Midwest becomes Canadian! Now we won’t have to drive over the border to get our prescriptions filled!