“I would like to thank the Idaho Potato Commission for assembling a categorized database of 1,700 potato recipes from around the world. I consult it frequently and it has become my favorite potato resource.” And here it is.

While Lucas M. Miller was serving in Congress, he proposed a Constitutional amendment to change the country’s name to “the United States of the Earth” because “it is possible for this republic to grow through the admission of new states…until every nation on earth has become part of it.”

In 1995 New Mexico’s state senate proposed an amendment that would have required psychologists to dress up as wizards when providing expert testimony on a defendant’s competency. Our friend Tim says, “They were cowards to not adopt it.”

When a psychologist or psychiatrist testifies during a defendant’s competency hearing, the psychologist or psychiatrist shall wear a cone-shaped hat that is not less than two feet tall. The surface of the hat shall be imprinted with stars and lightning bolts. Additionally, a psychologist or psychiatrist shall be required to don a white beard that is not less than 18 inches in length and shall punctuate crucial elements of his testimony by stabbing the air with a wand. Whenever a psychologist or psychiatrist provides expert testimony regarding a defendant’s competency, the bailiff shall contemporaneously dim the courtroom lights and administer two strikes to a Chinese gong.

@sonikudzu on twitter goes after the claim that most of the nutrition in a potato is in its skin.

In the context of horse racing, a milkshake is a combination administered to a horse, pre-race, intended to cause metabolic alkalosis of the blood. In theory this is a performance enhancer. Claims:

Nobel Laureate in Medicine Barry Marshall, who showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori plays a major role in causing many peptic ulcers, had this experience early in his career:  

In 1982 Marshall and Warren obtained funding for one year of research. The first 30 out of 100 samples showed no support for their hypothesis. However, it was discovered that the lab technicians had been throwing out the cultures after two days. This was standard practice for throat swabs where other organisms in the mouth rendered cultures unusable after two days. Due to other hospital work, the lab technicians did not have time to immediately throw out the 31st test on the second day, and so it stayed from Thursday through to the following Monday. In that sample, they discovered the presence of H. pylori. They later found out that H. pylori grows more slowly than the conventional two days required by other mucosal bacteria, and that stomach cultures were not contaminated by other organisms.

In 1983 they submitted their findings thus far to the Gastroenterological Society of Australia, but the reviewers turned their paper down, rating it in the bottom 10% of those they received that year.

Friend of the blog Dynomight writes a review of the theory that seed oils are the root cause of obesity and/or other western diseases. He concludes: 

A weak version of seed oil theory is that seed oils are highly processed, so why not use cold-pressed olive oil instead? If that’s the theory, fine. In fact, this is mostly what I do myself. I figure it might be useless, but it’s unlikely to be harmful, and olive oil is delicious.

…

But seed oil theorists mostly seem to push a much stronger theory: We know that seed oils are the cause of Western disease.

I’ll just be honest. I think this view is completely indefensible. I feel embarrassed when I see people promoting it. You’re sure? How? I don’t see any way to get to this conclusion other than heavily filtering the evidence—ignoring the flaws in everything that supports a predetermined view while scrambling to find flaws in everything that contradicts it.