Jennifer Silverberg

​The waistcoats and bow ties. The speakeasy affectations. The designer ice cubes.

Yes, the mixology revolution has given the naturally snark-prone any number of things to mock. (Including, for some, the term mixology itself.

Yet after a tasty tipple (or three), even the most skeptical of us had to admit that, damn it, the mixology movement is a force for good in the universe.

Until now.

More >>

Image via

Bacon up that nosebleed, boy!

​OK. The main reason for this post is to get the phrase "nasal tampon" into a headline.

But as long as we have your attention and/or disgust, let's talk about one of the strangest medical studies we've come across in, well, ever.

The study, from doctors and scientists at the Detroit Medical Center and published in the Annals of Otology, Rhinology & Laryngolgy (our subscription lapsed), looked at the use of cured bacon to stop prolonged nosebleeds.

Yeah, you read that right. Doctors packed a patient's nose with perfectly good* bacon to stop its bleeding.

(*Full disclosure: We don't know for a fact that it was perfectly good when it went in, but we can say with confidence that it was not perfectly good when it came out.)

The money excerpt, from a Guardian article about the study:

More >>

​Honestly, Gut Check was starting to get annoyed that the Girl Scouts of America hadn't gotten back to us about the unfortunate associations with the name of their new Savannah Smiles cookies. But then we heard about this story and realized the organization has PR problems that aren't the result of a booze-addled food blogger's atrophied brain.

At any rate, meet a California Girl Scout named (apparently) Taylor. She's upset that the Girl Scouts allow transgender individuals to join. In a YouTube video, she presents her case against transgender Girl Scouts with a lawyer's attention to detail and a public-access TV host's ease with a teleprompter.

What's that? Is Gut Check implying that this particular Girl Scout is merely the stooge for the political agenda of adults with an axe to grind against the cookie-powered organization?

Nah. Gut Check was on the high-school debate team and is fully aware that a teenager can produce a long argument with lots of block quotes that cloaks its logical fallacies in stab-your-ears-with-an-ice-pick boredom. See for yourself after the jump.

More >>

helpfulkitchendanzig.tumblr.com/

​Everyone has a new year's resolution, especially the people who jump down your throat and lecture you about how stupid resolutions are. You know they've got 'em, and theirs are probably especially shameful.

Since you don't need to lose any weight (really, you look fantastic!) and you've already quit smoking at least six times, why not focus on something a bit more practical this year?

Resolve to get the most out of your kitchen in 2012 with a little help from your usually-bare-chested-and-always-bare-armed pal Glenn Danzig.

More >>

On Friday, a woman in New York City named Minhee Cho ordered food at Papa John's. In lieu of her name, the cashier included a description of her on the receipt. Cho posted a picture of the receipt on Twitter, and over the weekend it went viral. Why? Well, just read the description.

Image via

Papa probably wishes he weren't in this house.

​No, your eyes don't deceive you. It actually says, "Lady chinky eyes." The cashier has been fired, and Papa John's has offered its apologies.

(h/t: Gawker and Eater)

Image via

The LeBron James-approved cake lost to the Dirk Nowitzki-approved cake in six.

​One year ago, Gut Check marveled at the Tower of Babel-esque birthday cake made for basketball megastar and serial playoff choke artist LeBron James. So we weren't exactly surprised to see this week's news from the Miami Herald that LeBron James' "people" had rejected the cake prepared for his birthday this year.

So Hickman designed a Heat-red cake with edible gold dust and an edible crown on top.

But when she went online early on New Year's Day, the photos tweeted worldwide were those of an ivory-colored rum cake with gold lion's heads from Miami's Divine Delicacies.

"I can't tell LeBron James what birthday cake to eat. It's LeBron James, for Christ's sake."

Image via

​Gut Check is going to go out on a precarious limb here and assume that if you were to make a Venn diagram of a) Girl Scouts of America executives, b) aficionados of early 1990's porn and c) fans of the band Okkervil River, it would feature very little overlap.

So we're not sure what it says about us that when we heard that the Girl Scouts were introducing a new cookie this year called Savannah Smiles, a synaptic explosion in our otherwise booze-addled brain led us quickly from apple-cheeked innocents selling sugary treats to one of the darkest moments in an industry with no shortage of seedy tragedies from which to choose.

First, though, the cookies, which shouldn't be confused with Savannahs, one of the names by which the Girl Scouts' peanut-butter cookies have been known throughout the years.

More >>

Michelle Hudgins

​File under: "Things You Were Already Afraid Of But For Other, More, Shall We Say...Visceral Reasons ."

This just in from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service: Undercook those holiday chitlins at your peril. (Or, more precisely, at the peril of Grandma, Gramps and Baby Snookums.)

You see, it's possible that big old plateful of pig intestines you're preparing to tuck into contains the bacteria Yersinia enterocolitica, which, the USDA informs us:

...can cause yersiniosis, a diarrheal illness in humans. Yersiniosis peaks in winter and is most common and severe in children under four, with adults over 85 being the next most affected age group.

And in the event that the looming threat of yersiniosis doesn't make a sufficient dent in your appetite, the food-safety experts remind us that chitlins might also harbor Salmonella and E. coli.

Of course, the authors of the USDA's news release don't call chitlins chitlins. They refer to them as "chitterlings."

In Gut Check's experience, people who refer to chitlins as chitterlings don't, as a rule, eat chitlins (or chitterlings, for that matter).

More >>

Courtesy of Matthew Willer

Bacon Awareness

​A bacon explosion is not a pack of bacon hooked up to M-80s, although eating one might make you feel a bit, er, eruptive. A traditional bacon explosion is two pounds of bacon weaved around two pounds of Italian sausage, covered in barbecue sauce and seasoning. This mass of meat is then smoked or baked before being sliced and eaten.

Local bacon enthusiast Matthew Willer's first successful bacon-explosion experiment (eight pounds, doubled from the original) left him yearning for more. A little research proved the unofficial world record for a bacon explosion was 60 pounds, so Willer immediately set his sights on a 120-pound bacon explosion.

More >>

​And so the story that has captivated the world the nation at least one food blogger watching the clock until the holidays has come to its conclusion.

As Gut Check suspected, the Dutch television hosts who claimed to have eaten a piece of each other's flesh were in fact perpetrating a hoax to raise awareness about organ donation. Because, if you don't register as an organ donor, marauding cannibals out of The Road will scavenge your corpse for the best bits and serve them alongside a spit-roasted baby.

Or something. Gut Check isn't entirely clear on the concept.

Thanks to regular reader Mike N. for passing along word of the hoax. Your prize is waiting for you in this dark room. Just make yourself comfortable right there, next to the fava beans and the glass of Chianti.