Jacob Childerson

A cheesy Taco Bell (YUM) gordita sounds good at 1 a.m., but first thing before work? No way. Taco Bell might rule the late-night “fourth meal” hours, but it’s eager to get into the breakfast business, too. A few weeks ago, it started testing a new product—the 89-cent Waffle Taco—as a breakfast item in a handful of Southern California restaurants.

The Waffle Taco’s self-explanatory: It’s scrambled eggs and a sausage patty folded into a soft waffle, like a taco. You can drizzle it with syrup, too, which is served separately. “We’re pleased with the initial reaction from our customers and if the Waffle Taco does well in testing, we’ll roll it out to all our restaurants that serve breakfast,” spokesman Rob Poetsch wrote in an e-mail.

Since 1958, 472 billion Lego bricks have been made. And even though most of those bricks are hardly bigger than your finger, 472 billion of anything is a ridiculous number. So what could you build with all the Lego bricks in the world? Surprisingly a lot. Like 74 Empire State buildings a lot.

There really needs to be more huge Lego structures in the world. Hell, there just needs to be more Lego in everyones life.

Imagine it, if 50,000 Lego bricks could create a 104-foot tall Lego Tower, 472 billion could practically build you a spaceship. Or a bridge to space. Of course, the Lego bridge might just end up crushing itself but hey, whatever, more Lego is always good.

Gazans with a hankering for the Colonel’s secret recipe can call up a delivery company and get some finger lickin’ food smuggled hot from Egypt in just three hours.

For six years, Rafat Shororo longed for the taste of a KFC sandwich he had eaten in Egypt. This week, he got his finger lickin’ fix at home in the Gaza Strip after a local delivery company managed to smuggle it from Egypt through underground tunnels.

“It has been a dream, and this company has made my dream come true,” says Mr. Shororo, an accountant, as he receives his order from the delivery guy.

The al-Yamama company advertises its unorthodox new fast-food smuggling service on Facebook. It gets tens of orders a week for KFC meals despite having to triple the price to 100 shekels ($30) to cover transportation and smuggling fees. The deliveries go from the fryers at the Al-Arish KFC joint 35 miles away to customers’ doorsteps in about three hours.

A portrait of America through the Golden Arches.

Photographer Nolan Conway’s latest project took him to 150 McDonald’s restaurants in 22 states to find out if there’s such thing as an average McDonald’s customer.

Our Deepest Fears Revealed By Google Auto-Complete

Google’s suggest tool is often as hilarious as it is shameful. But in this short video, it highlights the involving insecurities of life.

“I’m 10 and pregnant.” It pops up in the white auto-suggest drop-down before your finger can even leave the zero key. And that’s only because Google has seen that exact search hundreds, thousands—who knows how many times before.

The moment is jarring, but Marius Budin pushes forward right through this soft spot. His short, Life Through Google’s Eyes, is the simple search bar, recording what autofills for the query “I’m [X] and,” inserting the numbers 10 through 85. And what you see aren’t results like “I’m 35 and would like to eat better.” You get a glimpse into our basest insecurities regarding sex, friendship, and possibly the greatest idea underlying it all: loneliness.

Through the teen years, pregnancy is a primary concern—and in a dark turn of irony, it’s counterbalanced by concerns over virginity. Social questions creep up through our 20s—career, living at home, and even balding seem to echo the worry, “what will people say?”

But in reality, as big data shows us that we’re all searching for these same answers, maybe it’s time we just admit: We don’t need to air our concerns in anonymous solitude. There are more people who understand than we may think.

(via Fast Company)

“…buy a paint-spray gun, and then spray Doritos flavoring onto our existing yellow corn tacos…”

In early 2009, three years prior to Taco Bell’s 50th anniversary, CEO Greg Creed was already experiencing something of a midlife crisis. “Our target audience is [customers] in their 20s. Turning 50 makes us sound old, and I didn’t want to sound old,” Creed explains. “I said, ‘When we have our birthday, I don’t want a cake or a celebration.’”

So he issued a bold directive to his team instead: “I said, ‘[let’s] reinvent the crunchy taco,’” Creed recalls.

Take a few moments to browse fashion retailer Joe Fresh’s crisp, minimalist website and you might just succumb to sticker shock. For once, it’ll be because you can’t remember the last time you saw a pair of jeans this cool for $19.

Old Navy charges $34.50 for their incarnation of this season’s colorful denim trend, and they do so without Joe Fresh’s cachet as the fun new kid on the fast fashion block.

Boy howdy, Kmart (not really known for creativity or innovation) gets creative and almost racy in this ad : Ship My Pants

Charity Atter’s maid, Eva Tetteh, lowers a bucket deep into a well and waits about two minutes for the water to collect inside. Atter, a 37-year-old widow who lives in one of the fast-growing suburbs of Accra, Ghana’s capital, has been relying on well water for three years. “The water situation we’re facing here is a very difficult problem,” she says as she tends customers at her vegetable store in front of her house.

Water—or the lack of it—is one of the biggest issues facing urban Africa, which will see a 66 percent population increase to 1.2 billion people by 2050, according to the United Nations. Although water shortages have long plagued parts of the continent, they’ve become the potential killer of Africa’s economic takeoff. Ghana’s $35 billion economy, whose estimated growth of 8 percent in 2013 would outpace the sub-Saharan African average for a sixth straight year, cannot continue at that rate without a modern water network.

The Missouri Meerschaum factory in Washington, Mo., is the only place in the world that manufactures corn cob pipes made famous by such historical figures as Mark Twain and General Douglas MacArthur. Sales at the company have grown over the last two years, but that number could have been higher if not for last year’s drought.

March Madness explained with Star Wars

The TapIt Cap : Your Growler’s New Best Friend

The TapIt Cap is a patent-pending design that ensures the beer in your growler remains fresh and carbonated. Don’t know what a growler is? Growlers are used to transport beer home from craft breweries. They are reusable and are more ecologically friendly than bottles or cans, even if you recycle.

Buying craft beer in growlers is less expensive, but the value decreases when the beer isn’t consumed in one evening and goes flat after 12 hours. A capped growler can sit for a week or longer depending on how carefully it was filled. But after the first beer is poured from a growler, air flows in to replace the beer. Oxidation leads to bad flavors in the beer just a few hours after opening and the beer becomes flat. I realized that I, too, had begun to purchase fewer growlers. The TapIt Cap has changed the way my friends and I buy and brew beer.

Globally, the average mobile user consumed 201 MBs of data a month in 2012, more than doubling the 92 MBs monthly average of 2011, according to Cisco Systems’ new Visual Networking Index (VNI) for mobile traffic.

That may not seem like a huge amount, but it’s spread out over the entire world’s population, including places where 3G connections are still rare and smartphone uptake negligible. When broken down by region, the numbers really pop. Cisco (CSCO) found the typical North American accounted for 752 MBs a month, while Western Europeans ate up a monthly average of 491 MBs.

In total, devices with mobile connections generated 900 petabytes of traffic (a petabyte being 1 million GBs) each month in 2012. And we ain’t seen nothing yet. Cisco is projecting global mobile traffic will grow at a compounded annual rate of 66 percent for the next five years, doubling 13 times by 2017. This year, monthly mobile traffic will enter the exabyte era (an exabyte being 1 billion GBs). By 2017 global mobile users will eat up 11.2 EBs each month, according to the VNI.

One year ago, on March 5, 2012, a 30-minute non-profit-made video brewed an unprecedented level of social media buzz and backlash. Kony 2012, created by three filmmakers from Southern California, demanded the global community capture and try African militant leader Joseph Kony in the International Criminal Court by the end of 2012.

Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, was made famous by the record-setting YouTube documentary, as was the film’s explicit goal. Although Kony is responsible for enlisting child soldiers, sacking villages and raping women, he was never a household name in the U.S. until the release of Invisible Children’s film. The wanted war criminal is, however, still on the lam, one year after the film’s release.

This week Frito-Lay stocked stores nationwide with three new Lay’s potato chip flavors created by consumers, and come May, one of these crunchy creations will join the Lay’s lineup.

The three contenders: Cheesy Garlic Bread, Chicken & Waffles, and Sriracha (that’s a hot sauce used in Thai dishes in case you didn’t know).

The trio was culled from 3.8 million entries submitted via Frito-Lay’s “Do Us A Flavor” contest. Launched via Facebook, the contest invited consumers to submit their ideas for inventive new Lay’s flavors.

My how we’ve changed… | St. Louis, 1963

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is warning suppliers that it is adopting a “zero tolerance policy” for violations of its global sourcing standards, and soon plans to immediately sever ties with anyone who subcontracts work to factories without the retailer’s knowledge.

The changes, which begin taking effect March 1, come after Wal-Mart clothing was found at a Bangladesh factory where a fire killed 112 people in November, a factory the company said was no longer supposed to be making its clothes.

The tougher new policies replace the Bentonville, Ark., retailer’s prior “three strikes” approach to policing suppliers, which gave the suppliers three chances to address problems before being terminated.

By Grant Snider of Incidental Comics.