At my parent's house one year, we had a family of raccoons living in our chimney. We'd be eating dinner and hear the cooing sounds, pound on the chimney, and then they'd stop. Eventually, the babies grew up and the family left, but there were there for a whole season.

As for the sounds 'coons make, the cooing is cute, but the fighting noise is terrible. More then once I've been woken up in the middle of the night by what sounds like terrible, terrible high pitched squeals and yells, almost sounding as if they came from a little dog. My blood would run cold until I would remember that it was just a raccoon, and go back to sleep. Raccoons screaming is almost as bad as peacocks screaming through your neighborhood at 3 AM. (Don't know why suburbia had peacocks flying around at night, but we most certainly did.)

I saw/used this at a restaraunt in Ueno in Tokyo in 2007. It's fancy schmancy and within a few minutes of finalizing our order on the screen, we had our food.

In regards to this being the future of dining, it's certainly a possibility. You know those annoying TVs that show ads for everything/anything, and show your total at checkouts at Jewel and other grocery stores? I saw those in the convenience stores in Tokyo the first time I was there in 2001. I thought they were super hi tech cool. Now they're everywhere in the US and super annoying.

It's a similar story for how hookers got that name (or at least how it was popularized).

There was an officer in the Civil War named Joeseph Hoooker, and he always had girls over in his tent. Every night, different girls. They were known as Hooker's girls.

:D

Every day I was in Paris, I'd start the day going to a fast crepe place and got either a nutella or sugar crepe to eat as I went with my parents on our merry way.

Those things were damn tasty, and I dare say better as a fast thing in France then at any restaurant in Chicago.

If only this worked...I would never be bit up again.

Skipweasel - My cat tries to do that, or more like wake me up in the middle of the night by pouncing and gnawing viciously on my arm because he's hungry. It doesn't work, though - I just lock him out of my room :D

Hmm. Giving out high fives to randoms? That is something my boyfriend likes to do, as do My Morning Jacket fans.

It does look like packing peanuts.

This does look super tasty though, and maybe that's the part of me that played Ernie talking.

This has been around for a while; I remember my friend (who is very Japanese) asking me what mine was and then reading my 'description' probably about, oh, five years ago.

I've always wanted to live in Chicago, and now I've been living in Chicago for the past year and a half.

I can't see wanting to live anywhere else, honestly - I love this city.

As my friend said,

...WHAT

Dear God!

The...oh, dear god!

This would be better if the people making them took different aspects of various beanie babies and put them together to make an ever weirder variant...

I love putting food coloring in my baking experiments, but I never thought of rainbow before...

I have to try this.

Nice observation JC.

This is an awesome video.

I kind of want to worship it, but also to launch at it in a massive hunger.

Well, the company claims to be sending the rocket far, far away and not to orbit the Earth, so unless it hits an alien spaceship it shouldn't bother us or be space debris around our planet...