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NATIONAL PICKLE DAY | NOVEMBER 14 National Pickle Day recognizes the tart, sometimes sweet, and even spicy pickle. Each year on November 14th, pickle lovers pop open pecks of their preferred preserved pickle. It may be a Dill, Gherkin, Cornichon, Brined, Kosher Dill, Polish, Hungarian, Lime, Bread and Butter, Swedish and Danish, or Kool-Aid Pickle. No matter your choice, eat them all day long. #NationalPickleDay The term pickle comes from the Dutch word pekel, meaning brine. In the United States, the word pickle typically refers to a pickled cucumber. However, just about any fruit or vegetable can be pickled. The...

A cat named Vincent has been given a new lease of life thanks to vets at Iowa State University's Lloyd Veterinary Medical Centre.

The new viral craze is apparently scaring cats with cucumbers, because the Internet is a weird place and humans enjoy low-grade animal cruelty as long as it's adorable. But National Geographic reports that we should all maybe not be scaring our cats with cucumbers. According to Upvoted, the first cat-scared-by-cucumber video appears to have been uploaded in May and went viral by July or so. Countless others followed, to the point where Reddit has an entire Cucumbers Scaring Cats community. The idea behind these videos is that if you put a cucumber behind a cat, it'll freak out when it...

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 18 (UPI) — A viral trend involving placing cucumbers behind cats has been deemed cruel and harmful behavior by some experts.

Man sentenced to 3 years for holding up bookies with cucumber hidden in sock Gary Rough claims he was 'only joking' when he tried to rob the Ladbrokes in Glasgow, England, with a cucumber hidden inside a sock, which he tried to play off as a sawed-off shotgun. Rough was given 40 months jail time for the incident. A British robber has been jailed for holding up bookies with a cucumber. Gary Rough, 28, stuffed the lengthy vegetable into a black sock to try and make it look like a sawed-off shotgun. He then demanded cash from terrified staff at...

MADRID, Spain (AP) -- Spain's prime minister has hit out at the European Commission and Germany on Thursday for singling out the country's produce as a possible source of a deadly bacterial outbreak in Europe, and said the government would demand explanations and reparations. Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said the EU commission "was slow because from the moment the minister in Hamburg had ruled it (E. coli outbreak) was not caused by Spanish cucumbers it should have reacted more decisively and faster." The bacteria outbreak has killed 17 people, most in Germany, over the past week. The crisis paralyzed Spanish...

Spanish cucumbers not to blame for German E.Coli outbreak BREAKING NEWS: German scientists have revealed that the bacteria found in Spanish cucumbers did not cause the E.Coli outbreak in Northern Germany. This was revealed by Hamburg Health Minister Cornelia Prufer-Storcks. The Spanish government did not rule out a call for compensation from Germany for the “tremendous damage” that “speculations” had inflicted on Spain’s agriculture and food sector. Laboratory tests in Germany last week pinpointed the cucumbers as the focus of infection, although the Spanish health authorities claimed that the vegetables could have been contaminated in transit or on arrival. Almeria...

'Killer cucumbers' row between Spain and Germany Spain has accused Germany of "spreading alarm" and needlessly damaging trade after blaming a deadly E.coli outbreak on "killer cucumbers" imported from Spain. By Fiona Govan, Madrid 5:33PM BST 30 May 2011 Spain's authorities went on the defensive as countries across Europe cleared their shelves of the offending vegetables insisting that there was no proof the deadly outbreak had been caused by Spanish vegetables. Leire Pajin, the Spanish Health Minister, noting that no Spanish cases have been reported, urged Germany to speed up its probe and establish proof of what has caused the...

Three people in Britain have been diagnosed with a lethal strain of E.Coli that has already killed five people in Germany. Almost 300 people in northern Germany are in hospital and around 500 more are being tested for the infection. Organic cucumbers from Spain are thought to be the source of the bacteria, but travellers to Germany are also being advised to avoid eating raw tomatoes and lettuce. The Robert Koch Institute, Germany's national disease centre, said 60 cases had been reported in the last 24 hours alone, and infections have also been confirmed in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.

Besides the terrible killings inflicted by the fanatics on those who refuse to pledge allegiance to them, Al-Qa'eda has lost credibility for enforcing a series of rules imposing their way of thought on the most mundane aspects of everyday life. They include a ban on women buying suggestively-shaped vegetables, according to one tribal leader in the western province of Anbar. Sheikh Hameed al-Hayyes, a Sunni elder, told Reuters: "They even killed female goats because their private parts were not covered and their tails were pointed upward, which they said was haram. "They regarded the cucumber as male and tomato as...

BRANSON — In the wake of Big Idea Productions' bankruptcy and sale to new owner Classic Media, VeggieTales characters are struggling to define their post-Big Idea lives. In a modest but clean condominium in Branson, Mo., Bob the Tomato sits on a rented couch and nibbles cheese curls. The window overlooks the busy thoroughfare jammed with tourist traffic. Bob's chin shows three days of stubble, his eyes the emotional scars of a recent bout with depression, but tonight he'll be performing again for the first time since Jonah — A VeggieTales Movie. After bouncing around the country for the past...

The increasingly famous Montgomery County cucumber has been sentenced to legal limbo with the ruling of a federal judge last week, which is too bad, considering the hype that has enveloped this normally modest side dish. The Montgomery County cucumber has been the subject of countless news stories and commentaries this spring, as America undergoes the uncomfortable process of learning everything it ever wanted to know about the cucumber but was afraid to ask. The Montgomery County cucumber is the co-star of a low-budget flick, "Protect Yourself," along with an actress who has all the lines. Of course, the latter...

An increasing number of area school systems talk about homosexuality in their sex-education classes, a topic that Montgomery County wants to include as part of its curriculum next fall. However, Montgomery County is one of the few school districts that want to identify homosexual couples as a type of family. Several school districts including Arlington County say a family "comes in many forms," but they don't specifically identify same-sex parents as a family.

TELEVISION It's not pretty, but 'Animal House' defines a generation BY GLEN GARVIN ggarvin@herald.com LOS ANGELES -- Dean Wormer: Who dumped a whole truckload of Fizzies into the swim meet? Who delivered the medical school cadavers to the alumni dinner? Every Halloween the trees are filled with underwear; every spring the toilets explode. Marmalard: You're talking about Delta, sir. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. It was rebellious, it was anarchic, it was gross. It had kids getting wasted and puking and being promiscuous, sometimes all at once. Its heroes were drunks and slobs and Peeping Toms; its villains...