It's not a surprise that as we get ready for Halloween season, stories will start to appear that relate to the macabre. And nothing is more macabre to modern minds than the tale of Vlad Dracul, who was on the front lines battling the Muslims in Eastern Europe and reputedly impaled 20,000 bodies as a warning to them.

It seemed to have worked, at least in that famous instance. You can imagine a sane Ottoman general seeing that spectacle and thinking 'Do we want to own a country where people have not set a guy like that on fire? The personnel headaches would be tremendous.'

Mackie's at Taypack Ltd. has been around since 2009 but the joint venture between the Taylors, Perthshire potato farmers, and Mackie's of Scotland,  has finally figured out a way to differentiate themselves from Frito-Lay: they are making potato chips flavored like whisky and haggis.

Everyone knows what Scotch is. Haggis is sheep stomach stuffed with meat and barley. Scotland's National Poet, Robert Burns, sang its praises in his works.


Credit: tjmwatson, Flickr

It's no secret how Africa can feed itself - grow more food.

That sort of naïve statement is fine for environmentalists who were born as part of the  Agricultural 1%, but it falls apart in the real world that exists outside fundraising campaigns. A large chunk of Africa doesn't grow food all that well, which historically has meant relying on the patronage of rich countries and cycles of famine - but that also has made it a political football.

As most culturally astute people of a certain age know, 2015 is "The Future" of "Back To The Future II." "Back To The Future" was, of course, a seminal comedy in 1985 - a time when terrorists were from the Mid-East and you could do a time-travel experiment on your dog without getting protests outside the theater.