Did you know that a Southern Sea Otter eats five meals a day? Well, one who resides at Audubon Aquarium does, anyway. That can add up to more than 20 pounds of seafood a day, according to the Audubon Institute’s Web Site. The otters’ snack of choice is an ice-cold seafood popsicle that comes as part of a specialized diet planned by their nutritionists at the Institute. They are just a few of the more than 15,000 animals living at Audubon, all of whom are fed according to meal plans designed especially for them.

It takes more than $60,000 to foot just part of the animals’ monthly grocery bill, the Web site says, with that amount spent just on grain and hay for the Zoo animals alone. Imagine the dent you’d put in your pocketbook if you had a 20 to 50 pound per day appetite in addition to the rising cost of fuel and grain shortages that are already inflating the cost of groceries. And imagine if you had to rely on somebody else to procure that sustenance for you. A trip to the grocery on the way home from work for a $6.99 gallon of milk doesn’t sound so bad anymore does it? Read the rest of this entry »

by Sam Winston

An in-depth look at how the internet giants and New Orleans teamed up to challenge the very status quo of presidential debates. And what their chances are of succeeding.

“Their invitation had the distinct aura of something that had not been fumigated by the relevant authorities; in the increasingly big business of televised presidential debates, it was not an invitation at all, but a challenge—to the candidates, the major television networks, and to that man behind the curtain, the Washington-based nonprofit called the Commission on Presidential Debates.”- New York Observer