Apparently Mountain Dew drinkers were looking for something to drink in the morning, but they weren't interested in coffee, tea, or juice. "Alas," they cried, "where is the product that is marginally appropriate for breakfast, yet tastes enough like Mountain Dew that I feel comfortable drinking it?" And thus, Kickstart was born. (If we were Kickstarter, we'd sue.)

Kickstart has even more caffeine than its parent soda -- 92 milligrams compared to the 72 in regular Mountain Dew.  But it's healthy, because it has B and C vitamins in it, and juice, but not too much of it, just the 5 percent juice that would make it technically qualify as juice.

Is it your dream to get air-quality readings wherever you are, from an accurate, speedy, and relatively inexpensive device? Does it help if it's shaped like a pantyhose container? Well, if so, your dreams are about to come true with the Air Quality Egg, which blew through its $39,000 Kickstarter goal last year, raising more than $100,000.

This device measures NO2 and CO concentrations, the best indicators for air pollution levels, and shares its data with dozens or hundreds of other eggs to form a picture of air quality in your area. Plus, it looks cool! (Uh, probably. Pretty sure that thing up there is just a prototype.)

This goldfish wasn't terribly good at floating. So instead of just making her hang around on the bottom of the tank, being bored, her owner fitted her with a home-brewed sling that allows her to join her goldfish companions in their aquatic fun. Look at the way they all cluster around her like her little contraption makes her a celebrity.

You know how you look at dogs and you're like, "Wow, you're cute and snuggly"? But then you look at wolves and you're like, "Wow, you're hot! You are so cut! You have such long lean muscles!" Well, scientists studying DNA from wolves and dogs think there's a reason that dogs evolved into adorable, soft, sometimes squishy pets while wolves remain lean and sinewy, with a sort of telegenic rough trade appeal about them, and the reason has to do with the ability to digest carbs.

If you think that you have seen everything in the world of adorable animals, just wait, because you have never seen Yu, a turtle living at a water life park in Kobe, Japan, who has prosthetic flippers. Yu lost her flippers in a shark attack, and could only swim about half as fast as usual. Scientists made 26 versions of a prosthetic before finally figuring out a way to secure them to a vest. A turtle in a vest? Can you resist?

The first Coke slogan I remember is "Coke is Life." It certainly seemed true in its exuberant '70s advertisements, but it turned out to be not so true for a 30-year-old New Zealand woman who died recently of cardiac arrhythmia. Physicians are attributing her death to the woman's Coke habit -- over two gallons of Coke a day.

Jeremy Clarkson, the guy from the British show Top Gear, has designed and now driven the world's tiniest car. It looks more like a fifth grader's Halloween R2D2 costume, but it really is a car (or, as Clarkson put it, "I promise it's a real car"). It has a two-stroke 100cc engine. He takes it on the A3, which is a very big road, and although he lives to tell the tale, he does so kind of by the skin of his teeth, and there's not a lot of dignity involved.

Far and away the thing that most motivates me to consider staying a vegetarian is that I hate the idea of animals suffering -- not only as they die but also throughout their lives. But five weeks into this experiment as a meat lover testing out vegetarianism, I have to admit: I still want to eat meat.

I can’t do factory-raised, but I’m thinking, hey, farm-raised might be a nice compromise. I wanted to talk to some people who were involved in raising and killing their own animals, and lo and behold, I went to a party last week and happened to meet Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Brett Ridge, the stars of the reality show The Fabulous Beekman Boys, which tells the story of the couple starting a farm in upstate New York.

The show ended, the farm lives on. Kilmer-Purcell and Ridge raise two pigs a year, have them slaughtered on their farm every fall, and then they eat the pigs’ meat. I watched the episode in which their two pigs, Porky and Bess, are slaughtered, and interviewed Kilmer-Purcell about his experience raising, killing, and eating the pigs.

Q. So you had Porky and Bess from very young?

A. Yes, we got them when they were weaned and we raised them for 10 months before we had them slaughtered. That was the first time we raised and slaughtered two pigs, but we've done it twice more since then. We hire someone to come do it. [Laughs.] It is a misconception to think that every farmer can perform every task on a farm. I have slaughtered chickens before, but slaughtering a pig is a pretty special skill. It would be cheaper for us to bring them somewhere else to be slaughtered, but what’s most traumatic for the animal, we’re told, is the transport. We want to make sure we did everything as humanely as possible, and so we never took them out of their homes.

When people bitch about flying I think about Louis CK's monologue about how we want so much from the world that we are just assholes. That said: The legroom thing is bad. The sitting on the tarmac forever thing is bad. The trapped for hours next to a screaming kid thing is bad. And because the airlines can't really do anything about any of that, they have decided to improve the thing they can control: tea. British Airways is now using a new Twinings tea bag manufactured especially to excel at 35,000 feet.

Some Seattle construction workers were surprised to arrive at work last week to find two raccoons shacked up in a 150-foot tower crane, which was being used to build an apartment building at the corner of 24rd and Market. Experts were called in, but they were not able to catch the raccoons -- they just had to wait for them to leave on their own. Why, you might ask? Well, partly because raccoons can run 15 miles an hour, while construction workers tend to stand in one place going, "Holy shit, raccoons!" And partly because raccoons are sly little bastards. They like to cause problems and run away. Sometimes they bite people. (They run away after that too. They are good at going through garbage and getting rabies and killing cats -- they are not so good at taking responsibility for their actions.)