Chuck E. Cheese, Provocateur

Seven officers arrived and found as many as 40 people knocking over chairs and yelling in front of the restaurant's music stage, where a robotic singing chicken and the chain's namesake mouse perform.

Chuck E. Cheese's is an exciting place for kids -- all those flashing lights, singing robots, games, pizza, pitchers of rootbeer are enough to blow a six-year old's circuits. My brother once vomited from all the excitement.

But it's not just the little ones who can be overcome by the sophisticated atmosphere at Chuck E. Cheese's. Apparently, all that noise and chaos has an affect on the grown-ups, too. As their kids busily flap around on DDR and pee in the ball room, the parents are drinking heavily upstairs and getting in a surprising number of fights.

Said one police captain quoted in the article: "There's a biker bar down the street, and we rarely get calls there."

Science Marches On

Crucial, breaking news!

An Austrian scientist, who clearly has his priorities in line, has released his findings from a three-year study on the composition of belly-button lint.

Turns out the process of lint formation is dependent on a special kind of body hair whose sole purpose is to trap lint. Because that's somehow adaptive.

According to the article,

"...the scaly structure of the hair enhances the 'abrasion of minuscule fibres from the shirt' and directs the lint towards the belly button."

"The hair's scales act like a kind of barbed hooks," he said. "Abdominal hair often seems to grow in concentric circles around the navel."

The practical upshot:

Dr Steinhauser established that shaving one's belly will result in a fluff-free navel - but only until the hairs grow back.