Hottest Electronic Gadgets

The 404 614: Where we donate our SPAM to charity (podcast)

July 1st, 2010

Yay, SPAM!

Instead of automatically sending your junk mail to the trash bin, send it over to the burrito artists at Chipotle. The casual food chain is now accepting your spam at nojunk@chipotlejunk.com and will donate $10,000 to The Lunch Box for every 500,000 junk mails they receive.

The campaign is an effort to bring higher quality, healthier food with sustainable ingredients to school kids, but not to worry- said food does not include Chipotle burritos, which contain 1,179 calories according to Livestrong.com. Unfortunately, the call to action does not include sending Chipotle the other kind of SPAM.

Remember the big African killer bee migration that threatened to end the world in the 1990s? Well since then, the UK has seen a 15% drop in the general bee population , and scientists at Chandigarh’s Punjab University just released a study linking the bee decline to mobile phones.

Through a controlled experiment, researchers speculate that “electropollution” from the rising popularity of electronic gadgets causes the honeybees to lose their sense of navigation, preventing them from returning to the hive after pollination. Scientists are still puzzled as to exactly how to mitigate the issue, although we suspect that the collective bee population is secretly partnering with AT&T to bring about the final destination of phone reception worldwide.

(Credit:
The Consumerist)

I’m looking forward to flying home tomorrow to spend the next week with my family back in Huntington Beach, but this next story can teach us all a valuable lesson about carry-on baggage. Passengers on a US Airways flight from Atlanta to Charlotte were forced to evacuate the plane after a litter of writhing maggots dripped from an overhead bin onto a very unfortunate row of travelers. The intruders descended from the overhead compartment, where one passenger foolishly packed a container of rotten meat that attracted the larvae. So…who’s up for some lunch?

Tune in to the first half of the show for our commentary on all the stories above, plus an impromptu Calls From the Public DANCE PARTY featuring 404 theme song candidates submitted by listeners like you. If you’re a talented musician and love The 404 so much that you’re willing to donate a song for our theme music, get to work and send the mp3 to the404(at)cnet(dot)com, and we’ll play it on the air! Thanks to all of our talented listeners, we’ll be back tomorrow with another episode of The 404 Podcast.

Thanks for listening!