Back when I was a kid, life was pretty simple. Saturday morning cartoons were awesome, Ecto Cooler was abundant and the Soviet Union collapsed before they could drop any nukes on us. I couldn’t watch the news, or even my cartoons, though, without being reminded that there were other problems out there. Namely, a hole in the ozone layer and acid rain falling from the sky (which, in my mind at the time, meant the world was going to start melting).Scary and omnipresent as they were then, these two... READ ON

In the majority of the United States, one candidate gets all of the state’s electoral votes. That holds true whether the state has 55 electoral votes to give, like California, or a scant 3 votes to offer, like Montana. Two states, however, don’t have to go the all-or-nothing route: Nebraska and Maine. Those states have opted to use the Congressional District Method, where electoral votes are distributed according to the state’s congressional districts instead of the state as a... READ ON

Wikimedia CommonsThat’s all, folks: The 2012 election is finally over. In the run up, we tackled big election questions, from why we vote on Tuesdays to what would happen in the event of a natural disaster on Election Day to whether Americans actually move to Canada after elections. But there’s one lingering question we haven’t yet tackled: Where did the notion of Red States and Blue States come from, and how did those colors come to represent their particular political... READ ON

I could write a book on the strange stuff my cat does, but when I switched her food from dry to wet recently, she started doing something really weird: She’d maneuver her way around her food dish, pawing the ground as she went. Her behavior was odd enough that it warranted investigation. What was she up to?Though most seem to agree that my cat is trying to bury her food when she paws around her dish, opinions differ as to just why she wants to bury her... READ ON