How about a healthy alternative

Healthy?  What?  For Superbowl?  I know.  I must be kidding, right?

How about a bunch of carrot sticks, or pre-peeled baby carrots, celery sticks, bell peppers cut into strips and some hummus.  You can find good hummus at Whole Foods, and surprisingly, the Sam's near me has a really good one.  Not everyone likes it, but it's one of my favorite snacks.  You can also get pita chips and some baguette bread cut up into small slices to serve it with as well.  Add some calamata olives and some bruschetta topping, which is roasted peppers in olive oil, and I think you'll have a hit that is not just the same old same old.

• Appetizer Ideas - Shelly
  • My favorite: Oreos with whipped cream on them. YUMM! - (Got it from "Laverne & Shirley"
  • How about a healthy alternative - Happy MT Robin
  • buffalo chicken dip -- always a hit! - sm
  • This is always a hit at my house - sm
    • This sounds really weird, but s/m - penny
      • Do this also with hot dogs cut in coins... - nm

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I believe I'll pass on all of them.

Meat consumption usually means beef, pork, or chicken. Mutton and venison are common also. My favorite Indian restaurant avoids both beef and pork for religious reasons, but sometimes offers goat as an alternative to chicken. In the past few years, rising food prices and concerns about the environment are leading people to try new and different sources of meat. Here are five you may have never thought about.

1. Raccoon

Raccoon meat is cheap if you know of a local trapper. In Kansas City, raccoons go for $3-7 dollars each, and a whole animal will feed five adults. Preparing raccoon meat isn’t easy or quick. Frozen meat must be thawed, then parboiled, then stewed. The cooking time is measured in hours, but those who have tried it love the taste. That is, if you can get past thinking of raccoons as vermin, roadkill, or cute little masked bandits. You’ll find one reminder: trappers remove the head and three paws, but leave one paw behind to prove the animal is not a dog or cat.

2. Camel

Camel meat is quite common in the Middle East, and is reportedly quite tasty. Australians are now encouraged to try camel meat as the continent’s million-plus wild camel population is growing out of control. Camels are destroying the delicate ecosystem of the desert, and they burp huge amounts of greenhouse gasses into the air. You can find camel recipes if you look, but beware that some recipes are more serious than others.

3. Squirrel

Eating squirrel is nothing new in America. Just a few years ago, advice came from the University of Kentucky that people should not eat squirrel brains because they may contain a variant of Mad Cow Disease. The rest of the squirrel is fine, if a little stringy. Now squirrel meat is being promoted in Britain due to an overpopulation of gray squirrels. The American invaders are edging out the native red squirrels. Brits who resisted squirrel meat for centuries are now patting themselves on the back as they eat gray squirrel and do their part for the balance of nature. You’ll find plenty of recipes for squirrel online.

4. Yattle

Yattle is the name given to a crossbreed of yaks and cattle. Yak meat has less fat than beef, because yak fat is near the skin, where it helps keep the cold-climate animal warm, whereas beef cattle distribute their fat throughout the meat. First-generation yattle are the result of mating between a yak and a cow or bull. Male yattle are sterile, but females can breed with bulls, resulting in a 25% yak ancestry for second-generation yattle. Yaks, and yattle, consume less food than cattle, and produce valuable fiber to make sweaters. Yattle meat is supposedly indistinguishable from yak meat.

5. Kangaroo

Kangaroos are both plentiful and meaty, with a low percentage of fat compared to beef. They are also less damaging to the environment than cattle. However, kangaroo meat is slow to catch on in Australia. After all, most nations don’t eat their national symbol! Some European countries consume more kangaroo meat per capita than Australia, possibly because of Mad Cow Disease fears. Environmental groups encourage people to eat kangaroo because the animals do not burp or fart and therefore do not add greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere -strangely the opposite reason people are encouraged to eat camel meat. Kangaroo meat is used in sausages, stews, steaks, burgers, and sandwiches.

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   Maximizing the life of your hard drive                                          

The following is a list of important maintenance and monitoring techniques you can use to maximize the life of your hard drive and prevent data loss.

Hard drives are physically fragile – handle with care
Statistics show that 25% of lost data is due to a failure of a portable drive. (Source: 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey Results)
Contrary to its seemingly rugged appearance, your hard disk is a very delicate device that writes and reads data using microscopic magnetic particles. Any vibration, shock, and other careless operation may damage your drive and cause or contribute to the possibility of a failure. This is especially relevant for notebook users, as they are most at risk of drive failure due to physical damage, theft, and other causes beyond their control. That’s why we recommend regular backup of notebook hard drives, as often as possible.
Possible solutions include external USB or Firewire drives (although these are prone to the same risks), desktop synchronization, or backup at a data center through the web.

Hard drives write data in a non-linear way forcing it to become fragmented.
When files accumulate on your hard drive, they do not just get written in a linear fashion. A hard drive writes files in small pieces and scatters them over the surface. The fuller your hard drive becomes and the more files you save and delete the worse file fragmentation can be. Hard drive access times increase with fragmentation since your drive must work harder to find all the pieces of the files. The more fragmented your data is, the harder the actuator arm has to work to find each piece of a file.
A case in point: Disk fragmentation is a common problem for users of Outlook Express and database software. Each time outlook saves new mail, it does so in a different physical location from the previous time. This results in extreme fragmentation, causing longer access times and forcing more strain on the actuator arm.
Finally, in the event of a total crash, a fragmented drive is much more difficult to recover then a healthy defragged drive.
Luckily, Windows makes it remarkably easy to defrag your hard drive, simply launch the Disk Defragmenter utility (Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools), choose which disk or partition you’d like to defragment and set it to work overnight or while you are not actively using your computer. Defragmentation will speed up your computer and ensure a longer life for your hard drive.

A very small power surge can fry a hard drive – use a UPS and turn off your computer
Another little-known fact about the fragility of your hard drive is its susceptibility to electrical failure. An electrical failure can be caused by a power surge, lightening strikes, power brown-outs, incorrect wiring, a faulty or old power supply, and many other factors. If a power surge enters your computer, it may do an unpredictable amount of damage, including destroying your hard drive’s electronics or crashing the heads and possibly resulting in total data loss.
The best way to protect your computer from such dangers is to use a highly rated protected power bar or an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). Although these devices won’t eliminate the chances of a crash, they will serve as effective protection in most cases. Also, you can minimize the danger of an electrical problem and reduce wear of your hard drive by turning off your computer or using power-save modes whenever possible. It’s a known fact that 100% of drives fail, the question is when will it happen and will you be prepared?

*Be SMART, monitor the health of your drive to prevent unexpected crashes
All modern hard drives have a self-monitoring technology called SMART (Self Monitoring Analysis & Reporting Technology). What most people don’t realize is that the majority of hard drive failures do not have to be unexpected. Most failures occur as a result of long-term problems which can be predicted. By regularly monitoring disk health and performance, you can know about potential hard drive problems before you lose any of your data.
Several excellent utilities are available, including DiskView and Stellar SMART for standard IDE and SATA desktop drives. Also available are tools that monitor the health of SCSI drives and full RAID Array systems. Ariolic Software offers a great utility called ActiveSMART.

*The only fool-proof way to prevent data loss is... Backup!
If you only take one of the suggestions here to heart, let it be this one: always back up your important data. After all the monitoring and all the prevention measures are in place, one fact still remains: all hard drives fail. Backing up regularly will ensure that you’re never caught without your critical data. For individuals, the simplest solutions include external portable hard drives, dvd’s, and online storage.