(Illustration / Stacy Lenz)

NickMom — What? You’ve all thought about it.

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1. Registry: Plankton plankton plankton plankton plankton plankton plankton plankton.
2. Everyone laughed when you said you wanted to have an underwater birth BUT WHO’S LAUGHING NOW?

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Read the full list over at NickMom.

Men’s Health

On his epic summer tours, he creates a tiki-bar atmosphere on football fields in places like Indianapolis and Kansas City. He makes 50,000 people think they’re at a tin-roofed beachside canteen that seats nine. He preaches simplicity and oceanside afternoons in songs that hit a demographic sweet spot: folks young enough to feel free and old enough to reminisce about easier times. This recipe has made Chesney really, really popular.

Read the full article at Men’s Health.

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Pictured: Right before then became now.

GateHouse — I rarely pay heed to news out of the world of Science, mostly because we’re in a recession, people, and I’m not made of heed.

But it’s also because such news often arrives in the form of sizable and startling-looking words, many of which contain prefixes (ugh), in periodicals that I do not subscribe to, such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society and Redbook. I also find it overly scientific, and the people who write it tend to be like super-obsessed with things like molecules and dark matter and large hadrons colliding, and I had plenty of biology in the 10th grade, thank you very much. If Science talked more about Facebook and quidditch, maybe we’d have something.

You disgust me.

That said, now and again Science produces some actual news that makes me sit up and call my momma, which apparently is something I have to sit up to do, as it is very hard to dial the phone while reclining. Last week Science announced that coffee not only provides your primary reason to get up in the morning (yeah, I said it, CBS’ “The Early Show”) and is literally the only reason I can complete all basic tasks between the hours of 2:30 and 6 p.m., but it has other, more additional health benefits as well, such as not-dying, which is a pretty good benefit, frankly. I’d like to see other beverages come up with a benefit like that. Looking at you, Mello Yello, what do you got in the way of extending the average life expectancy? What’s that? Jack squat? I thought so. Just sit there and be mello, loser.

Anyway, and it goes on for a while, but the study basically reveals that coffee is good at making you die less. Now, depending upon the kind of either human or Romney you are, this news will elicit one of two reactions:

1. “AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” (joyously, followed by tearful hugging of increasingly uncomfortable strangers at the bus stop)
2. “I guess that’s good news, but I’m not really a coffee drinker so” and it is here that I would stop listening to your boring mouthwords, because if you are not a coffee drinker I cannot imagine what further conversation we would remotely hope to have, as I would literally be half-listening to every fool syllable dribbling out of your face thinking, “You get out of my house you get out right now.”

If you are with us in the former fraternity, however, it is hard to imagine being delivered greater news this week, unless they announced that every Facebook user who posts kid pictures kids gets 500 free shares, or that Scarlett Johansson was interested in having lunch at the houses of 36-year-old speedily graying Slovaks while wearing the Black Widow costume every day for a year oh that’s right sure eeeeeeverybody look at the creepy columnist guy now.

Back to news: The study, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine and featuring data from the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health, found that, in essence, coffee drinkers have a lower risk of death than non-coffee drinkers. But they’re not just talking about you one-cup-a-day amateurs, you plush pink bunny toys of coffee consumption. The study went on to find that people who drink more than three cups a day had a 10 percent LOWER risk of dying, and those who drank 4-5 cups a day had the LOWEST risk of death of all, although that’s partly because who has the time to die when you’re peeing that much?

And this isn’t just death like People Who Drink Coffee Are More Likely To See That Startled Moose Careening Out Of The Forest At Your Honda — this is a decrease in death from heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes, stroke, accidents, carafe explosions, grinder malfunctions, the Colombian rickets, everything.

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Related, sort of

• Starbucks Trenta: Probably a bit much, unless you’re a horse

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The story goes on to say that the study doesn’t explicitly show what they call a “causal link,” which is to say “a link,” which is to say, “Stop sobbing in public, you have children for God’s sake.” Yet this is America, and publishing a story about the health benefits of coffee and then expecting coffee drinkers to not host instant block parties is silly, it’s like saying your team won the fantasy sports league but you can’t bore people to tears on Facebook about it. So yes, COFFEE SAVES YOUR LIFE, PEOPLE. Thank you, coffee. And thank you, Redbook.

This is how it's done, suckers

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GateHouse — Despite growing up in a reasonably comfortable Indiana suburb, I never really got into the music of Tupac Shakur. This put me in direct conflict with my younger brother, Dave; while I would spend my formative Camelot Music-stalking time making important purchasing decisions about Tesla and the “Wayne’s World” soundtrack and, God help me, that Styx album with “Show Me The Way” on it (I KNOW, I ALREADY KNOW), Dave was able to leverage his good grades and positive attitude, as well as our parents’ divorce, into permission to buy pretty much anything with a parental advisory sticker and an Intro on it between the years 1991-1994.

I bring this up because none of the girl-pantsed losers I listened to in high school would ever remotely be considered for immortalization in hologram form; you cannot be baked enough to clamor for an all-projection version of Tesla’s “Five Man Acoustical Jam,” which I owned in both CD and cassette form and which may be an inaccurate reference, as I’m pretty sure no one is Tesla has died yet. I should probably fact-check this point before emailing this column to my editors, but Siri is all the way downstairs. Hang on. “SIRI! CAN YOU COME UP HERE AND ANSWER A QUESTION ABOUT TESLA?” Ugh, nothing. These phones are so buggy.

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Anyway, Tupac, as you likely saw, was onstage twice in the past two weeks, performing at the sprawling and malodorous Coachella Music Festival with former/current? collaborators Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Tupac’s performance, by all accounts, was a powerful testament to his perseverance and dedication, especially considering his death in 1996. Because this was Tupac The Hologram, or, more accurately, a bit of stage sleight-of-hand involving mirrors and projection that’s been around (in concept form, at least) since the mid-1800s, much like Tesla.

The Tupac-hologram effect, if you don’t have the Internet and haven’t seen it, is insane. It’s insane. It’s jarring and uncanny and slyly references the Tupac-isn’t-dead conspiracy and makes you wonder why “The Polar Express” doesn’t look this good and also makes you briefly wonder if you have ever been sure that anything in your life is truly real.

Tupac was resurrected by a company called Digital Domain Media Group, they handle special effects and such. Projection was provided by a company called AV Concepts, using a technique that dates back to 1862 (fact), during a production of “Jersey Boys” (not a fact).

Right, so, OK, company creates unsettlingly lifelike image of dead rapper, pairs him with aging marijuana aficionado for approval of affluent tweeting hippies using Civil War-era mirror technology, right? OK so here’s where it gets weird.

AV Concepts president Nick Smith told the Wall Street Journal that though this is the first performance by a dead guy they’ve put on the technology has been used to bring back others. And here I will pause to let you think about the possibilities: great thinkers, artists, political minds, authors, historical figures who could be used to communicate great insight into the modern world. Sooooo who did they go with?

“We’ve brought past CEOs and things that like that back to life,” Smith told the newspaper, providing no specifics, because of non-disclosure agreements.

This, of course, brings up a number of moral and ethical quandaries. What sort of lines are blurred, smudged over or crossed entirely by such technology? Who determines how far such a thing can go? And WHY ARE YOU USING THIS TECHNOLOGY FOR THE WORST THING EVER? REALLY? You can BRING THE DEAD BACK TO LIFE ON STAGE and you’re not gonna go with like Abe Lincoln or Martin Luther King Jr. but the GUY FROM CITIBANK? Let me ask you this, when you bring CEOs back to life CAN WE THROW THINGS AT THEM OR GET HOLOGRAM BAILOUT MONEY BACK?

OK first of all a number of things need to happen here: We’re gonna need to know what “past CEOs” have been brought back to life, so we can prevent those companies from ever holding another meeting again, because seriously this is like discovering your space shuttle works and using it to go to Chili’s. (Note to young readers: the “Space Shuttle” was a vehicle we used in the late 1900s for “human discovery and exploration,” we ran out of money for it in 2011 because everyone got upset about birth control.)

Also I think some investigation into the “things like that” would be warranted; if we’ve learned anything from Wall Street in the past few years, it might be GET SPECIFICS FROM THESE PEOPLE What is the “things like that” in regards to past CEOs? Past human resources coordinators? Floating heads in jars? Do you have anything about Steve Jobs you want to tell us BECAUSE NOW WOULD BE A GOOD TIME, as I’m still waiting for my iPhone to walk up the stairs.

Pictured: New York City school cafeteria

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GateHouse — You hear a lot about pink slime these days, because frankly, pink slime is an a-MA-zing turn of phrase. It’s a writer’s dream, a lyrical, almost onomatopoeic slice of verbal sleight-of-hand that grabs your brain and demands it to conjure up an image, requires you to stop what you’re doing — eating a hoagie, feeding your baby, delivering a baby — to consider it. Frankly as soon as someone coined the phrase “pink slime” it was over, stick a fork in it. Actually that wouldn’t work because sticking a fork in an industrial-sized vat of gelatinous goo wouldn’t be practical and actually probably really frustrating; maybe you should go with a spoon in this scenario. Or an ice cream scoop. Ooh, soup ladle!

We think about pink slime for the same reason most people think about pink slime: Because we are writing “Ghostbusters II.” But also we think about it because with a meaning that evocative, especially in an age where headline value is measured by the level of instinctual milliseconds it takes someone to click on something distracting while they’re supposed to be working and/or driving, it’s perfect. It’s like “swine flu” or “SARS” or “Newt Gingrich” — your brain can’t help but think “THAT SOUNDS JUST AWFUL AND UNELECTABLE YET I CANNOT STOP MY HAND FROM CLICKING ON IT,” and there, before you know it, you’re 12 pages into pink slime material on the web and vowing to never eat beef, or slime, for the rest of your life.

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Honestly I think it’s the color pink that’s the hook here; it’s a perfect descriptor for a unidentifiable, multisyllabic and wholly chemical-sounding foodishthing that it’s easy to imagine being horked into your kids’ lunches via murderous-looking machine in a factory in North Korea, or, more likely, a country with functional factories.

It works because it’s a color that no food in its right made would dare be made of — yeah, I said it, cotton candy, get out of here with your wispy tongue-dyeing weirdness — but it’s also just normalish enough to be plausible. The phrase “purple slime” is not believable, “blue slime” is an obvious giveaway and no one would even believe a container marked “yellow slime,” unless they were driving a prop truck to the Kids Choice Awards.

But that all said, it is also awful, because it’s pink slime, and it’s double-pants awful because it’s pink slime that goes in food, and it’s triple-pantsy-pants awful because some of that food is fed to children in school cafeterias, and I am very much looking forward to the day when “triple-pantsy-pants” becomes a nationwide catch phrase and all of you suckers owe me royalties, which I will immediately spend on fancy meats of unqualified freshness.

Listen, I am not here to swing your opinion on a cut-cost meat filler product that’s made from fat-heavy lumps of scraps that are cut off the edible meats, heated to vanquish the fat and then given a steamy ammonium hydroxide gas shower to kill E. coli and salmonella — a process that, I am learning in my research, works up to some of the time. Nor am I here to make jokes about a food-ish item so mired in controversy that is has been ungraciously yanked from Taco Bell and a supermarket chain with the savage-sounding name of Food Lion.

Nor am I here to refute the argument that “it’s OK because pink slime has been available for years,” because so have cigarettes, and those are also generally disallowed at school cafeterias, even in Texas, I’m like 75 percent sure.

Nor would I DREAM of adding to the legion of commentary about whether a semi-nutritional byproduct paste that appears to be something between the areas of “Baby Food” and “The Stuff That Darth Vader Probably Has To Eat, What With His Burned Up Throat And Everything” has supporters, including oh hey this is weird Rick Perry, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback and the lieutenant governors of Nebraska and South Dakota, which, taken together, make up a wide plains swath of Places You Do Not Want To Stop To Grab Lunch.

No, I am here only to say that as soon as pink slime became pink slime, its days were numbered. Now can I get you a hot dog?

Men’s Health — It’s a warm southern California morning, and I’m meeting Zac Efron in Studio City at a place called Weddington Golf & Tennis. With a name that stuffy, I expect marble and money. The course turns out to be public, with a plastic-cup snack bar where a waitress, without looking up, informs the 24-year-old movie star that she doesn’t take credit cards. They’ve reserved us a private tee, which is approximately 4 feet away from the adjacent public one.

Here at the practice range, Efron—in T-shirt, oversized cap, shorts, and Vans—strolls around in disarming anonymity, though to be fair, it’s hard for even the preeminent teen pinup of the 2000s to attract notice in a crowd that includes this many codgers in lavender pants. After talking and meandering (not especially well) through a bucket of golfballs, we encounter Roger Dunn, a California golf-shop magnate who gives lessons wearing a Panama hat and smoky sunglasses. We’d heard that Dunn is just shy of his 50th year of teaching, and he’s been introduced to us as a man of considerable local repute. Mostly Dunn has something to teach, and Efron is drawn to that.

Read the full article at Men’s Health.

NickMom

3. “I said, ‘Maybe we SHOULDN’T put the moray eel in the aquarium,’ but nooooooo no one EVER LISTENS TO ME.”

Read the list here.

Pictured: What shopping with kids looks like. Sometimes they're even the tantrum-my ones.

GateHouse — I approach clothes shopping like most people approach their pet’s funerals.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I guess with pet funerals there will be at least some part of it you’ll enjoy — warm-hearted memories of being lovingly licked all over your previously germ-free face, or the way your little Scotch terrier used to whizz like a French fountain on the pants of everybody new who entered your house, or that time you drank a giant glass of milk and then your dog got out and you found yourself sprinting through your neighborhood at the age of 13 with a full quart of milk slorshing around in your stomach, and when you found the dog you were overcome with relief at both locating the dog and the knowledge that now, finally, you could walk home slowly to throw up. Naturally, all of the preceding stories are accurate.

Anyway, point is, there is some joy in the funeral of a pet. There is no joy in clothes shopping, which, by contrast, is a miserable few hours of staring into a gaping hellmouth filled with things I am now too fat for.

I hate shopping, mostly because I’m terrible at it. This past weekend — and I feel no small degree of pride in saying this — I went into a few stores and successfully obtained a series of t-shirts that were, in essence, perfect clones of t-shirts I already owned, with some minor and in some cases molecular-level variation on the order of “Well this gray shirt is slightly more gray than that gray shirt I already own, but I like that gray shirt very much so maybe a grayer version of the gray shirt, plus the original gray shirt, is in truth a wise financial and stylistic decision.” I am a real party to go shopping with. If it’s one of the three days per year in which I’m required to try something on, I whine like a three-year-old getting a haircut.

Nine of these, please. Now let's get the hell out of here.

But something was different this time out. I embarked on this particular miserable shopping trip toting with me a six-month-old infant, because 1. I’m an incredible idiot and 2. I thought, oh, I know what will make slogging through Saturday afternoon traffic and fighting roving juntas of polos-tucked-into-shorts Shopping People to buy gray t-shirts more palatable: Let’s bring the poop machine. If we’re lucky he’ll spend a few minutes chewing on the metal hanger racks! (Spoiler alert: It totally happened. Let us hope, since the health care bill is going down in flames, that there are some reasonably effective hanger-disinfecting procedures in effect at whatever sweatshop in the Philippines produces Banana Republic clothing. If so that would be a great bonus, sort of like free snacks at your pet’s funeral. Wait, do people even still have pet funerals? Is that a thing? It seems like something you’d cut back on in the recession but then again people really like their pets.)

Anyway, while attempting to prevent my son from vaulting himself over my shoulder onto the disgusting floor of the outlet mall and thus freedom, I discovered something: That when you are a dude, clothes shopping with a six-month-old baby on your shoulder is a signal that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE DOING, that are singularly clueless, that you’re a lost puppy wandering the neighborhood waiting for your owner and his milkbelly to come track you down from a mile away, that you need assistance not only with clothes shopping but probably buttoning those clothes on the unlikely chance you make it back to wherever your house is.

Which I COMPLETELY WELCOME! This is not a complaint, as people can be very friendly and helpful and make google-eyes at the poop machine while you use the temporary diversion to scan the store for more gray t-shirts. And when they see you say hypothetically singing the Color Me Badd song on the store’s PA to your baby looking like someone particularly hip to the sounds of 1992, they’ll ask if you want them to hold the baby, or if they can hold something for you, or if they can give you a monster discount on gray t-shirts, which has never happened, but hey you never know.

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My 8-year-old’s debut on NickMom. You’re welcome, son.