I went to Porter House, my favorite restaurant. I was with a woman who was not with me for free. I think she had a filet with some kind of a salad and no vegetables, and I think she had wine. I don’t drink at all. I just had unsweetened iced tea.

She didn’t charge me for dinner, because I wouldn’t pay somebody to eat with them. But as a part of the night, she was like, “Yeah, we can go out and eat first, if you want,” so I was like, “Oh, okay,” and then we went home and kind of hung out. I had her for technically an hour, but she was cool with doing something else beforehand because she was kind of familiar with me, so she didn’t mind going out and eating. So we spent probably two and a half hours together.

Starting in 2006, millions of dollars were hastily distributed to grantees to further this poverty reduction strategy. The money went to such enterprises as “Laugh Your Way America,” a program run by a non-Spanish speaking Wisconsin minister who used federal dollars to offer “Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage” seminars to Latinos. It funded Rabbi Stephen Baars, a British rabbi who’d been giving his trademarked “Bliss” marriage seminars to upper-middle-class Jews in Montgomery County, Maryland, for years. With the help of the federal government, he brought his program to inner-city DC for the benefit of African American single moms.

The marriage money was diverted from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (formerly known as welfare), and much of it went to religious groups that went to work trying to combat the divorce rate in their communities by sponsoring date nights and romance workshops. In some cities, the local grantees used their federal funds to recruit professional athletes to make public service announcements touting the benefits of marriage. Women’s groups were especially critical of the marriage initiative, largely because it was the baby of Wade Horn, a controversial figure who Bush installed at HHS as the head of the Administration for Children and Families and the administration’s official “marriage czar.”

But there’s another explanation for why kids loved pizza Lunchables when adults didn’t. If there’s one overwhelming conclusion researchers have drawn from sensory testing about kids’ preferences, it’s that they’re crazy about sugar—a predilection that actually develops in utero. And it’s not just that kids like sweet, says Gary Beauchamp, the president and director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center; they crave it in much higher concentrations than adults do.

So it’s not just the adventure of constructing their own made-to-order (cold) pie that’s made countless kids beg their parents to send them to school with an Extra Cheesy Pizza Lunchable, including juice and Airheads candy, in tow. The combination box’s 28 grams of sugar (that’s nearly six teaspoons) probably has something to do with it, too.

In a blog post written last year, Google explained how it planned to avoid the leap second issue by using a tactic it called a “leap smear”.

This involved incrementally adding tiny fractions of time - a couple of milliseconds - gradually over the course of a day.

“This meant that when it became time to add an extra second at midnight, our clocks had already taken this into account, by skewing the time over the course of the day,” explained Christopher Pascoe, the company’s site reliability engineer.

For a decision that could ultimately affect more than a million soldiers in the Army, reserves and National Guard, the sudden shift from Program Executive Office Soldier was a head-scratcher. The consensus among the researchers was the Army brass had watched the Marine Corps don their new uniforms and caught a case of pixilated camouflage envy.

“It was trendy,” Stewardson said. “If it’s good enough for the Marines, why shouldn’t the Army have that same cool new look?”