Leave it to The Simpsons to accurately predict the future. Remember the episode where Homer and Bart suck the grease from Springfield Elementary's cafeteria to try and turn a profit, but the vacuum explodes and the kids wind up playing "snowball fight" with grease balls?

Well, that scene is now a reality. Okay, not the part about the grease fight - but pretty much everything else.

As the demand for biofuel rises, thieves making to look a quick buck are stealing the "yellow grease" leftover from restaurants that cook their food in veggie fat. Like Homer Simpson, they suck up the substance with vacuums, and can get a few thousand dollars from about 5,000 gallons (grease has shot up to 32 cents a pound).

It's not a job for the dainty thieves: Christian Science Monitor writer Ben Arnoldy describes the smell of a grease rendering plant as "like a combination between a fast food restaurant and a butcher shop, where maybe the meat's gone bad."

In the movie Grease, Danny Zuko gets stranded at the drive-in theater when Sandy storms out on him. As he sings a strange advertisement for the snack stand rolls on the screen behind him, complete with dancing sodas and trick-trained hot dogs. The song is great, but it is hard to tear your eyes away from those anthropomorphized snacks. I saw this video of about one of those snacks, giving a little backstory and spinning out a rather clever little tale of what happened to Jerome, the Marching Gumdrop, when he left "The Lobby Gang" - featuring Pops Corn, Bonnie Bon Bon, Smokey (a pack of cigarettes isn't exactly refreshing, but whatever), Hot Doggy and Sodey Pop - and struck out on his own.

It's strange, it's funny and, as if that weren't enough, it stars a talking gumdrop.

[via tgwae]

Some of you might recall a post a few months back about the worst foods to eat over your keyboard. Well, designer Duck Young Kong has come up with something akin to a T.V. tray that might protect your keyboard from your lunch. As you can see, it can hold your food and still leave room for you to type. Is this convenient? Probably. Is it a surefire way to get your greasy, grilled-cheese-hands all over your keyboard? You bet. It still looks like a recipe for disaster to me.

[Via TechEBlog]

Robert Tomey, a McDonald's franchisee owner, has put his leftover french fry grease to a good use: fueling his car. His stores, he says, produce about 10,000 gallons of excess oil each year and, after having a simple conversion performed on his car, he now has more than enough to get wherever he's going. In fact, Tomey says that 20-30 cars could be powered by that amount of oil. The grease is processed in a way similar to regular diesel fuel.

And Tomey is not the only one who does this. His conversion kit was purchased at Grease Car. Their conversion kits can cost up to approximately $2,000 and their emissions statistics are intended to provide potential consumers with an idea of how they'll be helping the environment if they convert a diesel car to run on vegetable oil. There seem to be many people who have successfully converted their cars, so it is possible we may see even more of them in the future, especially if McDonald's began to recommend this as an option to their franchisees, since it does seem like a great use for leftover grease.