I was struck by the apparent sloppiness of the CR podcast. They took a product that claimed to be both "organic" and "instant", and compared it to two leading mixes that may have been "instant", but certainly weren't "organic". No wonder CR claimed to be "shocked, shocked" by the very high unit price of the "organic" pancakes.

When I was growing up. Comsumers Union, CR's publisher, was seen as godlike and impartial in its reporting. That old standard, alas, seems to be long gone.

Those are such good points. I, too, thought Consumer Reports and Ralph Nader were gods. EL

I forgot to add that a simple Google search for organic pancake mix results in a number of competing "organic" mixes, any of which would have been more appropriate for comparison than either of the two leading national brand mixes in the CR podcast.

OK, what may turn out to be another "meatball" question, but I'll ask anyway: is there supposed to be any difference between pancake batter and waffle batter? Or is the only difference the utensil used to cook them?

I thought waffle batter had more shortening in it. (Or in my case, butter.) EL

Interesting - the magazine review of Batter Blaster last month said it was a "double." They thought it was fine, but that it didn't make as many pancakes as advertised.

who cares about ORGANIC?! all the REGULAR brands make me sick. they have disgusting HYDRIGENATED COTTONSEED oil in them. WHO EATS COTTON?!?!? thanks mom for my big plate of HEART DISEASE

"WHO EATS COTTON?!?!?"

Cotton Candy. mmm...

chocolate covered Egyptian cotton balls are quite tasty

I'd say that "concerned" and "[Cousin] Springs1" must have been separated at birth, assuming that they aren't one and the same person.

I HAVE no cousins, thank you VERY MUCH!

Ok, we are really in trouble now. Milo Minderbinder is here.

Someone hide the good silver!

Ironic that "concerned" is in lower case.

Yes, Hal the main page of D@L has up to date MCR box. That's an acceptable work-around, I suppose.

This just proves what I've been saying all along, that there is a programming error.

For as long as I've been using the internet I've been using CTRL-R only, which is a hard refresh in IE or Opera. Why would anybody use anything else? Anything less just repaints the screen with old cached data.

Now that we finally agree that the programming is bad, maybe someone could fix it.

I had a friend in high school who wrote a paper for AP English class entirely in printed capital letters. He thought it looked neater. The teacher was aghast. My friend, when I last heard from him, was a programmer for IBM working inside a vault.

Move over Michael and Farrah. Sad news: super pitchman infomercial king Billy Mays is dead.

Apparently screaming can be fatal.

Aww, why you gotta dis me concerned?? the FAMILY really MISSES you!!!

If Billy Mays is dead then his obit should be in all caps.

I thought y'all were kidding, but yes, Billy Mays has indeed passed on.

Owl, the obit should be written by Springs1, so we'd get the right amount of exclamation points.

Billy Mays dies

Doesn't it seem a bit ironic that his last gig was promoting a health insurance company?

And, hmpstd, we knew that Consumer Reports/Consumer Union was impatial because and no one would lie.

Bucky, my mom used the same batter for both pancakes and waffles. She made it with Bisquik. I used Aunt Jemima.

To complete the sentence above, which, apparently had the center blown out of it by a Brainfart, ...we knew CR/CU was impartial because they told us so.....

In the old days, Eve, CR/CU always trumpeted the fact that it accepted no advertising as proof of its impartiality. Its testing methods were usually pretty transparent, too. Nowadays, I'm not so sure.

You can use Bisquick (or Aunt Jemima or Krusteaz or whatever) for both waffles and pancakes, but there's definitely a difference in the amounts of stuff you add to them. Pancakes need maybe a couple of tablespoons of oil; waffles need much more. Also, if I recall correctly, you need more eggs for waffles.