We’d rather not poison the cat. That’s why we’ve picked up this Rescue Wasp, Hornet and Yellowjacket Trap ($24). It uses nontoxic attractants to lure in and do away with buzzing nasties.

[LINK]

One of my favorite things to do every afternoon when I get home is play a quick game or two of Lexulous online (modified Scrabble). Over time, I’ve seen the same people and as with any other social activity, I’ve ended up talking to my opponents/teammates about where they live in the world, what time it is when we’re playing, and most importantly, what the next meal is. This week’s recipe comes from one of my favorite players, Kathy Trim, also known as “kobekat.” One day when she mentioned she’d be making Sloppy Joes for dinner, I knew I couldn’t miss the opportunity to invite her to share one of her family’s favorite recipes with us on the column. My adult love for this sandwich was rekindled a few years ago after reading an article by Andrea Strong in the new York Times called “An Ode to Sloppy Joe, a Delicious Mess,” and it’s a recipe I’ve wanted to see here for a long time. It’s so easy to make and it’s the perfect party food when you want to put out a nice make-your-own buffet. We’d love to know how you make your Sloppy Joes delicious, especially if you have a vegetarian alternative! — Kristina

About kobekat: Kathy Trim is a Kansas-native who has lived in Kobe, Japan for over 20 years where she has raised four children, taught English and American cooking, and loved soaking up all things Japanese. In her free time she enjoys baking, collecting recipes, reading, and word games. She has a poodle named Toby and is a proud new grandmother to baby Leo!

CLICK HERE for the full recipe after the jump!

Sloppy Joes

Ingredients

• 2 lbs. ground beef (or beef/pork mix)
• 2 medium-sized onions, diced finely
• 3 cloves garlic minced or 2–3 tbsp. prepared minced garlic (jar)
• one 6 oz. can tomato paste
• two 8 oz. cans tomato puree or sauce (16 oz. total)
• 1 cup brown sugar (adjust according to taste)
• 2 tbsp. vinegar

1. Brown ground beef in skillet with onions and garlic until completely browned and onions are translucent and tender. Remove as much grease as possible from the beef mixture.

2. Add tomato paste and tomato puree and mix well.

3. Sprinkle brown sugar over the top and stir in thoroughly.

4. Splash vinegar all over the top and then mix in well.

5. Simmer for about 20 minutes so that the flavors can blend together.

6. Serve on hamburger buns or other type of sliced rolls.

For variation: Saute 1/2 cup chopped mushrooms with the meat, onions and garlic. Add 1 slice of processed cheese, or your favorite cheese, to each sandwich just prior to serving.

Photography by Kristina Gill. Sloppy Joe meat in a small flared bowl (white), on fish platter (milk) and salad plate (milk) all by mud australia; mini hamburger buns on vintage cheese board; napkin by IKEA; towel with red and yellow stripe, spoon and knife, vintage.

New York city drivers (and visitors to the Big Apple) flustered with the elaborate maze of parking regulations, shifting street-sweeping schedules, and frivolous no-parking hours can rejoice. A new app for iPhone and iPad untangles Gotham’s parking knot by illuminating the city’s rules and regulations with a tap of a finger. Building on previous parking apps, ParkPal ($FREE, Apple) delivers an easy-to-operate and accurate—the information comes from the New York City Department of Transportation database—interface with parking ordinances from all five boroughs. But they also have a website www.parkpalnyc.com

Presented on a Google map, streets are painted red, green, or yellow to signify parking availability in real time. When users tap on a street, a complete day-by-day, hour-by-hour breakdown pops onto the screen. The app even details regulations that change within the same block and drops a pin on the map to mark the parking location.

Drivers in other major American metropolises can look forward to forthcoming additions as ParkPal’s reach grows. Because as anyone who’s spent time driving endlessly around the convoluted streets of the West Village or strained their eyes squinting at signs in Midtown will tell you, a good spot is hard to find.

Nate Storey is a research assistant at Travel + Leisure.

Do you remember as a kid sitting on a phone book because you were too small to reach the table? Now your kids can have their very own Yellow Pages Booster Seat ($20), which we think is pretty cool. It’s kind of a retro throwback item….only we’re sure much more comfortable than the stiff ol’ phone book.

A test pilot is granted a mystical green ring that bestows him with otherworldly powers, as well as membership into an intergalactic squadron tasked with keeping peace within the universe.

With Marvel just raking in the cash with their various blockbuster properties, DC has yet to find any success outside the beloved Nolan Batman franchise. DC hopes to change that next summer with the Green Lantern, played by fanboy-favorite Ryan Reynolds who wields the legendary power Ring for a CGI-heavy intergalactic space epic. Hit the link to view the trailer in HD. Link

Green Lantern is the name of several fictional characters, superheroes appearing in comic Books published by DC Comics. The first (Alan Scott) was created by writer Bill Finger and artist Martin Nodell in All-American Comics #16 (July 1940).^[2]

Each Green Lantern possesses a power ring and power lantern that gives the user great control over the physical world as long as the wielder has sufficient willpower and strength to wield it. The ring is one of the most powerful weapons in the universe, and can be very dangerous. While the ring of the Golden Age Green Lantern (Alan Scott) was magically powered, the rings worn by all subsequent Lanterns were technological creations of the Guardians of the Universe, who granted such rings to worthy candidates. These individuals made up the intergalactic police force known as the Green Lantern Corps.^[2]

After World War II, when sales of superhero comic books generally declined, DC ceased publishing new adventures of Alan Scott as the Green Lantern. In 1959, at the beginning of the Silver Age of Comic Books, DC editor Julius Schwartz assigned writer John Broome and artist Gil Kane to revive the Green Lantern character, this time as test pilot Hal Jordan, who became a founding member of the Justice League of America. In 1970, writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams teamed Green Lantern with archer Green Arrow in groundbreaking, socially conscious, and award-winning stories that pitted the sensibilities of the law-and-order-oriented Lantern with the populist Green Arrow. Several cosmically themed series followed, as did occasional different individuals in the role of Earth’s Green Lantern. Most prominent of these are John Stewart, Guy Gardner, and Kyle Rayner.

Each of the Earth’s Green Lanterns has been a member of either the Justice Society of America or the Justice League of America, and John Stewart was featured as one of the main characters in both the Justice League and the Justice League Unlimited animated series. The Green Lanterns are often depicted as being close friends of the various men who have been the Flash, the most notable friendships having been between Alan Scott and Jay Garrick (the Golden Age Green Lantern and Flash), Hal Jordan and Barry Allen (the Silver Age Green Lantern and Flash), and Kyle Rayner and Wally West (the modern age Green Lantern and Flash), as well as Jordan being friends with West.

Powers and abilities

Each Green Lantern wields a power ring that can generate a variety of effects, sustained purely by the ring wearer’s imagination and strength of will. The greater the user’s willpower, the more effective the ring. The upper limits of the power ring’s abilities remain undefined, and it has been referred to as “the most powerful weapon in the universe” on more than one occasion. It has also been stated that every weapon has a weakness and the weakness a Green Lantern ring has is its wearer (though some argue that this is its strength). Across the years, the rings have been shown capable of accomplishing almost anything within the imagination of the ring bearer. Stories in 2006 retconned the ring’s long-established ineffectiveness on yellow objects, stating that the ring-wielder need only feel fear, understand it and overcome it in order to affect yellow objects (however, it is a learned and practiced ability, making it a weakness to some Green Lanterns), giving retroactive credence to the explanation of the ring’s real but surmountable weakness to yellow.

Power rings as used by various wielders have exhibited (but are not limited to) the following effects:

• Constructs of green ‘solid-energy,’ which can vary from microscopic to tremendous in size and/or complexity and are limited by the imagination of the ring’s wielder. This can be used to attack, defend, or to grab targets (Pre-Crisis, the rings generated telekinectic skills without constructs, if needed).
  • Force field generation, a someone protective aura (limited by user’s willpower) used to shield the wearer from the rigors of the vacuum of space. This provides a breathable atmosphere for the user as well. Contrary to older canon, a Green Lantern ring currently does not automatically protect its wearer from harm but must be willed into existence (previously, an unconscious wielder generated a protective force field automatically).
  • Generation of mental “earplugs” to block out telepathic communication and manipulation.^[9]
  • Rendering targets invisible.^[10]
  • lights and beams of various intensity and colors, such as destructive plasma and harmless multicolored lights.
• Movement capabilities:
  • Flight, including flight at speeds beyond that of light, although this creates an enormous expenditure of energy.
  • Relatively instantaneous transport across the galaxy and other distances through generated wormholes
  • Teleportation (an ability that has not been used in quite some time and may be outside the ability of modern Green Lanterns)
  • Pre-Crisis, the rings allowed for travel faster than the speed of light.
  • Time travel, though several power rings are needed to complete this.
• The rings can act as semi-sentient computers and accesses information through its connection with the book of Oa; the rings have problem-solving skills but they cannot make decisions or take actions on their own, and must be given directives by the wearer:
  • Translation of nearly all languages (originally, this was accomplished by using willpower, but this has changed in the modern era to be a function of the rings themselves.
  • Communication between ringwielders, regardless of distance apart
  • Diagnostic capabilities, allowing the user to see in X-Ray, contemplate illness, and identify materials.
• Mental powers of various stages:
  • Telepathy
  • Hypnosis, including projecting the target’s thoughts onto constructed maps
  • Creation and emission of certain types of radiation, including simulated wavelengths, such as kryptonite.
  • Placing humans into a state of suspended animation ^[11] and pulling them out of it.
• Changing the state of targeted matter and the wearer:
  • Allowing targets and the wearer to phase through solid objects
  • Rendering the wearer and targets to become invisible
  • Accelerated healing of wounds, protection and treatment from viruses and biological attacks and certain surgical procedures including reattachment of severed limbs and digits. More advanced medical procedures may be performed manually and are limited by the wearer’s knowledge of medicine. Pre-Crisis, a wearer could instantaneously reinvigorate limbs that hadn’t been used in years, so someone bedridden for years could walk as though their muscles were not atrophied.
  • Virtual shape-shifting by generating a hard-light holographic disguise around the ring bearer.
  • “Digitizing” the wearer to absorb them into the ring where they can live in a wearer-generated “world” of their own nearly indefinitely.
  • Pre-Crisis, a ring could alter a being’s molecular size (including shrinking to an atomic level), evolutionary stage (such as turning a target human into an ape), or distort specific targeted areas of the body (slowing the Flash down by making his upper torso too large for him to run).
  • Pre-Crisis, a wearer could animate non-living matter and make the target do whatever is willed.
  • Pre-Crisis, the rings could create a construct of a ring that a “non-Lantern” could use for 4 hours at a time (as opposed to 24) without a great effort of will.
  • Pre-Crisis, a ring could create multiple copies of it’s wearer if certain conditions were met; each copy had the capabilities of the original wearer.
  • In Green Lantern: First Flight Sinestro was able to “reconnect synapses” in the brain of a dead criminal in order to extract information via a kind of guided discussion.

Ahhh, our morning brew. We didn’t think it could get any better. But that was before we happened upon the Beatles yellow Submarine Ceramic mug ($15). Now we can start our days off with coffee and our favorite Beatles message: All You Need is Love (printed on the back of this cheery yellow mug). Plus, we can sit at our desks before the caffeine kicks in and ponder what it would really be like to live in a yellow submarine…