And with this warm weather comes tons of pop culture news stories that are just to the right of funky. We've rounded up some of the stranger stuff that we missed this week, and leave it up to you to decide if maybe being raptured wasn't such a bad idea.

1. People who think the Onion's headlines are real: Oh, it happens. And now it's a Tumblr. (Expect a book deal in the near future.)

2. Abed from "Community" shows up on "Cougar Town":

Easter egg for the super fans and the people who love Subway.

3. OWN picks up new series, "Don't Tell the Bride": Groom and future wife are separated for a month before the wedding; he has to make all the decisions about planning the event. Hope she likes nachos and a boob-shaped cake.

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Brown rice syrup is just one of many "natural" sweeteners that have taken off in the wake of the backlash against artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose, which, of course, were invented to defeat the dietary axis of evil -- refined white sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Once confined to Berkeley communes, these not-refined-sugar, not-man-made substances pose a huge marketing opportunity, since most people who avoid sugar don't want to get cancer but also aren't ready to commit to a joyless, dessert-free existence. Natural sweeteners are the perfect answer to this conundrum. Right?

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Gael Greene We had razor clams three nights in a row last week. John Dory, Bar Basque, Dressler. Good but not a match for Esca's.

mattduckor @GaelGreene Casa Mono's razor clams predate the trend and are excellent.

And this is what I tweeted in response:

MrEddieHuang @mattduckor cantonese razor clams predate the trend by at least a couple dynasties... #ohamericans...

Gael and Matt know their bidness. Not trying to call them out on anything. It's their job to report trends and identify them; they do it well. They didn't determine the way Americans -- and to a certain extent postmodern foodies around the world -- dine. This is just how they found it. And you may think, "Eddie, why would you care if razor clams are a trend or not? Let 'em eat razor clams!" But, see, as a chef and a person who cares about food and cares about culture, it's not that simple.

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Somewhere between the greens and beans of the old-time South to hippie-dippy nut loaves and the microwaved on-the-go Gardenburgers, we seemed to have lost our way. As meat got cheaper and cheaper, it went from an occasional (and seasonal) luxury to the center of our diets ... and the center of our food culture. We became, as Elissa Altman put it on her blog Poor Man's Feast, a nation of "vegetable idiots ... Vegetables are simply not a part of the American culinary lexicon: give a man a kohlrabi and he won’t know what to do with it. Give a man a steak, and he will." 

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Competitive eater Joey Chestnut has held on to his title at the annual July Fourth hot dog eating contest at New York's Coney Island, but one of his biggest rivals tried to crash the celebration and has been taken into custody.

Chestnut chomped down on 54 hot dogs in 10 minutes on Sunday to win the annual Nathan's International Hot Dog Eating Contest for the fourth year in a row.

Watching from the crowd was six-time champion Takeru Kobayashi (tah-KEH'-roo koh-bah-YAH'-shee), who has not signed a contract with Major League Eating to be free to compete in contests sanctioned by other groups.

But Kobayashi went on stage after the competition. Police officers grabbed him, and he tried to hold onto police barricades as they took him into custody.

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Summer heat has descended on most parts of the country, which means that it's time to break out the sunscreen, the unfortunate Ke$ha singles, and the icy treats. Usually that means ice cream and frozen yogurt, but this year, a new dessert from Asia -- with the endearingly Chinglish moniker of "Snow Ice" -- is gaining buzz in some parts of the country as an exotic and healthy twist on Pinkberry and its imitators. Like frozen yogurt, Snow Ice is cold and made with dairy but it's got a lighter, fluffier texture and looks vaguely like fake snow heaped into a cup. Like other frozen desserts, it's made by combining cream, milk, water, sugar and fruit, but unlike ice cream, it's frozen until completely hard, and then shaved into ribbons by a machine and deposited into a cone.

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I know it's only been a few short weeks since we all celebrated National Pretzel Day (you probably haven't even had time to take down your decorations), but here's a good reason to keep the excitement going: The salty treat is finally getting an upscale makeover. Pretzel dough has been traditionally used to make, well, pretzels, but in recent months it's increasingly been popping up in unfamiliar shapes -- braids, twists and knots -- in upscale bakeries and restaurants around the country.

Most soft, chewy pretzels are made from wheat flour, water and yeast, dipped in lye and sprinkled in salt. But recipes can vary immensely, depending on how elaborate you'd like to go -- Jeffrey Hamelman's book, "Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes," calls for fermentation, pate fermente (in which finished dough is mixed in with unfinished dough) and a bath of water and lye (requiring goggles). But newer pretzel offerings are increasingly straying from the straighforward formula, with flavors like Gruyère paprika and jalapeño cheddar (both of which are available at New York's Sigmund pretzel shop).

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What is it?

In the past few years -- and especially the past few months -- raw milk has become, despite the controversy that surrounds it, quite the trendy thing to drink. What is it? Unlike the stuff that most of us buy at the local grocery store, raw milk hasn't been pasteurized (meaning it hasn't been heated to bacteria-destroying 145 degrees). This means that, on the up side, it has a creamier consistency and exotic taste far removed from what you probably have in your fridge, and, on the down side, it has a higher likelihood of killing you.

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In the past few months, the macaron has often been touted as the heir to the cupcake craze, but another contender is rapidly emerging in the Southern states (specifically Texas and Louisiana) albeit with a far less classy name. Cake balls are three-bite sized treats that, like cupcakes, are portable, cheap, and the perfect size for people who want a taste of sweetness without indulging in a full slice of cake or pie (or just want to order something using the word "balls").

They are, as you'd expect, spherical desserts made of cake and frosting, covered with a semi-hard sweet coating, and unlike macarons, they're actually easy to make at home. The basic (and shockingly unwholesome) recipe involves baking a whole cake, crumbling it into tiny pieces, mixing those with frosting and covering the entire sugary mess with some sort of confectionary coating. They come in all kinds of different flavors -- ranging from red velvet and chocolate to "spicy chocolate baked with ancho, mixed with ancho cream cheese frosting and topped with cayenne toasted walnuts" (on sale at Austin's Holy Cacao dessert trailer).

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Fernet Branca is an Italian liqueur with a taste so pungent that your first sip has a good chance of making you either want to throw up or wash your mouth out with Pepto Bismol. Made up of over 40 different kinds of herbs and spices, the drink is often consumed as a digestif -- to help aid digestion after a large meal -- or as a hangover cure. After more than a century of popularity in Italy, Fernet's challenging taste is becoming increasingly trendy in the United States -- especially in San Francisco (So much so that, as Tasting Table recently pointed out, several Bay Area bar-restaurants have begun offering it on tap.)

Fernet Branca's intense effect on the palate is largely due to its extreme bitterness, though the drink also contains, among other exotic herbs, myrrh, gentian root, saffron, zedoary, chamomile, cardamom, aloe, and something called cinchona (the exact formula is kept strictly secret). San Francisco Weekly called it "black-licorice flavored Listerine," Robert Misch, the former head of the Wine and Food Society of New York called it the "liqueur of Hades" and wrote that drinking it is "like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer," and Betsy von Furstenberg was suspended from Actor's Equity in 1960 after secretly putting it into Tony Randall's onstage drink.

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Bacon has been the apple of food nerds' eye for so long that the backlash to it already had a backlash, its fans an impenetrable phalanx of fatty warriors. So what is it about bacon? Is it the salty goodness? The smoke? Or the way lard delivers these flavors in wallops? Either way, bacon is the cook's sledgehammer. But it's time to make way for country ham, the cook's ... er, well, whatever counts as the more elegant version of a sledgehammer.

Like prosciutto -- or the currently more ballyhooed Spanish jamón serrano -- American country ham is the uncooked, salt-cured leg of pig, hung to mature for months and sometimes years. The long curing was originally meant to let the salt work into the meat and preserve it from rot, but for eaters in the age of refrigeration, time-consuming chemistry is where the action's really at. Slowly, enzymes naturally in the meat will break proteins down into our coterie of tasty friends, the amino acids, which give us the satisfying, blooming taste of umami. The fats in the meat slowly change, too, creating beautiful compounds that Harold McGee describes as "characteristic of the aromas of melon, apple, citrus, flowers, freshly cut grass, and butter." Wait, did you catch that? Pork fat that tastes like butter.

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With a deft pinch of his chopsticks, the wriggling, still-alive limb is in his mouth and down his throat.

Raisher, 28, smiles. It's what brought him to his local food adventure club, one of a handful of groups dedicated to dining on exotic and bizarre foods from New York to Denver to San Francisco.

The iron-stomached champions of New York City are the Gastronauts, who meet monthly to feast on foods many wouldn't consider, such as pig hearts and intestine in vinegar, goat kidneys or sauteed lamb's brains.

"Nothing's off the table," said co-founder Curtiss Calleo, who grew up in Austria and Italy and wants to bring Old World curiosity to New York plates. "Any restaurant worth its salt has sweetbreads or tongue or pork bellies. There's a food renaissance going on."

Offal is old hat for groups like the Boston Gastronauts and the Organ Meet Society of New York City. There are groups devoted to eating only insects and some that venture into extreme territory, like the San Francisco Food Adventure Club that recently organized a human placenta tasting (the dinner had to be canceled due to potential formaldehyde exposure).

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Farr is the star of San Francisco's 4505 Meats, "Home of Revival Butchery," and he is taking his gospel to the barroom. He is one of a handful of young practitioners across the country who are staging bacchanalian "butcher parties," where they bring whole carcasses -- from rabbits to steer -- to bars, hang them up, take them apart, and cook them while wide-eyed partyers wash down the resultant meaty snacks with cocktails and beer. The resurgence of artisan butchery is supposed to be about respect for traditional craft, an emphasis on ethical, sustainable meat eating, and a renewed awareness of where our meat really comes from. Do blood-and-booze-soaked butcher parties cheapen these ideals?

Farr doesn't think so. "It's very educational," he says. "You get to see the whole animal, it gets processed in front of you, and then you eat it. And at the same time you get to have martinis or beer. It's just a good time all around."

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Severson reports that the rabbit is becoming a trendy new meat for ethically conscious carnivores. This isn’t the first time that rabbit has been touted as the next big thing -- the Wall Street Journal argued the same thing over a decade ago -- but in this case, there are several cultural factors working in its favor. Most notably, the fact that the movement toward ethical, local butchery has become a major part of American food culture over the past few years, and the rabbit is perfectly suited to it. (In her NYT piece, Severson attends a Brooklyn seminar where aspiring butchers pay $100 to learn how to raise and slaughter their own rabbits.)

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Only one "o" separates the sticky-sweet coconut balls called macaroons from macarons, but it's not the Passover treat that has Gossip Girls and American food fanatics buzzing. Macarons are traditionally high-end French confections that look like whoopie pies on acid -- incredibly saturated with color, their delicate outer shells are glossy and crunchy, with domed tops and flat bottoms (known as "the foot"). Basically crisp meringues of sweetened egg whites and almond flour, the cookies are sandwiched around a ganache, buttercream, or a fruit puree.

They come in a dozens of fruity, nutty and sweet flavors -- raspberry, lemon, pistachio, chocolate and caramel are common -- and even some highly unconventional ones: foie gras, white truffle, rose, violet. Macaron bakers pride themselves on fashioning distinctive colors and sometimes dustings of powders to distinguish their flavors, and their visual appeal is hard to deny. Check out these photographs to see the variety of their bright, saturated colors, which can look like an intense array of exotic fruits.

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The Sichuan button is a small, yellow flower bud that, when eaten, creates a strong tingling sensation in the mouth -- not unlike biting down on an iPhone -- and a sudden increase in salivation. The active ingredient is spilanthol, a chemical that’s used in food manufacturing and candies (to counteract astringents, which dry out the mouth, and to create the sensation of "freshness"). The full Sichuan button experience comes in three stages: first, a grassy taste, followed by a tingling and numbing sensation, then salivation, and, finally a fresh, clean finish. (It's usually broken up into smaller pieces in cooking.)

Clearly, having something feel like it’s electrocuting your mouth is the highlight of Sichuan button consumption, and, as one blogger described it, "the closest that anybody could compare was putting a 9V battery on your tongue." The Washington Post has more demurely called its taste a "mix of Altoids and Tellicherry."

Where does it come from?

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In 1998, the flamboyant Parola was involved in the notorious (and unsuccessful) attempt to make the nutria, a large aquatic rodent pest, into a nationally popular meat. (It probably didn't help that the animal looks like that giant rat from your childhood nightmares.) Now he’s turned his attention to another invasive species, the Asian carp. The large fish, which can reach up to 30 pounds, has muscled out indigenous fish in American waterways, including the Mississippi, and has the dangerous habit of jumping out of the water near moving boats (to see them in terrifying YouTube action click here). Now, working with the state of Louisiana, Parola is hoping to curb its numbers by marketing the fish as a menu item. As part of his outreach, Parola will be promoting the fish to the 1,500 members of the annual National Grocer’s Association convention in Las Vegas.

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For dieters, it’s the ultimate dream: a food that’s nearly calorie-free, filling to eat and ridiculously easy to make. The shirataki noodle, a product that’s recently been gaining notoriety, is being advertised as just that. Made from the plant fiber of the konjac plant (more dramatically known as "devil’s tongue"), an Asian species that looks like a casually misplaced elephant tusk, the thin, nearly transparent noodle’s main ingredients are water and a dietary fiber called glucomannan. The noodles are incredibly low in carbohydrates and calories, and studies have found that glucomannan helps reduce cholesterol and can aid weight loss. They have almost no flavor (but will absorb flavors from sauces or soups), have a texture like firm, springy gelatin, and cook almost instantly.

Where does it come from?

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Writes Kim Severson: "Only about 15 percent of people who buy kosher do it for religious reasons, according to Mintel, a research group that last year produced a report on the kosher food explosion. The top reasons cited for buying kosher? Quality, followed by general healthfulness."

But most people, Severson writes, aren't buying it because they're intimately familiar with the Jewish dietary laws that govern kosher eating (which include, "rinsing blood from carcasses with salt and water, never mixing meat and dairy, and allowing fin fish but not shellfish") but because they associate the food with humane farming, health, and good taste -- three assumptions that, Severson explains, may not actually be correct:

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If a recent prediction is to be believed, it’s Indian food -- with its spicy sauces, colorful rice and delicious naans -- that’s slated to be America’s next big ethnic food star. Among the evidence: a Chicago entrepreneur who’s planning a Chipotle-style Indian food franchise targeting "Main Street America," the increasing spice-friendliness of the American palate, and the growing cosmopolitanism of big-city eaters. Being somewhat, err, skeptical, we decided to run this trend past Krishnendu Ray, an assistant professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University and an expert on the succession of American ethnic foods.

Salon spoke to Ray over the phone about Indian food’s long march to popularity, the most America-ready Indian dishes -- and why some ethnic foods just can’t get any respect.

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