When I was a kid, the one saving grace of getting dragged along to the South Orange, N.J., post office by my mom was the chance to study the Art Deco-era murals illuminating the room. 

Little did I know then that the muted, stylish 1939 murals were painted by Bernard Perlin, who was hired at age 21 by the Works Progress Administration and went on have his work collected by top museums such as the Tate Gallery in London.

My hometown post office isn't unique, though. Because of the country's Depression-era hiring spree for artists, more than 1,100 post offices are home to art from this era. 

But now that the Postal Service is facing massive financial problems, it wants to sell hundreds of buildings around the U.S.

 

What? Students stealing $5,000 worth of Nutella from Columbia University dining halls each week? That's just ludicrous.

Stealing $2,500 in hazelnut-chocolate spread a week? That's more like it.

Being embarrassed by claims in a student paper like the The Columbia Spectator is one thing, but having your starchy Ivy League laundry aired in The New York Times is another matter entirely. So, Columbia took the odd step of issuing a self-deprecating press release on Thursday downplaying claims of grand snack-spread larceny.

Columbia claims the initial Nutella hoarding cost the school $2,500 the first week it was introduced in mid-February, then "quickly dropped to $450 per week for dining halls that serve some 3,600 students, seven days a week at three campus locations."

 

 

Wrigley wants to burst the bubble of the energy drink industry. 

The chewing gum giant, owned by private candy maker Mars, is rolling out a caffeinated product called Alert that will bear a warning label to scare off kids and those with sensitivities to the stimulant, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The gum will also cost about $3, or twice as much as a regular pack. Each pack will include eight pieces of hexagonal-shaped gum containing 40 milligrams of caffeine each. By comparison, a tall cup of Starbucks (SBUX) coffee includes 260 milligrams of the stimulant, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

That group, which advocates for healthy eating and food safety, isn't all that keen on the new gum.

 

Can Hooters make people forget that its name has nothing to do with owls? The privately owned Atlanta-based restaurant chain hopes so.

As Today.com recently noted, Hooters has revamped its menu and spruced up the decor of its restaurants to make them more appealing to women. The reason is simple: Hooters' old focus on the physical attributes of its servers as opposed to the quality of its food no longer made good business sense. A consultant quoted by Today notes that revenue "flattened out" -- pardon the pun -- at $1 billion in 2007 and was $850 million last year.

Part of the reason is the heightened competition in the so-called "breastaurant" category, from rivals such as the Tilted Kilt Pub & Eatery, Twin Peaks and Mugs N Jugs. 

Even at 77, activist investor Carl Icahn is a master at multitasking who shows no signs of slowing.

But he sure has hands full these days. Icahn is trying to persuade Michael Dell to abandon his $22.4 billion bid for the struggling computer company he founded and instead recapitalize Dell (DELL) and make a rich dividend payment to shareholders. Icahn has raised his investment in Herbalife (HLF), the multilevel marketer at center of his multibillion-dollar battle with a hedge fund titan. And he's blasting Transocean's (RIG) "ill-advised" mergers and has urged the offshore driller's board to raise its dividend.

What makes Icahn especially powerful lately is that he no longer manages money for clients, so he can do whatever he wants. 

If you spend a lot of time traveling on business and living out of your suitcase, you might have noticed something odd about bathrooms in many of the newer hotels. That is, their lack of a bathtub.

Certainly, many travelers still enjoy a long soak while on the road. And, of course, families with small children may need those tubs for their kids' cleanliness, playtime and as a transition to bed.

But on the whole, "less than 2% of people ever use a bathtub in a hotel room -- except at a resort," veteran hotel consultant Michael Matthews told Joe Brancatelli at BizJournals.com several years ago.

So, the hotel industry is now taking note of consumer trends while saving bathroom space -- and overall costs -- by installing luxurious showers instead of tubs in their new and renovated rooms.

 

Twenty grams. That's 0.7 ounces here in the U.S. and, as Gawker points out, translates to a strip of bacon, a small sausage, a thin slice of ham or 20% of a hamburger. It's also how much processed meat the typical person can eat a day without increasing the risk of developing cancer and dying early.

That's not exactly a fun fact for the world's omnivores, but then again the world isn't a very fun place for meat eaters these days.

Nor it likely to cheer up McDonald's (MCD) and other fast-food chains or packaged-food companies like Kraft (KRFT) or Hormel (HRL) that count on an eager market for processed meats.

And meat is a particularly touchy subject now in Europe.