Reason: Melissa & Doug barium in paint

Don't know what Recess is? Recess explained.

We've decided to institute a new tradition here at ZRecs we're calling "Recess."

Whenever we publish some extensive piece of original consumer reporting and deliver some potentially disruptive news in the process, we'll follow it with a "Recess" post to help us all put life in perspective. It's inspired by BoingBoing's "Unicorn Chaser" feature, which follows anything horrific and gory that appears there with a post about unicorns and rainbows. In our case, substitute "horrific" for "eye-opening" and "gory" for "thorough" and you have ZRecs' challenge. The solution is Recess - a palate cleanser for the psyche that invites us all to take a breath and regroup. Recess items may be funny, joyful, illuminating, or simply ridiculous, but they will be, if we can at all help it, free of subtext.

As with this tradition's antecedent, we encourage you to request Recess in the comments if we publish a post you feel requires it. We'll do our best to serve it up. You can also submit possible Recess items for our stockpile to zrecsmedia@gmail.com. Just put "Recess" in the subject line, and provide any photo credit or link you'd like in the body of the email. We'll file it away for a moment of communal need.

Here are two Recess items to follow up our Gaiam post from this morning, to help establish what we're after.