People eat at different speeds. That’s just how eating and people work. Yet there’s a disturbing trend in restaurant dining that some people have noticed: servers lurk, ready to grab your plate whether everyone else at the table is done eating yet or not. Why would they do this? Rushing the whole table makes economic sense for a restaurant, but why snatch away plates when other people are still eating?
Sightings of the trend date back to 2008, apparently, and the New York times made the practice part of a very long list of things that restaurants should avoid doing in 2009.
Some servers and even management told Ferdman that they were under the impression that this is what customers want, apparently never having talked to a customer before. Maybe that’s true in the hottest food spots where tables are at a premium and people are grateful for the opportunity to dine there, but in normal restaurants, people hate feeling rushed.
If you’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that there was something not quite right about the trend of encasing your lower half in skintight denim, you may be right: Researchers say squatting while wearing skinny jeans can cause not only temporary discomfort, but nerve damage as well.
Doctors in Australia report in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry that a 35-year-old woman was hospitalized for four days after experiencing muscle damage, swelling, and nerve blockages in her legs.
She’d apparently been squatting for several hours in skinny jeans while helping a friend move, remaining in that position for long periods of time while emptying cupboards.
She said her pants felt increasingly tight and her feet grew numb as she walked home later, causing her to trip and fall. The unidentified woman remained on the ground for several hours, unable to get up, before finally making it to the hospital.
“We were surprised that this patient had such severe damage to her nerves and muscles,” Dr. Thomas Kimber of the Royal Adelaide Hospital in Australia told the Associated Press.
A CT scan of the right leg and scans of both lower legs showing “hypoattenuation and oedema of muscles of the posterior compartment of the calves, consistent with myonecrosis.”
He says tight jeans have been linked to nerve lesions in the groin before, but nothing like the nerve problems and muscle damage what he and his colleagues saw in this situation.
Squatting compresses the nerves in the lower leg, he explains, which restricts blood from getting to the calf muscles, something that’s only made worse when your legs are trapped in tight denim prisons of pain.
Get a little elastic in that fabric though, and you could be okay.
“I think it’s the non-stretchy nature of jeans that might be the problem,” he added, since having some give in tight pants means the nerves and muscles aren’t getting squeezed.
This only further solidifies my “soft pants are the best pants” and “harem pants are healthy” fashion theories. When I say “fashion theories,” I mean I refuse to submit to a denim prison of society’s making.
It’s not often you hear about a shotgun wedding between two tech companies, but that’s apparently what happened for Verizon and AOL, as the recently betrothed said today that they had officially completed a $4.4 billion acquisition proposed just a month ago.
Verizon announced it has concluded its acquisition of AOL early Tuesday after purchasing all outstanding shares of the media company for $50 per share.
The deal, which officially makes the once-iconic dial-up Internet business a subsidiary of Verizon, expands the nation’s largest mobile phone operator’s portfolio to include AOL’s collection of media and technology companies including The Huffington Post and TechCrunch.
As Consumerist reported shortly after the news of the deal broke in May, Verizon executives specifically said that purchasing AOL, and all its advertising and user targeting software, “supports our strategy to provide a cross-screen connection for consumers, creators and advertisers to deliver that premium customer experience.”
For Verizon the deal also represents a larger presence in the arena of video offerings. Though the company already distributes mobile video through its mobile phone network, the array of platforms owned by AOL will give the company an opportunity to provide content through the internet.
The purchase of AOL will allow Verizon to tap into the former company’s software used to buy ads across the web and to connect user identity across mobile and desktop platforms.
Verizon and other mobile phone companies have struggled in the past to identify users as they move between products, in part because of the poor performance of cookies on mobile devices.
In announcing the completion of the acquisition, Verizon reiterated that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong would stay on at the company.
From fast food restaurants removing sugary drinks from kid’s menus to city governments considering taxes on soda, the soft drink industry has been the target of a crusade to end – or at the very least reduce – consumers’ love affair with fizzy, sugar-laden drinks and raise awareness of the negative impact such calorie-filled beverages have on one’s health. Today that mission continued with the release of a video that aims to curtail the incidence of soda-related disease by turning the most iconic soft drink commercial on its head.
Forty-four years after Coca-Cola released the popular – and catchy – “Hilltop” ad featuring people from around the world singing about peace and buying each other Cokes, the Center for Science in the Public Interest put its own spin on the promotion, showcasing real people suffering from diseases related to soda consumption.
“For the past 45 years, Coca-Cola and other makers of sugar drinks have used the most sophisticated and manipulative advertising techniques to convince children and adults alike that a disease-promoting drink will make them feel warm and fuzzy inside,” Michael F. Jacobson, executive director for CSPI, said in a statement. “It’s a multi-billion-dollar brainwashing campaign designed to distract us away from our diabetes with happy thoughts. We thought it was time to change the tune.”
And so they did. While the classic ad – which recently returned to consumers’ minds during the finale of Mad Men – is bright and cheery, CPSI’s version takes the viewer to a more serious place – the hospital.
Instead of smiling, happy faces, the new “Change The Tune” ad features people suffering from hypertension, diabetes, tooth decay and weight gain singing new lyrics to the “Buy The World A Coke” song.
“I’d like to buy the world a drink that doesn’t cause disease,” the song goes. “I’d like to teach the world about what sugar did to me.”
Although CSPI certainly targets Coca-Cola in its new version of the ad, other soda makers weren’t left out. A scene featuring large cups of soda with words such as obesity and weight gain scrawled on them feature logos for other sugary-drink companies, including Pepsi.
“Soda is just one of several contributors to diet-related disease, but it’s a major one,” Dr. Jeffry Gerber, a Denver-area physician who appeared in the film, says in a statement. “I see the connection between soda consumption and chronic conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and obesity every day of the week. It’s hard to ask patients to practice moderation when all of the advertising, marketing, and overall ubiquity of soda rewires people to overconsume sugary drinks.”
The new ad will be featured in several languages and provided as a resource to health advocates around the world where Coke and Pepsi sell their products, CSPI says.
In recent years, there has been an increased push by health groups such as CSPI, government officials and regulatory entities to reduce the amount of sugary calories consumed in soft drinks.
“As currently formulated, Coke, Pepsi, and other sugar-based drinks are unsafe for regular human consumption,” CSPI executive director Jacobson said at the time. “Like a slow-acting but ruthlessly efficient bioweapon, sugar drinks cause obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. The FDA should require the beverage industry to re-engineer their sugary products over several years, making them safer for people to consume, and less conducive to disease.”
Other regulatory proposals included former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to limit the size of soda containers. That plan was met with fierce disapproval and required many court appeals before essentially being quashed last summer.
The man retained an attorney after KFC said it had trouble getting in touch with him to confirm the animal source of the fried food, reports the Los Angeles Times. Though KFC says he refused to communicate directly with them, the company was able to get its hands on the food for testing through his attorney.
The company now says a third-party independent lab has confirmed it was a piece of hand-breaded chicken, as KFC had maintained. And as such, KFC would really like it if the customer would admit he was wrong.
“The right thing for this customer to do is to apologize and cease making false claims about the KFC brand,” KFC said.
Whether or not he’ll do that is uncertain. Last week he remained firm in his stance that he had bitten into a chewy piece of deep-fried rodent.
“Honestly, it doesn’t matter what others think I know what I bit into and what it looks like never in life have [I]… seen a chicken strip with a long tail,” he wrote.
Walmart has decided it will stop selling all Confederate battle flag merchandise in its stores and online, in the aftermath of the racially-motivated shooting last week at a Charleston church that left nine people dead.
The public outcry against the rebel banner has prompted Walmart to announce that it will no longer feature any merchandise with that symbol on it.
“We never want to offend anyone with the products that we offer. We have taken steps to remove all items promoting the confederate flag from our assortment — whether in our stores or on our web site,” said Walmart spokesman Brian Nick (via CNN). “We have a process in place to help lead us to the right decisions when it comes to the merchandise we sell. Still, at times, items make their way into our assortment improperly — this is one of those instances.”
Previously, Walmart sold items like a four-foot by six-feet version, a woman’s belt buckle and various decals, among other items. Those products appear
Sears also announced that it would be removing all merchandise featuring the Confederate battle flag from its site. Though it didn’t sell any items in its stores with the image directly, it had third-party vendors that did so online.
The Confederate battle flag is not to be confused with the official flag of the Confederacy (of which there were three official iterations). Sometimes called the rebel banner, the flag was the battle emblem for Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, notes PBS. It was rejected for use as the official flag of the rebels, but it was included in two later official flags as a smaller rectangle in a larger design.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation opened an inquiry into nearly 121,000 model year 2013 Dodge Dart vehicles after receiving 18 consumer complaints regarding braking issues.
According to a notice [PDF] from NHTSA, the complaints revolve mainly around issues in which the brake pedal can suddenly become hard to depress, leading to the need for an unexpectedly long braking distance.
Some of the drivers who submitted claims to NHTSA say they heard a “popping” or “hissing” sound when applying the brake, followed by a hard pedal feel and reduced brake effectiveness.
“My son was driving and he parallel parked so he could run into a store,” one complaint states. “When he returned he put it in gear and signaled to pull out. Suddenly, there was a loud popping sounds and what sounded like air whooshing out of the brake pedal. He attempted to apply the break and he said it felt like something was stopping it from going down.”
In several cases, Dart owners say they were driving at moderate rates of speed when the issue occurred and had to apply the emergency brake in order to come to a stop.
“While driving at approximately 40 miles-per-hour, the vehicle did not come to a complete stop when the brakes were depressed,” another complaint states. “The contact had to shift into a lower gear, apply the brakes and then the emergency brake.”
“When I was coming off of a highway, I tried to brake and my brake sounded like it accumulated air and then I heard a pop,” a Dart owner recalls. “The brake went stiff and I could not use the brake. My car kept on going at 50 miles-per-hour and I could not use my brake. Luckily enough I used my hand brake to stop myself and avoid a crush into a busy street.”
Some owners say that after the issue a dealer replaced the brake booster and master cylinder in order to correct the problem.
NHTSA’s preliminary evaluation will assess the scope, frequency and safety-related consequences of the alleged brake defect. An investigation can, at times, lead to a recall.
