Month: November 2010

From the international news desk at jimcofer.com… which is also occupied by a spoiled cat… let’s do the news!

– Even though the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles over fifty years ago, Major League Baseball’s lawyers have filed suit against a Brooklyn restaurant that’s using “Brooklyn” in the Dodgers’ font in their logo. I get that you have to actively defend your trademarks, which is why local TV and radio personalities sometimes get letters from companies reminding them that “Xerox” and “Kleenex” are trademarks. But this is ridiculous. Brooklyn Burger isn’t using the “Dodgers” name in any way… just the name of the city they left a half century ago!

– Quick: what has more cholesterol: one egg yolk, or a Hardee’s Monster Thickburger… which is has 10 ounces of beef, four strips of bacon and three slices of cheese? If you guessed the egg, you’re right!

– Halloween is becoming more and more popular in the UK, but it has been overshadowed by Bonfire Night for centuries. Held on November 5th to commemorate the failed attempt to blow up Parliament, the night features drinking, fireworks and bonfires, where effigies of plotter Guy Fawkes go up in flames. But this year someone else got burned. Footballer Wayne Rooney, the Manchester United star who makes $322,840 a week and was roundly criticized for his tepid play at the World Cup (and for the poorly-handled renegotiation of his Man U contract) was burned in effigy. You should check out the pics – they’re priceless!

– It seems like every week we hear of some new way crooks are cleverly using technology to scam people. Whether it’s ATM skimmers with mobile broadband connections, or tiny hi-def cameras recording PINs, it just seems like technology is moving faster than police can keep up with it. But let’s not lose sight of the low-tech scammers, too. A man in San Francisco was arrested for jamming paper napkins into the cash slots of ATM machines. People would use the ATM and simply assume that the machine was broken; the man would would come along a few minutes later, remove the napkins and the money, then replace the napkins and wait for the next victim to come along.

– A 10 year-old British girl has become one of the youngest “women” to successfully give birth… after she was impregnated by her 13 year-old cousin.

– You know Wendy… the smiling, red-headed mascot for the Wendy’s hamburger chain? Not only is Wendy Thomas, daughter of the chain’s founder Dave Thomas, alive and well, she’s about to appear in a series of commercials for the restaurant.

– And lastly, a partial victory for Dutch smokers: last week the government of the Netherlands announced that an exception to the county’s smoking ban would be allowed for small bars of 743.5 sq ft or less who have no employees other than the bar’s owner. Such bars are actually fairly common in the Netherlands (there are over 2,000 of them) and many of the owners of such bars had allowed smoking anyway, as the money they made off smokers more than offset the occasional fine. In fact, according to a friend of mine who lives there, it wasn’t uncommon for a health inspector to stop at a bar and fine the owner $250, and patrons would immediately chip in to a “fine fund” and keep on smoking.