Category: Commentary

It’s happened to every American who has ever traveled to Germany, Austria, parts of the Netherlands and perhaps even Eastern Europe. It’s a horrifying moment. You get off the plane… you go to your hotel… you head to your room, and can’t wait to drop off all your bags and take a shower. Once there, you decide to visit the bathroom… and then you see this monstrosity:

This, my friends, is a German toilet. It’s more or less the same as an American, British or Canadian toilet, but for one bizarre feature: the “poo shelf”. When you do #2 in der Fatherland, your poo comes to rest on the shelf in the middle of the toilet. There are two reasons the Germans designed their toilets this way: 1) it doesn’t cause embarrassing “splashes”, and 2) it allows the German to examine his own poo, enabling him (or her) to make sure everything’s A-OK “down there”.

Which is all well and good, but using these toilets is nevertheless frightening for most Americans.

First of all, since the poo is only swept off the shelf and down the drain when you flush, the toilet does nothing to contain odors when you’re doing your business. You’ll be able to smell each and every fragrant molecule as you poo. It’s disgusting.

Also – and it’s kind of hard to tell from the photograph – but the shelf isn’t nearly as deep as it appears. If you need to take a… uhhhh.. “substantial poo”, there’s the terrifying prospect of your poo building up and touching you on your ass. As it is, you need to be deft with the wiping hand, ‘cos your fingers will only be millimeters above a nasty pile ‘o poo.

And when it’s time to flush… oh Lord! Hopefully, the poo will sweep off the shelf and down the drain on the first try. Or it might stick in places, which causes a bunch of “panic flushing”, which in turn sets the mind off into international travel etiquette: “Do I leave it like this? Do I keep flushing? Do I wipe it off with tissue? Oh God, the travel guide doesn’t say anything about this!”

Oh, and if you’re a dude, just go ahead and sit down… the amount of “splashback” with these toilets is unbelievable.

St. Patrick’s Day is almost upon us, and I’m sure many folks out there will spend at least part of the day downing Guinness or Bass Ale. Some of you might even enjoy a “Black and Tan”, a layered drink with ale on the bottom and stout on the top. If you’ve ever wanted to make a Black and Tan at home but just weren’t good with a spoon (you pour ale into a pint glass and then slowly pour stout over the back of a spoon into the glass), you might want to check out a freebie Bass is giving out:

It’s called the “Brolly”. Brolly is the English word for “umbrella”, and the little widget that Bass is giving out works in much the same way: you pour a glass half full of pale ale, then place the Brolly on top of the glass. You then pour stout into the triangle at the center of the Brolly. The stout slowly trickles out of small holes on the sides of the triangle, making a perfect Black and Tan every time!

Bass reps might give these out at your local watering hole on St. Patrick’s Day, but you can sign up to get one for free at bass.com. You’ve gotta be 21 years of age or older,  this offer is not available in certain states, yadda-yadda-yadda, etc., etc.

Diablo Cody is a blogger, author and screenwriter that recently won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay for her film Juno. Out of college, her first jobs were doing secretarial work at a Chicago law firm and later proofreading ad copy.

She would turn her time as a secretary into a blog called Red Secretary, which detailed the (fictional) life of am English-challenged secretary living in Belarus, using events directly pulled from, or inspired by, her time at the law firm. She then, on a whim, stripped at an “amateur night” at a Minneapolis strip club. Finding that she enjoyed the experience, she quit her day job and began stripping as a career. This resulted in a book called Candy Girl: A Year in The Life of an Unlikely Stripper. She has since written for several magazines while working on Juno.

Anyway, shortly after the Academy Awards, several nude pictures of her leaked on the Internet. You can see one of them after the jump. Honestly, they’re not all that interesting – aside from the pierced nipples. I’m just posting the picture here for… ahhh… historical reasons:

Continue reading “Diablo Cody… Topless!”

Happy Georgia Day, everyone! Although I now proudly call North Carolina home, I spent the first 33 years of my life in the great state of Georgia. As such, I’m kind of attached to my “home” state.

On February 12, 1733, British general and philanthropist James Oglethorpe disembarked from the HMS Anne with the first settlers of the future city of Savannah. Interestingly, Georgia was originally founded as a “debtor’s colony” – a colony where Britain’s “worthy poor” could grow silk, indigo or rice to pay off their debts. However, so many years passed between the initial idea and the actual granting of the royal charter that few debtors actually made the move. In fact, less than two dozen households would move to Georgia to pay off their debts. Instead, the colony was filled with poor English artisans and tradesmen, as well as Protestant refugees from Switzerland, Germany and Austria. When it became clear that the Trustees of the Province of Georgia could no longer govern the colony (especially since their initial goal of helping debtors had been ignored), Georgia became a crown colony. After joining the Revolution despite the large number of Loyalists in the colony, Georgia eventually became the fourth state of the new United States of America by ratifying the Constitution on January 2, 1788.

Some interesting facts about Georgia:

– Although James Oglethorpe didn’t spent a lot of time in Georgia, he did spent a year there 1735. He secretary during this time was Charles Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism. Although Charles and his older brother John were known as “rebels” in the Church of England, Charles remained loyal of the Church of England and died an Anglican priest.

– Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi River (although Michigan claims to be larger because they count lakes as “land”). Georgia also has 159 counties, the most of any state in the U.S. besides Texas.

– Georgia was named in honor of King George II of Great Britain. Six other U.S. states are named after monarchs: North and South Carolina are named for King Charles I of England, Virginia and West Virginia were named for Elizabeth I, Maryland is named for Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of King Charles I of England and Louisiana is named for King Louis XIV of France.

– Georgia’s Cumberland Island is the largest undeveloped island on the Atlantic Coast. You can get to Cumberland Island by taking a ferry from St. Mary’s, the second oldest city in North America.

– Some famous Georgians include Joanne Woodward, Kim Basinger, Julia Roberts, Holly Hunter, Brittany Murphy, Dakota Fanning, Oliver Hardy (of “Laurel and Hardy”), Lawrence Fishburne, Ossie Davis, Chris Tucker, Stacy Keach, Robert Patrick, Kip Pardue, DeForest Kelley (“Bones” from Star Trek), David Cross (played Tobias Fünke in Arrested Development), Steven Soderbergh, Bill Hicks, Jeff Foxworthy, Paula Deen, Ed Helms, Sterling Holloway (did the voice for Winnie the Pooh and 100 other Disney films), Spike Lee, Jerry Reed, Burt Reynolds, Nipsey Russell, Ty Pennington, Ryan Seacrest, Ted Turner, Jim Brown, Ty Cobb, Bobby Jones, Larry Holmes, Herschel Walker, Jackie Robinson, Bucky Dent, John Henry “Doc” Holliday, James Brown, Gladys Knight, Little Richard, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, André “André 3000” Benjamin, Jermaine Dupri, Brian “Ludacris” Bridges, TLC, Harry James, Buckner & Garcia (of “Pac Man Fever” fame; they also do the “Waffle House songs”), Brenda Lee, Trisha Yearwood, Travis Tritt, Alan Jackson, Ray Stevens, Amy Grant, Jessye Norman, Madeleine Peyroux, Bill Berry and Mike Mills (of R.E.M.), Duane and Gregg Allman (of The Allman Brothers), The Black Crowes, Drivin’ ‘n Cryin’, Guadalcanal Diary, Pylon, The B-52s, Collective Soul, Indigo Girls, Widespread Panic, Howard Finster, Margaret Mitchell, Alice Walker, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, James Dickey, Clarence Thomas, Andrew Young, Juliette Gordon Low (founder of the Girl Scouts), John C. Frémont (explorer and first Republican candidate for president), Crawford Long (performed the first surgery with patient under anesthesia), Bert Parks (TV personality and longtime host of the Miss America Pageant), John Pemberton (inventor of Coca-Cola), Pernell Roberts (Trapper John MD!), Junior Samples (if you have to ask…), Will Wright (developed the computer game Sim City), S. Truett Cathy (founder of Chick-Fil-A), Clark Howard and Deborah Norville. There’s also Jimmy Carter and Nancy Grace, but I don’t claim those two… I like to pretend that they’re from Ohio.

As you probably know, Congress passed some “anti-terror” legislation a few years ago that requires American citizens entering the United States from Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean to have passports, where previously a driver’s license and\or birth certificate might have sufficed. This has led to an explosion passport requests, as people that might never have gotten a passport in the past now need one for almost all international travel.

Part of getting a passport is having pictures of yourself taken for it. While you’ve always been able to use your own pictures, most people opted to get them taken at a professional photo shop. This is mostly likely due to the photo requirements of the passport office: the pictures must be 2×2″ and have a neutral (white or off-white) background. These are hardly insurmountable problems, mind you, but at the end of the day most people opted for the easy route and shelled out $8-$12 to have a “professional” take the pictures for you.

But no more. At the website ePassportPhoto, you can upload a digital photo of yourself and the website will crop it and make sure it fits all of the State Department’s requirements. It’ll then spit out six or eight 2×2″ photographs as a single image file that you can then print using your home printer, or print at your local Walgreens\Wal Mart\photo shop for less than 50¢. All you need to do is take a picture of yourself in front of “a white or off-white background” and make sure that you have a “neutral expression, open eyes, and closed mouth”. A few mouse clicks later and you’ve got passport photos!!

And it’s not just for Americans, either. ePassportPhoto has the skinny on passport picture requirements for over 60 countries, so whether you’re a Peruvian or Brit that needs a new set of passport pictures, ePassportPhoto can hook you up!

Have you ever seen misinformation being spread over the Internet? The same incorrect story or fact gets repeated over and over again, and there’s little you can do about it. Oh sure, you can “reply to all” when someone sends you one of those “Bill Gates will give you $500 for forwarding this email!” emails… but when you see blogs and “reputable” websites repeat the same false story all the time, there’s not much you can do… other than get your own website and try to set the story straight. This is what I want to do with copyrights and trademarks. There’s so much misinformation out there about them, and the truth of it needs to be set free.

I see people using the terms incorrectly all the time. Several times a week, in fact. On an Internet message board, for instance, you’ll often see a question like “How can Microsoft copyright the word ‘Office’?” or “How can I tell if this 1920s cartoon character is still copyrighted?”. What these people are doing is confusing copyrights with trademarks.

Copyright is a legal protection that can be applied to an “original work of authorship”. In a nutshell, only books, music, motion pictures, computer software and a few other types of “creative work” can be copyrighted. In the United States, the Copyright Act of 1976 generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to: a) reproduce the copyrighted work, b) to distribute copies or recordings of the copyrighted work; c) to perform or display the copyrighted work publicly; and d) to prepare derivative works of the copyrighted work item. So if you were to write a book, you and you alone would have the right to reproduce and distribute the book for a certain period of time. As mentioned, you and you alone would also have the sole right to make derivative works: translations of the book, film versions of the book, audiotapes of the book, etc. There is no legal requirement for you to officially register your work with the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress, although this would certainly make any subsequent legal battles much easier. Copyright law also provides a mechanism for compulsory licensing. If you write a song, for instance, you cannot prevent anyone else from singing that song. But you can demand royalty payments from them.

Continue reading “RIGHTING THE WRONGS: Copyrights and Trademarks”

Have you ever seen misinformation being spread over the Internet? The same incorrect story gets repeated over and over again, and there’s little you can do about it. Oh sure, you can “reply to all” when someone sends you one of those “Bill Gates will give you $500 for forwarding this email!” emails… but when you see blogs and “reputable” websites repeat the same false story all the time, there’s not much you can do… other than get your own website and try to set the story straight. This is what I want to do with McDonalds’ apple pies. There’s so much misinformation out there about them, and the truth of it needs to be set free.

For years, McDonald’s sold fried apple pies in its restaurants. In fact, they still do in many overseas locations. However, in 1992 the company switched to a baked apple pie at all of its US locations.

The reason(s) for the switch have been fodder for “Internet conspiracy theorists” ever since.

Some claim that several people were burned by the hot filling, leading California (or Texas or New York, depending on who’s telling the story) to “ban” the pies. And so, because California (or Texas or New York) banned the pies, McDonalds opted to simply replace them nationwide for supply-chain reasons. After all, it wouldn’t make a lot of financial sense to make 1 type of pie for California (or Texas or New York) and another type for the other 49 states.

Others claim that California (or Texas or New York) banned them for health reasons. But why the company would be “banned” from selling fried apple pies, but not from selling Big Macs or Quarter Pounders remains unexplained.

The truth of the matter is that baked apple pies last much longer in the “holding oven” than their fried counterparts. The fried apple pies only lasted around 30 minutes in the holding oven, while the new baked pies can last for up to 2 hours. This leads to less waste, which has saved McDonald’s millions in the 15 years it’s been baking pies instead of frying them. And that’s what the switch was all about, really: saving money. That the new baked pies are perceived as healthier didn’t hurt the decision-making process at McDonald’s headquarters, either. In reality, though, the baked pies are not much healthier than the fried ones. When people want pie, they want a nice flaky crust. To get that crust, you need to mix shortening and flour. And in doing that, you get fat in the product. So they’re not much healthier than the fried pies, and to me they don’t taste as good… but they’re still pretty awesome!

Here’s what you need to take away from this article:

1. McDonalds’ apple pies were never “banned” by any government agency anywhere in the United States.
2. McDonalds switched to the baked pies because they last longer in the holding oven, thus reducing waste and saving the company money.
3. The fact that the new baked pies were thought of as “healthier” probably influenced the decision to switch over, but it was not the sole factor in that decision.
4. The baked pies aren’t that much better for you than the fried ones.