Category: Commentary

It seems like any time someone wants to point out a flaw in America’s civil court system, they have to bring up the case of the “old woman who spilled coffee on herself”. Which, at first, kinda makes sense. After all, coffee is usually served hot, right? Most people do, in fact, try to avoid spilling coffee on themselves, so what makes that old lady who sued McDonald’s so special?

Well, as you might guess, there’s more to the story than meets the eye. I don’t know if I completely agree with the decision in Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants, as the case is officially known. But I do know that there’s more to it than “stupid old lady spills hot liquid on herself”. I also know that McDonald’s lawyers committed an insanely stupid error in the courtroom, a goof so bad it makes Bill Bucker feel better about himself.

But first… the facts of the case.

On February 27, 1992, a 79-year-old woman named Stella Liebeck decided to join her grandson Chris, who was driving his father (Stella’s son) Jim to the Albuquerque airport. On the way home, Chris stopped at the McDonald’s at 5001 Gibson Boulevard SE so that his grandmother could get a cup of coffee. They got the coffee, and Chris pulled in to a parking space so that Stella could add cream and sugar. Since the car had a curved dash and lacked cup holders, Stella put the cup between her knees and removed the lid. But, as she did, the cup fell backwards, burning her groin, thighs, genitalia and buttocks.

Continue reading “RIGHTING THE WRONGS: The McDonald’s Coffee Case”

Growing up in the 1970s, vicious rumors abounded about Twinkies snack cakes. If one ate 10,000 Twinkies, so the schoolyard story went, you’d go crazy and kill someone! The story changed a bit later on: if one ate 10,000 Twinkies, he or she would be considered “legally insane” in the state of Georgia (or California, or Texas, or…). This later rumor was obviously a riff on the old “seven hits of acid makes you insane” urban legend. But where did the story come from in the first place? Why Twinkies? And did it have any basis in fact?

Actually, the story was born out of a great tragedy.

Daniel James White was born in Los Angeles on September 2, 1946. The second of nine children, he was expelled from Riordan High School for violent behavior in his junior year. He subsequently transferred to Woodrow Wilson High School, where he graduated as valedictorian. After a stint in Vietnam in the Army, White worked as a security guard at a school in Anchorage for a couple of years. He then moved to San Francisco and became a police officer. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, he quit the SFPD after squealing on a fellow officer who beat a handcuffed black suspect.

White transferred to the San Francisco Fire Department, where he became a hero after rescuing a woman and her baby from the seventh floor of a burning apartment building. White used this fame to get elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (San Francisco has a unified city-county government, so a “supervisor’ is the equivalent of a city councilman and county commissioner). Although a Democrat, White was pretty conservative, and often defended his mostly white, middle-class district against what he called “homosexuals, pot smokers and cynics”.

Continue reading “RIGHTING THE WRONGS: The “Twinkie Defense””

Today is Bank Transfer Day, a day when millions of folks promised to transfer their accounts from big commercial banks to smaller banks or credit unions. I’m not participating in this… and here’s why:

My birthday is in March. The August after I turned 21, my best friend Rich and I went to my parent’s beach condo in Florida for a short vacation. Shortly after arrival, we went to the grocery store to stock up on grub for the week, and there I got a 6-pack of Bass Ale. The beer had a flyer attached offering six pint glasses and a glass pitcher with cool retro Bass logos for $19.99 plus shipping. Since I was still in my “I’M 21! I CAN DRINK, THEREFORE I AM A BADASS!!!” phase, I decided to get the set. So as soon as I got back to Atlanta I sent them a check and promptly forgot about it.

Fast forward from that August to the following May. I was at work one Tuesday, and my mom called me in a panic. “Wachovia called! They said you bounced a check! What’s going on with your finances, son? Should we bring your dad in on this?”

STRIKE ONE: Although I lived at home, I was now 22 years-old, fully an adult, and neither of my parents were “co-signers” (or anything else) on my account. But some Wachovia drone felt it was perfectly OK to talk to my mom about my private financial matters.
Continue reading “Why I’m not participating in Bank Transfer Day”

I generally try to stay away from politics on this site, mostly because it’s so polarizing. If you don’t like Mad Men reviews, you can just skip over them and not think anything of it. However, political issues tend to excite people’s passions, and I don’t want to alienate readers. So I tend to stay away usually. Usually. But sometimes things just get get my blood pressure up, and I need to vent. And today is one of those days.

First of all, can someone explain to me how Arizona’s proposed illegal immigration law is not a legitimate exercise of a sovereign state’s police powers? See, here’s my line of thinking: back in the 1950s, various Southern states chose to ignore the federal integration laws. So the Feds sent in troops to ensure that Southern universities allowed blacks to enroll. So a state ignored a federal law, and the Feds decided to enforce the law. And the liberals thought this was a good thing. But when the Feds decided to ignore their own immigration laws, Arizona decided to take their own initiative. So the Feds ignored their own law, and a state decided to pass a law to remedy the situation… and now the liberals are calling foul. So which is it – can one sovereign pass a law when another sovereign willfully chooses to ignore an existing statute or not?

And why is it that when GOP candidate Rick Perry decides to go to a Christian retreat, the mainstream media cries foul and doubles their ink orders… but when candidate Obama met with members of the New Black Panthers that same media completely ignores it. What’s more, when those same Black Panthers were accused of some of those most blatant voter intimidation ever seen in the United States, Obama’s friend and Attorney General Eric Holder somehow decided not to prosecute anyone for it. And yes, this is the same Eric Holder who recently lied to Congress about the so-called “Operation Fast and Furious” (in a nutshell, the ATF allowed over 2,000 guns to be sold to people it knew worked for the Mexican drug cartels as a means of making a bigger legal case against the cartels; at least two US Border Patrol and ICE agents were killed with guns ATF allowed to be smuggled into Mexico, to say nothing of the dozens of Mexicans who died thanks to the operation). Holder told Congress, under oath, that the first he’d heard of Fast and Furious was around April 2011, but CBS News found documents which indicate that Holder was briefed on the operation as early as July 2010.

Say what you will about George W. Bush. Hey, he wasn’t my favorite guy, either. In fact, he’s the reason I changed my voter registration from Republican to Libertarian. But at least when Bush wanted to kill American citizens, he did it the old-fashioned way: by sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan to get shot or blown up. Obama hasn’t got the honor or stones to do that, so he just uses Predator drones to kill American citizens. Yes, Anwar al-Awlaki was a bad person. He was on every terror watch list there is, and the world is probably a better place without him. But it’s astonishing that no one seems to give a damn that the Obama administration, under the advice of the CIA, essentially executed an American citizen without a trial or due process of any kind. This, from the same people who crucified the Bush administration’s policies in the media. Dick Cheney wants an apology from them, and personally I think he’s due one. I also can’t wait until Obama deploys Predators here in the United States so they can execute his political enemies as well. And hey, perhaps he can follow Bev Perdue’s advice and suspend elections until he gets his way.

What the fuck happened to America?

Liberals crack me up. This picture is of a “Constitutionally-protected form of political satire that forms a clever juxtaposition between the policies of Adolf Hitler and George W. Bush”:

This picture, however, is a “racist hate crime”:

God bless you hypocritical do-gooders! Please don’t ever change!

It’s still there.

Fans of Georgia author Flannery O’Connor probably know that she had a lifelong love of birds, especially peacocks. What you might not know is that her love of birds might have started with a chicken her family owned when she was very young. She loved the bird so much that she even taught it to walk backwards!

There have long been stories that Flannery and her famous “backwards chicken” once appeared in a newsreel. However, despite several exhaustive Internet searches, I was never able to find it… until now. Here is the clip, called “Do You Reverse?”, which shows a young “Mary O’Connor” for about two seconds. Note that the other animals walking backwards in the clip are simply shown in reverse.

Look at how cute she was! 🙂

If there’s one thing the Internet seems made for – aside from porn, cute kitty pictures and fantasy football leagues – it’s complaining about bad customer service. And that’s not for nothing: if you spend enough time at The Consumerist, TripAdvisor or Elliot.org you’d think that most companies don’t just have bad customer service, they’re becoming downright hostile to customers these days.

But this isn’t one of those awful customer service stories. In fact, it’s the exact opposite of that, a story about great customer service. And it involves Virgin Mobile.

My parents gave me a Virgin Mobile Samsung Intercept phone for Christmas last year. Coming from Tracfone’s relatively ancient LG 600g handset, the Intercept seemed like magic. And for the first couple of weeks, it was! But then odd things started happening. The phone would lock up often, requiring me to remove the battery to restart. It would lose connectivity, apparently unable to gracefully switch between 3G and Wi-Fi. It would reboot for no good reason. Many of the stock apps (and parts of the OS itself!) would crash. Most worryingly, the phone would gradually slow down – not just in a given session, but overall, like a Windows computer loaded down with malware.

The phone shipped with Android 2.1, and Virgin Mobile promised that most of these issues would be fixed with the 2.2 (Froyo) update, which was due in February… then March… then April. I’m an IT guy, and I understand how software releases get delayed. So I was OK with that, but was getting tired of resetting (wiping) the phone every few weeks to make it usable. Wiping the phone was great for restoring performance, but every time I did so I’d lose my SMS messages and call logs, and then had to spend an hour or more reinstalling my apps and tweaking the phone (notification settings, sounds, etc.).  Anyway, the upgrade was finally made available in April, and I upgraded. And yes, a few things were fixed… but the phone was still slow and still locked up far too often.

Continue reading “Thanks Virgin Mobile!”