Landmark Freed v. Hanes Case

From Above the Law:  Lawsuit of the Day: Defective Underwear Causes Penis Pain
 
Let's get the boring stuff out of the way. Albert Freed (pictured) won a trip to Hawaii (not pictured). As part of the vacation celebration, Mrs. Freed bought her husband some new Hanes brand briefs. But Mr. Freed is a husky gentleman, and apparently the new trunks couldn't contain all of his junk. He sued Hanes, claiming they made 'defective' underwear.

Move over Roe v. Wade, America turns on a new hot button court case with Freed v. Hanes. Click here to read all the twists and turns (and chafing) in this fascinating case.

Freed v Hanes.pdf

Today's something or other #39

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Iowa City police are investigating an early morning assault in which a man accused another of being a zombie, then punched him twice. Police said the assault occurred at 1:17 a.m. Sunday at an Iowa City restaurant south of the University of Iowa campus.

A man was ordering food when he was approached by another man who called him a zombie, then hit him in the eye. When the victim tried to call police on his cell phone, the man punched him again, breaking his nose.

The man then ran out a back door.

The victim was taken by ambulance to a hospital.

Source: The Huffington Post

Today's something or other #38

Who knows what you'll turn up in Google Reader Recommendations?!


Amazingly Freaky Dead Tauntaun Wedding Cake [Star Wars]:

Today's something or other #37

Shooting Anvils 200 Feet In the Air Is as Bloody Crazy as It Sounds [Explosions]: "

See that guy who kind of looks like Ernest Hemingway? His name is Gay Wilkinson. His favorite sport is to shoot anvils in the air. Anvils. He says that women ask him: 'why would you like to do that.'

I tell you why, women! Because he can. Just pack a lot of black powder between two anvils, put a notepad with the fuse in between, light up, and watch the anvil on top shooting up 100 to 200 feet into the air, stop for a second, and then fall down pretty much at the same spot.

Yes! I understand you, Mr. Wilkinson. I actually want to hang out with you, drink beer, eat grilled meat, fire up anvils, and change our names to Yosemite Sam and Wile E. Coyote for a day. [Riverfront Times via Boing Boing]

“Led Zeppelin II” Turns 40

From Rolling Stone Magazine: “Led Zeppelin II” Turns 40: "



Forty years ago today, Led Zeppelin released Led Zeppelin II just nine months after unleashing their historic debut. Produced by guitarist Jimmy Page, II laid the groundwork for heavy metal with its classic “Whole Lotta Love” and firmly established Zeppelin as one of the loudest and greatest bands in rock at the time. II also boasts Robert Plant’s unparalleled vocal prowess on hits like “Ramble On” and “What Is and What Should Never Be” and John Bonham’s still-unmatched drum solo on “Moby Dick.”

When the album came out 40 years ago, Rolling Stone critic John Mendelsohn wasn’t exactly glowing in his 1969 review of the album, writing tongue-in-cheekily, “I’ll concede that until you’ve listened to the album eight hundred times, as I have, it seems as if it’s just one especially heavy song extended over the space of two whole sides. But, hey! You’ve got to admit that the Zeppelin has their distinctive and enchanting formula down stone-cold, man.” Of course, Mendelsohn’s opinion turned out to be the small, small minority, and Rolling Stone went on to place Led Zeppelin II on our 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

The New Rolling Stone Album Guide awarded Led Zeppelin II the five-star review it rightly deserves, adding that “Whole Lotta Love” “became a starting point for Aerosmith, Guns n’ Roses and Van Halen, among others. It’s an amazing song not just for its seismic riff and bingeing-on-lust vocal performance, but for its mind-bending midsection, in which Page orchestrates the aural equivalent of an orgasm (Theremin included.)”

So bust out your old vinyl or eight-track or CD, crank up your stereo volume high and celebrate the album’s fortieth birthday.

New life on Dundas?

Perhaps Dundas isn't over just yet after all? Maybe it is just evolving differently than originally envisioned. And, let's face it, did we really need a hip bar/resto strip on Dundas when we've already got the College, Queen West, West Queen West and Ossington strips nearby? Dundas Street, across the entire city, has long been a street remarkably resistant to gentrification.

From the Globe and Mail:

Suddenly teeming with indie coffee shops, Little Portugal is also becoming a little Left Bank. Emily Thomas pays a visit and gets the down-low on the boho joe. Dundas spills the beans.

Hard to believe this isn't a spoof

The handshake, with its potential to transfer the flu virus, should be replaced with the safer and more contemporary pound, says the dean of medicine at the University of Calgary.

Source: CBC.ca

But something had gone quite wrong

I've written about some truly awesome/scary food concoctions on this blog in the past (e.g. the uber Super Bowl snack; the White Castle & Bacon Bake; and who can forget the Turbaconducken?), but we may have a new champion in the food insanity sweepstakes. The beauty of this new contestant is the simplicity of its genius. The other offerings referenced above were all very high (cholesterol) concept but this one cuts right down to the bare essentials.

From The Economist:

On A fine afternoon at the Texas State Fair, a ringmaster encouraged a gaggle of children to flap their arms like butterfly wings. “What could possibly go wrong on a day as beautiful as today?” he asked. But a hundred yards away, something had gone quite wrong. People were queuing for an unusual delicacy: balls of butter, dipped in dough and cooked in a vat of boiling oil. Fried butter, in other words. The balls were dusted with a thin coat of powdered sugar. When bitten, they collapsed with an unctuous squelch.

Fairs are known for their decadent snack offerings. Most are unhealthy, and some push the conceptual boundaries of food into new territory. The Los Angeles County Fair, which ended on October 4th, featured a Meat Lovers’ Ice Cream Cone (don’t ask). The Minnesota State Fair is known for its foods-on-a-stick. The Texas fair bills itself as the fried food capital of the state.

Click here for the full article.

Today's something or other #36

The Martini - Why Everything You Know Is Wrong (source: Interesting Thing of the Day)

As a San Francisco resident, I like to brag that my city is where Important Things were invented. The television. The jukebox. Bay windows. Denim jeans. The slot machine. Cable cars. The fortune cookie. Chop Suey. And yes, Rice-a-Roni. It’s also reputedly the birthplace of quite a few alcoholic beverages, including Irish Coffee, the Mimosa, the Mai Tai, and the Martini.

Although the martini is apparently less than 150 years old, records of its invention are sketchy at best, and several other municipalities would like to take credit for it. A great many widely divergent stories about the drink’s origin are in circulation, each one as plausible as the next. But since this is a question that cannot be answered definitively, I choose to believe the story I like best. That story says that in the mid-1800s, a miner about to board a ferry in San Francisco for the trip across the bay to his home town of Martinez asked a bartender to whip up an interesting drink for him. The resulting mixture was named after the traveler’s destination, and years later, when the drink had become more popular, the name was shortened to “martini.” This story, I hasten to admit, may be entirely apocryphal, but it does at least seem likely that the name “martini” is in fact derived in some fashion from “Martinez.”

Mixed Messages
In addition to the drink’s uncertain provenance, no reliable documentation of its original recipe exists. Among the ingredient lists I found claiming to be the original are these:
4 parts sweet vermouth, 1 part gin, dash of bitters, two dashes of Maraschino, slice of lemon
3 parts gin, 1 part sweet vermouth, 1 part dry vermouth, dash of orange bitters, slice of lemon
3 parts gin, 1 part dry vermouth
2 parts gin, 1 part sweet vermouth, (sometimes) dash of orange bitters
1 part gin, 1 part dry vermouth

(In addition to the ingredients listed, every martini is mixed with ice to chill it; the ice is strained out before serving.)

You will notice, of course, that all these recipes contain gin—not vodka—and vermouth (a type of wine flavored with herbs and spices). Vodka martinis are a more recent invention (and, according to some, an egregious misuse of the very term “martini,” since vodka is all but tasteless). The same is true of the ubiquitous olive garnish, which is suspiciously absent from early ingredient lists. But the uncertainty of the recipe is precisely what’s at issue here. Since there is no canonical reference as to what the “one true” martini should contain, anyone who gets uptight over the fact that a certain martini recipe is “wrong” is arguing from a position of ignorance. (More on this in a moment.)

How Dry Am I?

In any event, it is clear that over the last century, the commonly expected ratio of gin to vermouth has steadily increased to the point that some martini aficionados consider even an extra-dry 8-to-1 ratio too “sweet.” If you want to be extremely hip, you can buy spray bottles designed expressly for “misting” a few microdroplets of dry vermouth onto cold gin to give your hyper-desiccated martini the mere suggestion of a hint of vaguely vermouthish essence.

This change is apparently no accident. Some sources claim that the gin commonly available a century ago was much more bitter than what we have today, that the purpose of the vermouth was to mask this bitterness, and that the decreasing proportion of vermouth has thus been nothing more than a natural adjustment to expose more of the gin’s flavor.

Shaken, Not Stirred?

But the biggest (and silliest) martini controversy is, of course, whether they should be shaken or stirred. Everyone knows James Bond’s choice, and I’ve read countless criticisms that Bond orders his martini the “wrong” way—that a sophisticated international spy ought to know better. One could perhaps justifiably criticize Bond (or, to be more accurate, Ian Fleming) for preferring a vodka martini, since the one thing we can say with certainty about the traditional recipe is that it uses gin. But surely the manner of combining the alcohols is of little consequence? Well, you’d be surprised.

Putting the ingredients (including ice) in a covered container and shaking will result in a colder beverage—ordinarily considered a benefit. But purists never seem to tire of saying that shaking a martini bruises the gin, as though this were a self-evidently ridiculous thing to do. You cannot bruise gin. You can bruise yourself or even a piece of fruit, but you simply cannot damage gin in any way merely by shaking it.

OK, say the critics, maybe “bruise” was a poor choice of words, but by shaking gin with ice you do change it—you aerate it (a tiny little bit) and you probably melt a little more of the ice, diluting it a smidgen more than you would by stirring. The presence of air bubbles (and perhaps a few ice fragments) can in fact make the martini slightly cloudy, but this appearance dissipates quickly. The real question is whether you can taste the difference between a shaken martini and a stirred one, and let’s just say that innumerable blind taste tests have yielded inconclusive results but a lot of bruised feelings.

Even if a shaken martini does taste different from a stirred martini, who’s to say the difference is objectionable? Some people like carbonated water better than still water. Some people like Pepsi better than Coke. Some people like their orange juice without pulp. These are all merely preferences, not matters of right and wrong. And so what if Bond, for whatever fictional reason, preferred his martini shaken? The point is that he knew stirred martinis were the norm—otherwise, there’d have been no point in ordering his specially. So he’s not betraying ignorance, but rather expressing a preference.

Or maybe he was doing it for his health. As crazy as it sounds, the British Medical Journal published a study showing that shaken martinis have measurably higher antioxidant properties than stirred martinis. Higher enough to make any real difference? Probably not. But at least when your know-it-all friends give you a dressing down for being clueless about proper martini preparation, you’ve got a great comeback.

10 new details on the iTablet

Hard to bet against Apple these days. It will be interesting to see their pricing strategy and how they position the Tablet in the marketplace.