Ask For The Blue Box, And Then Dump The Paper This Is Written ON Into It

This lawsuit here is the kind of thing that should cause you to be disqualified from ever using the court system again and cost your lawyer his license. Specifically his law license, but if you want to take his driver’s license or dog license or any other license you can think of while you’re at it, I’m probably not going to argue much. Good lord almighty, what an extremely dumb, obvious cash grab. These people have me rooting for a corporation, for god’s sake! I’m not saying people aren’t capable of literally being this stupid (see Berries, Crunch or Convoy, Freedom), but I’m pretty sure this one’s exactly what it looks like.

A woman is suing Kraft Heinz Foods Company because it takes slightly longer to prepare a single serving of Velveeta Shells & Cheese than the package says it does. The box says it will be ready in three and a half minutes, but since you have to perform several seconds worth of other steps, microwave it for that long and then let it stand for a bit while it thickens up, that can’t possibly be true. This makes it misleading to consumers and unfit for sale, so please give us a big bag of money, goes the argument.

4. First, consumers must “REMOVE lid and Cheese Sauce Pouch.”
5. Next, they must “ADD water to fill line in cup. STIR.”
6. Third, “MICROWAVE, uncovered, on HIGH 3-1/2 min. DO NOT DRAIN.”
7. Finally, they should “STIR IN contents of cheese sauce pouch.”
8. Defendant then notes that “CHEESE SAUCE WILL THICKEN UPON STANDING.”

9. Consumers seeing “ready in 3 1/2 minutes” will believe it represents the total amount of time it takes to prepare the Product, meaning from the moment it is unopened to the moment it is ready for consumption.
10. However, the directions outlined above show that 3-and-a-half minutes is just the length of time to complete one of several steps.
11. The label does not state the Product takes “3 1/2 minutes to cook in the microwave,” which would have been true.
12. To provide consumers with a Product that is actually “ready in 3 1/2 minutes,” the Product would need to be cooked in the microwave for less than 3-and-a-half minutes, so that all the preparation steps could be completed in the 3-and-a-half minutes timeframe.
13. Consumers are misled to expect the Product will be ready for consumption in a shorter amount of time than it really takes to prepare.

Update:
The case was thankfully thrown out over the summer, but Lowering the Bar argues that it was tossed for the wrong reason.

I predicted the case would be “thrown out on ‘reasonable consumer’ grounds,” like the (in)famous Crunch Berries case. It could have been, but instead the court held Ramirez hadn’t alleged an injury and so couldn’t sue in federal court. (Can someone who hasn’t been injured sue in state court? Sometimes! Are the results stupid? Frequently.) More specifically, Ramirez had alleged that she kept buying the product even after learning the awful truth: that it would take at least 211 seconds to get it “ready.” But if she then kept buying the stuff, that suggested she didn’t really care about the 210-second promise, so even if Kraft lied about that, the lie didn’t harm her. She didn’t pay anything extra because of it.
This is the right result—but for the wrong reason.
The court would be right if Ramirez had alleged that she tried to make the mac & cheese at least once, thus learning how long it took to make, and then bought it again anyway. But she didn’t. What’s that? The plaintiff didn’t allege that she tried even once to make the mac & cheese she sued about? Nope. She only alleged that she bought it “between October and November 2022, among other times.” So it’s theoretically possible she bought multiple boxes during that time, possibly stocking up in the event of a natural disaster or a zombie apocalypse or a Trump victory, learning only afterward that a fraud had been perpetrated. In that scenario, she would have been trying to get a refund for a stockpile of mac & cheese that had become utterly useless to her because it could not be ready in 210 seconds.
But … if Ramirez never actually tried to make the mac & cheese (or, I guess, never read the back of the box), how did she learn there was a problem that she needed to sue about? I assume not from the lawyer, because that would mean they just ginned up this claim in order to have a lawsuit. But I guess we’ll never know.

There’s a lot more there, including the revelation that the lawyer in this case has filed many others similar to this one, including one against Frito-Lay over how much lime constitutes a hint.

The People Who Live In My Apartment Building

When I heard that song, I knew I wanted to have the chance to use it. Now seems like as good a time as any. Thankfully, most of the people who live in my apartment building aren’t as weird as the specimens in the song…although we’ve had a few prizes. But lately, I keep running into weirdos. Am I just out of practice with dealing with people because I work from home so much? Or are people getting weirder. Here are some examples.

One day, Steve went to the garbage chute and found the lever that you use to open the chute was gone. The main garbage room’s knob was still there, but the chute handle had vanished. Who steals a doorknob? Even if it fell off, wouldn’t you bring it to the office or leave it in the garbage room so someone from maintenance might be able to put it back on? Nobody reported it but us, and the handle was nowhere to be found, so that wasn’t what was done. What are you going to do with a door handle built for a specific purpose?

That’s not all. While we waited for the building to fix the chute, we would go check every day to see if the knob was back on. A few days in, we found that the main garbage room door was locked. Why? Because people had been leaving their bags of garbage on the floor of the garbage room, hoping the garbage fairy would carry them away to their proper destination, I guess.

For a few months now, I’ve been trying to do some exercise by going all the way down the stairs and then climbing back up. For a while, I was nervous I would see people in there, and they would wonder what the heck I was doing. I rarely find anyone in there, but I always find evidence of the beehive of activity that is the stairwell.

  • There are cardboard boxes at the top of random sets of stairs.
  • At the tops of other ones, there are random piles of dirt.
  • I have occasionally put my hand in something wet on the stair rail. The stairs aren’t open to the elements. Eeewwww!
  • it smells like cigarette smoke at random places along the way.
  • Once, I kicked what felt like a chair cushion that was laying at the bottom of the stairs.

People, what are you doing in there? I hope I don’t find out one of these nights.

One day, I went down to check the mail. I was moving a little too slow for another guy’s liking, and he decided he was going to help me…by grabbing my arm and pushing me along. I didn’t even tell him I was lost. At least he asked where I was going, but I was doing just fine. It wasn’t fine enough for him, apparently. Then when I was leaving, I was getting ready to turn to leave the room, and he started loudly telling me “Turn!” Dude, how do you suppose I get around all the rest of the times I check the mail?

And the laundry room is full of strangeoids. The machines keep making error beeps after people set all their settings and press start, but nobody seems to know if, when that happens, it also steals a load’s worth of money. How do you not notice? Laundry is expensive! Another time, I put the card in the slot of the machine and it did nothing. So I asked someone what was on the screen, and he said “You have to press start.” He didn’t look. He just yelled that across the room. I might have understood if he’d never worked the machines in here. The way they work is they beep and show you your balance, at which point you set all your settings, and only then can you press start. but he was filling another dryer and said he always avoided the one I was trying to use. So he was familiar with these. Um, what are you talking about? And can you actually look at the screen before saying something completely useless? I think I know I have to press start…just as soon as I set all the other stuff.

Another lady was over at her daughter’s place so she could feed her cat and decided to do her laundry for her. But she didn’t notice what was in her daughter’s laundry, so wasn’t sure if things had gone missing. She also had no intention of coming back to check if those missing items had been brought back. I’m sure her daughter really appreciated the help. She probably appreciated it about as much as I appreciated her picking up items that I had dropped and putting them in the cart without telling me. I would have been thankful if she had either told me I had dropped them or told me that she had put them in the cart. But silently moving my stuff when I can’t see you doing it is NOT COOL! And then she wonders why I’m looking worried when a bunch of my stuff has gone missing. “Oh they fell on the floor so I threw them in your cart,” she says like that’s totally expected. She was perfectly fluent in the English language. Please, lady. For the love of Pete, speak!

Those are the examples I can think of right off the top of my head. I’m sure I’ll think of more. I guess I shouldn’t complain. It could be much much worse. You hear me, Universe? I already know it could be worse. You don’t have to show me!

Tell Me To Alter My Plans One More Time…

I guess I have some time to write this as I sit here on hold with Via Rail figuring out the very thing I’m talking about in this post.

As this snow storm of seeming doom rumbles towards us, the news can’t stop telling us to “alter our travel plans. They make it sound so easy. “There’s a big storm coming in. Alter your travel plans.” Anyone who says that so glibly a. has their family all within spitting distance, b. doesn’t have to rely on public transit of any kind, or both. I know they have to warn people about the coming storm. I just wish they’d realize how hard altering travel plans actually is.

This is the situation I’m in right now. I want to get home to my family because my dad is going in for major surgery in early January. My family lives 300 miles from me. Part of the trip will consist of Uber rides and driving with my brother because Go Bus sucks now. The other half is a Via Rail train trip that I just barely booked before all seats were full. In fact, none of the seats with changeable reservations were available anymore.

After a certain point in the holidays, it will be impossible for me to get home to see my dad because it’s likely they’ll want him to limit his exposure to other people before surgery. The surgery will require a week in the hospital and weeks of recovery.

If my family can even move the time of getting together, my train trip will be unusable because it’s likely I will have just gotten to my family when it’s time to get on the train and head back. I probably can’t change it. I’m on hold to find out, and have been for some time now. I’m probably going to hear that the answer is no, and that will be that.

So, Mr. Cheerful Weather Man. I know that my plans are going to have to change. But can you please realize that it’s not so easy as just rearranging some times? It’s likely that for some, your suggestion of altering plans translates to ruining family gatherings. It is what it is, but I have to say that every time you say “You might have to alter your plans…” I want to slap that smile right off your face.

As a pleasant update, Via says that since I bought the ticket with points, they’d be able to change it more easily. I don’t know what that means for people who actually paid for their trip, but at least there’s some hope for me personally.

Music Playing Kid: Alberto Cartuccia Cingolani, Five-Year-Old Classical Pianist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIaWMybDZoc
I remember being five years old and playing piano. The first song I learned had three or four notes in it and was played entirely with one hand. I didn’t get much better from there. I could pick some basic things out by ear and I stuck with piano lessons for several years, but it took forever to teach me anything and I wasn’t very good. Based on what I’m about to say this might sound a little silly, but I had a heck of a time getting my two sets of fingers to do different things. Looking back, I wish that whomever it was that put me into music when I started school had went with the drums instead. It’s doubtful that I would have wound up as awesome at that as young Alberto Cartuccia Cingolani is on the piano, but based on my experiences with both instruments I think I would have had a better chance at being decent.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about Alberto.

In the above video, his five-year-old self is banging out Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major in front of an audience like it’s nothing. His parents, both musicians, were looking for something to keep him busy the last few years while we were all in lockdown, so thought they would try out music. Apparently it’s gone well, and fast.

(translated) He started playing during the months of the first lockdown. I was always at home, so we started playing with a small play keyboard, in order to do something stimulating for the child. From there I realized that Alberto was well suited. We noticed with my husband that the child has perfect pitch. And from there we saw that a sort of didactic educational journey with the piano was worthwhile and so it all started. The child has forged ahead. For a year and a half now, the child has been doing remarkable things, both for the age and for the time it took to learn.

You can see some more videos here.

Christmas Is Interesting

I heard this depressing Christmas song the other day, not the one I referenced in the title though, and I wasn’t going to post it, but it won’t leave me.

lyrics are here.

So…Christmas is nearly here. How did that happen. I feel like it snuck up on me. Whenever I ask anyone else, they say it did the same to them. I wonder why? We’ve had other years where the weather hasn’t been Christmas-like and it didn’t seem as sneaky. We have our own special reasons, like the family having last Christmas in March and lots of stressful stuff going on, but that doesn’t explain everybody else. The malls didn’t seem so filled with what I call zombies, or people not looking where they’re going, madly searching for gifts and nearly plowing over everyone else in the process. Nobody seemed to know when the downtown Christmas market was coming, even though it’s at the same time every year. What has us all so distracted. Are we all dealing with Jerry Osiris?

By some miracle, we got our Christmas shopping done, no thanks to DHL Global who was handling shipping of some calendars we bought for people. Their idea of a job well done is “well, we delivered it somewhere. So it’s delivered!” It makes me think of the line from the song about Wernher Von Braun. “‘Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down. That’s not my department.’ says Wernher Von Braun”.

Somebody got some calendars. Maybe it was J.J. Nobody knows where they went, and nobody cares. DHL told me to go back to the merchant, like it was their fault. The merchant could only give me a refund or ship me a new one, priority post. Priority post is taking just as long as the other one took to get here. When I asked them to investigate where it went, all they said was “Are you sure it’s not in your mailbox?” When I said I was absolutely sure, all they said was “Well, they say it’s delivered. There’s nothing we can do.” Hell of a relationship you have there, customer service dude. At least UPS tried to investigate where the shipment went, and did bring it back. These guys just don’t care. This new calendar is supposed to arrive on December 23. Hopefully it arrives in the right place.

Christmas is weird for us this year. We each have to go to our own family Christmas stuff. My dad has been dealing with health issues, and is soon going to need a kind of major surgery. So, at the last minute, I decided to get my butt home. But because I wasn’t sure if there would even be a Christmas at the usual time because of the health stuff, I hadn’t tried to reserve spots on trains. This meant I had to get creative and try to hitch rides with family for part of the trip. On the way home, I just managed to get one of the last Economy Plus seats on the train. It was very close to sold out. So to make it easier to find room in people’s cars for the parts where I couldn’t get a seat on the train, I’m going to my family and Steve’s going to his. I’m going to miss him and his whole family, but it feels like the right thing to do.

A small note about catching transportation: Go Transit can go…fly a kite. If I wanted to catch the Go bus from Kitchener to Mississauga, I would have to stand at a random bus stop and flag the bus down. Flag it down? Why won’t it stop when people are at the stop? Because buses from multiple bus lines come there, so they don’t know what bus you’re waiting for. Seriously, dude. How long would it take to stop, ask, then move along? City buses have to stop and ask all the time when multiple city buses come to the same stop.

Their “solution”, and I wish I could place that word in the biggest air quotes I can draw, is to have me call a day in advance and tell them exactly what bus I’ll be getting on, and then they’ll make sure to pass that information on to the driver. They’ll make sure…like the bus driver will make sure to remember my stop. No, I don’t think I’m trusting my trip home to my family on Christmas Eve to that system. Aside from that, I always thought the benefit of Go Transit was flexibility. All of that flexibility is gone for me because a driver can’t be arsed to stop and ask if anyone is looking for the Go bus, and a company can’t be arsed to pull a bus into a terminal. So I’ll be taking a $100 Uber instead of a $14 Go bus because I’d like to get where I’m going. Thankfully, I don’t have a guide dog right now, so Uber shouldn’t ruin my trip.

Gees! Sorry for all the griping and whining. Maybe this depressing Christmas song got right into my bones! But after presents and people get where we’re going, we’ll all have a good time, I’m sure. Well, maybe my oldest nephew will be disappointed because I didn’t manage to bring Uncle Steve. I’m not as good at chasing him around the house, and by the end of Thanksgiving, he said “Next time, try and bring…um…oh what’s his name?” “Uncle Steve?” I asked, and he was very excited. Yeah! Uncle Steve!” Sorry, kid, Uncle Steve will be spending Christmas with Seppa!

I got asked a question that was harder to answer than I expected. A guy from Walmart was helping me around the store and said “This is my first year in Canada. What do people do at Christmas parties?” As I tried to answer him, I realized how diverse our Christmas parties can be. I wish I had been thinking more on my feet and just suggested that he ask the host of the party if people are all bringing food or gifts or whatever. But I went on this meandering journey of “Some people sing songs, some people exchange gifts, some people bring food, some people drink, some of them too much, but it’s mostly about just getting together and having fun.”

I hope everyone else managed to not be completely blindsided by Christmas, and manages to have a good time when it gets here. And I hope next year can please be kind to us. We’re all bruised and tender from these last couple of years. We’re healing, but the scab is not ready to be ripped off. Please don’t rip it off!

Hello? Hello?

Hello!

I’m here…mostly…I believe.

Sorry things have gotten so quiet these last two weeks. Believe me, that was not the plan. All I can tell you is that the sicknesses going around this year are no joke. I came down with one 10 days ago and while I feel a lot better than I did and even managed to do some Christmas shopping this week, I’m still not right. My appetite is a little screwy, I’m having trouble shaking the last of the cough and getting my voice back and I don’t have nearly the energy or focus that I should.

Don’t ask me what I caught. I have no idea. I thought it may have been Covid again since for a couple of days I had no sense of taste or smell, but I have four rapid tests that say it isn’t, so who knows. Whatever it is, it’s unpleasant and I don’t like it. It’s been a good excuse to lay around and watch a lot of wrestling, but that’s pretty much where the positives end.

If you don’t have your flu shot or the new fancy Covid vaccine, you should probably get those. I don’t have either one yet, but was planning to get them both right around the time I was felled by this shit. Ironically the biggest holdup was figuring out when would be a good time to be laid low by the reaction I’m almost certain to have to the Covid shot.

I don’t know when I’ll get either of them now. Right now I have symptoms albeit mild ones, but they won’t take me as long as that’s the case. I was hoping to have them out of the way by the time party season started, but since for us that begins on Sunday, that’s not happening.

But I can worry about all that later. Right now I’m more concerned about being able to feel like myself again. I was at least able to mash this post out, so that’s a start. Until today the mere thought of trying was enough to put me back on the couch.

More to come soon…hopefully.

Hi! I’m Your Dream Devil!

Does anybody else think those Lotto Max dream coach commercials are super annoying and dumb?

Basically, there’s this woman imagining what she could do with her lottery winnings, and this guy appears and tells her that as her dream coach, he wants her to dream bigger! Then the woman goes from imagining a country home to having a villa with a vineyard. There’s a whole set of these commercials, and some of them picture helicopter pads on top of their houses or other dumb stuff.

I’m getting old because when I see those commercials, I get grumpy. What the hell is this guy doing encouraging these people to blow their money? Is he trying to make sure they have to buy more lottery tickets and stay in the labour force because they’ll be broke again? Sure, it’s one thing to do a couple of fun or nice things, but why blow it all on a bunch of stuff that you probably won’t want in the long term, stuff that will be suuuper expensive to maintain?

Maybe it bugs me because I know what it feels like to need to watch my money. I’m good now, but there were times when I had to be very careful. I always had the necessities, but I had to pray that nothing would go wrong because if it did, there was no safety net. So, seeing someone stand there going “I think you should throw away your money!” drives me nuts because that feeling of having to be careful is a feeling that never totally leaves you. Plus, enough of us are already stupid with money. We don’t need encouragement!

As a silly aside, one time when this commercial was on, I wasn’t paying attention, and when he said “Susan, beautiful dream.” I thought “Oh boy, here comes another Donald Trump impression!” I’ve been ruined. I can’t hear words like “beautiful”, “gorgeous”, “tremendous” or “brilliant” without thinking of Trump, especially if the voice sounds remotely Trump-like.

Miss, Please Put Your Mounds Away

Damn cops, always ruining everybody’s good time. I’m sure this was the funnest house in the neighbourhood by a mile.

An Anne Arundel County woman was arrested Monday after police say she screamed obscenities and exposed herself to children trick-or-treating on Halloween night.
Around 7:30 p.m. Monday, officers were called to the 3600 block of Second Avenue in Edgewater. There, officers found 45-year-old Wendee Kaczorek exposing herself and screaming while handing out candy, police said.

She was arrested without incident in her driveway and later released. She was charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure.

Facebook Is Garbage, Part Whatever

There are a lot of reasons to hope that Facebook will just go ahead and die right along with Twitter, and this here is definitely one of them.

Under our rules Donald Trump is a politician because he announced that he is running for president again, and as such our fact checkers are no longer allowed to fact check his shit.

This is legitimately the dumbest fucking thing I’ve heard all day. If not to fact check politicians of all stripes especially the ones with a propensity for lying about every damn thing, why do you have fact checkers at all? I realize that Facebook likes to think of itself as a neutral party that does nothing more than allow people to communicate, but it’s too big and too relevant to too many people’s lives for it to reasonably take that stance and for it to not have some sensible moderation and truth standards. We’re talking about a company that literally gets people killed. Doing anything at all to help negate some of the problems it helped create is the bare ass minimum it can do. And here it is, again, doing not that. Jesus Christ.

Facebook’s fact-checkers will need to stop fact-checking former President Donald Trump following the announcement that he is running for president, according to a company memo obtained by CNN.
While Trump is currently banned from Facebook, the fact-check ban applies to anything Trump says and false statements made by Trump can be posted to the platform by others. Despite Trump’s ban, “Team Trump,” a page run by Trump’s political group, is still active and has 2.3 million followers.

“Some of you have reached out seeking guidance regarding fact-checking political speech in anticipation of a potential candidacy announcement from former President Trump,” the Meta staffer wrote in the memo.
The company has long had an exception to its fact-checking policy for politicians.
“It is not our role to intervene when politicians speak,” Meta executive Nick Clegg, a former politician, said in 2019, defending the exemption.

The memo noted that “political speech is ineligible for fact-checking. This includes the words a politician says as well as photo, video, or other content that is clearly labeled as created by the politician or their campaign.”