Knitanon

True Stella Awards

Hey, didja hear the one about the guy who put his Winnebago on cruise control, got up to make a sandwich, wrecked (duh!), and sued the manufacturer and dealer for not telling him that cruise control doesn't steer for you?  Better yet, that he WON?  He's related to the woman who won a settlement from the bar where broke her tailbone in a slip-and-fall (slipping on the drink she herself had just thrown at her boyfriend).  Also part of the family: the house burglar who was trapped in a garage for eight days, the woman who tripped over her own toddler in a furniture store and broke her leg, and the guy whose hand was run over by the driver of the Honda whose hubcap he was in the process of stealing.  All sued the other related parties in their misadventures; all won an award or settlement.

The other way they're all related:  Every single one is FALSE.  Urban legends.  No truth to them whatsoever. 

A few years ago, a guy named Randy had the thought (or suggestion from a friend--I can't remember) that it was a bit counter-productive, maybe even intellectually dishonest, to illuminate the ridiculous extremes of our tort system with invented stories.  Surely there had to be actual cases out there just as ridiculous as the old stand-bys!

Turns out there were--but most of them were a little too complicated to boil down into a tasty little  two-sentence nugget of entertainment.  Randy decided to go ahead with research and publication of cases and distributes them as they come up in a free email newsletter named after Stella Liebeck, the McDonald's coffee-in-the-lap lady.

BTW, did you know that when  the late Mrs. Liebeck spilled said coffee, her grandson (who was driving) had pulled over and parked at the side of the road?  That the jury reduced her initial $200,000 compensatory damage award by 20 % because they found her 20% at fault?  And after the jury's initial $2.7 million punitive damage award, a judge reduced it to $480,000?  The best part is that Liebeck and McDonald's settled secretly rather than go to appeal--nobody knows how much McD's eventually paid.

Strike a blow for truth--check out the True Stella Awards website.  I have had subscriptions to several of Randy's email publications continuously since 1999 and have been entertained the whole time.  Randy is also one of the most vocal anti-spam crusaders I know--your email is totally safe with him.

Truth really is stranger than fiction.

Make Land, Not War?

I am stunned by the scope of an ongoing project in Dubai, turning desert into varying types of landscape and creating hundreds of miles of new beachfront property.  Having been born and raised in California, where we turned thousands of square miles of desert and seasonal swampland into one of the world's most productive agricultural centers, I shouldn't be surprised.  It's just that here we changed the surface of existing land over a century and a half, while this project has a much shorter timeline and is creating new land.  Land from the sea, people.  They do this in Japan and Hong Kong, but that's 'cause they are all out.  On Google Earth (online crack for geography fiends) the preliminary land-making is clearly visible from an "eye altitude" of  300 miles.  The breadth of this expansion makes Las Vegas look like a lemonade stand with some Christmas lights.

My feelings are mixed.  I wonder about the environmental effects of scooping up billions of tons of seafloor  to create more land above it.  The little kid inside me who used to dam small creeks and create his own mini-rivers thinks it's really cool and wants to go see it.  With the population growth there I also see a huge market for a new technology being developed by some of my relatives (you know who you are).  My first reaction, though, was "my God, that's just wrong."

Check out the pictures or get Google Earth and poke around a bit.  One of the developments is called "The World"--an archipelago of hundreds of islands grouped to emulate the continents of the globe.  If you look closely, you can even see a dredge shooting seabed aggregate into France!  Not sure where I'll come down on this in the end.  The President, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and the U.N. General Assembly all await my findings with bated breath.