- Sometimes, Walmart shoppers get more than they pay for
when they buy discounted clothing, motor oil, cereal and a camera bag all in
the same place. For example, North Huntingdon, Pa. resident Bonnie Raygor
made a trip to her local bulk retailer of consumer goods
to buy a plastic bag of potatoes to
use in making dinner for her family. She picked the bag up, tossed it in her
cart and took it home, where she opened it to start making dinner. Inside, she
found a nice, slithery surprise: a 3 1/2-foot snake. Raygor reached into the
bag and found the orange and white snake and initially wasn’t sure what she had
found. "First I saw its underbelly, which is white. I thought I had a bad
potato. Instead I had a snake," Raygor said. "The bag was sealed. The
only thing that's in it are the little holes. So I'm assuming it was in there
when I bought it. I screamed." Like any distressed soul faced with a
vexing situation in the digital age, Raygor hurried to her computer and tried
to figure out what was happening. "I think it is a corn snake. That's what
it looks like on the Internet," she added. "I'm hoping it's a corn
snake, because I just stuck my hand in it and grabbed it." After the
initial shock of finding a snake in her taters wore off, she dumped the rest of
the potatoes out of the bag to make sure there weren’t any more reptiles
inside. She, her daughter and daughter-in-law put the snake into a reptile
enclosure that she has from previous pets and Raygor then called Walmart. "First,
they told me I should bring it to the lawn and garden department and they'd
take care of it," Raygor said. "And then I was dissatisfied, so I
called and asked to speak to a manager, and he said if I had a receipt, I could
get a refund. And that was the extent." No one is exactly stepping up to
accept responsibility for the snake ending up in the bag, including Harvest
Gold, which sells the potatoes, and Irving Farms Marketing in Maine, which
distributes them……..
- Facebook and its new purchase Instagram have broken their
big news…and the world has yawned in response. Early last week, the tech world
was buzzing about a Facebook press event to debut some sort of new addition to
the social networking sites offerings. Speculation centered on an RSS
reader t to replace the outgoing Google reader, but when the picture clarified
it was all about Instagram, Facebook’s photo-sharing application. The big news
was that Instagram was adding its own video service to combat Twitter’s popular
Vine service. Vine keep messages to six seconds, while Instagram will give
users 15 seconds to share whatever important message they can communicate to
their friends in that short span of time. There will be other differences between
the two services, the foremost being Instagram users being able to use the same
colorful and creative filters on their videos that they have taken to applying
to every damn mundane image they snap with their smartphones. Vine will have a
decided edge over Instagram in that it allows users to loop videos, a feature
Instagram’s take on short-form video service lacks. Vine has drawn in a growing
number of users since debuting earlier this year and has become popular largely
because it allows for the creation of videos that run in continuous motion, and
the creation of a perfectly looped video. That means videos are well-executed
enough that those watching them often can’t tell where they begin or end. At
least initially, Instagram users can only stop and start their recordings until
the allotted 15 second time limit is filled, sans looping capability. In some
sense, the differences between Vine and Instagram underscore the overall
differences between Facebook and Twitter: an open-ended, free-wheeling
arrangement (Facebook) versus one built on limits and concision. Which
service a person prefers depends on their endgame………
- The Yeah Yeah Yeahs have always been a little on the quirky side even
among the eccentric lot that is rock bands, so it’s fitting that they have
become the first band to ever shoot a music video on top of the Empire State
Building. The group, led by frontwoman Karen O, scaled the New York City
landmark to film the video for their new single “Despair.” A small crew of two
dozen helped set up the set on the viewing deck of the building, all of 86
floors up in the air. The shoot took place from 2 a.m. until sunrise and will
provide most of the footage for the “Despair” video, the second single taken
from the group’s “Mosquito” album. "It’s definitely not just another cool
day in the life of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,” Karen O said after the shoot. “It was
definitely an iconic moment. It’s hard to do something like that and not to
feel like it’s symbolic – it’s like the American dream for us, singing your
song on top of the Empire State Building, feeling like: man, where were we 10
years ago, when we were sitting around in some punk rock dive bar, thinking
about what to name our band, and New York City, and now here we are at the top.
It really felt dreamlike.” The project was possible only after getting approval
from Malkin Holdings (operator of the Empire State Building) and company
president Antony E. Malkin also sounded excited about the effort. “The way I
look at it is, why hadn’t this been done before?” he said. “Credit to them for
having the gumption to ask.” After their top-of-the-world success, Yeah Yeah
Yeahs will play a one-off gig at London's Islington Academy on July 15, their
first live gig in several weeks…….
- At long last, Japan has done it – and by it, don’t take
that to mean containing the fallout and environmental ramipercussions from the
Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. No, the Japanese have finally succeeded
in finding a way to further monetize the value of their most famous mountain. Iconic Mount Fuji
was officially recognized as a World Heritage Site at the annual UNESCO
conference being held in Cambodia, certifying a decade of continual efforts by
Japan to earn the recognition for its most cherished/valuable natural wonder. There
was a plan to register the nation's highest mountain back in 2003, but issues
with garbage dumping led the government to give up on a nomination as a natural
heritage site. Instead, they sought to have the mountain considered a cultural
heritage site in a proposal submitted last year. The news came as a huge bundle
of joy for residents of Yamanashi and Shizuoka prefectures, both of which share
the mountain. Both groups held celebrations at their respective city halls, but
the real celebrations likely took place in the minds and offices of tourism
officials, who know that the additional influx of tourists to the mountain will
bring in a lot of money. The mountain already hosts up to 300,000 visitors a
year and as inconsequential as an artificial designation from a global
non-profit might seem, the UNESCO honor will certainly bring more folks to the
mountain. In order to offset that expected surge, a $10 dollar entry fee will
be charged to those climbers aiming for the summit starting this summer during
peak season. As the government, tells it, that money will be used for various
environmental protection measures. Before the tourists start rolling in, locals
will celebrate their newfound (and meaningless) honor with fireworks and
cleaning efforts to get the mountain ready for its summer opening on July 1……….
- Now THIS is what women’s tennis needs. A sport that is
largely irrelevant on the athletic radar has but one, and only one consistent
draw: hotties in revealing tennis outfits. If those hotties happen to be the
two best players in women’s tennis and they just happen to have some simmering
bad blood between them, so much the better. The ladies in question would be Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams, who
faced off in the 2004 Wimbledon final and have met on various courts 13 times
since then. Sharapova won that 2004 match, but Williams has won their past 13
matches, including the French Open final two weeks ago. Maybe Sharapova is
still a bit irked over losing to her rival again in a major, but whatever the
cause, she lit Williams up at her pre-Wimbledon news conference Saturday. Sharapova
was asked about a recent Rolling Stone article in which the writer suggested that
critical comments directed at an unnamed player by Williams were referring to
Sharapova. Given that Williams has consistently kicked her ass over the past
decade, Sharapova could elect to keep quiet and try to win the next time they
meet, but she wasn’t about to let a potential slight go. "If she wants to
talk about something personal, maybe she should talk about her relationship and
her boyfriend that was married and is getting a divorce and has kids,”
Sharapova said. Among the quotes that sparked Sharapova’s ire was this gem: “"If
she wants to be with the guy with a black heart, go for it.” With the most
prestigious tournament on the WTA tour set to start, maybe Wimbledon wants to
take advantage of this catty drama by pitting Williams and Sharapova against
each other….in a mud wrestling match or Jello-O-related combat. Even with the
extra eyeballs on tennis for the next couple of week’s because of the
tournament’s hallowed status in the tennis world, that sort of attention could
go a long way toward boosting women’s tennis on the average sports fan’s
radar…….
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