I still hear the “the average human swallows 8 spiders in their sleep” line fairly often.
I think a lot of the lampooning was due to the belief that the outcome of such suits should be dependant upon negligence, and a lot of people don’t see serving coffee hot as negligent.
I knew this one awhile back.
Add to the fact that there was a bar nearby and that every night there were loud arguments and screaming that the neighbors ignored regularly. In follow up interviews, the neighbors were horrified to think they were considered that callous as to not call the police if they really thought something had been happening.
So when I was teaching an ethics class in the college, the book referenced this story several times (incorrectly) so I found the email address of the author to correct him on the real facts.
Sadly, the author had died, but his wife responded and we kept up correspondence for quite some time. She was also a university professor and suggested:
“Use this as an example to your students of how a poorly researched news story can unfairly scar a neighborhood and be quoted as an example in textbooks.”
She went on to tell me her husband would have been thrilled to hear the real story and would most certainly have used it as a prime example that not everything you know as “true” is really true.
Well, there’s hot coffee, and scalding 3rd degree burn coffee. McDonalds was serving their java at 180-190F.
This is a good site regarding the facts of the case. I recall a lot of the lampooning was along the lines of “of course coffee is hot…duh” and skipped over the skin grafts/3rd degree burns.
Again you seem to think that the fact that something caused injury means that the person selling it was negligent. Until you see the disjunct, you are not going to understand the lampooning.
Ooh, I thought of another one that drives me absolutely freaking bonkers.
There’s a popular myth that a baby having the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck during delivery constitutes a major life-threatening emergency. I’ll even hear people say stuff like, “I had to be born by emergency cesarean, because the cord was wrapped around my neck!” It’s also really popular in movies and TV.
It’s almost always not a big deal. The baby’s getting oxygen through the cord, not their windpipe, people! If the cord prolapses and gets compressed between the baby’s head and the cervix, that can be really dangerous, but a nuchal cord is pretty normal and not cause for panic.
And until you get that McD’s was neglient, you aren’t going to get that the lampooning is incorrect:
Quote from linky above:
McDonalds’ quality assurance manager testified that the company
actively enforces a requirement that coffee be held in the pot at 185
degrees, plus or minus five degrees. He also testified that a burn
hazard exists with any food substance served at 140 degrees or above,
and that McDonalds coffee, at the temperature at which it was poured
into styrofoam cups, was not fit for consumption because it would burn
the mouth and throat. The quality assurance manager admitted that burns
would occur, but testified that McDonalds had no intention of reducing
the “holding temperature” of its coffee.
An action is negligent if a reasonable person would not do it. Whether a reasonable person would, without additional warning, serve a beverage so hot that spilling it would send you to the hospital with a disfiguring injury is, I suppose, open to debate.
I would hazard a guess that most of us would find that serving coffee that is much hotter than the coffee one makes at home or gets poured at an ordinary restaurant requires a little bit of notice so that we take additional care not to spill it.
This is one millions of people believe because they saw it in a Disney nature documentary… but the documentary makers deliberately rounded up lemmings and drowned them to get the footage they wanted to see.
There’s also the oldie but goodie that Catherine the Great died while making out with a horse.
As many times as I’ve heard that rumor, I’ve never heard that she was “making out” with the horse. Schtupping, yes - smooching, no.
“Making out” with a horse sounds even wierder somehow. 
Your cite and your first post don’t quite match up. The article says stretching as part of a warm-up IS beneficial, it’s the static stretching pre-exercise isn’t so great (stretching cold). So the runner you see stretching against a tree may already have done some brisk walking light jogging to start warming up the muscles first. This is still currently recommended, including by my sport medicine doctor, my physio therapist, and RMT and in your own cite by Dr. Gloria Beim, an orthopedic surgeon in Crested Butte, Colo., who is the team doctor for the United States track cycling team.
Ballistic stretching or trying to stretch beyond our normal range of movement during a warm-up is not recommended and hasn’t been for going on 20 years now. Light stretching as part of warming up muscles (stretching after light intensity aerobic movement) within the normal range of motion is still considered beneficial.
“Marijuana is this state’s biggest cash crop.” I’ve heard this in 11 states from all kinds of people, but no one ever has a shred of evidence.
“This city/county/state has the most fast food restaurants per capita in the US, and the most heart surgeons.” Again, often stated, never backed up.
Exactly. But my original point was that Sampiro’s post seemed to imply that the mere fact that the woman was very badly injured meant that her case had obvious merit and that therefore no lampooning of her case was justified.
This itself is, at least according to my dad, a myth. He was at Altamont and says that he had no idea anyone was killed until a couple days later (there were like a zillion people there). It’s only in much later retrospect that people seemed to think that this murder was somehow symbolic. It didn’t seem so to anyone at the time. My dad is baffled by the notion that Altamont was somehow this terrible show that heralded the end of an era; he claims it was fun and the Rolling Stones were awesome.
What would you serve if you wanted to have an authentic Plimoth Plantation style Thanksgiving?
Nothing.
Thanksgiving was a day of prayer and fasting. (The turkey and Indians and Pilgrims concept was actually a harvest feast, something practiced in both Native and European and most other cultures.)
I don’t think the John Smith-Pocahontas thing is regarded as true so much anymore, but since so much of American history turns out to be not quite so pretty or romantic, I’ll do the opposite of the OP and mention one thing I was surprised to find out really was true: though the marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe definitely brought some advantages to the whites due to her father’s power, the historical record implies the main reason he married her was that he loved her.
I said all that did I?:rolleyes:
Her case did have merit due to her injuries because there was negligence though it was often spun to sound like “somebody spills coffee and finds out it’s hot and gets $2 million”, when in fact the actual case had a lot more to it than that.
No, you implied it. Read your post #122. You thought she was clearly deserving yet you mentioned nothing about negligence. You mentioned only that she was badly injured.
Nowhere in the article (which is just a quick condensing of the findings; the NYTimes probably wasn’t a good place for me to choose as a cite, but it was the first one that popped up) does it say where any study has shown stretching to be beneficial during warmup, either.
Dr. Beim recommends aggressive stretcing nonetheless (based on no studies), and she says she does find stretching to be beneficial for injury rehab, if it’s done every day. Next, there’s another study saying that daily stretching might be beneficial for performance, but offers no protection against injury and sometimes proves harmful. Then another doctor saying he still thinks people should stretch anyways, then the 2nd study’s author contradicting him, based on the study. Then
I think it’s just one of those holdovers from way back when when we had to do jumping jacks and stretch in P.E. before we did anything, including playing dodgeball. If we do ever get studies showing clear benefits, fine, I’ll buy it. And stretching for rehab, fine. And if you like how it feels, fine. But as for stretching in warmup, it only seems to make sense when the exercise you are participating in involves stretching, like ballet or gymnastics or contortion.
I wrote
That she deserved it would imply it was their fault, but “the mere fact that the woman was very badly injured meant that her case had obvious merit” is not implied. The fact I said she deserved the money would in fact imply that it was McDonald’s fault, otherwise she’d no more deserve the settlement than anybody else who was seriously burned that day.