No driver wants to encounter a piece of metal flying toward their heads, especially if that shrapnel is coming from a device meant to save your life. To cut down on that risk, Toyota is reissuing a 2013 recall of more than 700,000 vehicles.

Toyota announced that the company may have received an incomplete list of potentially defective airbag units from Japanese-supplier Takata when the recall was first issued last year, USA Today reports.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration notification [PDF] of the original recall, a defect on the passenger side frontal airbag could produce excessive internal pressure causing the inflator to rupture upon deployment.

In the event of a crash the airbags could inflate incorrectly in a crest and “propel fragments toward occupants.”

The renotification recall includes 766,300 model year 2003-04 Toyota Corolla, Corolla Matrix and Tundra trucks, 2002-2004 Sequoias and 2002-2004 Lexus SC 430 coupes.

Toyota reports there have been no crashes or injuries, but one seat cover did sustain burns related to the issue.

Last year, Toyota, Honda and Nissan recalled more than 3.4 million vehicles because their Takata supplied airbags were found to deploy abnormally.

Toyota re-recalls 766,300 for airbag shrapnel risk [USA Today]

The newest, fastest, shiniest, next generation of video game consoles — Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4 — launched to great fanfare last fall. They are both generally well-received and have sold in respectable numbers. Both companies have declared success, and not without reason. And yet, in spite of all the indicators of a thriving console business, this is almost certainly the last generation of set-top video game consoles we will ever see.

It’s not that video games are becoming less popular; on the contrary, the industry just keeps growing and adding new ways to participate.

But much in the same way that streaming video services like Netflix and Amazon Prime have supplanted the idea of a personal DVD collection, so too is an all-streaming, on-demand, rented-access culture coming to the world of games.

Why The Future Will Be Console-Free

• Cost Efficiencies: The development and manufacturing of new hardware takes too long, and it takes several years for that investment to pay off. It makes more sense to focus on cloud-based solutions that can be continuously upgraded rather than requiring consumers to adopt an entirely new product line every few years.

• A Disc-Less World: Digital downloads have already overtaken disc-based games. The next generation of gaming will likely be about subscription services running on Web-connected devices.

• Death to Pirates: Microsoft tried to kill console piracy (and the entire secondary market) by requiring installation of all games and constant Internet connections. It backed down for the current generation but the future, disc-free generations will make it very difficult, if not impossible to steal or share games.

Discs have been on the wane for a while now; digital distribution isn’t the wave of the future, but rather, of the present.

In 2013, for the first time, more video games were digitally distributed than were sold at retail — 53% to 47%, according to the ESA (PDF). In 2012 digital distribution was 40% to retail’s 60%, and back in the long-long-ago of 2011, it was a 70/30 split favoring discs.

Consoles have been about the last bastion of the optical drive. PC gamers have been switching over to using services like Steam, GOG, and others for years, as retail shelf space was carved away and buying anything other than a World of Warcraft expansion in stores stopped being an option. And although dedicated PC gaming enthusiasts who build their own desktop machines still install optical drives in them, the trend in home computing in general has been toward lighter, smaller, more portable machines like ultrabooks and iPads — no disc drive required.

But owners of Xbox and PlayStation consoles, of every iterative generation, have had game discs at hand that they put into their consoles to play. At the time the Xbox 360 system launched, in 2005, one of the two models sold didn’t even include a hard drive at all. The physicality of games, and the fact that players could share, rent, and resell them, has until recently supported an entire secondary industry (namely, GameStop).

The Downside Of A Console-Free Future

• An End To Sharing: You don’t actually own most digital games that you buy. You are paying to license them, according to terms you can’t change (and which 99.9% of people don’t read). These terms can and will be used to prevent you from reselling or sharing the games you buy.

• Sorry, Rural America: While those of us in major metro areas generally have access to reliable broadband, people in those areas without high-speed Web access will be lagging (literally) behind the rest of us, unless significant infrastructure improvements are made.

• Data Hogging: There’s a big difference, data-wise, between playing a multiplayer game online from your console and playing a game that is stored wholly on the cloud. The use of services like PlayStation Now, combined with other bandwidth-devourers like Netflix, will quickly chip away at the data caps — sorry, thresholds — that Comcast and others want to use to nickel-and-dime their customers into the poorhouse.

Even the consoles are now stepping away from purchased discs now though, and into a purely digital world. And it’s not just digital downloads replacing physical media; it’s live-streaming, too.

Starting later this summer, Sony’s PlayStation Now service will enter its open beta phase. The service allows users to remotely live-stream game content, instead of buying a disc or downloading a full game.

For now it’s limited in which devices it will run on, and how many games it has available, but it’s also just getting started. Sony’s eventual plan is to run the service directly to (Sony brand) smart TVs, bypassing consoles entirely, and to expand the library to include more — and more current — games.

While Sony has long been a company that wants consumers to only use its products, it’s not that hard to imagine that a successful launch of PlayStation Now could someday lead Sony to try to open it up as an app to run on non-Sony-branded devices… even, say, an iPad.

Using PlayStation Now, once it launches the planned subscription model, will be exactly analogous to logging into your Netflix account to binge on all of Breaking Bad instead of buying the DVDs — and with the same pros and cons.

There are a few big issues with a world of cloud-based, online-accessed, networked, streaming games.

The less physically tangible media becomes, including games, the higher the chance of consumers losing their paid-for access becomes. It already happens with multiplayer games, as when Nintendo unceremoniously yanked support for Mario Kart 7 when Mario Kart 8 launched earlier this month. As games age, it makes financial sense for a company like Ubisoft, Nintendo, EA, or Activision to stop spending time and money on servers a very small number of players use, and instead to focus on the newest titles.

But that does create an ephemerality in games that is absent — or at least less pronounced — in other media. At least for the time being, streaming a movie or getting an e-book is a preference, and not a requirement; we can always go to the bookstore or the library and get a paper copy of something if our Kindle copy gets pulled. But with games, the online component is rapidly becoming integral to more and more titles.

The other roadblock in the streaming future, though, is even more foundational. Of all the years to launch a streaming games service, 2014 perhaps most clearly highlights the biggest challenge: America’s broadband networks.

The problems we face with a complete lack of competition, broadband caps, terrible customer service, slow speeds at high prices, and cable company f*ckery (a.k.a. net neutrality) have not escaped the notice of gamers or the gaming press.

PS TV sounds like a great idea until you remember what a corporate-fucked joke American broadband is.
Jim Sterling (@JimSterling)

Your average big-budget blockbuster video game these days takes between 8 GB and 20 GB of data. That’s how much space it takes up on a blu-ray disc, on your hard drive, or to download from a digital storefront. HD video and audio files are not small.

We still don’t know how much bandwidth streaming PlayStation games will use. If it’s comparable to Netflix, as we worked out in January, then a gamer could get a solid 150 hours per month of playing in under the cap… so long as she didn’t also use the internet for anything else, and as long as nobody else in her household did either.

But of course, ISPs like Comcast and Verizon are unlikely to let that much data move through their systems without putting up a stink. Netflix has had to cough up cash to the last-mile providers this year just to keep providing their service to customers, and yet even after a new agreement, Netflix and Verizon remain in a standoff that’s preventing consumers from watching the videos they want to.

It is easy to imagine Comcast and Verizon demanding Sony pay to avoid bandwidth bottlenecks, just as they have demanded from Netflix this year. Additionally, if the FCC’s proposed “fast lane” version of net neutrality becomes law, streaming gaming could become subject to a thousand other fees and restrictions.

Big-budget games always try to leverage the best and newest tech. How much bandwidth will it take to live-stream a competitive 16-player first-person shooter at 4K resolution? Lots. And as long as all our internet access remains tied up in a handful of businesses without incentive to improve, access to that kind of gaming will remain mixed and limited at best.

Rented-access culture and the limitations of our broadband infrastructure are kind of depressing. So, too, is the fact that digital storefronts allow and in a sense even encourage companies to release fundamentally broken products at full price with the promise of later patches to fix it.

But the fun thing about the video game industry is that someone, somewhere, is always trying to come up with cool new things, too.

The newest frontier in high-tech gaming is one of the oldest wishes for it: immersive virtual reality. The Oculus Rift promises to offer it, and big business believes them: Facebook acquired the company for $2 billion earlier this year. Early reports out of E3 indicate that the current Oculus experience is astonishing.

Sony clearly feels that there’s something to this VR business, after years spent fruitlessly beating the 3D drum. They’re working on their own headset, Project Morpheus. And those who have gone hands-on with it think it’s pretty awesome, too.

The big blockbuster business of games is calcifying around certain common action tropes, just as the big blockbuster business of Hollywood has, too. But just as indie film thrives and tells all sorts of stories, so too do indie games. Sony devoted a significant portion of their E3 press conference to quirky titles from small studios, showcasing everything from abstracted mythology to interplanetary exploration. And that’s to say nothing of the explosion of independent development on all platforms that doesn’t get mentioned at a conference like E3.

We are in a period of change, away from the status quo of the last few decades, and so the challenges for both companies and consumers are legion. The industry is booming, and as its growth keeps skyrocketing, big businesses will do what big businesses do: create value for shareholders and consumers be damned.

But the video game industry is also not a monolith. It’s a fragmented landscape with a million different things happening all over. And despite all of the roadblocks, there’s a lot in the future to get excited about.

What happens when a big amusement park unexpectedly has to shut down for the weekend? Maybe it births some kind of cabin fever, because 16 Cedar Point employees have been accused of brawling over the weekend, while the park was closed due to a water main break on Saturday.

Sandusky police responded to another call on the scene, a park employee housing complex, early Sunday morning, and say they found a large fight going on in a recreation area, reports The Detroit Free Press.

A total of 16 Cedar point employees were arrested for disorderly conduct and aggravated rioting, after police reportedly struggled with people on the scene allegedly doing stuff like pushing, swinging at the cops and other behavior. One man was reportedly Tasered three times before he would comply with officers’ orders.

So basically, it was a brawl.

The park reopened on Monday morning, which might’ve been a rough morning if any of those workers were on the schedule, one might think. But they weren’t, because it seems they were fired.

A Cedar Point spokesperson tells Consumerist:

“Cedar Point police arrested several off-duty employees as the result of an incident that took place early Sunday morning outside an employee dormitory complex. This is a rare incident and none of those involved are still employed at Cedar Point. We have thousands of employees who do a great job at Cedar Point each year.”

13 Cedar Point workers from Michigan arrested after brawl [The Detroit Free Press]

Move over Angie’s List and Yelp, Amazon is reportedly launching a new marketplace to connect consumers with everyday service providers such as plumbers, babysitters and magicians.

According to a report by Reuters, Amazon will begin testing the new venture this fall in order to gauge consumer interest and iron out logistics for the service.

The new service will be direct competition for consumer review sites such as Yelp and Angie’s List, as well as traditional retailers Home Depot and Lowe’s, both of which have worked to link consumers with local service providers in the past.

Services promoted in the marketplace would reportedly be backed by Amazon’s “A-to-Z Guarantee,” already used to vouch for items sold by third-party sellers on the site.

While officials with Amazon declined to comment on the matter, Reuters reports that the e-tailer has also been exploring ways to connect the new service with products already for sale on through the site. For example, Amazon recently ran a promotion offering installation serves to users who bought Nest thermostats.

Amazon reportedly reached out to several service companies and startups in recent months to get a feel for the operations of the marketplace. Officials with San Francisco-based startup Thumbtack say representatives from Amazon asked them several questions about the company’s growth strategy and consumers’ reception for services.

Reuters adds that a local services venture has long been the goal of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who has personally invested in a Seattle-based startup that helps customers find contractors and estimated costs for home improvements.

Exclusive: Amazon.com plans local services marketplace this year – sources [Reuters]

Tossing a bag of dog feces on someone’s property is the kind of thing you’d expect from an adolescent, or maybe some intoxicated adults acting like adolescents. It’s not the kind of behavior you’d ascribe to the mayor of an upscale town in Southern California.

And yet, Mayor Dennis Kneier of San Marino, CA, has been caught on video lobbing a sack o’ doggie diamonds onto the lawn of one of his neighbors. He claims it’s merely a mistake, while the homeowner believes it’s political payback.

Security camera footage shows the mayor and his wife strolling down the sidewalk on Saturday. In the mayor’s right hand is a tied-up bag of poop (which everyone assumes is from a dog). As he passes by the house in question, the mayor tosses the bag up the walkway and onto the yard.

After he was identified in the footage, the mayor, who apparently doesn’t own a dog, says that he spotted the bag of excrement against a lamppost elsewhere on the property and that he should have been more thoughtful about where he tossed it.

“I made a mistake of putting it in his walkway,” Kneier said. “Rather than leaving it, I should have walked on by or disposed of it properly.”

The homeowner contacted police, who agree that the tossing off the bag appears to be intentional. The video doesn’t show when or where the mayor picked up the poop used in his dirty bomb.

“This was a mistake, for which I apologize,” wrote the mayor in a letter the homeowner. “It won’t happen again.”

But the homeowner isn’t having any of it. He says the apology letter only makes matters worse by trying to put some of the blame on the homeowner — who also owns no dogs — for allegedly having dog poop on his property to begin with.

“I don’t care where it was — if it fell from heaven and he got it,” the homeowner tells the Pasadena Star-News. “Chances are he had picked it up from the park. There is a dog waste station about 20 feet into the park… That would be logical because there are lots of bags of dog poop. He brought it all the way and dropped it on our property.”

The homeowner believes that he was targeted because of his recent opposition to a dog park that the mayor supports. The mayor tells the Star-News that he is offended by the allegation, saying that people are free to have their own opinions.

Before you take the above headline straight to your dairy-loving hearts and faint dead away, rest assured that cheese in general is here to stay (especially if I have anything to say about it). But for some cheesemakers, the United States Food and Drug Administration’s recent crackdown on certain kinds of cheese aged on wooden boards is a worrisome issue, one that they say could change how they practice their craft.

The FDA announced recently that under the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act, it won’t allow cheesemakers to use wooden planks to ripen or age cheese, because “Wooden shelves or boards cannot be adequately cleaned and sanitized,” reports Slate.

“The porous structure of wood enables it to absorb and retain bacteria, therefore bacteria generally colonize not only the surface but also the inside layers of wood,” FDA representative Monica Metz says in a statement. “The shelves or boards used for aging make direct contact with finished products; hence they could be a potential source of pathogenic microorganisms in the finished products.”

Many cheeses have long been aged this way, including European cheeses like Beaufort, Comté, Reblochon and even Parmigiano Reggiano. The crackdown could restrict access to those cheeses, as well as affect American-made cheeses using those same methods.

Of course, no one wants listeria or other foodborne bugs in their cheese. But it’s other bacteria that cheesemakers adore that live in well-maintained boards, along with some fungi. That particularly medley gives each cheese its unique flavor, which is the reason anyone eats cheese. Because mmm, that cheese flavor. I love you. Where am I?

As a result of the recent announcement, cheesemakers across the country have been circulating a petition to the White House, asking it to pay attention to these pressing cheese matters, saying it would “devastate the American craft cheese industry.”

The FDA’s Misguided War on Bacteria That Makes Cheese Taste Good [Slate.com] (Thanks, KC!)

It’s a scene from millions of family vacations: a 2-year-old boy climbs up a decorative object that he shouldn’t while waiting in front of the hotel. That’s what two-year-olds do. During one Utah family’s visit to San Francisco, this toddler mischief turned horrific when a statue fell on the boy. He seemed fine at first, but died of internal injuries at a local hospital.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that police had cited the art gallery in the past, along with other nearby merchants that kept large displays on the sidewalk. Here’s a Google Street View grab of the outside of the gallery, with the dolphin statue in the middle.

According to police, the boy climbed up the statue and wrapped his limbs around it, causing it to become unbalanced and fall off its pedestal. The statue tipped over and landed on top of the boy when both fell to the ground.

On the scene, paramedics treated the boy for a bloody nose, then transported him to the hospital. While in the emergency department, his condition worsened, and he was pronounced dead about four hours after the accident.

The police officer in charge of the case notes that the art gallery and other businesses had been cited in the past for keeping large displays and merchandise out on the sidewalk. “For a couple of years now, the merchants have been warned,” he told the Chronicle.

The gallery is in the Fisherman’s Wharf area, and most of the sidewalk is under the jurisdiction of the Port of San Francisco, meaning that merchants can’t put anything on the sidewalk in front of the line. Police didn’t say whether the statue was placed behind the line, but the gallery was cited for having displays on the sidewalk.

Boy, 2, killed by falling statue at Fisherman’s Wharf [San Francisco Chronicle]

If you’ve looked at real estate in the last few years, you’ve almost certainly reviewed the listings on Zillow.com and you’re probably quite familiar with the “Zestimate,” the site’s automated approximation of what the property is worth. Some realtors say Zestimates are useless and cause confusion for their customers, while Zillow defends the data. Interestingly, both sides use the same stats to argue their case.

In dueling stories in today’s Washington Post, the chief information officer of a D.C.-area real estate company and Zillow’s chief economist provide very differing opinions of Zestimates, which the realtor describes as “wildly inaccurate and inconsistent.”

“Market pressures change from week to week and from neighborhood to neighborhood,” he writes. “No algorithm, however sophisticated, can quantify the value of a kitchen that was remodeled just before a home was put on the market or a yard that is poorly maintained. It simply isn’t possible for any AVM [automated valuation model] to predict the value of a home with a level of accuracy sufficient to make a housing decision.”

The popularity of Zillow, mixed with buyers’ and sellers’ desire to have some sort of definitive number to slap on a property, results in too many people looking at Zestimates as gospel instead of the mere starting point that the site intends them to be.

“[N]ot a week goes by that we don’t encounter a consumer who is fixated on a particular value for a home because that’s what Zillow says it is,” explains the realtor. “Kudos to Zillow for making this kind of impression on the public — brilliant marketing. But our research shows that, on average, those ‘Zestimates’ are within 5 percent of the actual value of a home just half of the time.”

Which, as he points out, is similar to Zillow’s own stats for the D.C. area.

The question is whether that it’s okay to be within 5% of the actual value half of the time.

Not surprisingly, the realtor says no.

“As real estate agents, if we got within 5 percent of the value of a home that infrequently we’d be out of business,” he claims. “So if consumers want to base their valuation of a home purchase or sale on what they find on the Internet, we suggest they take out a coin and flip it.”

He points out that this means that the other half of the time, the Zestimates can be 10-20% or worse off from the actual sale price. In fact, Zillow’s data shows that around 1-in-10 D.C.-area homes sells for more than 20% off (higher or lower) its Zestimate.

In a market like D.C., Northern Virginia, and Maryland, there are some pretty pricey houses, so being off by even 5% can easily mean $15,000 to $50,000 of a difference. And the problem is much worse in other markets. For example, in San Francisco — one of the most expensive areas to buy in the country — only 25% of Zestimates fall within 5% of the actual sale price.

Zillow defends Zestimates, saying they have not only improved in recent years (the realtor agrees with that) but that they now are similar to what you’d get from a human real estate agent.

Beyond that, Zillow says that Zestimates are just meant to provide a helpful snapshot and that the number calculated by its computers should not be taken as the definitive estimate.

“On its own, the Zestimate allows users to quickly answer a host of important questions,” writes the site’s chief economist. “Am I likely underwater on my mortgage? How much value has a homeowner gained or lost since buying? What is the value of this home, relative to a similar home in a different part of town?”

I took a look at the Zestimates for my neighborhood in Philadelphia and found some very confusing Zestimates. My neighbor to the right has a house Zestimated at 50% more than mine while the house to my left is Zestimated 30% less. Thing is, these are virtually identical properties; all the same size, number of rooms, built at the same time, etc.

If I believe the one neighbor’s Zestimate, I’d be an idiot not to sell and run off with a huge profit. But if I turn the other way, I’m underwater on my mortgage and won’t be able to sell for years.

“The Zestimate is also designed to be used in conjunction with many other pieces of information because we know there are decisions when sometimes you need more than a Zestimate,” writes the site’s economist. “In these cases, we always recommend supplementing the Zestimate with professional advice. Great agents provide services far beyond just pricing a home: assistance in negotiation, help with marketing and priceless peace of mind. A computer will never replace that.”

What all of this means is that Zestimates are just a number and they’re only based on publicly available data. It doesn’t know that the counters in a home are ugly as sin, or that the previous owner had a cat with a bladder-control problem, or that the seller has lovingly cared for every inch of the property for three decades.

No matter how much you wave it around and point to it with urgency, a Zestimate isn’t going to convince a stubborn seller to come down on a price or a bargain-hunting buyer to improve his offer.

When you hear the words fried chicken sandwich, you probably think of lunch or dinner, right? Well, if you’re at Dunkin’ Donuts you might want to rethink your classification, because that’s just considered a snack – all 640 calories of it.

Despite expanding their sandwich offerings in an attempt to attract the afternoon crowd, officials with Dunkin’ Donuts maintain the chain isn’t in the lunch business, but rather in the snacking business, The Washington Post reports.

“We’re not moving into lunch. We’re in snacking. We never talk about lunch,” Dunkin’ Donuts CEO Nigel Travis tells the newspaper.

Travis says by offering more sandwiches the chain is simply reacting to consumers tendency to eat several smaller meals throughout the day.

But a quick look at the Dunkin’ Donuts online menu would leave many consumers’ definitions of what constitutes a lunch or snack turned upside down.

The menu is packed with a variety of wraps, bagels, flatbreads and traditional sandwiches featuring fried chicken, bacon, cheese, as well as, chicken and tuna salads.

A bacon ranch chicken sandwich will run you 660 calories, while a healthier grilled chicken flatbread still comes in at a filling 360 calories.

How does the bacon ranch chicken sandwich at Dunkin’ compare to actual lunch offerings at other fast food restaurants? Pretty comparable.

The Premium Chicken Ranch BLT at McDonald’s actually has fewer calories than the Dunkin’ sandwich with just 590 calories. But add medium fries for a “real lunch” and you’ll be sitting at about 970 calories.

However, snacks at McDonald’s come in well below Dunkin’ Donuts’ “snacks”. The grilled chicken ranch snack wrap at McDonald’s carries just 270 calories.

Similar sandwiches at Wendy’s and Burger King clocked in with more calories than the Dunkin sandwich, but they still weren’t far off. The Wendy’s Asiago Ranch Chicken Club has 670 calories, while the Tendercrisp Chicken Sandwich at Burger King has 700 calories.

Just because the sandwiches come in quick on-the-go packaging and lack sides such as chips or french fries traditionally associated with lunches at other fast food joints that doesn’t mean they should be considered a snack.

Senior nutritionist Jayne Hurley with the Center for Science in the Public Interest tells Consumerist “snacks” like those offered at Dunkin’ Donuts are last thing consumers need.

“With ‘snacks’ like that who needs meals? No one thinks of a Big Mac as a snack, yet it has “only” 550 calories,” she says. “The last thing most people need is 600 calories inserted between lunch and dinner … especially since we’re increasingly eating 1,000-plus-calorie appetizers, entrees, and desserts.”

Instead a registered dietician tells the Post that snacks should be considered “small, satisfying potions of food that can help curb hunger or a craving between meals.”

Sure, a sandwich from Dunkin’ Donuts could fit that description, but a handful of nuts or a piece of fruit are better choices to fill the void between meals than a 660-calorie sandwich.

“That is a meal,” the dietician tells the Post. “I can’t think of a good example where I would recommend a 500-calorie snack.”

Dunkin’ CEO: Our sandwiches are snacks, not lunch [The Washington Post]

Marketers don’t really need to encourage Americans to eat cereal for dinner or for a late-night snack. We’re already doing that. Well, I am. Yet Kellogg’s has come out with special limited-edition packaging for some of their sugariest cereals to encourage us to snack on them in the evening hours, and at least one of our readers finds it inappropriate.

“I was kind of outraged when I saw the packaging encouraging kids to eat froot loops for dinner,” he said. The question is, are these boxes really marketed to kids? Are Froot Loops really what they want you to eat for dinner?

If you read the back of this Krave box, it looks like the idea is to encourage cereal as a late-night snack: maybe a replacement for milk and cookies. Marvo of food blog The Impulsive Buy notes that Kellogg’s “made limited edition nighttime packaging to encourage something I already do, which is eat sugary cereals before bedtime because I ran out of chips and ice cream.” Sugary cereal will never be the healthiest snack you can snack on, but it’s not a whole lot worse than milk and cookies. Heck, if you get out a box of Cookie Crisp, it is milk and cookies.

At first the idea of a mini Times Square sounds like a New Yorker’s worst nightmare — the real thing is bad enough, filled with swarms of slow-walking tourists and the glare of flashing billboards incessantly hawking whatever product can afford a spot there. But hey, not everyone can visit New York City, which is why a Moscow mall decided to bring that experience to Russia with a scale replica of the popular tourist destination.

As my younger self who lived a few blocks west of that area at one point can attest, Times Square can be hell on Earth for anyone trying to actually get somewhere — work, home to the couch after work — as opposed to visitors who flock to that area to check out the sights.

Because not everyone has access to such a sight, the scale replica at a Moscow mall has taken the trouble out of flying to NYC by creating a replica of the tourist hotspot that features all the fun of bright lights and big city, but without being an actual part of a city, reports UPI.

The VEGAS Crocus City mall enlisted Philips Lighting to brighten up the model with 16 million different colors, using the same technology that lights the Empire State Building and the London Eye. The billboards are there, along with TVs and even the TKTS podium selling discounted Broadway tickets. Except it doesn’t sell any actual tickets, I’m guessing.

“This ambitious project included a media facade and a unique light design that mimics the shopping area of Times Square, demonstrating the growth of our business as well as our local expertise. That’s why we are truly proud of what we have achieved today,” said Marina Tyschenko, the head of Philips Lighting in Russia and CIS.

And hey, at least no one is trying to get through the crowds to catch their morning train. Now if someone could just create a scale replica of my couch and set it up everywhere I feel like napping, that’d be great.

Moscow mall recreates mini-replica of Times Square [UPI.com]

While bulletproof products are nothing new, in light of the numerous school shootings in recent years, there’s now a new market for such items. From bulletproof backpacks to the newest offering of bulletproof blankets, companies are now in the business of protecting children at the place where they’re supposed to be focused on learning.

A company called ProTecht (get it?) says its Bodyguard Blanket is made from the same materials used by the U.S. military, and is a product that was conceived after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School as well as tornadoes in Oklahoma.

It doubles as either a shield against 90% of all weapons used in school shootings in the U.S. (according to the company), or as protection to “stop that blunt-force trauma when that rubble is falling down on a child,” reports the Oklahoman (via Buzzfeed).

The blanket comes with straps that fasten around wearers with a lightweight pad on the back that’s made from high-density plastic, the same kind used in ballistic armor. It also protects against nails, shards of metal or other sharp objects that might be flung about or shot at the user.

The company tested the blanket at a shooting range, standing up against a 12-gauge buckshot, a .22-caliber, and a 9 mm, as well as others.

The blankets come with a price tag of $1,000, and are meant to be stored in a classroom so kids can lock the door and put them on quickly.

“Instead of bending over and hoping for the best, they’re afforded an extra layer of protection,” ProTecht’s managing partner explains.

ProTecht is now encouraging school administrators to adopt the Bodyguard Blanket as part of their lockdown protocol.

“It’s just sad that we’ve come to this in society, but that’s where we are,” the managing partner said, referring to recent shootings. “This thing gives kids an option, an alternative that will give them an opportunity to survive.”

Oklahomans develop blanket to protect youngsters in tornadoes or shootings [The Oklahoman]

If you’re looking to leave a very special tip for your Waffle House server, do it with cash. That’s the lesson learned from the story of one WH waitress in North Carolina who couldn’t keep the 4-digit tip left by a generous customer.

The server, a seven-year veteran of a Raleigh Waffle House, was working the overnight shift on Mother’s Day weekend when a local businessman wrote in a $1,500 tip on his credit receipt with the instruction that $500 of that be given to a needy-looking fellow diner in the adjoining booth.

But that tip just went back into the customer’s account instead of into the pockets of the server and the other diner.

“I feel like they stole from me,” the waitress tells the News and Observer. “They did exactly what they teach us not to do.”

A rep for the restaurant chain explained that, in order to preempt possible disputes from customers, company policy is to refund oversize credit card tips to customers and that big tippers should be asked to show their generosity via cash or check.

“It sounds weak to me,” writes the News and Observer’s Josh Shaffer. “You’re denying your workers a benefit based on a worst-case scenario. Nobody carries $1,000 in cash to a Waffle House, and plenty of people leave the checkbook at home.”

My college years in Virginia are full of late-night outings to Waffle House, which was often packed with revelers packing on the carbs, proteins, and starches in an effort to prevent hangovers. My guess is that Waffle House has probably has had to deal with its fair share of morning-after disputes from customers who, no longer intoxicated, regretted leaving substantial tips on their middle-of-the-night meals.

So a policy presumably intended to prevent the headache of fighting chargebacks appears to have turned into a bit of a PR headache for the restaurant chain.

Shaffer was able to provide the waitress’s contact info to the tipper, who says he is sending the server a personal check to make sure she gets the tip he’d wanted to leave.

[via Eater]

Washington Post

Fairfax County adopt a pet Washington Post Luna, left, a 7-year-old spayed domestic shorthair, is available from the Fairfax County Animal Shelter. Jade, center, a sleek, silky female, is available from the Humane Society of Fairfax County. Cece, a female domestic longhair, is about 2 years old ... and more »

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Road Rage: Man shatters car window with pipe W*USA 9 MANASSAS, Va. (WUSA9) -- Prince William County police have arrested a man who they say shattered another man's window with a pipe during a road rage. Loading… Post to Facebook. Road Rage: Man shatters car window with pipe MANASSAS, Va. and more »

32 Tibetan Terriers seized from Prince William Co. home in anima - DC News ... MyFox Washington DC Join the conversation on our Facebook page! Like us and tell us what stories matter to you. Join the conversation on our Facebook page! Like us and tell us what stories matter to you. MANASSAS, Va. -. A prominent D.C. lawyer and dog breeder facing ... and more »

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