pileofcrapola

Car-scratch repair pens are not magic. They might help you patch up light scratches on your car, sure, but they aren’t magic. What our gently buffed colleagues down the hall at Consumer Reports discovered when they tested some popular pens advertised for quick scratch repair. One problem with the products: a paint with no color can’t replace colored paint that has been scratched away.

That’s not a problem when you just have a fine scratch on the clear coat of your vehicle. That’s the kind of damage that pens like the DuPont Pro Fusion Color or the Turtle Wax Scratch Repair Pen are supposed to fix. The problem, CR notes, is that the pens are advertised as working on “all colors” of car paint, and you can’t blame consumers who don’t know better for assuming that this means it will fix all scratches. Even scratches that go down below the colored pain.

Once a scratch is severe enough, you’ll be stuck patching up the paint, adding your own clear coat, and then sanding it down to a smooth finish. Or you could just leave it. Spending $10 or so on one of these pens when it isn’t going to cover the real damage to the paint, though, isn’t worth your time.

Car scratch repair pens [Consumer Reports]

The future is slowly becoming something out of a Ray Bradbury story, as houses and everything in them get more interconnected. Devices become “smart,” able to foresee your needs and accommodate them before you even knew you needed a thing. But it’s not all self-driving Google cars and iPad-ready smoke detectors. New to the fray? A big ass ceiling fan that takes care of your room for you… whether you tell it to do so or not.

The description is literal; the company is, in fact, called Big Ass Fans. And, as GigaOm reports, their new home product is, well, basically a robot.

Robots, GigaOm explains, are devices that can make autonomous decisions. So a homeowner setting a thermostat to cool the house to 74 degrees at 8 a.m. is just telling a program to run, but a cooling system that, unprompted, analyzes the time of day, sunlight, indoor and outdoor temperatures, and decides to set the house to 74 degrees is robotic.

That’s what the Big Ass fans are supposed to do. As you use it more and more, it “learns” what you like and then starts pre-emptively acting accordingly. Do you tend to get cold and turn the fans off at a certain temperature or time of day? In theory, this fan will start doing that for you.

Company CEO Carey Smith told GigaOm that sure, a user can use the related app and “teach” the fan to do certain things. But, Smith added, that’s not really what it’s about — nor, he thinks, what people really want.

“We don’t think in general you want to play around with apps,” Smith told GigaOm. “And we think that 100 years from now people will think it’s amusing that you even ever thought about these things. It’s a waste of personal energy to have to think about that.”

Of course, robot brains aren’t cheap. A standard home ceiling fan tends to run somewhere in the $35 – $300 range. So how does the Big Ass fan compare?

At launch, the lineup of robot fans will start at $895, Smith told GigaOm. Ouch. The future where our rooms will predictively self-cool may be coming, but given the price tag, most folks will probably choose to take a few seconds to flick a switch for some years yet.

Big Ass Fans’ new ceiling fan is really a robot [GigaOm]

With this that and the other thing getting recalled on what feels like a daily basis, maybe you feel like you don’t have the time to stay abreast of what foods aren’t safe to eat. That’s why the Food and Drug Administration has started its very own Flickr account to alert consumers when products are recalled. The more you know, the less you end up clinging to the bathroom floor for dear life in extreme gastrointestinal distress. H/T to The Verge [FDA Recalled Products 2014 on Flickr]

If you don’t like the idea of grasshoppers descending on your town like a creepy, crawly blanket of bugs, stop reading now. Because while that’s probably not exactly what Albuquerque feels like right now, there’s an invasion of grasshoppers in that area right now so dense that the bugs are showing up on weather radar.

I can just imagine the conversation meteorologists had with that one…

“There are bugs on the radar.” “What? THe radar has a bug? Call IT.” “No, I mean… grasshoppers. Lots of’em.”

It’s the worst grasshopper infestation in the area in 20 years, reports ABC News, citing officials who have seen the insects on the radar. Officials with the National Weather Service says the critters make it look like it’s raining, when it’s just bugs. Lots of bugs.

“We have actually been noticing the insects on radar since about Memorial Day,” said NWS spokesman David Craft. “We have noticed the greatest impact on the radar during the evening, but they are noticeable at other times of the day, too.”

So what’s a few bugs here and there? Well, unless you like bugs flying in your face at any point while you’re running, walking or generally being outside, plants getting eaten up and are a fan of dead bug goop all over your car while driving, you probably wouldn’t like this many grasshoppers.

The plague is the result of a dry winter, which didn’t kill off all the egg pots the cold weather usually does, explained one professor. That, combined with hungry bugs coming from the lackluster feeding grounds on the open range has made it rough for all the residents with thick, green lawns prime for the chowing.

But don’t go spraying pesticides like crazy, warn officials — it’s not going to help anything.
“Some people are freaked out about them, others fear they will bring disease, and some folks want different agencies to spray to control them,” said a rep from the the Bernalillo County Cooperative Extension Service.

If you want to keep your garden safe in Albuquerque, cover your plants, the BCCES rep explained.

“We are encouraging gardeners to cover plants. Insecticide sprays are ineffective and not recommended. Grasshoppers are flying upwards of 3-5 miles,” he told ABC News. “If an insecticide for the home gardener is used, it may kill a few grasshoppers, but more will be flying in. The more the homeowner sprays, this will negatively impact other insect species as well as the plant growth,.”

Getting antsy being around so many bugs? You’ll just have to wait it out, he adds.

“As with everything this too shall pass.”

Anyone else having flashbacks to reading By The Shores Of Silver Lake where the Ingalls family (spoiler alert) had to leave Minnesota because grasshoppers were eating everything? We’re with you, Albuquerque. Don’t move to South Dakota just yet.

Grasshopper Swarms So Dense They Show Up on Radar [ABC News]

Sometimes we have questions from you, our fresh-faced and bright-eyed Consumerist readers, that we just don’t have an answer for. And when that happens, we will move heaven and earth to get the answers. Or just you know, look into things. Thus it was with the Mystery Of Velveeta Cheese Slices And Differing Calorie Counts.

If there’s anything I like on this big blue marble, it’s talking about cheese (eating it comes first, of course). So gather round, everyone, for a tale from reader Paul, who sent in a very valid question with the above photo:

“All Velveeta is not created equal!” he wrote, saying that while shopping he happened upon a bit of a strange caloric phenomenon. “I discovered that the 16-slice package of Velveeta had a calorie count of 40 calories per slice while the 24-slice package of Velveeta had a calorie count of 35 calories per slice. How is this possible?”

How, indeed? The answer is pretty simple — turns out if you want a bit more of a cheese-like punch per slice, you should buy the 16-slice package. Per a spokeswoman from Kraft Foods:

“This is a great question and the answer is quite simple. The weight of the individual slices in the two packages is actually slightly different. In a 12 oz. package, which has 16 slices, each slice is .75 ox or 21g. In a 16 oz. package, which has 24 slices, each slice is .67 oz. or 19g. Because the weight of the individual slices in the 12 oz. package is slightly greater, the calorie count is also slightly higher. If you compare this to similar products, you’ll find the same thing in most cases.”

There you have it. The fatter the cheese slice, the more calories. And now you know, and we can all rest easy tonight, at last.

With medical marijuana now legal in nearly half the country and pot now a legal retail item in Washington and Colorado, it would make sense that the nation’s tobacco companies would be seeing the potential for making green from green. And a new report uncovers documents showing that the tobacco industry has been thinking about marijuana long before most of the people who smoke it today were even born.

Researchers, led by Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, Director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at UC San Francisco, searched through the mountain of tobacco company documents that the industry was forced to make public as part of a legal action, and which are now housed in the UCSF Legacy Tobacco Documents Library.

Their report, just published in the health policy journal Milbank Quarterly, unearthed a treasure trove of correspondence on the industry’s interest and research into marijuana going back to the 1960s.

“From all I can gather from the literature, from the press, and just living among young people, I can predict that marihuana smoking will have grown to immense proportions within a decade and will probably be legalized,” reads a note from a professor at the University of Virginia (go Hoos!) who supervised the Philip Morris Fellowship in Chemistry to the manager of chemical and biological research at the company’s research laboratories. “The company that will bring out the first marihuana smoking devices, be it a cigarette or some other form, will capture the market and be in a better position than its competitors to satisfy the legal public demand for such products. I want to suggest, therefore, that you institute immediately a research program on all phases of marihuana.”

Eventually, Philip Morris reached out to the Justice Dept. to figure out how it could research pot without getting in trouble — and more importantly without the public knowing about it, presumably out of fear that this could damage the company’s reputation and tip PM’s hand to the competition about what it was working on.

A 1969 Philip Morris memo mentions that the Chief of the Drug Sciences Division at the DOJ was “most anxious to have the smoke from Cannabis sativa analyzed the way smoke from tobacco is analyzed.”

This later led to a back and forth where a deal was made that the DOJ would officially request that PM undertake this research that the government could not afford to do.

“We will be pleased to carry out these analyses on a gratuitous and confidential basis, reads a Dec. 1969 letter from a Philip Morris exec to the DOJ. “[W]e request that there be no publicity whatsoever given to our willingness to perform this work and to receive samples for that purpose.”

The DOJ official wrote back that he didn’t see a reason this confidentiality couldn’t be honored.

In a letter to Philip Morris dated Christmas Eve 1969, the DOJ official suggests that the best way to obtain samples confidentially would be to avoid the traditional route of applying with the Psychotomimetic Advisory Committee, “since that application then becomes rather well known.”

Instead, he suggests that Philip Morris apply to the District Director of Internal Revenue for a tax stamp as a Class V researcher.

“Perhaps it would be of value if I were to visit your laboratory and discuss with your people some of the methods used, size of sample needed, etc.,” reads the letter, “so that when you receive the tax stamp, I can have enough information to make the request for cannabis in my name, thus preserving your anonymity.”

In early 1970, the Philip Morris execs who made this deal with the DOJ then took the idea to the company’s top management, once again employing the pretense that it was not an internal, corporate idea, but a request being made from the Nixon administration.

“We can hardly refuse this request under any circumstances,” reads the memo. “[W]e regard it as an opportunity to learn something about this controversial product, whose usage has been increasing, so rapidly among the young people.”

The letter goes on to explain that, hey, maybe we should consider being in the marijuana business:

“We are in the business of relaxing people who are tense and providing a pick up for people who are bored or depressed. The human needs that our product fills will not go away,” explains the memo. “Thus, the only real threat to our business is that society will find other means of satisfying these needs.”

Thus the notion of others providing marijuana as a competing product “strongly suggests that we should learn as much as possible about this threat to our present product.”

And in fact, among many younger Americans, pot is more popular than tobacco, with nearly 1-in-4 high school seniors having smoked marijuana while only about 1-in-6 had smoked cigarettes. In the last 15 years, the rate of high schoolers smoking pot has maintained while the rate of cigarette smoking among this age group has been cut in half.

Yet because it remains illegal in the eyes of the federal government, the tobacco industry isn’t officially working on any sort of marijuana products.

“Our companies have no plans to sell marijuana-based products,” a spokesman for Altria Group Inc., the parent company of Philip Morris, tells the L.A. Times. “We don’t do anything related to marijuana at all.”

Likewise, a rep for R.J. Reynolds tells the Times that research that took place in a previous era doesn’t matter now.

“I cannot begin to speculate on the thinking of management more than 20 years ago,” said the rep. “Regarding the current cannabis market, we are not pondering any expansion or involvement in that market, nor do we conduct any research into marijuana.”

Medicinal drugs can be beneficial, even lifesaving — but not, always, in combination with each other. Putting two and two together in the human body can cause a million different unexpected, unintended, downright harmful side effects. Until now, those “adverse interactions” have been difficult to research, sort through, and track. But today, the FDA is launching a new initiative designed to let members of the public have access to, and make sense of, all the data.

The OpenFDA project is starting with nearly a decade’s worth of information, covering reported drug interactions and errors from 2004 through 2013. It’s no small amount of data; there are about 3.6 million adverse interaction reports in there from those nine years.

Anyone who wants to can query the dataset. It’s not quite designed for individuals like the CSPC complaints database, though, with an easy web-based view.

Instead, the FDA has just launched an API that taps into all this data. An API (application programming interface) is the thing that lets people make a program that talks to someone else’s program, basically. So, for example, game designers can use the an API provided by Facebook to design apps for the social site.

That means software developers can now build their own tools to access the FDA data through this API, and to present it in different ways — everything from a table of data to a fully interactive map.

Making the data available as a large, sprawling set is more useful to anyone who needs or wants to spot patterns: what kind of mistakes are being made? By who? Where? What interactions happen most commonly, that more medical professionals and consumers should be educated about? Which are most rare, and therefore easy to miss? Public health researchers, analysts, medical professionals, drug companies, health insurance companies, and anyone else with the time and inclination can now call on the drug interaction API with their own programs to dig into the data looking for the information they need.

They FDA does plan to expand their open data initiative, they added in their announcement, but needed to start somewhere and so the pilot program deals with the millions of adverse drug interactions that were previously only accessible “through difficult to use reports or Freedom of Information Act requests,” not with a few clicks of the mouse.

FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data [FDA, via The Verge]

Some nights, I dream of a time when there won’t be any ridiculous calls to 9-1-1 reporting all the various non-emergencies we’ve reported on in the past. It’s a good thing I’m an optimistic person who loves to sleep a lot, because I might be dreaming for a while. I’m talking to you, guy who allegedly called 9-1-1 repeatedly because his wife threw his beer out.

After a Florida man called 9-1-1, police arrived on the scene to find that the reason for his calls was that his wife had “thrown out his beer,” reports WPBF.com.

According the arrest report, the man appeared intoxicated (not that we haven’t heard of perfectly sober people being just as ninnymugged as drunk people) and police informed him that the loss of his booze wasn’t a reason to call 9-1-1.

That didn’t appear to sway him whatsoever, as he reportedly called 9-1-1 again and was uncooperative with the operator, allegedly refusing to say what his emergency was. He called back again and started yelling that a woman outside had broken into two of his beers.

Where I come from, we call that “cracking into a cold one.”

When he’d called 9-1-1 seven times over four hours, police arrested him and charged the man with misuse of the 9-1-1 emergency system for making a false alarm or complaint or reporting false information.

Man called 911 on wife for ‘throwing out his beer,’ police say [WPBF.com]

Back in 2010, an Army sergeant in Hawaii was chowing down on food bought from an on-base Burger King when he claims he chomped into some needles that were definitely not on the nutritional info for the sandwich. Now, after years of negotiating a settlement have proved fruitless, he’s suing both the fast food chain and the Army and Air Force Exchange that sold him the burger.

According to the AP, the now-former soldier not only got pricked in the tongue by a needle from his Triple Stacker sandwich, but that he later required hospitalization after a needle became lodged in his small intestine.

Burger King is pointing the finger at the government, as the Exchange operates the BK in question.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney representing the Exchange tried to have the case dismissed, arguing that the plaintiff can’t sue because he suffered these injuries during the course of military service.

But the judge in the case brushed that argument aside, pointing out that the plaintiff was actually home sick that day; all he did was eat some BK that his wife had purchased for him.

“Eating a Burger King Triple Whopper (equally available to the military or general public) while at home on a sick day does not implicate military command or discipline,” wrote the judge.

“Him going to war in Iraq has nothing to do with him going to Burger King,” the plaintiff’s wife explains to the AP. She says she’s “disgusted” that they could not reach a settlement on the matter.

“I think we’re more irritated than anything,” she says. “We’re not in Hawaii, so now we have to spend even more money to fly to Hawaii to have a trial when everyone agrees someone screwed up.”

Prince William County crime report Washington Post Prince William County. These were among incidents reported by Prince William County police. For information, call 703-792-7245. PORTSMOUTH, ENGLAND - JUNE 03: British Normandy Veterans (L) Joe Cattini, ...

It is a virus that kills more people each year than AIDS, and yet most know little about it: Hepatitis C.

Britain's fertility regulator says controversial techniques to create embryos from the DNA of three people "do not appear to be unsafe" even though no one has ever received the treatment, according to a new report released Tuesday.

The fanatic passion Delneri Viana holds for his beloved Botafogo soccer club really gets under his skin -- 83 times and counting.

A former Blue Angels commander tolerated inappropriate sexual comments and pornographic images in the workplace -- including photos of naked women in the cockpits of the precision flying team's planes -- during his time as its leader, the Navy said Tuesday.

A former Blue Angels commander tolerated inappropriate sexual comments and pornographic images in the workplace during his time as leader of the famed precision flying team and will be given a letter of reprimand, the Navy said Tuesday.

Some Utah high school students who cracked their yearbooks to find sleeves digitally added to their tank tops and a tattoo erased say school officials have apologized to them.

Panera will announce a big change coming to its menus: no more artificial additives.

Which scares you more: Hurricane Victor or Hurricane Victoria? People are slightly less likely to flee an oncoming storm with a feminine name than a masculine one, a new study finds.

The mayor of the hometown of a recently released U.S. soldier is urging Americans not to judge Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl (boh BURG'-dahl) until all the facts are in.

The Virginia Health Department is advising consumers not to drink Marva Maid Dairy milk in half-pint containers with sell-by dates from May 30 through June 2.

The Virginia medical examiner's office says Dave Brockie, the frontman for the heavy metal band GWAR, died of an accidental heroin overdose.

5, after crossing the Tydings Bridge get off at Perryville and take Route 1. Stay on Route 1 past Longwood Gardens, and then get onto Route 322. That will bring you back to I-95, past the bridge. EARLIER: RANDALL CHASE Associated Press

A Hagerstown woman who smothered her 2-month-old daughter by passing out drunk on top of her while breast-feeding is going to jail.

Fairfax County transportation officials announced Tuesday that a new bus route will begin running when the Silver Line opens to take passengers from Wiehle Avenue to Dulles International Airport and the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center.

Kyle Larson lingered near his car waiting for the race to begin at Dover International Speedway when British television presenter Cherry Healey joined him on the concrete. Kneeling next to a rear tire, Healey snapped a selfie with NASCAR's newest star.

Do you remember if you still have a Myspace account? You know, that social media site with all the blinged out backgrounds and angsty blogs, the friend network that time forgot? Myspace is still alive, and it’s out there thinking about how much fun you two used to have, how much fun you could still have, if only you remembered it existed.

Maybe Myspace was having a rough night and a few too many slugs of the ol’ 1s and 0s (clearly binary code is the booze of the Internet because just go with it), and there was no one to tell it not to email its ex, no matter how “chill” it promised the overall tone of the missive to be.

But whatever the case may be, users who still have accounts on the site might’ve gotten an email over the weekend just to say hey, remember your photos? They’re still out there.

According to the Washington Post, thousands of former users got an email from their former buddies at Myspace with the subject line “Your Photos are Back!” Going to assume that “From the dead!” is implicated in that statement.

The marketing email goes on to explain that you’ve still got “the good, the rad, and the what were you thinking” out there. Yep. You put that on Myspace. And also that. If you want to see it, you’ll have to log in again, see?

The company tells Mashable: “Myspace has been reaching out to current and past users to re-engage them through a personalized experience.”

Which loosely translates to, “Maybe by looking at old photos of yourself doing god knows what, you’ll be more inclined to like our totally redesigned site that is now focused on music, or something.”

Next time, have your best friend take your phone away before you hit the binary bottle, friend. Drunk emailing is never as good idea the next morning as it was the night before.

Myspace still exists, and it’s desperate enough to blackmail you into logging in [Washington Post]
Myspace Is Embarrassing Users With Old Photos to Win Them Back [Mashable]

Five years ago, a large shipment of Nike sneakers were supposed to go from the shoe company’s distribution center in Tennessee to another center in Texas. The $3 million worth of footwear vanished en route but recently turned up in a house in Kentucky.

A woman in Radcliff, KY, and her daughter tell WLKY-TV that they had bought the load of sneakers off another woman and were selling them for $5 a pair.

“Apparently Nike had called and contacted them and the shoes were stolen and they had been stolen since 2009 and there were three million dollars worth of shoes in my front yard,” says the seller, who claims to have had no idea the sneaks were stolen. “They confiscated all of them.”

Her daughter, still sporting some Air Jordans from the huge stash o’ shoes, describes the massive array of footwear they had spread out on their lawn.

“I can’t even tell you how many shoes we had, it was unbelievable,” she recalls to WLKY. “There was flip flops, there was Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian heels… Expensive shoes.”

They said that during the week they would sort through the piles of shoes to match up correct pairs and then sell them at the flea market.

“I’ll sit there for not even two hours and make $200,” says the daughter.

No one has been arrested yet, but we’re curious with what Nike will do with a boatload of 5-year-old stolen shoes.

Police are investigating after finding $3 million worth of missing shoes at a central Kentucky home.
Media outlets report that officers with the Radcliff Police Department confiscated thousands of pairs of Nike shoes that were scattered in front of the home.
According to a search warrant filed last week, the shoes were supposed to be shipped in 2009 from a Nike distribution center in Tennessee to another one in Texas, but never made it.
The women who were in possession of the shoes said they had purchased them from someone else and didn’t know they were stolen.

They said they were selling them at a flea market.
Police are investigating. No arrests have been made.

Read more: http://www.wlky.com/news/Missing-shoes-found-at-Hardin-County-home/26257554#ixzz33V6ngOHK

When you pay $30 per month for a security system, you sort of expect to get a working security system. At least, most people would. Not in Comcastlandia, the strange world ruled by the corporate policies of Comcast. A Houston family started alarm service in 2007, and then learned from experience that their alarm system wasn’t working. And hadn’t in the entire seven years that they had been paying for service.

Fortunately, they didn’t learn that their alarm was offline after a break-in or any of the other things that an alarm system is supposed to prevent. Every time the family left the house, they would set the alarm, and it would act as if it were activating. Then, one day they found the back door sitting open when they came home. The alarm was set, and should have gone off. It didn’t.

It turns out that this was no mere temporary glitch. The alarm had never worked. Comcast determined that the alarm had been offline since some point in 2007. While it’s nice that the family had a pretend alarm system to reassure them for the better part of a decade, they are somewhat annoyed that they sent Comcast three grand to provide security services and got nothing in return.

“I’m a loyal customer and my thing is I don’t mind paying for a service if you’re providing the service,” the lady of the house told local news station KPRC, “but they weren’t.”

Comcast countered that the seven years of non-service weren’t their fault, since the user agreement says that customers are supposed to test their systems monthly. If the system is offline and the customer hasn’t tested it, that makes everything the customer’s fault. Comcast offered the couple a $20 credit.

Once a local TV station got involved, of course, Comcast paid closer attention. The company says that they’re going to refund all of the money that the household paid for their non-alarm system over the years.

If you do have an alarm system, make sure that you follow any instructions in the user agreement about testing.

Alarm insecurity: Will your home alarm work when you need it? [KPRC] (Thanks, Amy!)

FURTHER READING:
The Hidden Cost of False Alarms

The last time we noted the first display of Christmas decorations at Hobby Lobby was in 2010, when they first put out the decorative items in mid-June. That’s only about six months before the holiday, though: clearly they’ve been missing out on some sales. That’s why this year, the Christmas decorations are out before the end of May.

Reader Justin liberally decorated his e-mail to Consumerist with festive question marks. “Seriously??? Christmas creep before June??” he wrote. “Why even take it down at all?”

A Pentagon investigation concluded in 2010 that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl walked away from his unit, and after an initial flurry of searching the military decided not to exert extraordinary efforts to rescue him, according to a former senior defense official who was involved in the matter.