Get Cynical

Ugh:

A 16-year-old who went on a drunken night of debauchery that ended with four innocent bystanders dead and two of his friends seriously injured got probation for his crimes. A judge decided that because the boy was rich, he didn’t know he would get in trouble.

Ethan Couch admitted to all of his crimes. He and seven of his friends stole alcohol from a Walmart, got wasted and piled into Couch’s pick-up truck. After speeding along at 70 miles an hour in a 40 mph speed limit zone, he struck and killed four pedestrians who were standing by their cars on the side of the road. Two of his friends, who were riding in the bed of his truck, were thrown from the vehicle and critically injured. One remains in the hospital with severe brain damage. Nine other bystanders were also injured. At the time of the wreck, Couch’s blood alcohol level was four times the legal limit.

How a person goes from all that damage and winds up with 10 years of probation is an odd story.

Prosecutors were hoping to send Couch to jail for up to 20 years, but the defense made the case for why Couch should be let go with just an ankle bracelet and a court order to go to rehab for a while. Their main line of argument was that Couch was actually a victim too. His parents enjoyed a life of wealth and privilege and due to that never bothered to teach Couch that actions had consequences, an expert brought in to defend Couch dubbed the condition “affluenza.”

From Eater.com:

Here’s a cafe that’s being proactive about customer behavior towards waitstaff: A Nice-Matin reporter tweeted a photo of the menu at La Petite Syrah in Nice, France, where customers who order their coffee politely are charged significantly less than those who don’t. Customers who order their coffee with a “bonjour” and a “s’il vous plaît” (hello and please, respectively) are charged €1.40 ($1.93 USD). A coffee ordered with no greeting but with “s’il vous plaît” costs €4.25 ($5.85), and a coffee ordered simply as “un café” costs €7 ($9.63).

The cafe owner tells the Local that the tiered pricing structure started as a joke, a response to “very stressed” and “sometimes rude” lunch customers. “I know people say that French service can be rude,” he adds “but it’s also true that customers can be rude when they’re busy.” Apparently there has been an improvement in customer attitude.

From Consumerist:

Someone at a Missouri Sonic Drive-in chose to express both their support for the Kansas City Chiefs and their utter ignorance by using the restaurant’s sign to post a message that combined nearly every offensive Native American stereotype into one garbled statement.

“‘KC CHIEFS’ WILL SCALP THE REDSKINS FEED THEM WHISKEY SEND – 2 – RESERVATION,” read the sign outside the Sonic in Belton, MO, referencing yesterday’s game between the Chiefs and the Redskins.

After a passerby snapped the above photo and posted it to Twitter, the story took off, with people calling for the sign to be removed and for Sonic to issue an apology.

Related:
Redskins’ Kike Owner Refuses To Change Team’s Offensive Name

Naissance de "Sympathy for the devil " (one+one… by cinocheproduction

So awesome:

After the Rolling Stones’ partly misguided, partly inspired attempt at psychedelia, Their Satanic Majesties Request, the band found its footing again in the familiar territory of the Delta Blues. But with the 1968 recording of Beggar’s Banquet, they also retained some of the previous album’s experimentation, taken in a more sinister direction on the infamous “Sympathy for the Devil.” In the studio, with the band during those recording sessions, was none other than radical French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, who brought his own experimental sensibilities to a project he would call One Plus One, a document of the Stones’ late sixties incarnation—including an increasingly reclusive Brian Jones. Godard punctuates the fascinating studio scenes of the Stones with what Andrew Hussey of The Guardian calls “a series of set pieces—an incoherent stew of Situationism and other Sixties stuff”:

Dan Burns explains his space-time warping demo at a PTSOS workshop at Los Gatos High School, on March 10, 2012.

Emirates 777 go around at Birmingham Airport due to high winds – Thursday 5 December. This aircraft tried a second approach at BHX but wasn’t successful so diverted to London Gatwick.