McDo Food Poisoning

.

There’s a pair of email forwards going around now about food poisoning cases in local branches of McDonald’s. (Manila, Philippines, in case you didn’t know.) Specifically the branches in Glorietta Makati and Intramuros. I tracked down the emails by the signatures attached and contacted the people purportedly involved, and from what I’ve heard from them, these emails are true. It sounds like McDonald’s offered to settle with the family for the medical bills of the victims, but the family is suing for time lost at work and “emotional damages” as well. Uh-huh.

Well, here’s the FB4F page about it. Looks like this isn’t a hoax. McDonald’s Philippines, however, is keeping annoyingly silent on the issue — to their loss. From what I’ve seen on PEX, people are getting scared, and lots of McDo branches aren’t always as crowded as they used to be.

There’s a PEX topic on this too, in the Food and Drinks forum.

Update: The whole thing is an old issue by now, but remember that food poisoning incidents such as this are not as uncommon or catastrophic as the email makes it out to be, and remember that email forwarding campaigns are never a reliable way to spread word about such troubles, since the medium has no gatekeepers, and unscrupulous folk can add, subtract, or edit details to fit their own agendas or senses of humor.

Of Chickens and Roads

.

Something about the riddle that goes, “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

CHICKEN

“Why did the chicken cross the road?” is an old nursery riddle, and a lesson in flawed circular logic. The answer, “To get to the other side”, is really no answer at all, in that it gives no reason as to why the chicken crossed the road, but rather what it means to cross a road in the first place: getting to the other side of the road. The person who pauses to try and answer the question as to why a chicken would cross a road — without having been given any more data to work out a decent premise — cannot accept “To get to the other side” as an answer. That is not an answer to the “Why,” but to the “What” of crossing roads.

The true answer to the riddle is that there is not enough information given. The fact that it refers to “THE” chicken as though it were a primary character in some narrative assumes that there is more to this story than meets the eye. If the question were phrased as “Why does A chicken cross the road?”, then it could be taken to refer to chickens in general, and from there we could infer something about the generic nature of chickens and what in that nature would stimulate them to the crossing-of-roads.

But no, the question is about THE chicken, which means we are dealing with an individual chicken, with its own individual stimuli and background — which are not referred to in sufficient or even insufficient detail to infer any reason for it to cross the road. We can only be satisfied that it did cross the road, and that it did indeed reach the other side safely, much to the disdain of intellectuals everywhere.

The Realm of Thought

.

The Realm of Thought, a new forum on PinoyExchange, moderated by yours truly. This will be the forum for discussions in philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences. I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing a lot of atheists and other self-styled intellectuals frequenting this part of the board. I myself will exercise a more-or-less laissez-faire policy concerning moderation of this board. (No one listens to Bible truth online much anyway, unless they’re already Bible-believing Christians to begin with.) It’s turning out well, though, except for a few of those trolls who like wreaking havoc.

Cosmic Baby Steps

.

The space shuttle lifted off today on a mission to the International Space Station. I’m excited about the space station. We’re finally getting our space dreams for the 21st century in gear. Better late then never.

But there’s still a long way to go. Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of 2001 was far too premature; we’re nowhere near that level of technological advancement today. Even the ISS is a far cry from the launch-pad cum space-hub that we envisioned our space stations would be in the 1960’s. This is just the testing ground, the schematics, not even a working prototype.

Premill Portents

.

Here’s an interesting blog from a biblical Christian (as far as I can tell, anyway) who is scanning current events for the unfolding of biblical prophecy. He seems calm and rational about it, not alarmist or overly presumptuous like a lot of pre-millenial born-again doomsayers.

Memnocch on PEX

.

Why are there people like this on the Net, I wonder? This Memnocch loser has been posting disruptively pornographic or flame-ish posts all over PEX, and now he claims that he’s invincible to do what he likes on the board. We may soon ban him.

Kit-Kat

.

Ahhh. Few things are more delicious than original American Kit-Kat. Not the Malaysian or Australian export varieties with their grainy-sugary texture, mind you, but the actual chocolate itself from America. Rich, sweet, wafery KitKat. Mmmm.

Not quite Network Admin just yet…

.

It took me two days, but I finally figured out how to get this LAN to connect through the office hub’s dialup access. Of course, I eventually gave up on Win98 ICS and obfuscated network configurations in WinNT4, so I downloaded WinGate instead.