Exploding Patio Sets?
OK, not really… but now that I have your attention, let me tell you what happened this past weekend. It was Saturday, a relatively warm, cloudy day here in New Jersey. Like every Saturday for the past few months, my routine was the same, I would go out on my back deck, enjoy a cup of coffee and my morning cigarette (yes, I know… don’t go there), the dogs run around the yard, and then I get ready and head off to the gym. So like every other Saturday morning, I knew exactly what the condition of the yard was (mostly I note whether I will be mowing or doing yard work that day). Nothing was particularly amiss or out of the usual.
As I was coming home, TheWife calls me and says the our patio set is “broken” (I really must speak to her about her ability to understate a situation). I arrived home to find that the tempered glass top of our patio set had shattered into nothing but a chards of glass. I mean tiny. The pieces were so small that you could fit two or three of them on a dime. I found this quite baffling. Now granted tempered glass is supposed to break in a way that prevents thos huge sharp edges from forming, but in the past, I had only seen the tiny pieces at point of impact when something broke the glass, and the rest sort of hung together in a “sheet” of broken pieces. In this case the entire tabletop was completely in chards. I did my best Gil Grissom imitation (other than taking photos… dammit), looking for a cause. There were no rocks, sticks, branches from a tree or other projectiles within the rubble. The ring that protects the center hold where the umbrella goes had fallen straight down and landed on the leg of the table, so obviously the table came straight down, and not at some angle. There was no blood to indicate that a squirrel or other animal had landed on it crashing through. I even entertained the notion that since I live in the flight path of Newark Liberty International Airport that it was a case of “blue ice” and that in the midday sun, it had just melted… but even that would have left some sort of residue from the dye (and or contained waste…ewww). No, nothing seemed to fit.
The table, was one I had purchased from K-Mart a couple of years ago, one of their Martha Stewart line of tables. I was talking about it this week to somebody, and decided to look up some information on Tempered Glass, and at first found this article discussing how when tempered glass is compromised in some way that it can seem like it just “explodes.” Back into Google for a search of “Tempered Glass Exploding” and there… the first article up (at least at the time I did the search), was this little piece called, “Sounds of Summer: Martha Stewart Tables Shattering.” Turns out, this “phenomenon” that had struck our table was not at all uncommon.
There is apparently even a class action lawsuit that is in the works against Martha Stewart Living Omnipedia and JRA Funiture. However, JRA Funiture filed Chapter 7 Bakruptcy (total liquidation) last year, so at least they are no longer the source (depending on inventories of course) of the tables, but it also means no recovery for the Class Action Lawsuit either.
I’d like to think that with JRA Funiture out of business that this is the end of the situation, but to be honest, reading how Sears (and/or Kmart) and Martha Stewart Living have not even (so far as I can tell) acknowledged this as a problem, outside of saying they will work with consumers under warranty, leaves me a little ill at ease with them, leaving me doubting whether I want to trust them again. Problem is, at least the old sets were also farmed out under different names to other chains as well. JRA’s funiture was also sold under the Hampton Bay name at Home Depot, as well as being carried by Sam’s Club, Target and Safeway. (Only Home Depot has has a similar report of an exploding table that I have been able to find so far).
If you have (or had) one of these sets, if your table is still under warranty you can call K-mart Customer Service about it at 866-562-7848 (though K-Mart has not specifically said they will honor the manufacturer’s warranty) or Home Depot (who will honor the warranty) at 800-585-9969. Other than that you are probably out of luck. So what does this all mean? I guess, most of all be careful if you are going to buy a glass top patio set from a discount retailer. In my case, I am thinking a nice teak set might be in our future instead of risking it with glass again.
Friday Foccacia
I thought Raven-Symone was pretty much done when she passed on actually being part of the Chetah Girls, but apparently not. It seem she is on a 55 city “Pajama Party” tour with the child band Clique Girls (the Clique Girls are 8, 9 and 10 years old, making them the youngest pop group in music history. How cool is that?)
Whenever I am in a store like Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. I almost always wind up helping or explaining something to another customer. Either because the sales associate doesn’t know the information, or is trying to push something on a customer that isn’t really quite right for them. I guess now I had better be careful, because there have been times that I have badmouthed a product, or spoken about how overpriced it was at a given establishment. When somebody did that at Best Buy recently however, apparently they called the cops on him.
When I first read about a new study that says teens don’t worry about losing their hearing. My first reaction was, “Duh… Ya think?” But as I thought about it a little more, I seem to remember hearing and reading about such thing when I was a teen (yes… all those years ago), because of the sudden popularity of the Walkman. Now I don’t doubt that the damage that can be done with today’s stronger earphones, especially with noise cancellation. But I don’t see “everybody” being deaf from those Walkan’s now, so I am kind of thinking that these studies are overstating things, just a tad.
Being a father of a little girl, I was quite outraged by the message presented at the website missbimbo.com. But Tracee from So Sioux Me has done such a good job, and expressed exactly what I was thinking, it would probably be best if you just read her post.
How funny is THAT Department - The RIAA who has no problems with suing and attempting to collect a $220,000 award in the one (and only) file-sharing suit they have won, from a woman that allegedly shared 24 songs. But now they are mad and think it is excessive that they have been ordered to pay $298,000 in attorney’s fees on a case they didn’t win.
A worm in the Apple - I am sure there are plenty of Apple Fan-boys that thought nothing about Apple trying to sneak Safari onto iTunes users machines, but if you think you are safer using Safari, you are sadly mistaken.
Is that an RFID in your pocket or …
Despite what some people may think, I am not all about government intrusion in our lives, but the government is supposed to be there to protect the people, especially from the likes of monolithic corporate giants that have nobody’s interest at heart but their own.
Why isn’t that the case any longer? Why do special interest groups always get their way? (Yes, I know it is all about the money and re-election funds… it was a rhetorical question. Just follow… OK?) An excellent example is the recent first in the country RFID laws passed in Washington State.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, RFID chips are being put into and used in “everything” now, or at least they will be very soon. That “touch-less” Gas-N-Go card you have from the Station? RFID, Those new “intelligent” passports that are coming? RFID, the new digital Drivers Licenses that are being rolled out? RFID. Even some of those frequent shoppers cards. You have a lot of information that is now accessible, just by walking past an RFID reader set to grab that information.
Now rightly, there is cause for concern, and the laws they were pushing in Washington made sense. There were basically two parts; the first is making it illegal for anybody to attempt to access your information for fraudulent purposes. Rather obvious, and somewhat redundant, since fraud is already illegal, but I guess this would be another tacked on charge, or perhaps you can simply be arrested for “attempted” fraud. Whatever, I don’t have a problem with that. If somebody is “skimming” my information, then sure he should get in trouble for it without me having to be an actual fraud victim. But then there is the second part of the law, or more correctly, the original bill… because it never made it into the law.
That part, required retailers and other businesses to only gather information about you on an opt-in basis. As is always the case… it seems, the retailers and their lobbyist fought this part of the law, and eventually got it pulled out. So, now skimming is only illegal for an individual; corporations that are skimming are free to gather information about you, how long you shopped in their stores, where in the store you went, how much time you spent in each section, just by strategically placing some RFID scanners, and you will be none the wiser as they gather this information.
But don’t worry, I am sure some company will come out with some sort of RFID blocking wallet, that will be ugly, cumbersome and expensive, but will “protect” you from the “snoops.” Yup that is right, to have the privacy you should expect by default… you will have it. As long as you pay for it. (Maybe!)
Why do children have to die for common sense laws?
Abigail Taylor died Thursday from injuries sustained last June when when she sat on a wading pool drain; the suction so strong that it suck out part of her intestines. It is always a tragedy when a child dies, and always there is some knee-jerk reactions, some good and sometimes even some not so go. But when it happens for something incredibly stupid, it is all that much more infuriating.
On the heels of this incident, in December Congress approved legislation to “ban the manufacture, sale or distribution of drain covers that don’t meet anti-entrapment safety standards.” It was called the Virginia Graeme Baker Pool and Spa Safety Act [pdf], the named for the granddaughter of former Secretary of State James A. Baker, III, who was killed when she was trapped by the suction of a drain in 2002!
Now, I don’t understand why this wasn’t already a law, because it seems so brain-dead obvious to me as a parent, but can somebody explain to me, even after the first incident, and when people started lobbying for this law in 2002, it took 5 freakin’ years to get this written into law? Now, I am willing to bet if I left it at that, I would have somebody come along and say “there’s a war on and Congress had ‘more important’ things to contend with.” But if that is the case, then can somebody explain to me why Abigail Taylor had to die when over those same five years Congress sat back, played IM games with Pages, stuffed freezers full of cash, taking bribes, and making medical diagnosis via videotape. They had “the time” to do it, but it seems unless there is enough dead children for them to stop taking donations from corporations that are too cheap to manufacture these things safely, they just allow it to go on.
Propoganda: Not just for foreign countries
It has been long known that the U.S. Military (along with many others, this is not a American phenomenon), uses propaganda in times of war. Planes littering villages with leaflets, buying of air time and ads in newspapers in a sort of psychological warfare. But tactics like these are (or were) supposed to be strictly controlled; as a matter of fact by trying to be more coy about it, the United States came under fire when they admitted they were planting stories in Iraq newspapers as “news articles.”
But it certainly seems that those days of propaganda planting being kept out of our news streams is history. Oh sure, it has been blatantly obvious for some time that the Faux News Channel is little more than “right wing mouthpiece” and tries to twist things to fit that image, but certain talk shows hosts aside (*cough* Hannity, O’Reilly *cough*) the data is usually twisted but not typically made up. Not so in this recent false article planted in Time Magazine. Glenn Greenwald over at Salon.com has done a nice job of comparing the unsubstantiated (false) claims in the Time article piece, with something that the author of the Time article couldn’t be bothered with, facts and numbers.
It is really sad, that you now have to be critical about everything you read. It is at a point where I trust very few sources of information outside my blogroll. I may not agree with all of you all the time, but at least there, I know if people don’t know, they don’t know, they don’t just make up the facts as they go along.
It really is a sad place we are in right now.
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