CrankyRants.com

“It’s… (choke)… It’s Company Policy!”

That’s what a manager at a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant in Miami cried out defiantly on tuesday after being shot several times in the arm trying to protect the chili sauce, authorities said.
 
A man in the Wendy’s drive-through argued with an employee because he wanted more of the condiment, police said. The worker told the customer that restaurant policy prohibited a customer from getting more than three packets.

The man insisted on 10, reports said. The employee complied, but police said the customer wanted even more.

The manager came out to speak to the man, said Miami-Dade police spokesman Mary Walter. The customer then shot the manager, who was taken to a hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening.

The customer fled in his vehicle with a female passenger, authorities said. No word yet on the street value of the stolen packets of Wendy’s Chili Sauce, but authorities place it well into the $1.23 to $2.12 range.

This is what you have to do to get upgraded to First Class these days? Two doctors on a Delta Air Lines flight from Germany delivered a baby in front of the first seats after first class. Delta Flight 131 to Atlanta was over the Washington area when a woman about 32 to 36 weeks — or nine months — pregnant went into labor Wednesday afternoon, prompting an emergency stop in Charlotte, N.C., about nine hours into the flight.

Vincent said the baby weighed about seven pounds and had not been named yet, though I’m guessing it will somehow involve a reference to the in-flight adventure. “Flyboy” or “Boeing” or “Depp” since the Pirates of the Carribean was probably playing during the delivery. It’s always playing on every plane at all times. Trust me.

A new study in postmenopausal women demonstrates how one half of a cup of soy nuts each day may work as well as anti-hypertension medication to lower blood pressure. And women with moderately elevated blood pressure, a condition known as pre-hypertension, also showed reductions in their blood pressure after eight weeks of eating soy nuts, Dr. Francine K. Welty of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and her colleagues found.

In response to the exciting new discoveries, the American Medical Board is recommending that those with hyper-tension or higher than normal levels of cholesterol and high blood pressure should immediately receive a sex change if they are not currently a women and chryogenically freeze themselves until their body has aged to the point of the the decline of menopause. Then eat lot’s of soy nuts.

As travel season approaches, you need to be careful. These days, it’s becoming increasingly more dangerous to travel the globe. Not because of airline security or road-hazards. No, anymore your biggest concern should be… circulation.

Zahra Ghasemi, a physical therapy supervisor at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, conducts research into venous thromboembolism, a form of blood circulation disorder that is apprently hightened by long-haul travel. Overseas flights. long-distance driving. They all carry a small amount of danger from too little physical activity during such long trips. Suggested tips include wearing loose clothing, not crossing your legs during long flights, and of course… walk around as much as possible during the trip or during stopovers.

The lesson to learn? Plan all of the adventure vacations that you like. Travel the world on a global holiday with exciting destinations offering scuba diving with sharks or rock climbing or wild-animal punching in Africa. Bungie-jump off of a cliff in some European hot spot after hang-gliding from a mountain retreat in between snow-skiing trips and white water rafting.

Just please, for your own safety! Do NOT cross your legs. Ever!

What will $25 million buy you these days. How about a good meal with a really… Really good view.

Martha Stewart is sending gracious living into orbit, picking a gourmet space meal of duck breast confit and semolina cake with dried apricots for her billionaire space tourist “best friend” and his comrades in the international space station.

Charles Simonyi, a software engineer and one of the 400 richest Americans according to Forbes Magazine, is set to lift off aboard a Soyuz space capsule with two Russian cosmonauts. He paid roughly $25 million for a 13-day trip to the space station.

You know, nothing says mid-life crisis like blowing the Gross National Product of a small Eastern European nation to have a zero gravity duck dinner. Atmosphere. That’s what diners are looking for these days. Heh. Atmosphere. Cause… they’re in space. Little gastronomical humor there.

No word yet on how the fabulous meal that Martha is laying out will taste after being crammed into a small toothpaste tube… cause I’m pretty sure that’s how they do things in space these days. Don’t want a stray apricot getting stuck in any Deploy Chute buttons or anything.

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Archaeologists on a Greek island have discovered a large Roman-era tomb containing gold jewelry, pottery and bronze offerings, officials said Wednesday. The building, near the village of Fiscardo on Kefalonia, contained five burials including a large vaulted grave and a stone coffin, prompting a quick and angry rebuke by the Iranian Government.

Even though the dig was no where near the fabled lands that made up ancient Sparta, uncovered artifacts dated hundreds of years after the battle of Thermopylae, and offered no insight or speculation on the Persian Empire, Iran is furious.

“Once again our great and proud ancestry has been shamed,” shouted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “by horrible and racist depictions of the Persian Empire by these alleged scientists who promote nothing but hatred in their uncovering of small stone coffins unrelated to our people in every way.”

Ahmadinejad was equally outraged that archaeologists also located traces of what may have been a small theater with intact stone seating in a nearby plot that also reflected no relation whatsoever to the Persian Empire or the Ancient Iranian peoples.

“This is Blasphemy!”, Ahmadinejad exclaimed in a recent press conference, dressed in lavish Persian robes and distinct facial piercings. “This is Madness!”

A marine mammal rehabilitation facility opened a dolphin “chat line” of sorts Saturday, hoping to teach a deaf dolphin’s unborn calf to communicate.

Castaway, as the stranded Atlantic bottlenose dolphin is named, has been recovering at the Marine Mammal Conservancy since Jan. 30. A battery of tests has confirmed she is deaf.

Dolphins need to hear echoes of sounds they produce to find food, socialize and defend themselves against predators.

“We asked ourselves ‘How do we get the calf to speak when we have a deaf mother?’” said a representative from the conservancy.

They decided to electronically connect Castaway’s habitat with a lagoon at Dolphins Plus, a research and interactive educational facility a few miles down the Keys Overseas Highway. Underwater speakers and microphones were installed at both locations and connected via phone lines.

Though initially built strictly for the newborn Dolphin’s use, scientists hope to open several lines to the public as well, offering live phone chats and steamy online audio streaming with a host of hot, smooth dolphins world-wide.

“I’ve studied dolphins my whole life. They are a naturally sensual creature, and our research could certainly benefit from additional revenue streams,” the representative exclaimed while slipping into a wetsuit. “I have a very good feeling about the future of this project… because I really like Dolphins. Really…. Really like them.”

Here’s a good one. School district officials in Union City N.J. are trying to identify who watched $250 worth of pay-per-view porn using a school cable television box.

Someone after business hours used one of the five cable boxes in the Board of Education building to order the films, priced between $4.95 and $9.95.

So… you put televisions with cable in or near an environment with access by teenage students, and you wonder why you got billed for 50 hours of Spice Channel? Wow. Let’s see if we can put the pieces together here.

It certainly doesn’t take a 5th grade math teacher to figure out that half the reason that adolescent boys are so good at video games and electronics, is because they’ve honed their skills by devising workarounds to every parental lock and v-chip porn blocker known to man. Half the reason Edison discovered the electric light bulb was so he could secretly view his collection of exotic womanly etchings in a dark room where no one could find him.

I guess it’s possible it wasn’t the students, though. Apparently the school officials have since gotten rid of three of the cable boxes, stating that the only reason the building had cable was in case of emergency.

Wait… what? That must’ve been a para-phrase. The direct quote was probably more along the lines of…. “Um… we got premium cable for… uh… emergencies. Yeah. That will do. Emergencies.”

From the towering Great Dane to the feisty little Chihuahua, all dogs are brothers under the skin. Now, researchers have uncovered a reason why the animals wearing that skin vary so much in size.

Dogs have the largest variation in body size of any land animal, so researchers led by Elaine A. Ostrander of the National Human Genome Research Institute decided to look into the reasons why.

They found a section of genes that controls small size in dogs and reported their results in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

This is it. This is officially what our best and brightest are now spending their research efforts on. We have hunger ravaging our planet. Disease sweeping through populations. Unidentified objects falling from the sky and troubling our elected officials. And this is what we’re studying now.

Why Great Danes are bigger than poodles.

I can appreciate that there is a genetic puzzle to unravel in just about every aspect of life. And of course I can understand the need to learn about human DNA testing through the discoveries brought about in the study of animals. But still. We’re studying what makes big doggies bigger than little doggies. It’s like Dr. Ostrander was late for work on “Select Your Genetic Area of Research” day at the NHGR Institute. “Dammit! All the good one’s are taken! Fine. So it’s between ‘Why cats flick their tails when they’re trying to hide’… and ‘Why some dogs are really really big.’ I freaking hate cats… so…”

The good news, is that through the Institute’s research, we may finally be able to get help for the more pathetic dog breeds. Yippy dogs throughout the world can hold out hope that one day… there may be a cure. Furless, shivering Chihuahua’s, through the tireless efforts of the Genome Project and their wealthy benefactor, the mysterious “Paris H.”, can now hold their tiny golf-ball-sized heads high. Knowing that someday. Someday soon! They may be slightly bigger and have hair follicles.

The march of science staggers on.

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The co-inventor of the TV remote, Robert Adler, died Thursday of heart failure at a Boise nursing home at the age 93.

In his six-decade career with Zenith, Adler was a prolific inventor, earning more than 180 U.S. patents. He was best known for his 1956 Zenith Space Command remote control, which helped make TV a truly sedentary pastime.

In a May 2004 interview with The Associated Press, Adler recalled being among two dozen engineers at Zenith given the mission to find a new way for television viewers to change channels without getting out of their chairs or tripping over a cable.

But he downplayed his role when asked if he felt his invention helped raise a new generation of couch potatoes.

“People ask me all the time — ‘Don’t you feel guilty for it?’ And I say that’s ridiculous,” he said. “It seems reasonable and rational to control the TV from where you normally sit and watch television.”

Some respctful jokes for the funeral may include the following:

“Guess his batteries… just sort of ran out, poor guy.”

“His picture looks good. Can you get up and change it for me?”

“Have you seen Robert anywhere?” - “Check under the coffin lid over there.”