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So that's why they call it "sizzling fajitas"

Stupidity.

The incident: A guy burned himself after attempting to pray over some of Applebee's sizzling fajitas.

The appropriate response: Being less stupid in future.

The actual response: He attempted to sue Applebee's for not warning him they were hot.

Way back in March 2010, Hiram Jiminez and his brother Rafael visited an Applebee's restaurant in Westampton, New Jersey.

Jiminez bought a steak fajita, which was brought to him in a sizzling skillet.

According to court records, the waitress did not warn him that his food was hot. Presumably because that's not a thing that waitresses do, as, generally, if you're ordering food in a restaurant, you are doing so under the assumption that it will be served to you hot. Especially if that food is brought to you making an audible sizzling sound and emitting smoke, as Applebee's fajitas generally are.

After getting the food, Jiminez says he bowed his head over the dish and began to pray. As he was doing this, he claims that there was a "grease pop" from the fajita plate, which burned his face.

Jiminez then panicked and pulled the fajita skillet into his lap, causing burns to his legs, according to court docs.

According to a report on NJ.com, Jiminez attempted to sue Applebee's in 2013. The case was dismissed after the judge ruled that the danger posed by putting your face next to a pile of smoking, sizzling meat and vegetables was "open and obvious."

Jiminez appealed the case, and, earlier this week, almost five years after the incident, was told that he would not be getting any damages.

 

 

Where not to go on vacation, part 347

I guess the backpacking hike through Afghanistan was full.

Unclear on the concept

If you don't want to be divorced you shouldn't go to divorce lawyers.

A British woman attempted to sue her former lawyers for professional negligence, claiming that, alongside a number of other allegations, they failed to advise that finalising divorce proceedings would inevitably cause her marriage to end.

The curious case - made against two solicitor firms - had already been rejected by the court, but was revealed in the transcript of a later appeal by the claimant against the dismissal of other aspects of her case.

Jane Mulcahy had argued that the lawyers should have made it clear that a divorce would cause her marriage to be terminated - something which she apparently wanted to avoid.

The lawyers failed to regard her Roman Catholic faith and should have recommended judicial separation - a step down from full divorce - as an alternative course of action, she said.

The allegation was revealed in a subsequent appeal court judgment last month, in which Lord Justice Briggs said: “The most striking of Mrs Mulcahy's many allegations of negligence against her solicitors was that, having regard to her Roman Catholic faith, Mrs Boots had failed to give her the advice which was requisite in view of her firmly held belief in the sanctity of marriage…

“…either in terms of the alternative of judicial separation, or about the impossibility of pursuing divorce proceedings to a clean break settlement, without thereby inevitably bringing about the final termination of her marriage, which she wished to avoid.”

The appeal was also dismissed.

Why are these people walking the streets?

Think about it. What does it say about a man of God when he prays for a military coup to overthrow of the government?

A Christian TV host this week called on God to consider a “military takeover” of President Barack Obama’s government because it could be the only way to save the country from tyranny.

On his Monday Internet broadcast, Morning Star TV’s Rick Joyner predicted that democracy was “doomed” unless the Lord imposed martial law.

“The balance of powers in the legislative and judicial branches were supposed to balance and keep in check, hold in check, the potential tyranny from the executive branch overstepping their bounds,” Joyner explained. “The people are not always right, it depends on what people they are. And another thing the founders warned about is this thing will only work for a moral and a religious people. You remove morality, you remove the religious influence, and it cannot work.”

“We’re headed for serious tyranny, a terrible tyranny right now,” he continued. “But guess what? The kingdom is coming, the Kingdom of God is coming. And America is not the Kingdom of God. I think we have been used in some wonderful and powerful ways by God, we’ve been one of the most generous nations in history. We’ve done so much good.”

“That’s why I appeal to the Lord: Don’t let us be totally destroyed, please raise up those who will save us. And as I’ve been telling friends for a long time, no election is going to get the right person in there because the system is so broken.”

Joyner added that the “only hope is a military takeover, martial law.”

“And that the most crucial element of that is who to the martial [sic] is going to be,” he said. “I believe there are noble leaders in our military that love the republic and love everything we stand for. And they could seize the government.”

There used to be a thing called treason. People used to go to jail for advocating the violent overthrow of the government. Maybe you get a pass if you are praying to God to overthrow the government.

When religion collides with science

When you think that creationists wandering the backwaters of the US couldn't be topped, there's always a Saudi cleric.

A Saudi cleric sparked a wave of mockery online when he warned women that driving would affect their ovaries and bring “clinical disorders” upon their children.

The warning came ahead of an October 26 initiative to defy a longstanding driving ban on women in the ultra-conservative kingdom.

“Physiological science” has found that driving “automatically affects the ovaries and pushes up the pelvis,” Sheikh Saleh al-Luhaydan warned women in remarks to local news website Sabq.org.

“This is why we find that children born to most women who continuously drive suffer from clinical disorders of varying degrees,” he said.

His comments prompted criticism on Twitter, which has become a rare platform for Saudis to voice their opinions in the absolute monarchy.

“What a mentality we have. People went to space and you still ban women from driving. Idiots,” said one comment.

“When idiocy marries dogma in the chapel of medieval traditions, this is their prodigal child,” wrote a female tweeter.

Luhaydan, a member of the senior Ulema (Muslim scholars) Commission and former head of the Supreme Judicial Council, said that “evidence from the Quran and Sunna (the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed) completely prohibit (women’s driving) on moral and social background.”

An online petition titled “Oct 26th, driving for women” amassed nearly 12,000 signatures, while access to it was blocked in the kingdom on Sunday.

Saudi Arabia is the only country where women are banned from driving.

Activists declared a day of defiance against the ban on June 17, 2011, but few women answered the call to drive. Some of those who did were stopped by police and forced to sign a pledge not to take to the wheel again.

Saudi Arabia imposes other restrictions on women, including a requirement to cover themselves from head to toe when in public.

The 2011 call, which spread through Facebook and Twitter, was the largest mass action since November 1990, when 47 Saudi women were arrested and severely punished after demonstrating in cars.

 

T. Rex was a plant-eater

That's what this creationist says.

 

My trust in mankind...

...is getting tested.

More people in Louisiana's Republican Party think Obama is to blame for the post-Katrina government actions than George Bush. Obama wasn't President for another three years after Katrina. Bush was.

This is not a hard one to figure out. How stupid do you have to be?

A significant chunk of Louisiana Republicans evidently believe that President Barack Obama is to blame for the poor response to the hurricane that ravaged their state more than three years before he took office.

The latest survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, provided exclusively to TPM, showed an eye-popping divide among Republicans in the Bayou State when it comes to accountability for the government's post-Katrina blunders.

Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible. Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans — 44 percent — said they aren't sure who to blame.

Bush was criticized heavily when he did not immediately return to Washington from his vacation in Texas after the storm had reached landfall. The government was also slow to provide relief aid and Michael Brown, then-director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), admitted in a televised interview that he learned that many of the storm's victims at the New Orleans Convention Center were without food and water well after the situation had been reported in the press.

Brown's handling of the response ultimately led to his resignation, but Bush offered an infamous endorsement of the FEMA chief only days before he stepped down. 

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," Bush said.