In most American cities, a man has the right to walk down the street, reach down the nearest sewer, and devour whatever fish me might find therein without being scolded by some government bureaucrat. Unfortunately, that’s no longer true in Newark, New Jersey, where health officials are now claiming sewer fish consumption is “dangerous.”
A school in the UK has banned its cafeteria staff from feeding students triangle-shaped flapjacks after one pupil suffered a "sore eye" during a recent food fight.
New York City's ban on the sale of sugary drinks goes into effect on Tuesday, and The New York Times would have you believe "coffee drinkers... are likely to face a thicket of complications." This is wrong. Coffee drinkers—people who drink actual coffee in appropriate amounts—will be fine. Others—people who drink enormous buckets of caffeinated syrup—are likely to be inconvenienced.
Fox News blowhard in chief Bill O'Reilly has a serious problem with President Obama's "nanny state" and he really got a chance to flex that muscle this week. And why haven't you heard about all the civil liberties the current administration is stomping on? Why, because of the liberal media of course, another one of O'Reilly's punching bags. All in all it made for a particularly blustery week in O'Reilly-land. Here are the highlights in 60 seconds.
Good news for those of us who enjoy consuming the products of barbarous torment:
Are you cool and underemployed? If so, the UrbanBaby set might want you to be a "special guest star" in their childrearing show. Meredith Berkman, who covers the mommy beat for the Sun, writes about her quest to find the perfect non-babysitter to babysit her children. "A former flirtation expert, I am legendary in my circle for picking up baby sitters in unexpected places: at the Jewish Museum shop (an Israeli rock singer); in a swimming pool (a developmental psychology graduate student), and at Wollman Rink (a skating coach who is also a student)."
As the Times reports, "The New York City Board of Health voted unanimously yesterday to move forward with plans to prohibit the city's 20,000 restaurants from serving food that contains more than a minute amount of artificial trans fats, the chemically modified ingredients considered by doctors and nutritionists to increase the risk of heart disease." We're of two minds here: On the one hand, it's hard not to see this as another example of Bloomberg-era nanny-statism aimed pretty specifically at the lower orders (as a Times sidebar explains, most of your high end, Danny Meyer-type joints already eschew trans fats) in an attempt to modify behavior without spending any money on root causes. On the other hand, if you've ever tried to wedge yourself in between two tubbies shoveling the contents of a KFC Mashed Potato Bowl into their gaping maws aboard a crowded 6 train, you can sort of see the point.
