If you’re not a complete jerk, its polite to leave a 15-20-percent tip on your bill, whether it be coffee, an ice cream cone or a full dinner. But if you live in Hawaii, apparently it’s common for people to leave just 14.8 percent, making them the worst tippers in the country. Compare that to Idaho, the most tip-friendly state, where tippers leave an average of 17.4 percent, according to Square.
The mobile payment company based their rankings on millions of credit and debit transactions throughout the month of July from more than two million retailers (ranging from boutique businesses to Starbucks) across the country. Results show the national tip average is 16.4%.
And just like the old cliché, the study found that the most wealthy states tipped the least, and the most poverty stricken states gave the most. Money can’t buy class.
Some people, however, admit they don’t tip via Square, because the app requires you to tip before your service. How many people are tipping in cash after the service is actually performed? We may never know.
August 16 is known to many Elvis Presley fans as the anniversary of his untimely death at the age of 42 in 1977. It is also the perfect occasion, for many, to honor him by indulging in his favorite foods, including fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches (with or without bacon), fried biscuits, bacon-wrapped meatballs, chicken fried steak, jelly doughnuts and vegetables saturated with butter and salt.
While it may be OK to indulge in these foods occasionally, it is not healthy to make a regular diet of them.
What was it about these foods that appealed to Elvis? He could have afforded spa cuisine and high-end restaurants, but he maintained his love of southern-style comfort food, always in large portions, even when his weight crept up and his health went down.
As a food researcher and registered dietitian for more than 20 years, I have studied some of the reasons we turn to comfort food – and also how eating to feed our emotions can sometimes get out of hand.
Reason Number One: We Like It
There are many theories as to why we choose food we know is not good for us, not least of which is that it tastes good.
Other ideas range from social norms, environment and memories to emotions, genetics and the microbiome; the nature versus nurture debate is alive and well for eating habits.
Similarly, our environment influences our dietary choices, for better or for worse. Growing up poor in what are now known as food deserts may preclude the intake of fresh fruits and vegetables. Additionally, food preparation methods are influenced by culturally acceptable traditions, such as cooking greens with pork fat, as is common in the South.
Presley was raised in a poor household, where it is rumored that dinners sometimes included squirrel meat, but his mother was an excellent cook. He spoke fondly of her specialties, such as fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn bread and gravy. These foods probably later reminded him of both his family and simpler times. It is easy to see the appeal of eating foods from our childhood; reminiscences of family outings, holidays and sporting events often lead to conversations of the foods that were eaten there. Even the smell of those foods can bring back happy memories. There is something to be said for food that is good for our soul.
Elvis was not alone in finding comfort in food. Thirty-eight percent of adults report overeating or eating unhealthy foods due to stress, with almost half doing so at least weekly. This behavior serves as a distraction or even a way to numb feelings of sadness or depression. Emotional eating, as this is called, may arise from an inability to manage emotions in other ways. It is self-perpetuating, as the eating behavior in turn increases cravings and intake .
As a dietitian and nutrition educator, I am the first to declare there are no bad foods, only bad amounts. When choosing to comfort ourselves with, well, comfort food, I recommend trying a small portion and eating it slowly; we will likely enjoy it just as much as a large portion if we are truly mindful about enjoying it. Follow this with distracting ourselves with a walk or other activity, and we can avoid the neurological and hormonal adaptations that encourage a continuation of emotional eating. Short of saying that food is addictive, I would say that research has shown that some individuals are more susceptible than others to the habit-forming behavior of overeating high-fat, high-sugar foods.
Those neurological and hormonal adaptations are also influenced by genes.Leptin and ghrelin are digestive neuroendocrine hormones known to regulate hunger and fullness. Current research focusing on their genetic variants and determinants will help us understand eating behavior, but most nutrition experts agree that genetic susceptibility can be overpowered by intentional healthy eating efforts.
The role of nature can be explored further in examining the microbiome, which refers to the bacteria, good and bad, found in the gut. Research suggests lower diversity in gut microbiome is associated with more unhealthy eating behavior, and there is evidence that gut bacteria affect how we respond to hormones that make us feel hungry or full.
What causes a low diversity of gut bacteria? A diet high in fat and processed foods and a low intake of fiber, fruits and vegetables. Increased good bacteria can be achieved with more fresh fruits and vegetables, legumes, fermented foods and probiotic sources such as yogurt and kefir.
Were Elvis’ eating habits due to nature or nurture? We will never know. Also, we will never know the extent of his loneliness and whether his sense of isolation was fed, in part, by his fame. Yet I think we can all agree that it is heartbreaking to think that a man who brought so much joy to so many people relied heavily on food for comfort.
While the foods of our youth retain a hold on all of us, and biology influences our genes and gut, a combination of factors was likely at play in Elvis’ yearning for food. The lesson learned may be for each of us to figure out a way to balance these influences, and to do what’s best for both our body and soul.
Iran just introduced a new “robots only” restaurant — the very first of its kind in the Middle East. Located in Tehran, the whole point of Robochef is to help “people become familiar with modern technology, not just to watch it on television,” owner Hossein Zibadel tells the Financial Tribune.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BXcOCJ7liaA/
Hossein Kashani tells the Tribune “the technology could help eliminate the problems restaurant-owners and managers face on a daily basis” adding that “the new technology can help restaurant owners better manage their patrons’ requests as they deliver exactly what customers want in their meals.”
Robochef’s technology includes multi-touch “smart tables” that allow customers to choose their dishes, which are then delivered via pulley system directly to each customer’s table.
There were reportedly lines of people waiting to get into the restaurant when it opened several months ago. Check the Instagram video above for a visual.
Daniel Craig will be returning to play James Bond for one more film but now the 49-year-old has a new clause in his contract – no nudity.
“Daniel is still in great shape but at the age of 49 he doesn’t think he needs to be showing as much skin as he has in the past,” sources tell Straight Shuter. “We are still going to see Bond shirtless and in tight swimming trunks but the totally naked James that we saw in ‘Casino Royale’ in 2006 is a thing of the past!
Chelsea Handler’s Ultimate Betrayal Of Jennifer Aniston
Chelsea Handler and Jennifer Aniston are no longer friends, which means the comedian is now free to hang out with Brad Pitt.
“Chelsea never hated Brad for what he did to Jennifer. She always blamed Angelina Jolie for the nasty split. But now that she isn’t friends with Jen, Chelsea is free to work with Brad,” sources tell Straight Shuter. “Chelsea has long been a fan of Brad’s ‘Plan B’ production company and is talking with them about a few projects. Don’t be surprised if we see Brad and Chelsea having lunch together soon!”
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Washington state’s two top elected officials — Gov. Jay Inslee and Attorney General Bob Ferguson — fired back at the nation’s top law enforcement officer over marijuana legislation. Basically, Inslee and Ferguson have told U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions that he is blowing smoke when it comes to rational drug policy.
The two state officials on Tuesday strongly replied to a letter from Sessions warning that the federal government could begin enforcing federal laws against cannabis in the state that legalized it in 2012.
“Your letter … makes a number of allegations that are outdated, incorrect, or based on incomplete information,” Inslee and Ferguson, both Democrats, wrote to Sessions. The letter was first reported by Tom Angell at MassRoots.
“We have twice requested an in-person meeting with you because we believe it will lead to better understanding than exchanging letters,” the Washington leaders wrote. “If we can engage in a more direct dialogue, we might avoid this sort of miscommunication and make progress on the issues that are important to both of us. ”
The letter takes issue with Sessions on a number of positions and requests a meeting to discuss:
Whether DOJ intends to follow recommendations from its Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety — in particular, its reported recommendation to continue previous federal policy on state legalization of marijuana.
Whether President Trump’s previous statements of support for medical marijuana, and leaving recreational marijuana legalization to the states, represent the policy of the federal government.
Whether DOJ will support reasonable federal policies allowing financial institutions to provide service to licensed marijuana businesses, in order to avoid the public safety risks and transparency problems associated with all-cash businesses.
How state-regulated marijuana should be treated by the federal government following the President’s declaration that the opioid crisis constitutes a national emergency, and whether the federal government will support objective, independent research into the effects of marijuana law reform on opioid use and abuse.
Whether the federal government will help protect public health by supporting agricultural research on the safety of pesticides used in marijuana cultivation.
Whether the federal government will support research into expedited roadside DUI testing methods for law enforcement, as alternatives to blood draws.
Inslee and Ferguson reminded Sessions that the Washington voters had spoken very clearly on the issue of legalized marijuana:
“We encourage you to keep in mind why we are having this conversation. State and federal prohibition of marijuana failed to prevent its widespread use, which was generating huge profits for violent criminal organizations. The people of Washington State chose by popular vote to try a different path. Under Washington’s system, responsible adults are allowed access to a highly regulated product that returns substantial tax revenues to the government even as it displaces illegal activity.”
Andrew David Jensen was arrested on July 26th for suspicion of burglary. On October of 2016, there was a break in the city of Thousand Oaks, California and policemen were surprised to find that the toilet of the house hadn’t been flushed. Authorities suspected that it was the work of the burglar who, in the heat of things, forgot basic social rules.
“The suspect did his business and didn’t flush it”
Said Tim Lohman, the very concerned detective who’s leading the investigation. He also said how this was the first case he’d heard of where the police had gathered the suspect’s DNA from a toilet.
“When people think of DNA evidence they usually think of hair samples or saliva”
I’m no expert, Mr. Lohman, but I think DNA’s everywhere in our bodies, especially in everything that comes from our insides. The detective said that he didn’t know if Jensen had an attorney and that his hearing was scheduled soon.
The police department ran the DNA they had through their profile database and found a match. Authorities tracked down Jensen in his home and caught him, 9 months after the robbery had been committed. That sucks so bad and we have so many questions. Was it number 1 or number 2? Is Jensen berating himself over the fact that he could’ve gotten away with the perfect robbery but didn’t because he forgot to flush the toilet? What did he steal? We’ll never know.
A combination of trusting Google Maps and bad car luck left this man stranded in the desert for days.
Mick Ohman said he left home one day to take a leisurely drive through the Bradshaw Mountains in Arizona for lunch. After a particularly tough ride through a boulder-filled path, his car broke down. He was stranded without cell service, far from home.
According to ABC News, his only provisions were a half-full water bottle, two beers, a sandwich and some crackers in a lunchbox in his car. Depending on one’s level of health and age, a person can die from dehydration as quickly as a few days to a week. In the Arizona heat, Ohman was losing hydration quickly.
He recorded video messages to his loved ones and put notes on his car and phone, saying, “If you find this phone and I didn’t do so well, please tell my sisters how much I love them.” He resorted to drinking his own urine — which was better than drinking from the streams, he said.
More than 48 hours passed before he was able to find help, in the form of a biker riding through the mountains. He flagged the biker down and rode back to town with him to get help.
The Department of Health just announced the issuance of new proposed regulations that would make changes to the NY’s medical marijuana program to improve access. Among other things, they would reduce some of the onerous security requirements for registered organizations, shorten the length of the medical marijuana course certifying practitioners must take from four hours to two, and allow additional types of medical marijuana products to be sold.
“This is yet another positive step forward for New York State’s Medical Marijuana Program,” said New York State Department of Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker. “These regulations will continue to improve the program in several ways, including making new forms of medical marijuana available and improving the dispensing facility experience.”
New York’s medical marijuana program has been criticized by the Marijuana Policy Project and patient advocates as unnecessarily restrictive, and initial patient registration numbers were very low compared to other state medical marijuana programs. The Department of Health has made several changes to the program since it issued a report in August 2016, including adding chronic pain as a qualifying condition and allowing registered nurses and physician’s assistants to recommended medical marijuana.
The proposed regulatory changes can be viewed here.
Lawmakers have also been working to improve the medical marijuana program this session. In June, the Legislature passed a bill to add post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a qualifying condition. Gov. Andrew Cuomo must still sign the bill in order for it to become law.
As of August8, 2017, there were 26,561 certified patients and 1,155 registered practitioners participating in the state program. The number of certified patients has increased by 11,569 (77 percent) since the addition of chronic pain in late March.
For more information on New York’s Medical Marijuana Program, go here.
Game of Thrones has never been a bad or boring TV show. Quite the opposite is true—throughout most of the series run, you practically forget you’re watching a TV show. Reviewers and writers have praised GoT for its novelistic characters and narrative pacing, in addition to esteeming its cinematic set pieces. It’s a sly shorthand to indicate this isn’t like any previous TV show you’ve experienced.
Because while encountering the best stories the boundaries of form melt into gas and vanish. Great storytellers aren’t confined by the rules of what it means when a story is a TV show or movie or novel or anything else. Instead, they break the rules by forgetting they exist and replacing them with their own. Through a sort of narrative osmosis, so does the audience.
You intuitively accept this when watching a Paul Thomas Anderson movie or Lena Dunham’s Girls or listening to the work of Frank Ocean or Louis C.K. Their art compels you because when engaging with it, you feel anything can happen at any time. There are no rules. None, anyways, besides the ones they create.
So it was with Game of Thrones. When a show has the balls to kill its major protagonist the episode before its first season finale, pull off something like The Red Wedding, and strand a major character like Daenerys outside the main plot—and most side quests—for six seasons, you had no choice but complying with what it gave you. Game of Thrones had no care for your expectations or demands, which is precisely why you couldn’t stop watching. This was a game played by its own operation. As an audience, so long as it never betrayed those rules, you couldn’t dismiss the show.
Thanks to George R.R. Martin’s immaculate world-building and fantasy genre subversion, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss didn’t have to invent much. They drove the train along the track laid for them. And what an exquisite train they built! Filled with a colorful acting troupe and lovely interior design, all while cutting away narrative fat and cleaning up clunky dialogue, theirs was a job well done.
But Martin’s inability to finish the books caused Benioff and Weiss to receive promotions as storytellers. Now they must lay down the train track and set course for our eventual destination while maintain the train’s general upkeep. It’s all caused a sort of creative Peter Principle, as Benioff and Weiss have responded in their new roles to reducing Game of Thrones, alas, into being a TV show.
Again, it isn’t a bad or boring TV show. But never has the show nakedly submitted to its formal confines like it has this season. Limited by a seven-episode season, character travel now occurs in 15-minute proceedings that, as many have noted, would’ve previously taken half the season. On some level this is forgivable. Because those horseback rides and brothel visits and inn stays provide two main objectives: a) fleshing out character development with rounded emotional arcs and b) establishing settings and context for this massive world.
By this season, we know Westeros and its geography. Revisiting those vistas could be seen as superfluous and impede the story as it propels into its end game. Exploring character motivations could occur multiple ways and doesn’t require walks in garden or sailing on ships. So long as our heroes’ behavior adds up, it’s an easy sacrifice.
But that’s not really happening, is it? As of late, these complex, moody characters have felt like gamebots. Why they’re proceeding down their paths is often barely explained and rarely explored, outside of twists, deaths, and soapy drama.
Take for example Jaime Lannister’s arc over the past episode “Eastwatch.” Following an emotionally loaded charge to lance Dany, Bronn saves his life. He recognizes the Lannister cause vs. Dany will result in bloodshed and heartbreak. In King’s Landing, Jaime reunites with his brother Tyrion, who he vowed to kill after Tyrion murdered their father Tywin. This is a convoluted bond between brothers, as they recognize the heart underneath each other’s veneer. They might be the only ones in this messed-up world of their who do. But Jaime, who technically already agrees with Tyrion’s position of ending the war, silences his brother when he tries to explain why he did what he did.
The plot moves forward as they instead agree to a really really stupid plan to smuggle a wight into King’s Landing so Cersei will abstain from war. Why does Cersei need this level of convincing again? Well, you audience members already know she’s cray cray so stop asking questions. Why is Jaime willing to hear out Tyrion on this, again, really really stupid plan but not the devastating murder of their father? The same father, by the way, whose harsh spirit and worldview continues to haunt the actions of each Lannister kid in interesting various ways. Well, hmm, who knows? But isn’t it SoOoOooO wild Cersei got preggers? Kind of complicates things for Jaime as he continues to love a woman who manipulates him and has no real regard for his life, which didn’t he realize that when he almost died ten seconds ago and she didn’t care? Are we suddenly to believe Jaime is an oafish, obedient servant, when he’s been portrayed as anything but?
And how did Jaime reach King’s Landing unperturbed by Daenerys exactly? She will burn alive anyone who refuses to bend the knees, like the Tarlys, but won’t capture the man who just tried to kill her? Cunning and exacting in her war of attrition against the Lannister Army, but too ignorant to wait five seconds for a one-handed man in clunky armor to surface above water? We’re supposed to instead speculate Dany assumed Jaime dead, I guess. Which wait. If that’s so, why does Dany then allow Tyrion to visit Jaime—the man who freaking tried to kill her!—and convince them of this really, really stupid plan? Wouldn’t Tyrion at least mention any of this to his brother?
The more you ask regarding narrative points and character motivations, the more questions actualize. Queries like why does Samwell Tarly, previously shown as hyper-observant and attentive to everyone, silence Gilly when discussing Rhaegar’s annulment and Davos suddenly describing M.I.A. Gendry as a “surrogate son,” despite having his own family we haven’t seen in seasons now. By now, we’ve learned answers won’t ever come. It’s become clear this season intends to service fans not the story. Benioff and Weiss will cut any narrative corner to materialize the dragon sequences and dramatic showdowns of which fans have long anticipated.
People want Jon to face the White Walkers again so Benioff and Weiss made it happen. They manifested some convoluted reasons to manufacture a Suicide Squad of troublemakers everyone loves like The Hound, Jorah (who immediately leaves Dany, his love, why?), Tormund, and Gendry. (Though we all know Suicide Squads aren’t really Suicide Squads until Will Smith literally asks, “What is this? Some kind of Suicide Squad?” and the audience can finally realize, OH, this was the Suicide Squad that was promised.) This random team-up makes about as much sense as the Suicide Squad movie—which, need I remind you, isn’t a good thing!
Game of Thrones isn’t exactly super expensive fanfic now, just lazy storytelling. The showrunners expect you to understand the confines of television episodes they have left. Though the story requires further exploration, understand these actors don’t want to reprise these roles forever. And understand that HBO needs to maintain massive popularity to justify the reported spin-offs they’re producing, so the story must appease the widest audience possible. But that’s the problem with Game of Thrones now—I don’t understand why much of anything happens. At least the dragons are cool.
“Security notices have mysteriously appeared in the dressing room and makeup areas around its headquarters in New York,” sources tell Straight Shuter. “They read: ‘Restricted Access (in bold) Back Stage Area For On-Air Talent & On-Air Guests Only. Beyond this point NO photos, video or recording of any type allowed!’ ”
Someone must be worried that Anderson isn’t as pretty without his makeup and hair done!
Justin Bieber Not Returning Anyone’s Calls
Justin Bieber has his family and friends worried after he quit his tour to spend time with his controversial pastor. And now the young singer isn’t returning people’s calls.
“Justin has stopped talking to a lot of his friends. He seems to have cut everyone out of his life except his pastor,” sources tell Straight Shuter. “People are worried that Justin is giving his new pal way too much power over himself and his career. Anyone who has an opposing opinion has been removed from his life.”
Straight Shuter recently spotted Justin’s manager at the hit Broadway musical ‘Dear Evan Hansen.’ Could Justin be heading to Broadway if he answers his phone?
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While the foods of our youth retain a hold on all of us, and biology influences our genes and gut, a combination of factors was likely at play in Elvis’ yearning for food. The lesson learned may be for each of us to figure out a way to balance these influences, and to do what’s best for both our body and soul.
