Bob Marley’s Family Is Starting A Line Of Branded Marijuana For Reasons No One Must Explain

(ChrisGoldNY)

In a branding combination that goes together like Bob Marley black light posters and college students, the late musician’s family says it’s starting a new line of Bob Marley marijuana. If you need someone to explain the relationship between Marley and Mary Jane, go ask your 19-year-old niece/nephew/son/daughter living in the basement.

The family has partnered up with a private equity firm that focuses on the cannabis industry called Privateer Holdings. The two have struck a 30-year licensing deal, reports Fast Company, to create Marley Natural (what, not Marleyjuana?!), a pot brand that will have a slew of products on the market at dispensaries around late 2015.

The line will come plastered with the new Marley Natural logo of a lion, which is an important symbol to Rastafarians, anchored with two leaves. Products include topical things hemp-derived lotions and the like, as well as six “heirloom” strains of marijuana that were personal favorites of Marley.

“We really want the products to be rooted in Bob’s life and in his message, and be authentic to his Jamaican roots,” Privateer CEO Brendan Kennedy told Fast Company. “We’re doing everything out of respect for Bob and out of respect for his vision.”

The deal had to be worked out in secret ahead of today’s announcement, seeing as the company’s headquarters is in New York City, where recreational pot is not legal.

MOVE OVER, AIR JORDAN: CELEBRITY-BRANDED WEED IS HERE [Fast Company]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Target App Now Tells You If Times Are Available In-Store And Where To Find Them

Target’s updated app allows customers to see if items are available at local stores and where to find them inside the store.

Have you ever made a shopping list, driven to the store and then realized they were out of certain items? Apparently, Target has an answer to that frustrating experience in the form of an app update that can tell consumers what’s in stock and where to find those items inside the store.

VentureBeat reports that Target’s new service, which was implemented by Washington-based tech company Point Inside, makes it possible to offer in-store functions for all 1,801 of its U.S. locations for the first time.

A customer’s shopping list shows what aisle the item can be found in. [Click to enlarge]

The company’s updated app allows a shopper to start their list using a type-ahead function that includes brand named items. The app will then notify the customer if the product is available at their chosen store location and what aisle they can find it in.

The new function uses Point Inside’s StoreMode platform which digitizes stores’ layouts for electronic use.

Once inside the store, the app uses the digitized model of the store to create a map showing the user the aisle location of each of the items on their shopping list. During Black Friday the app will reportedly alert consumers to the location of doorbuster items.

While the map can pinpoint the location of products, Target lacks the in-store beacons or similar communication capabilities that would enable Point Inside to provide shoppers with the exact route to those locations, VentureBeat reports.

Additionally, because GPS is lost inside the retail stores the new service can’t show shoppers where they are in relation to their desired items.

Josh Marti, CEO of Point Inside, tells VentureBeat that the service’s platform does not support personal information; meaning that if the system were to get hacked it would only produce an unnamed person’s shopping list.

Attention, shoppers: Now you can target anything inside a Target store [VentureBeat]

by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

Study: Eating Trans Fat Could Be Bad For Your Memory

(Coyoty)

While you’re munching on sticks of margarine and snorfing down packaged snacks, is there a nagging feeling tugging at your brain? Like there’s something you have to remember but… It’s gone, and one group of researchers says it’s that consumption of trans fats that can do some damage to your memory.

The study was presented this week at the American Heart Association conference in Chicago, reports USA Today, and says that out of 690 middle-aged men tested, the ones who said they ate the most trans fat or partially hydrogenated oil, remembered 11 fewer words out of 104 than those who at the least.

Other studies have linked eating food with trans fats to obesity, aggression, heart disease and diabetes. The study’s researchers say trans fats are basically worthless things we’re shoving down our gullets..

“Trans fats increase the shelf life of the food but reduce the shelf life of the person,” said the study’s author, Dr. Beatrice Golomb, a professor at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine. “They’re a metabolic poison and that’s not a good thing to be putting into your body,” she said. “They don’t provide anything the body needs.”

Another expert weighed in, saying that this study joins other research showing that what we eat is linked to how we think. As my Great Aunt Enid always said, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

“The supply of nutrients in blood to the brain can actually affect its function,” said Dr. Patrick T. O’Gara, president of the American College of Cardiology.

Why this happens hasn’t been proven, and it’s not clear exactly how trans fat would case memory loss, but other health experts say the findings make sense.

The good news is there are less trans fats out there in the food supply since 2006, which is when food manufacturers were required to list their presence on labels. Most margarine doesn’t have it anymore, and other companies have reconfigured their baked goods’ recipes to take out the hydrogenated vegetable oils.

It’s important to note that even if a food’s label says trans-fat free, that designation can be earned by anything containing less than half a gram of trans fat to be labeled as such. Look out for “partially hydrogenated” on the label instead, and check the ingredient list if you’re gung ho about going trans-fat free completely.

Eating trans fat may damage memory [USA Today]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

The Who Remix Old Songs To Fit Into New Ads

Using hit songs to sell shoes, food, insurance, cars, and many other items is nothing new, but because those tunes don’t always fit precisely into the super-tight confines of a 30-second TV ad, the songs are often either butchered by editors or re-recorded specifically for the commercial. In an effort to make their music more easily shoehorned into ads and other media, The Who has remixed more than a dozen classic songs.

AdAge reports that the band’s guitarist and primary songwriter Pete Townshend recently told his music publisher that he still possessed the original multitrack tapes for many of the band’s hits from the ’60s and ’70s.

Thus, music production agency Mophonics was able to do Townshend-approved, ad- and movie-ready remixes of 15 classics, including “My Generation,” “Baba O’Riley” and “I’m Free.”

With the growth of online subscription services like Beats, Spotify, Google All Access, and others, actual sales of music have dropped in recent years, and will likely continue to decrease. Thus, artists need to keep making money through other means, and licensing for ads and entertainment is an incredibly lucrative business, earning $750 million a year for the American music industry.

Rather than allowing some anonymous editor slice and dice these classics or have some unknown band do a sound-alike knock-off of a song they think is titled “Teenage Wasteland,” Townshend says the approved remixes gives him some control and involvement in the final product.

“A lot of work [went] into these,” Townshend tells AdAge of the tweaked tunes, “especially because the respect shown by the remixes to the original songs and song shapes. I know that makes remixing harder, and less fun for them, but a lot of fun for me.”

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Reminder: Beware Of Deferred Interest Credit Card Offers This Holiday Season

Whether you shop online or at brick-and-mortar retailer this holiday season, you’ll undoubtedly be offered countless chances to save money with store-branded financing options offering “0% interest” for six, 12, 18 months. These can be incredibly tempting, but many people don’t realize they are often signing up for deferred interest accounts that can come back to bite you on the rear-end in a very nasty way.

As opposed to true 0% interest offers, where you are not accruing any interest during the introductory promotional period, a deferred interest card account is actually accruing that interest during those months and you’ll have to pay it all if you haven’t paid off the balance in full by the end of the intro period.

To illustrate the difference, use this example of an $800 computer. One card offers a true 0% interest offer for six months. A second card is a 0% deferred interest account for six months. Both have 20% APRs (which is about average for retailer-branded cards) after their intro periods.

If you pay off that $800 before the six months is up, you don’t have anything to worry about in either case. But if you need a seventh month, the difference is huge. That extra month will only hit you with around $2 in interest for the true “0% for six months” offer. But if you need a seventh month and you used a deferred interest card, you’ll be hit with all of the interest that has accrued during the six months, which is around $55.

The folks at CardHub.com have put together their annual report on deferred interest cards, and the good news is that several major retailers — including Target, Costco, Nordstrom, Gap, BJ’s, and Kohl’s — don’t even offer deferred interest cards. Not that you should rush out and get store-branded cards from these retailers, but at least you’ll know you won’t be hit with the deferred interest.

That said, many large retailers — including Walmart, Apple, Home Depot, Sears, Lowe’s, Macy’s, Amazon, Toys R Us, Staples, Best Buy, and Meijer — still offer these questionable cards, and the level of transparency varies wildly from store to store.

On the one end are stores like Walmart and Apple, which earned the highest possible transparency scores, meaning that they do not go out of their way to hide the fact that you will be hit with all the interest if you have an unpaid balance at the end of the promo period.

On the other end are Amazon and Pottery Barn, which earned shockingly low scores for the readability of the terms of their offers. RadioShack earned virtually zero points on the transparency test, placing it at the bottom of the list, but CardHub says that this may soon improve as the retailer transitions to a new website.

Not only can deferred interest cards hit you in the back of the head if you don’t pay off the balance in time, that interest is often bordering on usury.

Amazon’s deferred interest plan comes with an APR of 25.99%, Apple’s ranges from 22.99% to 26.99%. Other stores maxing out at 26.99% include Home Depot, JCPenney, Macy’s, Pottery Barn, and Toys R Us.

Cards from Staples and Best Buy are even harsher, starting at 25.24% and going as high as 27.99%, but that’s still not the highest. Office Max/Office Depot accounts are fixed at 27.99%, RadioShack hits you with 28.99% interest, and Dell takes the high-interest crown, charging a maximum APR of 29.99%.

Whatever card you choose, you should do everything you can to pay off your balance before that promotional APR expires. Credit card companies are banking that you won’t be responsible enough to do that, so prove them wrong.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

If You’re Going To Ask A Cop For A Ride To Burger King, Don’t Have Pockets Packed With Pot

(Alan Rappa)

This isn’t one of those stories where an incapacitated person makes silly fast food demands of the police and ends up getting arrested. But alas, while it’s nice to know there are cops out there willing to drive your average hungry citizen to Burger King, bringing along your drugs for the ride is not going to go over well in your new carpool.

A 27-year-old man involved in an apparent argument with a cab driver early Sunday morning brought the cops out to look into things, reports the New Jersey Advance.

After things were smoothed over, the passenger asked the officer if he could give him a lift to Burger King on the other side of town, ostensibly because he was hungry.

The officer agreed, and all was well and good… until he informed his new passenger that in order to ride in the patrol car, he’d have to perform a pat-down. Makes sense — you can’t have someone with a weapon in the back of your ride for safety reasons.

That’s when the officer allegedly discovered that the man was packing pot, and had marijuana in his pockets. Needless to say, he did not get to Burger King that night. He was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Man who asked police for ride to Burger King busted for pot, Mount Olive cops say [NJ Advance]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Marriott, Hilton Revise Policies To Add Penalty Fee For Last-Minute Reservation Cancellations

(Eric Norris)

Consumers used to having the ability to make hotel cancellations the day of arrival for free had better get their wallets out next time they try to do so at Hilton or Marriott hotels. The two chains are apparently taking a lesson from the airline industry and implementing a fee for last-minute reservation cancellations.

The New York Times reports that starting January 1 both hotel chains will charge guests a penalty of one night’s room rate if they fail to cancel their reservation by the day before their scheduled arrival.

Officials with Hilton say the change was made so the hotel could provide consumers with a more consistent booking process and to make rooms available for when guests are in need of last-minute travel accommodations.

The new fee charge and last-minute cancellation policy will not affect some of the brands’ smaller chains. Current cancellation policies won’t change for hotels that already require a two-day, four-day or longer advanced notice, the Times reports.

“Some hotels have more restrictive policies in place, so please refer to your individual conformations to verify their policy,” officials with Hilton say in a statement.

Bjorn Hanson, an official with the New York University Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism, says hotels’ once standard policy of having until 6 p.m. on the day of arrival to cancel are long gone.

Instead, he says, hotels’ tighter cancelation policies are a response to an increasing trend in which business travelers cancel accommodations more than they used to.

The Times reports that the policy change for Hilton and Marriott could also be a sign that the hotel industry is taking a page from the airline industry which charges additional fees for any number of things including canceling and rebooking flights.

According to estimates from IdeaWorksCompany.com, the airline industry earned $2.81 billion in cancellation penalty fees in 2013, up from $1.67 billion just five years ago.

For years, hotels have earned ancillary revenue through fees for Wi-Fi and so-called resort charges. With the addition of tighter cancellation policies and penalties, those fees are sure to account for a large chunk of the industry’s earnings.

In fact, Hanson projects that hotels will accrue a record $2.25 billion in fees and surcharges this year.

Still, the industry has a long way to go to catch up with airlines, which raised about $14.3 billion in total ancillary revenue last year, the Times reports.

Inspired by Airlines, Hotels Increase Fees [The New York Times]

by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

Nutella Sells Personalized Jars, Misses Out On Potential U.S. Sales Bonanza

If Coca-Cola was able to move more bottles of dark brown high fructose corn syrup water by slapping names on the labels, why can’t the same idea work for other products? That is probably not the idea behind a new Nutella campaign, which lets you pay more than six bucks for a jar of the choco-nut spread that literally has your name on it. Instead of figuratively having your name on it, as usual.

Unfortunately, you can’t wander over to the local grocery store and pick up one of these jars, unlike the Coke bottles. You have to order them from Selfridges, the luxury department store in London that was definitely not founded by Jeremy Piven. Extra difficulty: you can’t order them online. They are only available in stores. If you happen to be visiting London, Manchester, or Birmingham in the near future, you’re in luck. If you aren’t, well, you’ll have to fire up your color printer and make your own at home.

Why are we telling our readers about this, then? To highlight the potential sales bonanza that Ferrero, makers of Nutella, are missing out on. Sure, Americans definitely don’t need an excuse to consume more choco-hazelnut spread, but that has never stopped us before. It certainly didn’t stop us in the case of the Coke campaign.

You Can Now Buy Nutella Jars Personalised With Your Own Name [Buzzfeed]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

4.5 Years Later, Restaurant Owner Pleads Guilty To Serving Whale Meat

(a lonewolf)

Way back in March 2010, we brought you the story of The Hump, a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles charged with violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act by serving the meat of the Sei Whale. The eatery has since closed, but the case against its owner has lingered, until yesterday, when he entered a guilty plea in federal court.

Both The Hump’s parent company and its owner pleaded guilty to one count of unlawful sale of a marine mammal, reports the L.A. Times. The two defendants will pay a total fine of $27,500.

As part of the plea agreement, the owner will be on probation for 12 months if the court approves of the deal.

Documentary producers who had previously made the Oscar-winning film The Cove about dolphin hunting in Japan, secretly filmed chefs at The Hump preparing whale meat for customers who requested the illegal delicacy.

This led to an undercover investigation by federal authorities, who say the chef retrieved the whale meat from his car in the parking lot before slicing it up for customers.

Shortly after the March 2010 bust, the restaurant issued a public apology, saying that it had “ignored its responsibilities to help save endangered whales from extinction and failed to support the world community in its uphill fight to protect all endangered species.”

The Hump vowed to put into place new policies to prevent a repeat of such an incident, but within a month the eatery was closed.

Two Hump chefs have already pleaded guilty to misdemeanor counts of conspiracy and the sale of marine mammals, but have yet to be sentenced.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Two Men Ride All Of Disney World’s 46 Rides In One Day

(ajruck)

There are many things that as a kid, we swear we’ll do when we’re finally old enough to live our own lives: Build that awesome treehouse, tell Scott McMeaniePants from 7th grade that he’s a total knob, and ride amusement park rides all day long with no one to tell you to stop. Two grown men lived that last childhood fantasy out, riding all 46 rides at Disney World in a single day.

The two guys accomplished their feat on Nov. 7 over 17 hours, an epic journey of riding rides that totaled 22 miles of running for the intrepid adventurers, reports the New York Daily News.

Both grew up in the Midwest and visited the park every now and then as children. They both developed a love of theme parks, and met in a chatroom on AOL in their 20s which is when they started to bond over their hobby.

Apparently it ain’t easy to do, but it was all in good fun.

“People find it really hard to believe I guess,” one of the men, 41, told the NYDN. “It’s not like we’re solving world hunger. But it’s fun to have a little challenge that no one has ever done before and people think is impossible.”

One of the men has lived in Orlando for nine years and says he’s been to Disney World hundreds of times by now. But he still remembers that as a kid, he tried to get as much out of that one day at the park as he could, riding as many rides as possible.

The pals made their first attempt — and first meeting in real life — last year. Unfortunately, three of the rides were closed due to weather at the end of the day.

This year they started planning early, checking the schedules for all of the rides, timing exactly how long it’d take them to get where they needed to go and figuring out when each ride would be at its least crowded. They also trained physically and packed six protein bars and water bottles to refill along the way.

“If you had asked me ahead of time if I could have (run 22 miles), I would have said ‘no way,’” the 46-year-old friend said. “But over the day it’s only a mile and a half an hour so it’s not that bad.”

With FastPass tickets in hand, they started their day off at 8 a.m. at Hollywood Studios and endedit 15 minutes before the park closes at 1 a.m. at the Magic Kingdom.

They had time left, so they went on four more rides just to double it up and make the total 50 rides.

“There’s a big difference between taking all of the rides and taking many rides,” one of the guys said. “You really have to get into the nitty gritty of the strategy.”

Two men take on all 46 rides at Disney World in one day [New York Daily News]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist