Pizza Hut Australia Now Offers Doritos-Coated Crust

Pizza Hut may have introduced an amazing array of pizza variations recently, but their newest variation is one that you won’t be able to find in this country. While a Doritos-coated, cheese-stuffed pizza crust might seem like a quintessentially American treat, you can only get this pizza in Australia.

Sometimes the delicacies and monstrosities that fast-food chains offer abroad eventually make their way to the United States. Considering the success of Doritos Locos Tacos, this product seems like a good candidate for Pizza Hut to export back to its home country.

“We know from research how big an impact the crunch sound has on one’s appetite,” the company quotes Fatima Syed, for The Hut Down Under. “This is an all taste, no waste pizza.” We hope that Pizza Hut has more advanced snack chip pizza technology than competitor Papa John’s, which produced a Fritos pizza that our readers mostly found to be crunch-free and kind of gross.

The crust is available only for a limited time, but you can match it up with any regular Pizza Hut toppings. If you’re in Australia. And you dare to try a Doritos-encrusted pizza.

This is not a drill. This is a real pizza.

Pizza Hut and Doritos create the ultimate cruuunchy stuffed crust [Press Release] (via 7Deadly)

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Cat Makes Everyone Happy By Surviving 30 Days In Moving Box On A Cross-Country Trip

Mee Moowe, you did it. (WAVY.com)

There are many bad things in the world, things that make you sad and upset and tempt you to throw large, breakable things against the wall and rail against whatever it is that’s bringing you down. In those moments, grab hold of the fact that a cat’s owners say she survived 30 days trapped in a box that traveled cross-country, without food or water to sustain her.

Her owner says it all started in Suffolk, V.A. in September, when movers were packing up the family home as they prepared to move to Hawaii, reports WAVY.com. Mee Moowe the cat went missing at some point while the movers were there.

The family thought maybe she’d just run away, scared by the movers and all the noise they were making, and decided to delay the move for three more nights. They stayed in the empty house, hoping Mee Moowe would come back.

Finally, they were forced to leave, and abandon hope of finding the beloved cat.

“It made me sick. It was heartbreaking,” her owner said. “My girls were devastated trying to tell me that I couldn’t leave without Mee Moowe.”

It took 36 days for the family’s stuff to travel from Virginia to Hawaii, from packing day to unpacking time. Movers were unloading boxes at the new home when Mee Moowe’s owner says she heard a faint meow for help. Or at least, that’s how I’d translate it.

“The guy goes, ‘what was that sound?’ and my heart just kind of sunk for a minute and I thought, ‘no, no way.’ And then we heard it again. And the guy said, ‘was that a cat?’” she said.

It was Mee Mowe, weak, anemic and half her former size, with her eyes crusted shut, inside a box. She wasn’t in good shape, but her Hawaii vet says she’s going to make it, despite surviving without food or water for more than a month.

“I was in shock,” her owner said, adding that the cat went right up to her daughters and won’t let them leave her. “I couldn’t believe it. I think I was grateful that she was alive, but I was furious this happened to her.”

WAVY.com spoke with the veterinarian’s office that treated Mee Moowe in Hawaii. They said she exhibited classic symptoms of starvation, but somehow, she survived more than a month without food or water.

But there’s another snarl before she can curl up at home with her humans — Mee Moowe was supposed to stay in Virginia with a family member so she could get all the vaccinations she needed to move to Hawaii. Now she has to stay in quarantine at the vet in Hawaii for three months, at a cost to her family of $4,000.

The family is happy to be reunited, despite that, in light of the seemingly impossible trip their cat made to get back to them. Vets say it’s not likely a cat would survive such an ordeal, but a lot depends on the health of the feline before undergoing such a hellish trip.

“I’m just as shocked as they are,” her owner said. “I have no idea how she did it.”

Owner: Trapped cat survived 30-day trip in moving box [WAVY.com]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Authors Argue In Court That Google Books Scanning Project Is Bad For Book Sales

(Joel Zimmer)

Is Google Books a useful tool for finding exactly the book that you need and driving sales, or a copyright infringement on a massive scale? That’s been the longtime argument (in court) between Google and some of the authors whose work appears in the search engine. At stake are billions of dollars that Google would owe the Authors Guild and individual authors who are parties to the suit.

Google Books is now a decade old. The project began with the scanning of university book collections. Google Books reproduces pages from these books and scanned them using optical character recognition, making every word of the text searchable. The collection also includes vintage magazines, something that we’re very fond of mining to mock advertising from the past.

While there’s no legal issue with scanning and reproducing books that are long out of print and that are now in the public domain, authors do take issue with their books sitting in their fully-indexed entirety on Google’s servers. A federal judge dismissed the authors’ case at the end of 2013, and the parties are currently arguing the case in a federal appeals court. While the authors claim that scanning books and making them searchable is a potentially money-making infringement, Google contends that the database is really intended to make books easier to find and buy. Pages for each book do provide links to purchase the book that a surfer is looking at, or to locate it in a nearby public or university library.

Google should pay authors for scanned books, U.S. appeals court told [Reuters]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

DirecTV’s HBO Contract Indicates It Could Sell Standalone HBO Go

(Ángel Raúl Ravelo Rodríguez)

There are several mysteries surrounding the impending 2015 launch of HBO’s standalone streaming video service: Will it be the same as HBO Go? What will it cost? Do I have to buy it through my cable company? HBO hasn’t given any answers to these questions, but recent news about the network’s contract with DirecTV appears to indicate that even the satellite services may be selling the service.

Buried in this Wall Street Journal story on a clause in HBO’s contract with DirecTV is a mention that “DirecTV would immediately get the right to offer HBO’s streaming product” if the premium cable network can sign up more than 450,000 online subscribers nationwide (or 300,000 in any one market).

As DirecTV doesn’t currently offer its own broadband service, that seems to indicate that the satellite company would use its customer service and billing departments as a storefront for HBO.

This meshes with a November statement by HBO CEO Richard Plepler, who brushed off concerns that a standalone HBO Go would cannibalize its cable customers.

“There is gold in the hills, lets go get it together,” explained Plepler, hinting that the cable companies who also provide most of the terrestrial broadband service in the U.S. would get a cut of the monthly fees for the streaming service.

But DirecTV poses a different issue, as there is no immediately apparent incentive for a customer to get a streaming service from a company that can’t currently carry that stream. That may all change if DirecTV’s merger with AT&T is successful, but even if that deal is approved it could be quite some time until DirecTV is able to offer any broadband service to many of its more than 20 million customers.

The Journal story that includes the detail about DirecTV being able to sell HBO’s streaming service primarily focuses on a clause that would allow the satellite company to scale back its marketing of HBO if that 450K subscriber number threshold is crossed.

While that does seem like a clause intended to penalize HBO for possibly siphoning off pay-TV customers, it doesn’t make much sense why DirecTV would want to stop marketing a product that it makes money from. And with the two other big players in premium cable — Showtime and Starz — also looking to launch standalone services, it’s not like DirecTV would benefit by shifting its marketing to either of these networks.

HBO’s contract with DirecTV ends next year, and the streaming issue will undoubtedly be a major part of the negotiations for a new deal.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Police Arrest Kohl’s Shopper Accused Of Wandering The Store While Masturbating

(JeepersMedia)

Shopping can already be a stressful experience in the holidays, what with people racing to grab the best deals, filling up parking lots and elbowing each other in the Frozen aisle. But police say one Kohl’s shopper upped the bad shopping experience ante when he wandered around the story earlier this week, private bits out and masturbating as he strolled.

Police in Illinois were called to the department store around 4:30 p.m. one afternoon, reports KSDK.com, after other shoppers reported seeing his exposed genitals as he pleasured himself on a walkabout around the store.

The suspect fled before police arrived and ran toward a Popeye’s nearby, but cops caught up with him when he tried to board a bus.

Officials arrested the 21-year-old and charged him with one count of public indecency/sexual conduct, noting that he was stopped for a similar incident inside a Marshall’s store in the area in October.

At least he didn’t involve any stuffed animals in his alleged acts of grossness.

Man accused of exposing self at Kohl’s [KSDK.com]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Verizon Expanding LTE Networks, Ever-So-Slowly Doing Away With 3G

(dooley)

It’s the end of an era! Or at least, the beginning of a process that will eventually lead to the end of an era. 3G was once the great new hotness that made everyone run out and buy an iPhone, but over the years it’s been left in the dust by faster 4G LTE service. Now Verizon, the country’s largest wireless carrier, has started down the road that will eventually kill off the venerable 3G once and for all.

The folks over at GigaOm have explained what’s going on. There’s a lot of technical information in their post, but the gist of it is pretty straightforward: Verizon’s slowly doing away with their 3G service in order to provide new levels of LTE.

It all boils down to the science of wireless communications. Mobile data is transmitted through radio waves, part of the electromagnetic spectrum. In the U.S., each wireless company has a specific chunk of frequencies in the EM spectrum allotted for their use. (The FCC regulates who gets to use which chunks, mostly through spectrum auctions.)

The last couple of times Verizon expanded LTE (4G) service, GigaOm explains, they put it in “new” chunks of spectrum — sections they had recently purchased or traded for — that weren’t previously in use. But now, as a network analyzer has spotted, Verizon’s newest LTE connections are happening in bandwidth frequencies that they’ve had for a long time, and that they used to use for older tech. Basically, as GigaOm puts it, Verizon is “cannibalizing” old bits of their network in order to do upgrades and expansions.

Of course, what happens when you Frankenstein something new together is that the parts aren’t in the old system anymore. With the frequencies that once supported Verizon’s 3G network now taken up with its 4G network, the 3G network is shrinking.

Representatives for Verizon confirmed to GigaOm that they are testing changes, and that eventually — at some point in the undetermined future — they plan to convert all of their networks to LTE.

But that time is definitely not yet. 80% of Verizon’s mobile traffic does go through LTE, according to GigaOm… but Verizon is the nation’s largest mobile carrier by far, and those 20% of customers using 2G and 3G devices still add up to about 40 million people.

The evolution and dominance of mobile voice and data was quick, taking place over mostly the last 15 years, and as tech evolved rapidly networks became something of a hodgepodge amalgam of technologies. Verizon’s on the long, slow path to full standardization. But tech being what it is, we might well be two iterations past 4G LTE by the time they get there.

Verizon starts killing off 3G networks to make room for LTE [GigaOm]

by Kate Cox via Consumerist

CDC: This Year’s Batch Of Flu Shots Might Not Fight Current Flu Strain That Well

(Alec Tabak)

There you are, arm bared and teeth set, ready to endure the needle required to deliver a dose of flu vaccine, because you know that getting a flu shot will prepare you against the onslaught of illness. But it might not work out all that well, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, because this year’s batch of vaccine is proving a bit weak in the face of the current strain of flu going around for 2014-15.

The CDC has taken samples of flu cases this season and says that they suggest that the vaccine on hand right now is perhaps not the best match for the most common seasonal flu strain going around in the U.S., the agency said yesterday, according to Reuters.

As such, it’s issuing an advisory to doctors saying that flu virus samples taken between Oct. 1 and Nov. 22 showed that a little less than half were a good match for the current influenza A (H3N2) component in shots for the 2014 to 2015 season. That means that perhaps the virus has drifted from where it started.

While flu activity hasn’t been much to worry about so far, it’s going up, the CDC says, and the H3N2 strain of viruses appears to be the one on top in most cases.

That’s not good news, as flu seasons where this particular strain is dominant tend to have higher hospitalization rates and more flu-related deaths. This is especially true for older people and very young kids.

So is there a point to getting a flu shot if you haven’t already? The CDC says the current batch of vaccine could still shield you somewhat against drifted viruses and keep you from some of the more severe aspects of the flu, like hospitalization or death. And you’ll still be protected against strains that haven’t mutated that are contained in the vaccine, like influenza B viruses or H1N1.

CDC says flu shots may not be good match for 2014-15 virus [Reuters]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Ford And Chrysler Expand Recalls Of Vehicles With Takata Airbags

Yesterday, airbag-maker Takata made a terrifying admission: the company has no idea exactly why its products have been spraying metal shards into motorists’ bodies when they deploy. The good news is that two more automakers have, with the encouragement of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, expanded their recall of vehicles containing Takata parts to those registered in more states.

The expanded airbag recall now includes model year 2004 and 2005 Ford Ranger and model year 2005 and 2006 Ford GT trucks, but still only recalls those sold in tropical areas with high humidity like Florida, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Trucks sold in high-humidity regions of some other southern states are included, but this recall remains baffling to people with common sense: don’t people sometimes buy a truck, then move to a different state sometimes in the following decade? Aren’t vehicles sometimes sold to people living in different towns?

Chrysler, for its part, has expanded its own recall to include Dodge Ram 1500, 2500 and 3500 trucks, only in model year 2003. It also includes only trucks sold in those high-humidity areas.

The NHTSA is not thrilled with the current state of this recall, which has been limited to the tropical states where “most” of the explosions have occurred.

Ford expands U.S. recall of Takata air bags [Reuters]

Air bag recall pressure builds; Takata remains defiant [Detroit News]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Customer Sues Domino’s Because Intestine-Piercing Wire Bristles Are Not A Pizza Topping

(Brandy Lee)

If you’ve ordered enough pizzas, you’ve probably come across a few with a stray topping that shouldn’t be there. In most cases, the worst that can happen is you eat some green pepper, sausage, or mushroom that you hadn’t intended on consuming. But one Washington state man claims he didn’t realize until it was too late — and he was having emergency surgery — that he’d eaten some Domino’s Pizza topped with wire bristles.

The Seattle Times has the story of a lawsuit filed by the Domino’s customer who says that wire bristles in his Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza ultimately pierced his intestine as they tried to work their way through his digestive tract.

The plaintiff says that he felt a “sharp tearing” in his throat after taking a bite of the pizza. Apparently not realizing what he’d eaten, he washed his meal down with juice and ate some bread. But the throat pain eventually became a “dull pain” in his abdomen.

The culprit was the pair of 1.5″ fine-gauge wire bristles that doctors removed during surgery. One of the wires had pierced the man’s small intestine, according to the man’s wife, who later took photos of what she alleges are additional bristles on top of the pizza.

The suit was filed against the local Domino’s franchise responsible for this pizza, seeking damages for injuries and loss of income.

According to the Times, a county Health Dept. review of this eatery found that employees were using wire brushes to clean the pizza ovens, and that some brushes showed signs of wear.

A rep for Domino’s corporate office said that while franchisees are independently owned, they are still required to follow local, state and federal health regulations.

The plaintiff and his family say they want to send a message about the use of wire brushes in kitchens.

“A company should be accountable to what they’re providing consumers,” said the customer, who has recovered from his surgery. “I’d like to see food organizations look for ways to implement better safety practices.”

“I’d like them to find a new way to clean their ovens,” said his wife to the Times.

The use of wire brushes in the kitchen — and subsequent complaints about bristles ending up in food –has been investigated by the Centers for Disease Control, which previously advised foodservice businesses to “examine whether their patrons are at risk for this injury” and suggests looking into alternate ways to clean cooking surfaces.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

8 U.S. Postal Workers Accused Of Swiping Packages Filled With Pot

(Maulleigh)

While the sight of hundreds of packages filled with mystery goods going past you day by day might eventually prove too strong of a temptation, the job of a U.S. Postal worker depends on not pilfering those boxes and bags destined for others. That’s why eight USPS workers at a Long Island mail processing center have been arrested for allegedly stealing packages crammed full with marijuana.

And yes, you’re right — it’s illegal to mail marijuana, from California where it’s legal medically, or from anywhere, so maybe they thought no one would go asking questions about it?

Investigators say the eight accused figured out that the illicit packages were likely filled with pot based on the fact that they originated in California and were oddly shaped, reports the New York Daily News.

It all started when three empty Priority Mail packages were discovered in the backyard of an abandoned house nearby. A drug-sniffing police dog confirmed suspicions that that wacky smell was indeed, marijuana.

As it turns out, the packages had been sorted and processed at the facility nearby, where surveillance footage showed one worker sneaking out a fire escape door carrying three large packages that looked an awful lot like the pot packages found in the backyard.

Officials reviewed months of the facility’s tape and found the worker and his accused co-conspirators had allegedly stolen a whopping 263 packages believed to contain drugs. They then would put new address labels on them so they could be delivered elsewhere for the drugs to be sold, authorities say.

“Abusing their positions of trust as postal employees, the defendants allegedly stole hundreds of packages to further their drug dealing efforts,” said Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch.

When feds executed some search warrants, they found 129 pounds of pot with a value of around $930,000 in a dozen re-labeled packages. Eight workers have since been charged with theft of mail and drug conspiracy. Because it’s still stealing the mail, even if what’s in the mail shouldn’t be there in the first place.

Postal workers on Long Island busted for stealing pot packages [New York Daily News]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist