Like many in society's subgroups, people who work in "death" industries or professions in the U.K. may believe it difficult to reach "like-minded" suitors. Hence, Carla Valentine established Dead Meet earlier this year and told Vice.com in October that she has drawn 5,000 sign-ups among morticians, coroners, embalmers, cemetery workers, taxidermists, etc., who share her chagrin that "normal" people are often grossed out or too indiscreet to respect the dignity of her industry's "clients."
We might, said Valentine, need a sensitive companion at the end of the day to discuss a particularly difficult decomposition. Or, she added, perhaps embalmers make better boyfriends because their work with cosmetics helps them understand why "many women take so long to get ready."
Can't possibly be true
• A passerby shooting video in November outside the Lucky River Chinese restaurant in San Francisco caught an employee banging large slabs of frozen meat on the sidewalk — which was an attempt, said the manager, to defrost them. A KPIX-TV reporter, visiting the precise sidewalk area on the video, found it covered in "blackened gum, cigarette butts and foot-tracked bacteria," but the manager said the worker had been fired and the meat discarded. (The restaurant's previous health department rating was 88, which qualifies as "adequate.")
• The Food and Veterinary Administration of Denmark shut down the food supplier Nordic Ingredients in November after learning that it used an ordinary cement mixer to prepare gelatin products for nursing home and hospital patients unable to swallow whole food. An FVA official told a reporter: "It was an orange cement mixer just like bricklayers use. There were layers [of crusty remains] from previous uses." As many as 12 facilities, including three hospitals, had food on hand from Nordic Ingredients.
Questionable judgment
Assistant Attorney General Karen Straughn of Maryland issued an official warning recently for consumers to watch out for what might be called "the $100 bill on the windshield" scam. (That is, if you notice a $100 bill tucked under your wiper, do not try to retrieve it; it is likely there to trick you into opening your door to a carjacker.) When questioned by WJLA-TV of Washington, D.C., Straughn admitted there were no actual reports of such attempts — and that the story is a well-known urban legend — but nonetheless defended the warning.
Lesson in civics
North Hempstead, N.Y., enforces its dog-littering ordinance with steep $250 fines and street-sign warnings displaying the amount. However, insiders have long known that the signs are wrong — that the written regulation calls for fines of only $25 — and officials have been discussing how to correct their error while still discouraging littering. According to a November WCBS-TV report, now that residents know the actual amount, the debate is whether to replace the erroneous signs (expensive) or just raise the fine 1,000 percent (to $250) and save money.
Continuing crisis
As young professionals have embraced urban neighborhoods, locally grown produce has proliferated in community and even back-yard gardens and is thought to be healthier than pesticide-laden commercial produce. However, the New York Post revealed in November (based on state Health Department data) that such gardens in construction-dense New York City are vulnerable to astonishingly high levels of lead and other toxic metals. One community garden in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant, for example, showed levels of lead nearly 20 times the safe level.
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