Oberlin, a private college with a $50,000 tuition, has entered once more into this year’s Tedious Campus Culture War Debate. After hearing complaints that its sushi program wasn’t good enough for reasons of racism, the place of learning has issued an apology.
A recent Singapore Airlines flight carrying 328 passengers and 28 crew members from Singapore to London was halfway through breakfast service when the plane experienced some unexpected turbulence and the "fasten seat belt" sign was turned on.
A man in San Antonio brandished weapons at a Taco Bell, exchanged gunfire with police and spent three hours negotiating with a SWAT team from inside his hotel room. Because Taco Bell raised the price of the Beefy Crunch Burrito.
Advice for fast food servers: Don't mess with someone's BBQ Bacon Double Jr Cheeseburger Deluxe, or you might regret it. Just ask the Michigan Wendy's drive-thru employee who fought back against obnoxious customers, and set off a huge brawl.
This will make you feel better about American legislators' childish antics: The Ukranian Parliament erupted into a brawl last night, with punching, egg-throwing, and opposition leaders setting off smoke bombs. The speaker shielded himself with an umbrella. Video and gallery.
At San Francisco's Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, militant vegans in hooded sweatshirts and masks pied ex-vegan writer Lierre Keith. Their pies were laced with chili peppers—the better to make her weep.
A string of cutbacks have threatened Google's status as a veritable Shangri-la of free gourmet food. Meanwhile, Facebook is ramping up the dining perks. Today the Times suggests Facebook might be "the new standard-bearer for corporate-sponsored dining." Food fight!
Since we opened up that can of stewed pears by praising the guy who threw tomatoes at Sarah Palin, we figured it's a good time to explain why it was cool that he did that. In other words: Food fight!
In this video, a reporter repeatedly interrupts clergymen, arguing with them about the definition of a "grocery store," and finally gets so mad he storms out of the press conference. He's very earnest! But crazy. [700WLW]
"That's business," said Balek when Valleywag reached him by phone.
In October, before Google's cost-cutting campaign began in earnest, the company had more than 10,000 contractors, founder Sergey Brin said. In a mid-December SEC filing, it reported only 4,300 temporary workers.
A cautionary tale for New York Googlers, who have been asked to vote on which snacks will be offered in its shrunken larders: New York magazine tried a similar approach, and found that people voted for much healthier snacks than they actually were willing to consume. [NYMag.com]
Google's offices in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood are the latest to feel the pinch, with hours curtailed and snack service cut back, according to an internal memo. To understand what a shock to the system this is, remember how, when Google went public four years ago, cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin swore they…
Food is at the center of Google's corporate culture, a sign of the company's Pollyanna worldview and the outsized financial success which enables this largesse. So why is Google is closing a café? Off The Grid, one of Google's 18 in-house eateries at its headquarters, abruptly shut its doors this week. Employees are…
Food is part of the Google myth: All you can eat, three meals a day, with plenty of room for your friends and family. No more. Following the curtailment of dinner service, Google is now restricting employees to two guest meals a month. Contractors and temps will not be allowed any guests at all. Google HR chief Laszlo…
The brouhaha over Google's once-legendary, now troubled free-meals perk has bubbled up more charges of wrongdoing in the search engine's kitchens. An anonymous poster has taken to Craigslist to air charges against Google's former global food manager, John Dickman. (The post refers to him as "Dick," but it's…
One of our sources with Google's ready-to-boil kitchens, whom we've nicknamed "Deep Fried," tells us that the employee-coddling search giant has a much bigger food problem than cutbacks on dinner — and a much bigger labor problem than a lack of work visas for its programmers. More than half of the contract workers…
Google's cafeterias have become such a point of pride for the company, even if it has to close a cafe now and again, that longtime AdWords customers recently received a spiral-bound copy of the Google cookbook title "Keyword: Delicious." If anything, the cookbook proves just how much fat there is to trim at the…
Live by the fork, die by the fork. Now that Google is cutting back on its free food, where will its flacks woo journalists? Morale in Google's kitchens is rock-bottom, as leaderless workers try to keep understaffed cafes running, even as Google management insists they open new eateries. The last place Google's PR…
Google's food cutbacks are more targeted than we'd first heard. Dinner will still be served in buildings which house engineers, according to a former Google chef who's made his own inquiries about the changes at the Googleplex cafeterias. Google's only eliminating the evening meal in cafes frequented by nontechnical…
