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Name: Dennis
Country: Canada
Birthday: 3/8/1984
Gender: Male
Interests: Improvisational comedy!
Expertise: Improvisational comedy!
Occupation: Student
Industry: Entertainment
Message: message me
Member Since:
12/6/2002
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| Dear Mum,
Last week it was a case about Enderby Town FC. This week, in torts, we are reading Alcock v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire and White v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire, which are both cases that arose in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster!
I feel like the knowledge of English football that you imparted to me has prepared me well for law school.
Love,
Dennis
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| When you see me in the library, hunkered down over my materials, I might not be as studious as you think. Sometimes, I am frittering away my time reading about other matters, or writing home about them.
Personally, I lay the blame squarely on the editors of my Contracts case book. If they hadn't included cases about now-defunct English football clubs, this would not have happened!
(BTW, the following makes more sense if you understand that my mum is a mad supporter of Southampton FC.)
Dear Mum,
Sometimes I get distracted during my studies, and start reading about the history of non-league football clubs on Wikipedia.
Today I was trying to read Contracts, when a quote appeared in my textbook from Lord Denning MR. The quote was taken from a case called Enderby town FC v The Football Association. So I looked up Enderby Town to figure out who the heck they were - turns out they were the predecessor club to Leicester United FC, a team in the 6th tier of English football who went bust in 1996. So I started looking up other defunct English teams.
Sadly, such clubs as Folkestone FC, Epping Town FC, Eastleigh Athletic FC, and Bournemouth Gasworks Athletic FC are all no more.
But on this list of defunct football clubs was Accrington Stanley FC. I was curious because I know full well that Stanley are not defunct - it turns out that the current Accrington Stanley has nothing in common (other than its name and home town) with another club that went bust in 1966.
So I started wondering how the current Accrington Stanley (founded 1968) rose from non-league football to the dizzying heights of League Two. Well, wikipedia has the answer for me:
"The club's recent rise to the Conference level, and eventually to the League, is attributed in part to the windfall of hundreds of thousands of pounds reaped by the sell-on clause in the December 2001 transfer of former Stanley star Brett Ormerod to Southampton, who paid Blackpool over a million pounds for his contract."
Now you know!!
Dennis
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| My parents read my earlier post about urban legends and moved swiftly to set the record straight. A few days ago I got this email from them:
Dennis,
This is no urban legend. When I was in grade 9 Peggy Milan pulled a dried
mouse head out of her bag of Sids sunflower seeds. Our principal Mr. Walsh
who was supervising the class at the time helped her write a letter to the
company. I think she received a case of sunflower seeds a few weeks later
(excluding the mouse heads) enjoyed reading your blog VC. Menace - you are a Case! Jan told me the Aussie story; it didn't happen to her I once found a stone in a tin of Sunrype raisin pie filling - do you remember ? I sent the stone to S'rype & they sent me a bunch of juice boxes !!
There you have it - straight from the horse's mouth!
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| Speaking of urban legends, do you remember ripping the tabs off pop cans and saving them up for charity?
If you ask most people (at least in North America) they will tell you that in elementary school they saved the tabs off of pop cans for some charitable purpose. Usually it was to pay for some healthcare provision that wasn't covered under MediCare. Why on earth would they do this? This is just another urban legend. There is no organisation that takes pop can tabs as payment for some charitable good!
If you ask people (and I have) why they think that you can redeem the tabs from pop cans for charity, they say that it is because you can sell the aluminium for money. This is certainly the case with copper - there are companies that will buy reclaimed copper in order to be able to recycle it. But if this was the case, why wouldn't you save the whole entire can?!?! You'd get a lot more money for that than you would for the puny tabs!
According to what I read, this urban legend originated back when you needed to pull a tab off of a drink can to get it open. Obviously today the drink cans are designed so that you don't need to pull the tabs off, but that might just help perpetuate the urban myth - it is now more rewarding to collect tabs for imaginary charities, because you actually have to do some 'work' for it.
The most amazing manifestation of this urban myth that I have ever seen was at the Metro grocery store in Ottawa; the one at Viewmount and Merivale. At one of the check-out counters, someone had put a clear plastic container with a hole cut out the top of it on display. There were a small number of pop can tabs in the bottom of this container, but to be honest, I don't think that number ever grew. Underneath the container was hand-printed note. In child's writing, it urged customers to save the tabs from their pop cans. For all I know, that thing is still there.
These big block letters said, and I'm not kidding you: "Please save the tabs from pop cans. We are collecting them. We need 4 million to get a wheelchair."
It is so ridiculous that you think I am making this up, but I am not. FOUR MILLION TABS to get a SINGLE WHEELCHAIR!!!!
DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW UNECONOMICAL THIS IS?? It's staggering!!
We don't even have to assume that a single can of pop costs $1 (which is what the price ususally is in a vending machine). Even at the lowest imaginable price, the scheme is just ridiculous! If you were buying no-name cola, in bulk, on sale you could probably get cans at $0.12 a pop. A simple internet search turns up a company selling wheelchairs that start at $99. FOUR MILLION pop cans at $0.12 would cost $480,000. In what bizarro world would this be considered a good bargain?? At what terrible elementary school did this scheme to collect FOUR MILLION pop can tabs have its genesis?? Any right-thinking person has to know that this is nothing more than a CRAZY urban legend!
Actually, come to think of it, I am quite sure that if you showed up at the headquarters of the cola company with a truckload of FOUR MILLION OF THEIR POP CAN TABS, I have no trouble believing that they would give you any wheelchair your heart desired!
My biggest regret - in my life - is that I never took my camera to the grocery store with me.
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| I haven't blogged for some time because I caught cold and was sick for two weeks. When I am sick, I am NOT interested in blogging. But before my blogging hiatus, I had promised you that I would add some more comments about Donoghue v Stevenson, the important case from 1932 that essentially set the foundation for the way courts do tort law today.
I was studying the legal concept of the "duty of care" when I got entirely sidetracked. The duty of care is a legal concept to describe the sort of obligation you might owe someone else when you undertake to do certain things. Remember, Donoghue v Stevenson was about a foreign object that was found in a bottle of ginger beer. According to the facts of this case, a slightly decomposed snail was found in a bottle of ginger beer after Mrs. Donoghue had consumed the contents of that bottle of ginger beer. Upon learning of the snail, Mrs. Donoghue became violently ill. She was diagnosed as having gastroenteritis. She remained ill for nearly a month and had to seek hospital treatment. Fortunately, she recovered.
This relates to the "duty of care", because the courts found that Mr. Stevenson, the ginger beer manufacturer, owed Mrs. Donoghue a duty to take care to ensure that there would not be foreign objects in the ginger beer that Mrs. Donoghue would consume.
This case is a truly brilliant case, for reasons I might talk about in a subsequent blog post. But this case also bothers me because of its incredible facts. I mean, it's about an animal found in a food product, which seems to me to be really fantastical.
This became more of a problem for me after hearing my professor lecture on this case a few times. Every time he introduced this case he brought up two other similar cases that he claims to know of personally; he knows that a former student of his once found a mouse baked into a loaf of bread, and he also claims that he knows of someone who found a rat's head in a Big Mac they ordered at an Ontario McDonald's. He brought up these other two examples to make the story of a snail in ginger beer seem more plausible. This had the opposite effect for me however, because I know the old "mouse in the bread/burger" story to be an urban legend.
I know it to be an urban legend because I first heard it from my mother when I was very young, and it was an urban legend back then too. In fact, I heard it in two different incarnations from my mother. (As it has been some 15-odd years since my mum told me these stories, I am sure that I remember them with less-than-perfect accuracy. Also, I seem to remember being about 7 when I was told these stories, but the truth is I was probably older, and in fact, the stories were probably told to me at some interval, perhaps even years apart.) The first story was simply this: "Someone bought a loaf of bread at Safeway and there was a mouse in it." It is particularly notable that it was at Safeway. I remember thinking even as a young child that this was particularly ironic; the store is called "Safeway" for the specific reason of communicating to customers that it is a "safe way" to buy their groceries - yet it apparently was not safe at all! When I heard that story I thought that Safeway should, at the very least, change its name.
I grew up in a small town where there was only one grocery store, and it was an IGA. My already-strong brand loyalty to IGA became even stronger when I heard about such goings-on at the cold, impersonal, big-city chain of Safeway!
The second time I heard it from my mother was when she told a story that supposedly came from a family friend. This is especially interesting because the family friend in question is someone that I know quite well; I suppose there is nothing to stop my from phoning up this friend and asking her myself if this story ever actually happened. This family friend used to live in Australia - that much is true. According to the story, during one of the summer's when this friend lived in Australia, the continent suffered a plague of mice. The mouse population apparently just exploded and there were mice everywhere in Australia. (Even as I am typing this I am searching google to find out of this alleged plague is a matter of historical record, or is an urban legend itself. When I type "mouse plague" into the search engine, it automatically offers up "mouse plague in australia" as the first suggestion. Remarkable. UPDATE: OK, there is now no doubt about the recurrence of mice plagues in the grain-growing regions of Australia. I have just watched some of the most scarring youtube footage I have ever seen in my life.) So, our friend living in Australia and a plague of mice are the undoubtable parts of this tail - I mean, tale. The whole story is that, in Australia, during this mouse plague, our friend made a cake. When she put it in the oven it was fine. When she took it out of the oven, it had a mouse baked into it. (Apparently because there was a mouse hiding in the oven that had time to climb into the cake pan before being baked to death.) At least, that's how I remember my mum telling the story. It is more likely she told this story as one which our friend knew of from her time in Australia, as opposed to one that happened to our friend. I'm going to have to call that person up and try and sort this out.
The point is, I've heard the mouse-in-baked-goods story before, and I'm just convinced that it's an urban legend. So when variations of this story are invoked to support the likelihood of a snail in ginger beer, it only serves to make me more suspicious of the existence of said snail. This is all the more interesting to me because a) the remains of the snail that was allegedly in the ginger beer was never produced as evidence, and b) my professor, in an as-yet-unpublished book, admits that the snail may have been "real or imagined".
So I did a little more internet digging. It turns out that Google Books will throw up a few books by one Jan Harold Brunvand, an American scholar who specialises in American urban legends. According to his "Encyclopedia of Urban Legends", the rodent story is known to people who study this sort of thing as the "Rat in the Rye Bread" legend. Apparently it originated in America or Canada in the 1940s and in its earlier incarnations almost always involved rye bread. Interestingly, according to Mr. Brunveld, the bakery that is supposedly involved was almost always named as well; this would be consistent with my mum naming Safeway in her rendition of the story.
However, this scholarship from Mr. Brunvand does not mean that a mouse baked into bread never happened. It just means that most renditions of the story are not based in a specific occurrence of the phenomenon. Burnvand says that the mouse/rat in the bread story persists precisely because it is so plausible. And, in his book "Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends" he says that there have been numerous suits filed in American courts claiming damages after a mouse or remains thereof were found in a cola bottle. He specifically mentions Ella Reid (1931) and George Petalas (1971) as plaintiffs who brought actions against bottlers for this reason, with at least Mr. Petalas being successful.
This got me thinking about other urban legends and how they morph and persist. More particularly, I was thinking about how it is always big chains that are the subject of these stories. When it's a burger joint that is involved, it is almost always McDonald's. Virtually every time I hear an urban legend about a foreign object in a burger, it is always McDo's. In some cases, it's been Wendy's. But I have never once heard anyone tell a story about a contaminant in a burger from Arby's, Harvey's, A&W, or even Burger King.
This blog post has become far too long already - when I come back, I have all kinds of crazy stories to tell about urban legends:
- Why is McDonald's always the target of these urban legends?
- Is someone really trying to ban this worthy thing that I believe in??
- Was it really worth it for my elementary class to pull all those tabs off of pop cans??
I never realised how into urban legends I was! Apparently I've really been bottling this up for some time . . . .
Anyway, my point in this whole rambling rant is that the most important case in the entire English common law is based upon a snail that probably never even existed.
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