It's fetishizing (word?) food, at great expense, when food is something everyone needs. I have a cut off in my tolerance of the-good-life sort of stuff, I think. I don't think I'd make a very good rich person.

Sounds like you'd be a really good rich person.

It was there when my dad was growing up - he used to talk about it all the time.

People keep trying to start up light rail here but it's really hard to come up with a practical plan. The city is so spread out that every plan combines high cost with small coverage.

It's a publicity stunt-- no more than a dozen people will order that seriously, unless there are more crazy drunks in AC than I thought. And it's not about the decadence of the wealthy-- it's about the sheer tackiness of Atlantic City. A waiter who mists things in your mouth? Who does that?!

So apparently, believing that a ghost is watching you makes you less likely to cheat.

[link]

The study that determined this is actually kind of clever. They set up some difficult test, with a financial incentive to do well. They also make it possible to "cheat" on the test. (The software for the test was supposedly defective, and would sometimes show you the answer before the question. Test subjects were asked to press the space bar to clear the answer when this happened.) And some of the test subjects were told that some people claimed to have seen the ghost of a dead graduate student in the room.

Perhaps because they were scared of a dead graduate student's ghost hanging around, participants in the ghost story condition performed worse than those in the other two conditions on the mental rotation problems. More importantly, participants in the ghost story condition pressed the space bar faster than those in the other two conditions (though the difference between their times and those of the participants in the in memoriam condition only approached significance) when the answers were "mistakenly" shown prior to the problems. It appears, then, that thinking about the presence of a ghost in the room made the participants less likely to cheat by looking at the answers before getting the problems.

Tigers choose primates as playmates: [link]

Maybe the waiter misting thing isn't really port, but is like Binaca or some other breath thing?

oh my god. The second picture, with the tiger in front of the orangutan is the cutest thing.

Maybe the waiter misting thing isn't really port, but is like Binaca or some other breath thing?

Rich people with halitosis who require dessert captains to keep them minty fresh?

perzactlly! It's all a result of lighting and smoking $100 bills.

None of this may be logical or supportable, it's just something that makes me feel a little sick

I think it just has to be supported by the fact that it makes you feel sick.

Part of me believes that the misting might enhance the taste sensation (my line of food-fetishising is much earlier than yours, and has to do with lowering the caloric content of foods when so many people are not getting enough calories in the first place), but getting someone else to do it is silly, and why is the atomiser worth so much money?