Should you be required by law to pay a gratuity if you don’t think the restaurant’s service was worth it? The police in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania think so, and they arrested two college students for refusing to pay a $16.35 tip over what they claim was poor service.

Philly.com – Nov. 19, 2009:

“You can’t give us terrible, terrible service and expect a tip,” said Pope, a 22-year-old Moravian College senior who’s a Pottsville native, according to the Lehigh Valley Express-Times.

They had to find their own napkins and cutlery while their waitress caught a smoke, had to ask the bar for soda refills, and had to wait over an hour for salad and wings, they told NBC10.

The pub, which was very busy that night, took the $73, but then called the cops, who treated the matter as a theft.

From the people who brought you Baconnaise, bacon flavored popcorn and, of course (who could forget?), Mayonnaise Wrestling! At least it isn’t also covered in chocolate. Or chicken fried. Or both.

Supermarket giant Coles will change the name of an in-house brand of biscuits amid claims it is racist.

Coles Spokesman Jim Cooper said the name of the “You’ll Love Coles” brand of chocolate and vanilla biscuits, called Creole Creams, will be changed as part of the company-wide rebranding of Coles products.

The name change comes on the back of claims of racism, with the word Creole used to describe a person of mixed European and African ancestry.

“The word Creole comes from a period when people’s humanity was measured by the amount of white blood they had in their bloodstream. This is the same kind of thought that underpinned horrific regimes like the Nazis,” Sam Watson, the deputy director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland, told brisbanetimes.com.au yesterday.

But Mr Cooper today disputed the racist claims and said the name Creole Creams referred to the “well-known Creole cuisine style that originated in the US.”

The word ‘creole’ is racist? It clearly refers to race, or more specifically skin colour, but as far as I’m aware its not derogatory. Is this biscuit thing just politically correct nonsense? If you are injured while eating one, would it constitute a race related incident?

The Times – October 19, 2009:

That exercise is the key to losing our collective weight is something that we know so deep in our cultural guts that to question it would be ridiculous.

Except that is what the most cutting-edge obesity researchers are now doing. The recent studies show that the benefits of exercise for weight loss have been overstated. This idea is shocking. It goes so far against the orthodoxy that it is not something many can accept. And certainly for governments and the food industry that places them under so much pressure, it is too much to swallow.

But, as Professor Boyd Swinburn, director of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention, says: “This is provocative in many ways . . . but my concern is that if we put the emphasis on exercise we are unlikely to tackle the obesity problem as we are not driving at the root cause.”

The idea that exercise will help to shed pounds is fairly recent — emerging at the same time that obesity began to boom in the 1980s.

A fixed-price special often sounds like a sweet deal. But while more eateries are offering such bundled deals these days, they typically provide smaller portions—which may leave you feeling a little hungry.

These days, the average markup for an iced tea runs a whopping 4,400 percent. Just don’t expect you’ll always get a lemon wedge with it. At about 10 cents a slice, the lemon costs about twice what the drink itself does.

Read the article for six more examples of the restaurant side of the shrink ray phenomenon that’s been going on in grocery stores for some time.