June’s Creation

A month ago I posted about the rice recipe that caused a woman to have a nervous breakdown.

Summary: In 1989, Bobbie June Griggs submitted her rice recipe to South Carolina Electric & Gas's annual rice cookoff. She didn't win, but they published her recipe in their cookbook anyway. So she sued them, claiming its publication had caused her to have a nervous breakdown. For good measure, her husband sued also claiming "loss of consortium." The case almost made it to the Supreme Court, but they decided not to hear it, thereby letting the previous decisions stand. Those decisions were that: a) you can't copyright a single recipe, and b) "copyright law does not cover infliction of emotional distress." So Bobbie June Griggs was out of luck.

A few of you asked, what was the recipe? Thanks to the magic of interlibrary loan, I finally managed to obtain a copy of it, courtesy of the Charleston County Library, which sent me a photocopy of it free of charge. So here it is — the rice recipe that caused a woman to have a nervous breakdown.

I haven't made it yet, but I plan to try it out sometime in the near future. If any of you make it, let us know how it is, and post a picture of it.

Posted By: Alex - Sun Jan 24, 2016 - Comments (11)
Category: Food, Cookbooks, Lawsuits, 1990s

Baked Beans in Boots

One of life's unanswerable mysteries — Why did the man have baked beans in his boots?

London Times - June 30, 1998

Posted By: Alex - Sat Jan 23, 2016 - Comments (20)
Category: 1990s, Cars

Longshot Bet

In 1997 Steve Caldicott of Birmingham placed a bet with William Hill Bookmakers that his son Jack, who was 3½ months old, would score a goal for England in the World Cup final in 2018. If he scores, Steve will win $1.67 million.

Jack is now 19. Any sign that he's a budding soccer star? He's still got two years to go. But, of course, England will also have to make it to the World Cup final.

Southern Illinoisan - Jan 16, 1997

Posted By: Alex - Fri Jan 15, 2016 - Comments (6)
Category: 1990s, Gambling, Casinos, Lotteries and Other Games of Chance

Free Hot Lunch

Did someone say free food?

The Milwaukee Journal — Jun 17, 1990

You can purchase some Free Hot Lunch for only $9.49 at Amazon:

Posted By: Alex - Thu Jan 07, 2016 - Comments (2)
Category: Food, Music, 1990s

Careers for Girls

In 1990, Parker Brothers released a new board game called "Careers for Girls" in which players could choose from six jobs: supermom, rock star, school teacher, fashion designer, animal doctor, and college graduate.

By contrast, the career options in the non-gendered version of Careers included things such as Ecology, Teaching, Sports, Computer Science, Space, Show Biz, Big Business, and Politics. (The game was invented in 1955, and the various career options changed over the years.)

Of course, the company got slammed for being sexist and soon discontinued the "for girls" version of the game, claiming a "lack of mass appeal."

The Big Game Hunter blog offers more background on the history of the Careers game and its original inventor, James Cooke Brown (science fiction author and creator of the artificial language, Loglan).

The Southeast Missourian — Nov 26, 1990

Posted By: Alex - Wed Jan 06, 2016 - Comments (9)
Category: Games, 1990s

The Fainting Woman Sex Case

Classic weird news from 1993. Posted over at about.com.

Posted By: Alex - Wed Dec 23, 2015 - Comments (2)
Category: Crime, 1990s

Rice recipe caused nervous breakdown

1992: Bobbie June Griggs sued South Carolina Electric & Gas, claiming that its publication of her rice recipe caused her to suffer a nervous breakdown. Her husband also brought an action for "loss of consortium."

Griggs had entered her rice recipe in the utility's Third Annual Rice Cookoff in 1989. She wasn't picked as a finalist, but the utility nevertheless included her recipe in the cookoff cookbook (Rice, a lowcountry tradition: the official cookbook for the Third Annual South Carolina Rice Cookoff). This is what triggered the nervous breakdown.

The state court dismissed her case, noting that it was really a copyright case and thus belonged in the federal courts. In 1995, the state supreme court affirmed this decision (although one justice dissented). And it seems that Griggs tried to take her case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, because the AP reported in April 1996 that the Supreme Court also refused to hear her case, noting that "copyright law does not cover infliction of emotional distress" and also that you can't copyright a single recipe.

Her recipe, which she said she spent 10 years developing, involved canned tomatoes, meatballs, onions and bell peppers on a bed of rice. She called it "June's Creation."

Spartanburg Herald-Journal - Apr 23, 1996

Posted By: Alex - Fri Dec 18, 2015 - Comments (10)
Category: Food, Cookbooks, Lawsuits, 1990s

Peels and All

June 1997: Mait Lepik won Estonia's first banana-eating contest thanks to a time-saving strategy. Instead of wasting precious moments peeling the bananas, he simply ate the bananas peels and all. His first-place prize was a free trip to the Canary Islands.

That's how the story was widely reported back in 1997 (such as here and here and below), but I have a hard time believing that it could be quicker to eat a banana with its peel still on, rather than taking a brief moment to remove the peel. After all, the skin is full of fiber and takes time to chew. I think it should have been reported that he managed to win the contest despite not peeling the bananas first.

In the video below the article, professional competitive eater Kevin Strahle (aka L.A. Beast) eats six unpeeled bananas. It's not easy for him. So I don't see how it could have been an easy way for Lepik to win a banana-eating contest either.

San Bernardino County Sun - June 22, 1997

Posted By: Alex - Thu Dec 17, 2015 - Comments (12)
Category: Food, Sports, 1990s

Heaveno!

Leonso Canales of Kingsville, Texas began his campaign to replace the greeting "Hello" with the less satanic "Heaveno" in 1988, but he got really serious about it in 1997 when he placed ads in the local paper showing the word "Hello" scratched out and replaced with "Heaveno." That same year, his campaign received official support when the commissioners of Kleberg County voted unanimously to designate "Heaveno" as the county's official greeting.

Canales died in Sep 2014, and with his departure the wind seems to have been taken out of the sails of the Heaveno movement. The website heaveno.com has been abandoned (although the old site is preserved in the Wayback Machine).

The Encyclopedia of American Loons includes a brief entry about Canales, and his son posted a memorial to him on YouTube (embedded below).

Standard-Speaker (Hazleton, Pennsylvania) - Jan 17, 1997

Posted By: Alex - Mon Dec 07, 2015 - Comments (5)
Category: Languages, Religion, 1990s

Wrong Signature Montblanc

In the mid-1990s, Montblanc began selling a limited-edition pen engraved with the signature of Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers — at a price of $750 for a fountain pen or $375 for the ballpoint version. But in 1996 the company admitted it had made a mistake and recalled all the pens. The engraved signature was from the wrong Alexandre Dumas. Not the author of The Three Musketeers, but rather his not-quite-as-famous son, author of "The Lady With the Camellias.'"

The mistake was first noticed by the owner of a pen store in Toronto who was displaying a manuscript in his store that included the signature of the senior Dumas and noticed it didn't match the one on the pen. [More info: Eugene Register-Guard - Oct 6, 1996]

At the time, there was a lot of speculation that the wrong-signature pen would quickly rise in value. But no. Checking on eBay, it seems that both versions of the pen go for about the same price (anywhere from $800 to $2000). Probably because too many of the wrong-signature pens were made to make it a rare item.

There's a discussion of both pens on the Fountain Pen Network.

Posted By: Alex - Sun Nov 22, 2015 - Comments (4)
Category: 1990s, Goofs and Screw-ups