LowerTheTone.com

Its hard not to find McDonalds or Burger King burgers tasty at some point in your life. Be it when dying with a hangover, or post drinking session with your friends or just because you are hungry, we’ve all done it. I went through a period of many years where I didn’t venture near fast food joints after reading Eric Schlosser’s excellent book, Fast Food Nation.

However now I’m older and far more ignorant. So when my head is pounding after a night on the tiles, I will settle, the odd time, for a drive thru from whatever fast food joint is nearby.

The trick with fast food is the flavour. Not the ingredients that are pulled from the ground, but the lab created flavours. Schlosser goes into as much detail as legally allowed in his book to explain it. Despite the complexity of it, one thing is for sure, you can blindfold a person and they will know the difference between a Big Mac and a Whopper. Both companies are very proud of their burgers that for sure.

But a strange thing happened recently. On a hungover trip to McDonalds, they had a new burger on the menu, the Big Tasty. ( I believe its called the Big N’ Tasty in some countries). It was a few quid extra but it looked huge and had bacon on it and I had a hangover..

It was tasty. Not as big as I expected but tasty. However there was something glaringly obvious about it as I removed the huge slices of tomatoes from the bun. It tastes exactly like Burger King’s Whopper.

Some google searches later and it transpires that the burger was introduced to directly compete with Burger King’s Whopper. See here. Now maybe I’m naive and this is common knowledge. But for the few extra euro for the same tasting, slightly smaller looking burger, I never thought I’d say this but….. I should have went to Burger King!

Facebook was in the news a lot this week. Mostly because of breasts. The social networking site has been removing photos of women breast feeding as they are considered to be obscene under their policy since 2007. Perhaps the decision makers on Facebook are all men, but they obviously never heard of the expression, Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. There are lots of angry women on facebook. A facebook group was set up by a lady, Kelli Roman, who noticed photos disappearing back in 2007. The group, “Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding Is Not Obscene!” has almost 130,000 members. A spokesperson for Facebook Barry Schnitt, in an unusual move, commented on the campaign advising that they only remove obscene photos where the full breast is exposed but they dont remove many breastfeeding photos. I say “unusual move” because Facebook are generally non responsive to many non standard user queries

The campaign set up a seperate sight with some of the photos that were branded obscene here. (Yes be warned, these photos contain boobies!)

I don’t have kids nor have I breasts, but I do think that in many cases Facebook is creating a bigger problem than it is trying to prevent. Breastfeeding is natural thing and the vast majority of it have been part of the process at some stage in our lives. By banning photos which is generating publicity is doing nothing but creating bigger stigmas around breastfeeding in public, something which regularly pops up in discussion both on and offline.

See an article in the New York Times here.

But the Facebook antics doesn’t end there. Internet movie uber geek, Harry Knowles, had this Facebook profile closed down without warning recently. Knowles, the founder and owner of the movie site Ain’t It Cool, had thousands of friends on his profile and would befriend anyone who requested it. He regularly updated his profile and photos. However Facebook didn’t like it when Harry received many Birthday greetings and closed his profile down. Although Harry wasn’t given a reason, he speculated that it was because of the high activity on his account. Weird. More on it here.

So all this social networking is giving me a headache. Its now acceptable to send birthday greetings via your social networking site (instead of um, a text message?) but its not acceptable to breastfeed your kids or be popular. Strange morality issues there me thinks!

What do you think?