Watercooler Stories

Company offers service for drunk dialers

SYDNEY, Nov. 30 (UPI) -- An Australian wireless company is offering a new service aimed at helping "drunken dialers" before they place that embarrassing call.

The new service comes after Virgin Mobile found 95 percent of the people it recently surveyed admitted to making phone calls after drinking too much, Sky News said Tuesday.

Of those people, 55 percent grabbed their phones first thing in the morning to find out who they called. Among the recipients of drunken calls were ex-spouses, current partners and bosses.

Under the new service, customers can call a special number before they go out drinking and enter in numbers to be blocked from their cell phones, the Australian Broadcasting Corp., reported.

They can't dial those numbers out and those numbers cannot dial in until 6:30 a.m. the following day.

Provo reconsiders cat-dog ownership law

PROVO, Utah, Nov. 30 (UPI) -- No one is allowed -- at least legally -- to be a cat person and a dog person at the same time in Provo, Utah, but the city council may soon change that.

It's currently illegal to own both a cat and a dog at the same time. In fact, residents of the central Utah city are in violation of the law if they have more than two dogs or two cats.

The city council has set a vote for Dec. 8 in which members are expected to change the law to make it legal to own as many as two dogs and two cats at the same time.

The change comes at the urging of Susan and Bill Sewell, who, with their six children, tried to adopt a kitten from the Utah County Animal shelter. While filling out paperwork, a center employee learned of the family's current pets -- a dog and a cat -- and said the Sewells would have to leave empty-handed.

"If someone is willing to adopt an animal, it doesn't make any sense to turn them down and then destroy the animal," Susan Sewell told the Provo Daily Herald. "It just didn't make any sense."

The family took the matter to City Councilman Dave Knecht, who is sponsoring the change in pet law.

Book: Don't let the baby just cry

LONDON, Nov. 30 (UPI) -- Ignoring a crying baby could lead to permanent brain damage, concludes a book by British psychologist Margot Sunderland.

"The dramatic claims are the latest chapter in one of the most hotly debated areas of child care," the London Daily Mail said about whether to immediately tend to upset babies or let them cry.

"If you ignore a crying child, tell them to shut up or put them in a room on their own, you can cause serious damage to their brains ... that can result in severe neurosis and emotional disorders later in life," Sunderland told the Daily Mail. The Centre for Child Mental Health official said one in five British children "has or will have a mental health problem," and she believes uncomforted distress is a major cause.

However, Janet Bullen of the parental support group Cry-sis, said no one "in their right mind would leave a baby to cry for any length of time."

Bullen said there is a big difference between crying for a few minutes and crying for hours.

"This book is going to scare people to death," she said.

Junk food ban curbs school district funds

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 30 (UPI) -- A junk-food ban in Los Angeles public schools is costing the district $1,000 per week and pinching funds for after-school activities.

Five months into the experiment, the drop-off in revenue from sales of soda, candy and other popular items at student stores and vending machines has chopped sales on some campuses as much as 60 percent, the Daily News reported Tuesday.

For example, San Fernando Valley schools lost $301,820 in beverage revenue in the first three months of 2004 when Los Angeles Unified School District officials banned soda sales.

Some blame the district's red tape for limiting what ought to be an appetizing selection of healthy alternatives.

"The healthy food is still working. There are lines of kids that would like to buy stuff. There's just nothing to buy. There's not a wide enough variety of products to choose from," said Lisa Jones, community outreach coordinator at James Monroe High School, which piloted a slightly less-restrictive program last year before switching to the district's new standards.