Go Manteca, it’s ya birthday

News10.net reports of a stolen car in Manteca. Big deal, right? Ok, so the car was a rare Ford GT that retails for $160,000. Still, it happens, no big. Read on…

That wasn’t all. Waterford said that in order to start the GT, the thieves found the battery charger and jumped it. They pushed a Mustang belonging to rapper 50 Cent out of the way and from the damage that was caused, probably fished-tailed the GT out the showroom’s double doors.

Hey, Manteca, rapper 50 Cent parks his Mustang on a showroom floor in your town, get that news to the chamber of commerce! Give those waterslides a run for their money. And while you’re at it, your town has sold 5 of the only 500 GT’s made each year. That’s….one second, 500 divided by 5, oh wait, 5 divided by 500, no 5 times 500…a decent amount of fancy cars sold in an otherwise small town. Well done.

A lifetime of six dollar burgers.

How’s this for poetic justice?

The parent company of Carl’s Jr. burger chains agreed to pay $255,000 to settle claims that a shift manager at an Elk Grove restaurant used racial epithets, told co-workers he had “white pride” and flashed white power signs while on the job, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced Wednesday.

What led to this huge payout by the company to their former employee?

Two weeks after submitting the petition, Galloway was fired, allegedly for eating food without paying for it, Ehrlich said. She also received a death threat on her answering machine and, without a job, was left homeless, according to her attorney, Michael Nkosi.

I just love the sequence of events in this case, that results in Carl’s Jr. settling for $100,000 with the woman and another $155,000 with other employees. Was that alleged stolen six dollar burger worth it, Carl Jr.?

Have smog, will travel.

As many of the proud 96% know, businesses only operate during business hours. That leaves us working stiffs little time to do many of our errands.

So, I had to do the smog check thing yesterday. I decided to try out Smog ‘N Go down in what used to be Laguna. They have several locations, and they’re open well past 5 PM – the one I went to was open until 6:30. Their total fee for smog testing was about $50, which includes the $8 smog check certificate, and a $10 discount coupon (check your pennysaver mailings too – sometimes there’s a good discount on smog checks in there as well).

No appointment was necessary, and I was in and out in half an hour.

I could go on and tell you about the great service I received within those 30 minutes, but they already do on their website:

Quick – Clean – Courteous – Convenient – Competitive. In and Out in a hurry!

I would say they lived up to all of it. And yes, my car passed.

Riva Bar & Grill: Pride of Gold River

Honestly, I can’t even begin to describe the food at the new Riva in Gold River. So many other aspects of the meal outshone the food that I have no idea what to say. First, there was the fact that it’s Gold River neighbor, Il Forno Classico, a fine restaurant and our eatery of choice for the evening, was not in the Entertainment Book. I mean, how dare they! Who do they think they are! Just for that, we decided to eat at Riva. Next was temperature of the window booth in which we were seated. I’m not sure what the exact temperature was, but it’s safe to say that it was on the low end of the Kelvin scale. Add to that our rather interesting fellow diners at an adjacent booth, and any chance of actually enjoying the meal was gone.
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Online map wars

The online map game is getting competitive. As is the case with most online firsts, Google presents a beta product only to have Yahoo! follow suit shortly thereafter. When Google Maps debuted last year it was very exciting. Coupled with Google Earth, I quickly became a daily visitor. However, Yahoo! recently introduced their beta version of a map product and I must admit I’m impressed. If not only for the easy to use interface, I find myself visiting this site more and more.

Basically, Yahoo! took a few of the features that Google Earth offered and implemented them into their web service. That is, you don’t have to download and install the Earth product to sort by categories, for example. And the category listings are very helpful. After entering “Sacramento, CA” into the “Get Map & Directions” field I am able to search by categories such as Restaurants > Italian or Entertainment > Movie Theaters (it’s a beta remember so maybe they’ll remove the listing for the Pussycat Theater?). The real bonus for me being that each listing offers up the address and phone number along with directions to and from without doing more searching. And in a crazed phone number search that is very handy.

And with their API product your very own Sac Rag might be coming at you with some cool new features in ’06!

Double-plus ungood security at Raley’s

Tonight my family and I found ourselves at Raley’s on Folsom Blvd (in the “famous colleges” part of town–Raley’s is actually between Notre Dame Dr and Julliard Dr). After a very successful weekly shopping trip with our two young ladies, we finally made it to the checkout stand, where we found ourselves second in line. And that’s when I noticed that the customer ahead of us was purchasing about a dozen of a certain item, and that said item was being kept by Raley’s in a plastic security device (like they used to use for CDs) which had to be unlocked by the cashier using a specialized tool. This was going to take some time, time that I no longer had. Now, there are a lot of dangerous and/or highly stealable items in your average supermarket–gallons and gallons of liquor, mens magazines, prophylactics, duct tape–so it’s no surprise Raleys would need to take some precautions. This particular item? Infant formula.

The only thing I could think is that, like every single food item in the entire store, infant formula lends itself to being opened and secreted out of the store using all manner of cloak-and-dagger shenanigans, like putting some of it in a bottle to feed your baby because you’re broke and desperate. Is it common to use security protections on infant formula that are not used on any other food item in the store? Is this Raley’s corporate policy, or was it borne of the genius of this particular store?

(And if you’re wondering: no, I’ve never even cracked the cover of 1984. But I think that’s pretty obvious since I think I’m mangling the reference.)