On Lucille Miller, who in San Bernadino in 1964 was convicted of burning her husband to death in his Volkswagen.
| Saturday Evening Post | Apr 1966
Chelsea Welch, the US waitress who was fired after she posted a picture of a tip receipt on Reddit, wrote for us:
I was a waitress at Applebee’s restaurant in Saint Louis. I was fired Wednesday for posting a picture on Reddit.com of a note a customer left on a bill. I posted it on the web as a light-hearted joke.
This didn’t even happen at my table. The note was left for another server, who allowed me to take a picture of it at the end of the night.
Someone had scribbled on the receipt, “I give God 10%. Why do you get 18?”
I assumed the customer’s signature was illegible, but I quickly started receiving messages containing Facebook profile links and websites, asking me to confirm the identity of the customer. I refused to confirm any of them, and all were incorrect.
I worked with the Reddit moderators to remove any personal information. I wanted to protect the identity of both my fellow server and the customer. I had no intention of starting a witch-hunt or hurting anyone.
Now I’ve been fired.
The person who wrote the note came across an article about it, called the Applebee’s location, and demanded everyone be fired — me, the server who allowed me to take the picture, the manager on duty at the time, the manager not on duty at the time, everyone. It seems I was fired not because Applebee’s was represented poorly, not because I did anything illegal or against company policy, but because I embarrassed this person.
In light of the situation, I would like to make a statement on behalf of wait staff everywhere: We make $3.50 an hour. Most of my paychecks are less than pocket change because I have to pay taxes on the tips I make.
After sharing my tips with hosts, bussers, and bartenders, I make less than $9 an hour on average, before taxes. I am expected to skip bathroom breaks if we are busy. I go hungry all day if I have several busy tables to work. I am expected to work until 1:30am and then come in again at 10:30am to open the restaurant.
I have worked 12-hour double shifts without a chance to even sit down. I am expected to portray a canned personality that has been found to be least offensive to the greatest amount of people. And I am expected to do all of this, every day, and receive change, or even nothing, in return. After all that, I can be fired for “embarrassing” someone, who directly insults his or her server on religious grounds.
In this economy, $3.50 an hour doesn’t cut it. I can’t pay half my bills. Like many, I would love to see a reasonable, non-tip-dependent wage system for service workers like they have in other countries. But the system being flawed is not an excuse for not paying for services rendered.
I need tips to pay my bills. All waiters do. We spend an hour or more of our time befriending you, making you laugh, getting to know you, and making your dining experience the best it can be. We work hard. We care. We deserve to be paid for that.
I am trying to stand up for all of us who work for just a few dollars an hour at places like Applebee’s. Whether a chain steakhouse or a black-tie establishment, tipping is not optional. It is how we get paid.
I posted a picture to make people laugh, but now I want to make a serious point: Things like this happen to servers all the time. People seem to think that the easiest way to save money on a night out is to skip the tip.
I can’t understand why I was fired over this. I was well liked and respected at Applebee’s. My sales were high, my managers had no problems with me, and I was even hoping to move up to management soon. When I posted this, I didn’t represent Applebee’s in a bad light. In fact, I didn’t represent them at all.
I did my best to protect the identity of all parties involved. I didn’t break any specific guidelines in the company handbook – I checked. But because this person got embarrassed that their selfishness was made public, Applebee’s has made it clear that they would rather lose a dedicated employee than an angry customer. That’s a policy I can’t understand.
I am equally baffled about how a religious tithe is in any way related to paying for services at a restaurant. I can understand why someone could be upset with an automatic gratuity. However, it’s a plainly stated Applebee’s policy that a tip is added automatically for parties over eight like the one this customer was part of. I cannot control that kind of tip; it’s done by the computer that the orders are put into. I’ve been stiffed on tips before, but this is the first time I’ve seen the “Big Man” used as reasoning.
Obviously the person who wrote this note wanted it seen by someone. It’s strange that now that the audience is wider than just the server, the person is ashamed.
I have no agenda here. I seek no revenge against the note writer. I have no interest in exposing their identity, and, at this point, I’m not even sure I want my job back. I was just trying to make a joke, but I came home unemployed.
I’ve been waiting tables to save up some money so I could finally go to college, so I could get an education that would qualify me for a job that doesn’t force me to sell my personality for pocket change.
Is Pink a Color?
MinutePhysics, a popular YouTube channel, posted a video a little while back saying that there is no pink light. This seems to have sparked a debate over whether or not pink is a color - an issue not really brought up by the original video. So, is pink a color? As usual, science is more complicated than you’d initially believe.
Since this is a physics blog, let’s go with the usual physical understanding of what ‘color’ is. Every color, effectively, is just a certain frequency of light. Electromagnetic radiation is characterized by its wavelength, frequency, intensity, etc. When the wavelength is within the visible spectrum (the range of wavelengths humans can visually perceive, approximately from 390 nm to 700 nm), it is known as “visible light,” a range which we breakdown as Roy G. Biv.
There is no single frequency which our brains correspond to “pink” light. Then, how does pink exist? Effectively, pink is a combination of red and violet light - two colors from opposite sides of the visible spectrum. Since these two colors are literal opposites on the visible spectrum, pink could not exist as a fundamental frequency in nature (if you tried to average out the frequencies and “mix” them, you’d arrive at a color somewhere near the middle of the spectrum, around yellow or green). Thus, pink isn’t a fundamental frequency floating out there in space - a single frequency that we could call “pink” doesn’t exist.
Hold on Tumblr bro, Pink obviously exists, I see it on Nicki Minaj all the time!
Yes, yes - what we perceive as Pink does exist on its own, but does that necessarily make it a true color? Will Pink be excluded from the highly exclusive Color Club much like Pluto was ousted from the Planetary Patrol?
Take a second to look around you, you’ll see tons of objects - probably many colored ones. When you look at, for example, a red object - that object absorbs all of the other frequencies except red, and it reflects red back to you. However, when you look at a pink object - you are not seeing pink wavelengths of light. An object would appear pink because wavelengths of both red and violet are being reflected - and our brains perceive it as a new “color,” namely pink.
On a very fundamental level, pink is not a fundamental part of the universe - because no color is. The universe is chock full of electromagnetic radiation, and the only truly fundamental properties of it are wavelength, amplitude, frequency, etc. Color is a phenomenon completely produced by your brain - it’s how we perceive the light. Even different animals perceive light differently than us - like certain animals that can see beyond the visible spectrum, including infrared light. As biologist Timothy H. Goldsmith wrote for Scientific American, “color is not actually a property of light or of objects that reflect light, it is a sensation that arises within the brain.” So, by existing only as a human means of understanding the universe, pink is just as “real” as any other color.
So, there you have it - pink is not a part of the light spectrum, it is the effect of our brains filling the gap between blue and violet, but does that make it any less of a color than anything else?
Let’s look at two common definition for what a color is - one artistic and one scientific.
Scientific Definition: The sensation produced by the effect of light waves striking the retina of the eye. The color of something depends mainly on which wavelengths of light it emits, reflects, or transmits.
Artistic Definition: Color is the element of art that is produced when light, striking an object, is reflected back to the eye.
While there is no fundamental definition of color in all respects, personally, I’d say that pink fits both of these descriptions. Since no color is a fundamental property of the universe, pink does not exist as a part of the visible spectrum, but since all colors are just fabrications of our brain, I have to side with pink here. There are intelligent people on both sides of this debate, and one’s interpretation of definition seems to be how one decides whether to draw the line or not to exclude pink. Where do you stand?
Once more: Christoph Niemann’s tribute to Maurice Sendak. Because it is a wonderful way to start the new year.
Happy 2013.
I loved this the first time I heard it. Even more now.
A father’s life, one year after the death of his three daughters in a fire.
| New York | Dec 2012
GIF of the Day: Elephant Jumping on a Trampoline
Based on a short animation by video artist Nicolas Deveaux.
Today’s spirit animal.
Curious History: Extreme Pumpkin Carving
American artist Ray Villafane has taken pumpkin carving to a whole new level. Using his background in fine art and his work in designing models for DC and Marvel comics, Ray turns pumpkins into gruesome Gothic gargoyles.
I miss growing strange pumpkins.
cooool
