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Only in America?

THE NEXT TIME you are in Cleveland, Ohio and want to be large-hearted to a homeless or a beggar, think twice. You just might get on the wrong side of the law.

John Davis saw a beggar in a wheelchair when he was getting off a motorway in Cleveland and decided to make the poor man’s day by tossing him a couple of dollar bills out of the car window.

To his misfortune, however, the man in the wheelchair did not manage to grab both the bills and one of them landed on the street.He was wondering if he could get out of the car and help the man with the bill when he got his second shock: a traffic cop pulled up alongside him and wrote him a ticket.

“I have a brother who is paralyzed. My brother’s in that same situation and struggles,” he said after the shock of the ticket. The ticket was for littering the street!

Davis just might face up to $500 including costs and is planning to challenge the ticket in court.

Also, he is going to think twice before being a good Samaritan.

“I’d like to do it again but I’m petrified I’m going to get a ticket,” he said.

Playing with fire

APPLYING SUNSCREEN might help you avoid getting sun burnt but it surely is no guarantee that you will not get burnt in other ways, instead.

Brett Sigworth recently said that he sprayed himself with a certain brand of sunscreen aerosol spray in preparation for a day in the sun, grilling up some exciting food.

Only, he had not bargained for what happened to him in the minutes after that. Barely had he bend over the grill to get it going when skin literally caught fire, resulting in second-degree burns on his chest, ear and back, where he applied the sunscreen.

The warnings on the bottle read, “Flammable, don’t use near heat, flame or while burning.” But said nothing about effects post its application, the man claimed. The company which makes the brand of sunscreen spray said it will urgently start an investigation.

We are not sure what to make out of this bizarre incident but what we know is that we certainly don’t intend to go near anything hot or with a live flame, if we have used an aerosol spray on the body!

Seeing Orange!

AMIDST ALL the talk of going green and eco friendly and increasing our green footprint comes news of a charming new green possibility for our homes: functional tableware made from biodegradable orange peels.

While winter months flood the markets and our homes with fresh oranges, they pretty much disappear from our diets and lives the rest of the year.

Designer, Ori Sonnenschein is now saying that there is a way oranges can be part of our everyday lives through the year. Given the rounded shape of the orange peel, the designer spends his time making mugs and small bowls from them.

The design was recently exhibited at the Milan Design Week where it rubbed shoulders with other sustainable designs made by students of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. The designer has aptly named his line of tableware,‘Solskin Peels’.

“I focused on finding a local biodegradable and functional material. I found it in citrus peels. Through simple processing I could produce a lightweight, durable, biodegradable, water resistant material with a pleasant aroma, color and texture.”

The orange peel collection includes cups, plates, spoons, mugs, and small jars.

Beat that!

FOR THRIFTY home makers and penny pinchers alike, this is the ultimate invention: a sauce bottle that pours out the last drops of ketchup out of the bottle without all the shaking and swearing that goes with it.

Engineers at MIT recently uploaded a video that showed a specially coated bottle that had the ketchup within streaming out smoothly and effortlessly. In just 6 days the video went viral, getting as many as 118,300 hits.

For finicky homemakers who want to maximize their money, the bottle with LiquiGlide technology could be the most useful innovation after the toothpaste tube press that makes sure the last mg of toothpaste is out of the tube and on the tooth brush. Some viewers left comments praising the innovation and terming it a miracle.

The engineers from the Varanasi Research Group at MIT are, meanwhile, pitching the innovation as at least a partial solution to global food wastage and environmental pollution. In the past, scientists have claimed that eliminating squeeze bottles could save 25,000 tons of petroleum-based plastics a year in caps alone and this bottle could just be the substitute to the squeeze bottle.

• —sudhamenon2006@gmail.com