Whipped Cream Difficulties

NYT obit for the late Harold J. Cromer, also known as “Stumpy”, “half of the vaudevillian duo Stump and Stumpy”.

Recently, a bunch of gas stations in my area rebranded their associated convenience stores/markets as 7-11 franchises. I kind of liked this, as it is nice to be able to stop off and get gas and a Slurpee when it is 101 degrees outside. (Many of the stand-alone 7-11 stores in my area have closed over the past few years.)

But they just can’t stay out of trouble, can they?

Federal authorities seized 14 7-Eleven stores on Long Island and in Virginia early Monday, arresting nine owners and managers and charging them with harboring and hiring illegal immigrants and paying them using sham Social Security numbers, people briefed on the case said.

More:

The store remained closed through the early morning, with law enforcement agents turning away customers who ordinarily stop in for coffee. A worker for the Town of Islip said he had seen similar law enforcement activity at several other nearby 7-Elevens.

I wonder what the cops were drinking, and where they were getting it from. I also wonder if anyone is keeping track of the doughnut inventory at the seized stores.

Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York (another book I enthusiastically recommend) has an interesting piece in Wired about why ethylene glycol is such a swell poison. (Pure ethylene glycol is colorless, odorless, and sweet tasting. I hope that I never tick off someone to the point that they’re willing to poison me, because if they put ethylene glycol in my iced tea, I wouldn’t be able to tell.)

(Blum’s piece is tied to the M.D. Anderson poisoning scandal, which I thought about mentioning last week. But there really wasn’t a lot I could say about it; as Blum notes, ethylene glycol isn’t a particularly exotic poison, and the incident itself seems to be your basic boring lover’s spat.)

(Edited to add: Oh, so that’s where I found the Blum piece! Thanks, Tam! And I wasn’t aware Blum was writing regularly for Wired: I’d read some of her articles in Slate, but none since I gave up on Slate as a site publishing outlandish and ridiculous crap in an attempt to get page views.)