Turkey burgers are divine

(disclaimer: I'm going for a third straight sports-free blog entry. I already feel faint. The worst part is, I have enough material to go another two or three sports-free entries!)

Quick hitters:

- Give me a turkey burger over a (beef) hamburger any day of the week. If ground turkey wasn't so expensive ($2.29/lb at Costco for ~6 lbs of meat), I'd stop buying ground beef altogether and switch to ground turkey. Tacos with turkey meat, spaghetti with turkey meat sauce, turkey meat balls, etc...they all work for me! Plus, I like to believe that ground turkey is healthier for me than ground beef. About the only ground turkey recipe that doesn't work quite well, in my culinary experience, is turkey meat loaf. The turkey meat just leaves the finished loaf too dry for my tastes; that's where fresh, ~10-15% fat ground beef does the trick.

(Believe it or not, I have never tried grilling turkey burgers! If only I had some charcoal, I'd throw a couple turkey burgers on my Weber grill and go on a turkey burger bender.)

- I am impressed with Canon's repair department. My sister's Canon Powershot SD100 camera failed; it was a problem with the CCD, as detailed here. I called Canon's repair center, and immediately got a UPS prepaid label to ship the camera to them. The repair took them only two days, and they shipped the camera back via Fedex 2-day delivery! On top of that, apparently Canon also thoroughly cleaned the camera, inside and out.

Now to the story I wanted to talk about today:

- A woman in Walnut, CA, Sarah Vasquez, and her mother are suing Best Buy, alleging that a Geek Squad technician, Hao Kuo Chi, recorded the woman showering using his cell phone. According to the lawsuit, Chi went to the bathroom and apparently planted his phone in a way such that he could get a shot of Vasquez showering. Eventually, Vasquez found the phone in her sister's room, removed the chip (a microSD card, probably), and went to a Verizon store to view the video. The victim claims that Chi could be seen setting up the camera in the footage.

According to this link, Chi has plead no contest, and was sentenced to 72 hours of jail, three years of probation, as well as community service, "sexual impulse" classes, and he must stay away from the victim at all times. Here are my thoughts on this story:

1) I'm still trying to envision how the guy set up his cell phone to do this. Unless the phone was concealed in, say, a medicine cabinet, or hidden in a hamper, I think I would have noticed if someone left a cell phone in my bathroom (not that that would EVER happen :P).

2) The no contest plea leads me to believe that the claims against him are true. If he didn't do it, the chip would have told the entire story. If Chi never appears on the alleged video, as the victim alleges, wouldn't that provide some reasonable doubt to the story? As far as I'm concerned, if I were wrongfully accused, I would have screamed bloody murder and threatened the accusers with a defamation suit. One of two things must be true here: either the guy did it, or he didn't but was absolutely certain that the evidence against him would lead to a conviction.

(The following paragraph contains an analogy to sports. You have been warned).

The no contest plea, in my eyes, is the equivalent of a baseball player having no comment when asked if he had ever taken steroids. If you didn't cheat, never considered cheating, and don't want to be grouped with people accused of being cheaters, wouldn't you come out and say "hell no, I did NOT take steroids"? Instead, most athletes are going with a heavily-worded "no comment," leaving the general public to believe the guy's hiding something.

One thing is for sure; it'll be interesting to see how much Best Buy offers the plaintiff in a settlement. I'm 99% sure that Best Buy will not want this case to go to trial.

Until next time!