McDonalds and Blackboard


Top Blog Boing Boing tells us that McDonalds is trying to patent the sandwich, or at least a series of idiotic devices for making sandwiches. It goes so far to describe the proper way to assemble a hamburger on the piece of paper that you are going to then wrap the burger in. No prior art there, I'm quite sure.

The best part is found on pages 32-33 where they describe the "Method of Making a Hamburger Sandwich with Cheese." They actually include a line art drawing of a piece of burger wrapping paper with a target in the middle of it where the burger should be assembled (reference to figures 41-49 on pages 16 & 17).

"A food worker stacks, in order, cheese 42, onions 64, and a sliced pickle 68 on a staging area 142 of a hamburger sandwich wrapper 140. The staging area may be marked by indica 14Z as shown in FIG. 41 to assist the person who assembles the sandwich." (blah, blah, blah) "For a breadless sandwich leaf lettuce may be substituted for the bread crown and heel. Thus, in this sense the term "bread" or "bread component" also includes leaf lettuce or similar materials..."

So now lettuce is the new bread. You really can't make this stuff up. Truth is stranger than fiction. Here's a PDF of the patent app.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed2Go is NOT Higher Education

Image
For several years now I have railed against the use of ed2go courses when they are affiliated with a college or university. During my time on the Minnesota Online Council I was especially adamant against the listing of the ed2go courses at the MnOnline website as though they were endorsed courses from a member institution. There is no way that I think the brand should be diluted by including courses like this in our offerings. Why not? Glad you asked. NOTE: most of this post was written after I discovered that my own school had recently signed on with ed2go. This saddens me to no end since I spent the past five y ears railing against the use of ed2go in Minnesota Online and our colleges. Our VP in that division assures me that they will do what they can to not harm our reputation for quality online offerings - and I believe that, I'm just not sure how much of that we can actually control. I waited a couple of weeks before posting this to see whether my opinion would be changed by...
Read more

Another Switch from Blackboard to Desire2Learn

Image
As many of you know, I am always interested in the comings and goings of the LMS wars. Who's leaving Blackboard and what are they going to? I rarely have to ask the opposite question - who's migrating to Blackboard from a non-Blackboard platform - because it almost NEVER happens. The latest one to catch my eye was the University of Surrey in the UK. Here's their press release about choosing D2L . Nowhere in the release do they mention what platform they've been on - but it doesn't take much effort to find this on their current website: So, yes, this is another school switching from Blackbeard to Desire2Learn. I find portions of their press release to be revealing about their previous experience with BlackCT Vista. "A new hi-tech system is being introduced at the University of Surrey to enable students to learn on computers and mobile devices via a more personalised platform ." "The new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), replacing and vastly improving...
Read more

New Netiquette Guidelines for LSC Online

The LSC Online Programs Advisory Committee decided to craft a set of netiquette guidelines that would serve as the recommended list that faculty could use for their online courses. It's not a full policy or anything like that, just an attempt to give them some useful information to post in their online courses. Faculty are free to use them, change them, add to them, not use them at all, or whatever. The list is posted in the LSC wiki . This project was taken on because many of our online faculty had been using a particular web resource for many years as a netiquette guide. That web page began carrying less-than-attractive banner ads and quite frankly was always more about general online netiquette rather than focused on online learning. There are quite a few other sets of guidelines out there, but many of them are rather lengthy or include items that we don't feel are needed, and occasionally we just disagreed with them. So, we decided to write a relatively short list of our ow...
Read more