Free Republic

RIFLE, Colo. — Many stores and restaurants are telling people not to bring their guns inside, but one western Colorado restaurant not only embraces the practice of packing heat, it encourages its customers to carry openly — and its waitresses do, too. As she takes your order at Shooters Grill in the town of Rifle — yes, Rifle — waitress Ashlee Saenz carries a pad, pen and a loaded Ruger .357 Blackhawk revolver holstered on her leg, Old West style. It's loaded, and she knows how to use it

 I Am an American!             I was born an American. Unlike my grandparents, I was born in the greatest nation in the history of the world. Being born here didn't make me a real American. That took time. I became an American, slowly and decisively over my entire life. I learned to be an American, through experiences, and knowledge, and witness. I remember moments in my life that brought me to the realization that being born here, in America, is one of the the greatest blessing I had been given. As a young boy, I watched as my...

An Albertville man shot and killed a black bear that wandered into his yard Tuesday evening, according to the Wright County Sheriff’s Office. The Sheriff’s Office got a call about 7:45 p.m. Tuesday from a resident of the 10000 block of 64th Street NE. in the northwest metro community, saying that a bear had come up to the sliding-glass door in the resident’s back yard. A sheriff’s deputy spotted the bear near another residence a few blocks away, on the other side of a park and wooded area. Then a gunshot sounded, and the deputy saw the bear run into...

The Habit Burger and In-N-Out lead the pack. Chick-fil-A also has lots to squawk about. Turns out nobody’s loving it. The standard McDonald’s hamburger — the one that claims to satisfy “billions and billions” — finished dead last in a new Consumer Reports taste test. The Hamburglar’s favorite meal earned a score of just 5.8 out of 10 from the magazine’s readers, putting it far behind West Coast chains The Habit Burger Grill and In-N-Out Burger, which scored 8.1 out of 10 and 8 out of 10, respectively. The top fast food burger available locally was Five Guys Burgers and...

Gordon Ramsay Announces End of Kitchen Nightmares June 23, 2014 Over on GordonRamsay.com, your source for all kinds of Gordon Ramsay news and updates, the British chef says the time has come for him to put a fork in Kitchen Nightmares, which began ten years ago, we're guessing, with a bunch of yelling and a handful of inept U.K. restaurateurs. The chef discussed his franchise with Deadline recently, and said that he intended to "turn it upside down, reposition it and maybe hand the position over to someone else one day." This doesn't mean the end for Hell's Kitchen, MasterChef,...

The idea that eating cocoa-rich, dark chocolate may offer greater health benefits than milk chocolate is not new. Cocoa is loaded with compounds called polyphenols that have been shown to help our bodies fend off inflammation and maybe even improve our moods. And now a small study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association offers evidence of another possible benefit: improving vascular health by increasing blood flow. Researchers studied patients with peripheral artery disease, or PAD, which affects about 20 percent of adults older than 70 in the U.S. and other Western countries. People who have PAD can...

In California, a legal skirmish has erupted over strawberries — or rather, over strawberry breeding. To be absolutely precise, the battle is about strawberry breeding at the University of California, Davis. This is more important than it might sound. More than half of all strawberries in the supermarket trace their ancestry to breeding plots at UC Davis. The strawberry breeders at UC Davis, who've led that program for decades, are leaving the university to carry on their work at a new private company. The California Strawberry Commission, which represents farmers, is now suing the university, accusing it of betraying a...

Just for the San Francisco Gay Pride 2014, Burger King introduced a new burger: the Proud Whopper.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) says acrylamide in food potentially increases the risk of developing cancer for consumers in all age groups. The authority has launched a public consultation on its draft scientific opinion about the substance. Acrylamide is a chemical compound that typically forms in starchy food products such as potato crisps, chips, bread, biscuits and coffee, during high-temperature processing (above 150°), including frying, baking and roasting. […] Acrylamide has previously been linked to cancer. In 2002, Swedish researchers found the compound by coincidence and had a strong suspicion that acrylamide was a carcinogenic agent. But EFSA acknowledges...

WESTWOOD (CBS) – A truck carrying 7,000 pounds of lobster slammed into an MBTA rail bridge in Westwood early Tuesday morning, sparking a fire and huge problems for commuters. The driver of the 13-foot tall Ryder rental truck tried to clear the 10-foot, 6-inch East Street overpass around 4:50 a.m. and failed. The truck burst into flames after the crash. Surveillance video captured the impact. “As a result of impact, a small fire started in the air-conditioner compressor that is positioned near the roof of the truck,” Westwood police spokesman Paul Toland said in a statement. “The fire was quickly...

The sweet foods we crave to relieve stress have been shown to cause obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Short of a ban on sugar refinement, how can we break the habit?The race against obesity continues apace. Last week, for instance, the bid to save New York's sugar addicts, by banning large bottles of soft drinks, fell flat. Meanwhile a small study published in the journal Neuroscience Letters discovered receptors for stress hormones in taste buds. This could help explain why people end up preferring sweeter foods in times of trouble. "Stress and sweet are obviously linked. We've known...

Burger King is celebrating gay pride with a message on its Whopper wrappers. The fast-food chain says it will post a video online Wednesday that shows scenes from a San Francisco location where it sold a “Proud Whopper.” Customers were not told what is in the burger, which comes wrapped in rainbow paper. Once opened up, a message inside the wrapper states, “We are all the same inside.” The idea is that the Proud Whopper is no different from the regular Whopper, despite its colorful packaging. The marketing effort is part of Burger King’s push to connect with customers in...

Baptiste Dubanchet is cycling 3,000 miles from Paris to Warsaw, only eating food that has been thrown out, in protest against the food we waste. The Local Germany met him to see how he lives off “dumpster-diving.” Baptiste, from Tours in France, said his objective was to denounce waste by only eating food thrown away by supermarkets, bakeries and restaurants. Travelling by bicycle, the 25-year-old's carbon footprint will be close to zero at the end of the trip. “I do not pay for any of the food I eat. The only thing I take is water,” he told The Local....

Paiute Deadfall Trap The Paiute is a very quick trigger mechanism. It is also fairly easy to set. Unlike the Figure-4 trigger, it uses cordage. Examine the photos carefully and you will get an idea of how this trigger works. The bait is placed on a long thin horizontal bait stick. This bait stick is held at both ends by friction. When the bait stick is moved, it slips off of the short trigger stick that the cordage is tied to (wrapped around the vertical stick). This allows the weight to fall. Be careful to place the deadfall so that...

American reality TV star Kim Kardashian has called her trip to Vienna to attend the Opera Ball “a true nightmare,” adding that “it was so racist”. Scenes from the trip were shown on Sunday night's episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, and Kim told her sister that “it's like we're honestly in a time warp. Racial insensitivity, everything from this trip, has just been a true nightmare.”

The food sampling operation across 20 fast food outlets in Lancashire also found ham on 10 out of 15 pizzas contained turkey DNAA trading standards department has revealed EVERY takeaway they investigated in a recent inspection has been selling customers pizzas containing “fake cheese”. Officers visited 20 outlets in Lancashire for the food sampling operation and performed tests on ingredients used in hundreds of pizzas sold to customers. Each premises failed on descriptions of the ham, cheese, or both. The report revealed 19 out of 20 samples were found to contain “analogue cheese” - an artificial cheesy substance that is...

A worker was caught on camera preparing shawarma with his feet, prompting public calls on Saudi authorities to punish the restaurant. But officials later denied the restaurant is based in the Gulf Kingdom and said it could be in Turkey. A picture showing the worker squeezing the shawarma meat on the bar with his feet with the help of two other workers was published on social networks in the Kingdom. “Social network users called for action against the restaurant and slammed those workers for abusing public health at a time when demand for restaurant food surges during Ramadan,” Sada newspaper...

SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, CALIF. | First in an occasional series On a cool January day in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Steve Ellis culled his sick bees. The only sounds were their steady buzz and the chuffing of the smoker he used to keep them calm as he opened the hives, one by one, to see how many had survived. The painful chore has become an annual ritual for Ellis, and, hardened now like a medic on the front lines, he crowned another box with a big rock to mark it. “This one is G.A.D.,” he said. “Good...

For one year, Greta Taubert renounced our consumer society. Eating, drinking and dressing without spending a cent, the 30-year-old German woman wanted to see what life would be like if the economic system collapsed. The first thing she badly wanted after her 12 months of consumer abstinence? “Tights,” she replied spontaneously, nursing a cappuccino in a café in Leipzig, a city in what used to be East Germany. SNIP “I even made my own shampoo,” she said. “But I started to look like a Neanderthal. My friends told me, ‘Now you’re going too far’,” she laughed.

A Maryland woman who ordered a meal at a Sonic Corp fast-food restaurant got something extra with her French fries - a bag of marijuana. Carla McFarland, 35, of Frederick, Maryland, and her children, ages 6 and 8, were about to eat a chicken strips lunch on Thursday when she discovered a small, green plastic bag of marijuana in her fries, according to the Frederick County Sheriff's Office. Spokeswoman Lieutenant Jennifer Bailey said on Friday no arrests had been made and the incident is under investigation. McFarland said a Sonic employee claimed ownership of the marijuana and was promptly fired....