To shed a bit of light (or possibly to add to any confusion) on the McDonald's coffee case:—

Once some years ago I bought a burger and a large cup of coffee at a McDonald's drive-up window. I had accumulated several of McDonald's pressed paper trays, complete with depressions to hold cups. I set the cup in one of the trays over on the passenger seat and drove to a nearby park to eat my lunch. When I got there, I notice that the passenger seat was sopping wet, and when I pried the plastic lid off the styrofoam coffee cup, the cup was empty. The disk-shaped piece of styrofoam that formed the bottom had fallen out. I thought it was just a fluke until a couple of months later my wife and I and a friend stopped at a McDonald's for coffee. As we were driving away from the window, the bottom fell out of the friend's cup, dumping the hot coffee on her legs. She got scalded pretty well and was mightily pissed-off, but she didn't sue. I don't know if that's what happened to the woman who did sue, but I do know that McDonald's had a problem with their styrofoam cups. If you squeezed them a bit, as you had to when prying the plastic lid off, the bottom could drop out.

Noted in the news very recently, a list of the most dangerous things to consume while driving: 1} coffee, 2) soup, 3) chili -- and I can't recall the rest, but they were all things that have a high spill potential (who eats soup when their driving!??).

On to funnier things:—

When I was there, most of the classrooms in the University of Washington music building were equipped with phonographs. The first thing you had to do was lift the lid. Pasted to the bottom of the lid you found a list of instructions, the first of which said, "Lift Lid." The second instruction said "Turn Unit On," and there was a diagram showing the location of the "ON" switch. The third instruction said, "Check to see the unit is plugged in."

Okay. . . .

Don Firth