BDC Now: Facebook Won’t Let 114-Year-Old Use Real Age on Profile
Everyone knows you have to be 13 or older to use Facebook. But did you also know that you can’t sign up unless you’re younger than 100? Check it out in today’s BDC Now, and read more about a new take on a Boston time lapse, the NFL’s brand issues, the onslaught of rat season, and why our seasonable fall is both wonderful and terrible.
Facebook: Where You’re Not Allowed to Be Yourself
There was good news for Facebook users earlier this month when the social media network announced it would revisit its “real names’’ policy that had kept some members of the LGBT community from using their preferred names. But that still doesn’t mean you can be totally honest about who you are. Anna Stoehr learned that the hard way when she signed up for Facebook just ahead of her 114th birthday. Apparently, Facebook doesn’t believe anyone born before 1905 could possibly use Facebook, so Stoehr had to lie about her age. She may have been born in 1900, but that’s not what her profile says. Of course, as long as she was pretending to be younger, she decided to take a couple extra years off. So if you want to send a friend request to the oldest woman in Minnesota, you’re looking for the tech-savvy 99-year-old.
All the Ways to See Boston, Now in One Place
Sight-seeing in Boston has many forms. You can take in the views from the Top of the Hub. You can hop on a duck boat and check things out from land and sea. If you want to splurge, you can snag a seat on a helicopter and get the bird’s eye view. But we’re willing to bet you’ve never seen it from all the famous vantage points at sunrise, sunset, daytime, and nighttime all at once and from the comfort of your desk. Well, now you can. Julian Tryba put together something called a “layer lapse’’ that splices together different time-lapse shots of Boston from different times of day. The short film combines 150,000 photos with a soundtrack courtesy of Alex Adair, and basically turns the city into a visually stunning instrument. Go ahead and watch. It will take you fewer than three minutes and you may never see the city in a cooler way than this.
The NFL Is an Expert in Brand Management
San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick can’t win. He’s sponsored by Beats by Dre, but the NFL (his employer) is sponsored by their competitor, Bose. So every time Kaepernick wears his Beats to an official NFL event, it costs him $10,000 in fines from the league. That leaves him with a pretty terrible choice: He can either submit to the NFL’s demands and not show up at press conferences wearing the brand that sponsors him, or he can stick with Beats by Dre and get fined by the NFL. Or, apparently, he can just buy some tape. Kaepernick came out to his post-game press conference last night with his brand’s headphones draped around his neck, but beat the NFL’s fines on a technicality. He covered the Beats by Dre logo with a piece of white tape. That officially makes the NFL the only place on earth where smoking marijuana is penalized more harshly than hitting your wife, bodily harm is an expected part of the work week, and wearing the wrong brand of headphones can cost you $10,000. Unfortunately, tape can only solve one of those problems.
It’s Rat Season
Orkin just released its rankings of American cities with the worst rat problems, based on its 2013 rodent “treatments.’’ And while it’s comforting to see our fair city of Boston fall outside the top 10, the following sentence immediately wiped that comfort away: “Each fall, rats and mice invade an estimated 21 million American homes. It only takes a hole the size of a quarter for a rat to squeeze inside, and a hole the size of a dime for mice.’’ That’s just horrifying. We understand that small animals need food and warmth too, but we’re not running hotels here. If you need us, we’ll be spending the next few days finding and plugging every hole in our houses. We suggest you do the same.
Yes, September’s Weather Was That Good
High temperatures in Boston for today and tomorrow could push 80 degrees. Yes, that’s a potential for 80 degrees during the same month that, just three years ago, featured one of the worst snow storms in recent history. But hey, that’s the new world we live in. It’s a place where NASA reported that 2014 had the warmest September on the books and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting that this year could be the warmest ever. It’s tempting to just throw our winter jackets back in the closet, kick back, and soak in whatever warmth and sunshine we can get, but something tells us we might want to take action on that whole global climate change thing.
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