Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Remember Gloria Sykes? Straight out of small-town, corn-belt America, she's the good churchy woman who swore she was transformed into an insatiable sex machine after being bounced around in a San Francisco cable car accident. Buying the idea that your name is mud after you've become a fireball with fifty guys a week, a California Superior Court jury awarded her $50,000.

I'm no doctor, no expert on how bumps can rearrange lifestyles, but I figured Sykes' case had to be unique, a once-in-a-lifetime thing (or fling). I was wrong.

The National Center for Public Policy Research reports that a twenty-seven-year-old man in Michigan hit the courthouse jackpot for $200,000 after claiming that a car crash led him to switch sexual gears. Previously happily married, the man testified that he became gay after being rear-ended by a pickup truck!

For good measure, the Michigan jury, after being sufficiently informed of the money-makes-people-whole-again model of U.S. jurisprudence, also awarded $25,000 to the man's ex-wife. No one in court, of course, suggested brainstorming for a non-money solution, a creative long shot--something like giving the man Sykes' phone number.

For those of us schooled in the idea that there's no such thing as a free lunch, this $225,000 in awards means nothing less than a $225,000 hike in car insurance premiums. Unfortunately, if all goes according to plan, we can also expect to pay some jacked-up prices to compensate the latest folks who say they've been victimized by tacos, doughnuts, pita wraps, milk, soap, and toothbrushes.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Mulkesh K. Rai sued Taco Bell for serving him an incorrect burrito. Rai, an allegedly devout Hindu, ordered a bean burrito and was instead handed a beef burrito. By biting into it, Rai claims to have violated his most fundamental religious principle. Maybe I'm too laissez-faire, but I'd bet ten to one that an all-knowing God would know that fast-food joints aren't perfect and move on. Instead, Rai insisted that the wrong burrito produced the predictable list of actionable traumas: severe emotional distress, loss of wages, big medical expenses, blah, blah, blah.

"Eating the cow, it was a really devastating experience," explained Rai, "so much so that I had to go to a psychiatrist. I went to a doctor. I couldn't sleep." On top of seeking money for guilt and sleeplessness, Rai also sued for the cash to cover trips to both England and India--the destinations for religious purification ceremonies to get over the incorrect burrito, including a dip in the Ganges River.

Similarly, a woman in Nashua, New Hampshire, suffering from severe emotional stress has sued a doughnut shop for gross negligence, claiming that her tension began when she and her coworkers opened a box of baked goods that allegedly included a dozen or so in the shape of male genitalia. "There's no word yet," reports the National Center for Public Policy Research, "on what happened to the evidence."

Like Rai, vegetarian Patrick Fish became highly unsettled at Wendy's in Utica, New York, after eating a garden veggie pita that contained a bit of gelatin --a product made from animal tissue--in its sauce. Saying he only

purchased the pita after being assured by a Wendy's employee that it contained no animal byproducts, Fish filed suit for a cool $30 million. "It is hard for non-vegetarians to understand," he explained, comparing his experience to someone unwittingly eating human flesh. "You feel like you've been tainted." For all other equally tainted vegetarians, the president of the Vegetarians Awareness Network, Lige Weill, announced that his group was considering a class action lawsuit. Wendy's announced it would remove the gelatin.

Also targeted, in this land of the brave and free, as too risky for our fragile constitutions are such things as milk and toothbrushes. Claiming that his clogged arteries are a result of his lifetime of milk drinking, Norman Mayo has sued the dairy industry in Texas. In addition to money, Mayo wants government-imposed warning labels on all milk cartons. "Milk," he says, "is just as dangerous as tobacco."

Meanwhile, Chicago lawyer Richard Applebaum is gumming up the legal system with a class action lawsuit against U.S. toothbrush manufacturers for their failure to warn consumers of the potential of "toothbrush related injury." The suit also names the American Dental Association for its "seal of acceptance" endorsements of certain brushes.

My favorite of all, though--the one that best illustrates how far we've slipped--is the soap ban in Florida. The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reports that officials at the Town Center Club of Bonaventure and Century Village in Pembroke Pines have banned soap from their gym showers. "We do not provide soap in the showers because, God forbid, someone might slip," explains Tony Gleeson, vice-president of the clubhouse at Pembroke Pines. The Bonaventure Town Center has already paid out $50,000 to settle just such a claim after a resident who slipped in the shower filed suit. The clubhouse, citing lawsuit worries, has since removed all soap from its showers and has posted signs that warn bathers not to bring their own. "We'll document the people using soap," says Bob Fedderwitz, Bonaventure's executive director.

Ralph R. Reiland, associate professor of economics at Robert Morris College, is the coauthor of Mom and Pop versus the Dreambusters: The Small Business Revolt Against Big Government. His e-mail address is [e-mail].