This past week’s episode of “Dateline,” “How Safe Are Your Favorite Restaurants?”, rated the top ten moderately priced family chain restaurants for health code violations. They measured critical violations, which are the kind of things like cross-contamination, food temperature, and vermin (ew!), which can send you to the hospital.

The upshot is that Denny’s is the best, Red Lobster and Bob Evans aren’t bad, and pretty much avoid everything else. Given the option, I choose an Austin-owned restaurant locally and apply that same approach to most major cities, but sometimes on a highway or in a suburb, the choices are few. Yikes!

This reminds me, Greg says that according to a recent Rand study, people living in suburbs live four fewer years than people living in the cities. Supposedly, this is because of traffic stress and fatalities during peak commute times.