Anyone who has loved a pet dreads the time when the pet seems to be suffering so much that you feel that the humane thing to do is euthanasia. But that decision is never obvious nor easy because there will be very bad days when you think that the time has come that are followed by better days and you are grateful you did not go through with the decision. This up-and-down can go through many cycles and you never get over the guilt of finally making the fateful and irreversible decision.
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No doubt many of you would have heard of this story about a raccoon that climbed up the outside of a 23-story building while people looked on aghast and afraid of a slip that would send it to its death. Fortunately, after many hours of suspense that lasted almost a day with the raccoon occasionally pausing for rest on window ledges, the story has a happy ending.

The Ohio Department of Transportation released the following video.

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What surprises m is that the police are really chill about the whole thing and let him, after he had rammed the vehicle several times, keep jumping on the car for a long time, only moving in when he falls off. I am glad that they waited for him to calm down since there was no one in the other car and it was a wreck already. But as always, I wonder how things might have turned out if he had been black …

There’s more on the incident here.

The news today has multiple stories about chef Anthony Bourdain who committed suicide in Paris at the age of 61. I am not a foodie, never watch cooking shows, and had never heard of Bourdain until he recently appeared on a TV show (I think The Daily Show) to talk about the #MeToo movement and distance himself from his chef friends like Mario Batali for their acts of sexual abuse. He also made an apologia, not because he himself had done anything on those lines (he said that he had not tolerated such things in the kitchens he ran) but because he felt that the fact that the women he knew (even his girl friend Asia Argento) had not confided in him with their horror stories was a sign that he was not seen as an ally.
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Take a look at this 17-second video.

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Watch what ensues when a motorcyclist has a minor collision with a car.

This year’s national Spelling Bee competition ended on Thursday and, to no one’s surprise, the winner was once again an Indian-American. All but three winners since 2002 (and every one since 2008) have had Indian-sounding names. I have written many times before about the Spelling Bee, expressing my view that it seems like a colossal waste of time and effort by children and their families spent in learning to spell obscure words that they will likely never encounter again in their lives, apart from the fact that they could always simply look it up if they needed to.
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This video shows an extraordinary rescue of a child who was dangling from a fourth floor balcony in Paris.