I don’t understand some people

You have no doubt heard of the phenomenon of the people who ‘dine and dash’. These are people who eat in a restaurant and then leave without paying. The usual perpetrators are small groups of young men. Why they do it is unclear, since usually it is not because they are hungry and lack money for food. Maybe they treat it as a lark. This is a despicable practice, especially since some restaurants dock the server for the amount of the unpaid bill. Given that servers get paid less than the minimum wage, this seems particularly outrageous.
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Today is National Dog Day

In honor of the day, here is a little video of a dog ‘rescuing’ a child from the ocean. The dog either thought that her shrieks of delight were actually signals of distress or maybe he was acting on the general principle that children should not be in the ocean without wearing a lifejacket. He was also probably annoyed at the grownups present for not aiding in the ‘rescue’ and instead simply filming it.

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The last days of ‘Peter Bergmann’

There is a haunting short documentary about a mysterious man who appeared in 2009 in Sligo, a small seaside town in Ireland, with a carefully laid out plan to get rid of all traces of his identity. He was successful in that no one has since been able to figure out who he was, which is quite surprising in this day and age when it is so hard to hide our traces.

It appears that not only horses are thoroughbreds

There was an interesting case of a young women who blew through a stop sign at 60 mph and when she was stopped by police and questioned, volunteered an interesting defense.

A woman seen speeding through a stop sign at 60 mph (97 kph) told officers they shouldn’t arrest her because she’s a “very clean, thoroughbred, white girl,” police said.

Her eyes glassy and bloodshot, Lauren Elizabeth Cutshaw was slurring her words and a Breathalyzer showed her blood-alcohol level at 0.18 percent, according to police in Bluffton, South Carolina.

Cutshaw, 32, told the arresting officer she shouldn’t be jailed because she was a cheerleader, a dancer and a sorority girl who graduated from a “high accredited university.”
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The British have a genius for making things complicated

Starting with their weird units for length (inches, feet, yards, furlongs), mass (ounces, pounds, stones, etc.), volume (fluid ounces, gallons), and their now mercifully extinct old currency (pounds, shillings, pence, three-pence, half-pence, farthing), where the conversions never seem to involve a simple factor of ten, the British seem to have, whenever given the chance, opted for a more complicated system when simple ones based on the factor ten stared them in the face. Note that the single word ‘pound’ could refer to a force, a mass, or money. Unfortunately they imposed these systems on their colonies and we had to suffer through them as students. Most countries have taken the sensible step of switching to the metric system, with the US being a notable holdout.
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People do not necessarily ‘suffer’ from diseases

Actor and strong science advocate Alan Alda recently revealed that he has had Parkinson’s disease for the last three years.

The 82-year-old told the CBS This Morning show he was diagnosed three-and-a-half years ago but had only decided to speak about it now.

“The reason I want to talk about it in public is… I’ve had a full life since then,” he said.

“You still have things you can do,” he went on, revealing he was “taking boxing lessons three times a week.”

Parkinson’s is a progressive condition in which the brain becomes damaged. It can lead to tremors, difficulty moving, speech changes and eventually memory problems.

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