We are all targets of various scam artists who prey on the gullible and the naïve in order to fleece them. But when one such debt collector called Andrew Thierren’s wife falsely claiming that they had an outstanding debt that needed to be repaid, his first reaction, like that of many of us, was to hang up and ignore it. But when the person called again and threatened his wife with rape that was going too far. This normally genial salesman got furious and launched an intense solo investigation to find out whom this person was and who they worked for, and in the process uncovered a vast network of scammers.
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When you see drawings for proposed architectural projects, they show an idealized vision with pleasant environs consisting of wide, neatly landscaped streets and pedestrians and dogs walking among minimal traffic. My eye was drawn in today’s local newspaper, the Plain Dealer, to an article about a new condominium project on a street that is very close to the university I used to work at and so I am familiar with the neighborhood.
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There is much misery and suffering in the world, some of it due to natural disasters, others due to human actions. In the former category was the recent 7.3 earthquake that hit Iran and Iraq and killed over 500 people and caused greater damage and death in Iran. So it was nice to watch this clip of a little boy bringing his friend to an emergency food station run by the Red Crescent and telling the workers that she had not had any food and asking that she be given some. He did not ask for anything for himself but an aid worker stopped him as he walked away and gave him some food too.

Carla Sinclair highlights how some people in the Dutch town of Nijmegen, who happened to be behavioral change experts, noticed a problem at an intersection where bicyclists who were turning right were being crowded off to the side due to congestion. So they took matters into their own hands and used duct tape to create separate lanes to nudge the cyclists into different lanes leading to much smoother flow.

Though crude, it worked and the city is now going to make the lanes official. What struck me was that there seem to a lot of cyclists and that they are pretty law abiding folk.

Caitlin Doughty writes about two recent cases where people came across the bodies of dead people but then dumped them, thinking that they were mannequins put out as pranks. She is the owner of a funeral home and she says that part of the problem is that too few people spend any time at all with their deceased loved ones, thinking that they must quickly shunt them off to funeral homes, and thus have little idea of what a dead person looks like.
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A story has emerged of a drunken Uber passenger in Texas berating the driver using insults and profanity. There is audio of the exchange taken after the driver stopped the car and called the police after she refused to leave. What struck me while listening is how calm and patient the driver is.
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One of the first things that struck me when I came to the US is the massive wastage of food. The most obvious signs of this can be found in the dumpsters behind grocery stores and restaurants where plenty of perfectly good food is thrown away because it is easier to do so than it is to make arrangements to divert it to people who might be able to use it, or because of dates stamped on the product that suggest that it is unsafe to eat when it is not, or because they are afraid of being held liable if someone falls ill. There are poor and homeless people who depend upon finding edible food in dumpsters in order to survive but surely there must be a better way of getting that food to them?
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