9 posts tagged “well done”
London, October 2004
A large band of tweedy revolutionaries toasted Mr. Beau Brummell with their hip flasks at his memorial on Jermyn Street, SW1, before proceeding northwards, with a pause to admire the fine wares in the windows of Jermyn Street's stores. Reaching the Oxford Street, they sought to draw attention to the appalling lack of gentlemanly services available on Britain's high streets. Several operatives entered the premises of Mr. R. McDonald, where they requested devilled kidneys, kedgeree and vintage champagne. Needless to say, they left empty-bladdered.
Other flashpoints were Starbucks (where pots of oolong and china cups were not forthcoming); Specsavers (no monocles); All Bar One (cocktails off the menu); the final straw was when an operative entered an emporium named Carphone Warehouse, and found that it was neither a warehouse nor did it sell telephones for cars. Even a simple request for a walnut encasement for the telephone in an Alvis Speed Twenty was met with a blank stare.
The band of protesters then sauntered down Regent Street, where their spontaneous hat doffing and jovial greetings to all and sundry were much appreciated. The only exception were the constabulary, who for some reason saw several dozen polite, immaculately dressed Chaps and Chapettes as a threat, and by the time the party had reached Piccadilly Circus, the number of officers outnumbered the protesters.
At tea time, Piccadilly Circus was declared a Doffing Zone. Anyone entering hatless or sporting unsuitable headwear was gently offered doffing instruction; curious tourists wearing baseball caps were offered more dapper alternatives such as trilby, fedora and homburg. Afternoon tea was served in delightful china cups on the steps of the statue of Eros, while more advanced techniques, such as moustache growing, were demonstrated to curious members of the constabulary, who failed to see the connection between hirsute constables and a happy citizenry.
The very foundations of vulgar society and homogenized chainstore Britain were not brought to their knees, and Parliament did not call an emergency meeting to deal with the situation. However, the Chaps all had a jolly good time, no-one was hurt, and, who knows, perhaps the likes of Mr. Starbucks really will consider putting some loose leaf teas on his menu, purely to entice a more civilised customer in future.
© The Chap Magazine. All rights reserved.
Boy Guides Medics After Mom Passes Out
April 25, 2008
COLUMBUS, Ind. -- The family of a Columbus kindergarten student is thankful he paid attention to lessons about whom to call in an emergency.
Jared Lebrun, 6, recently was alone with his pregnant mother at home when she passed out because of pregnancy complications, reported WRTV in Indianapolis.
"She fell down. She fell asleep for a little while," Jared recalled on Thursday.
Jared called 911 on a cell phone and told a dispatcher that something was wrong with his mother. The dispatcher couldn't trace the call, so he asked Jared for the address. Jared wasn't sure he knew it, but he knew how to get it.
"He actually stepped out to the front of his house to make sure he knew the address and he read the address to the dispatcher," said Ed Reuter, of the Bartholomew County emergency operations center.
Two 911 dispatchers kept Jared on the line.
"He knew where he lived, the street and his address. We had problems with understanding the street name from him, but he knew what [subdivision] he lived in," dispatcher Scott Crase said.
Medics arrived and helped Jared's mother, April, who is now doing fine. Emergency workers hailed Jared as a hero.
Jared recalled that while he still was on the phone with the dispatchers, his father -- who was out of town -- called on another phone. Jared had a phone on each ear.
"I told my dad to hold on because I was talking to the ambulance," Jared recalled.
By MAGGIE MICHAEL
The Associated Press
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Egyptian police confiscated four ancient mummies on Wednesday and arrested three antiquities smugglers who had stolen them from an ancient graveyard, a security official said.
Wrapped in layers of linen and decorated with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, the mummies were found in the southern province of Minya, 135 miles south of Cairo, the official said on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press.
The three smugglers also were found with 10 small ancient statues. They confessed that they had planned to sell the objects to antiquities brokers, the official said.
The mummies are of a child and three men, but no further details were available, the official said. Archeologists were summoned to check the mummies, he added.
Egypt has drastically stepped up efforts in recent years to stop the trafficking of its antiquities. It has warned foreign museums that it will not help them mount exhibitions on ancient Egypt unless they return smuggled artifacts.
By ASHOK SHARMA
The Associated Press
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
NEW DELHI -- Conservationists welcomed an Indian government plan to create eight new reserves to protect the country's dwindling tiger population, and called Wednesday for more action to prevent illegal trading in tiger parts.
It will take five years to set up the new reserves, which will cover an area of more than 11,900 square miles at a cost to taxpayers of about $153 million, the government's Tiger Project announced Tuesday. Private groups will also contribute funds.
The aim of the reserves is to protect the existing tiger population and stamp out poaching, said Rajesh Gopal, the Tiger Project secretary.
"The (government) assessment shows that though the tiger has suffered due to poaching, loss of quality habitat and loss of its prey, there is still hope," Gopal said in a statement.
New estimates suggest India's wild tiger population has dropped from nearly 3,600 five years ago to about 1,411, the Tiger Project said.
Belinda Wright, director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, said the government may have overestimated the number of tigers in 2003, but that the falling numbers were still shocking.
"I think it's a very serious wake-up call," Wright told The Associated Press. The population of tigers in Asia is estimated at around 3,500 today compared to nearly 5,000 in 1997, she said.
Unless the government drastically improves enforcement steps against poachers and illegal wildlife traders, the number of tigers will continue to dwindle, she said, adding that India, Nepal and China - where demand for tiger parts is strongest - should cooperate to prevent the trade.
The Tiger Project plans to employ retired soldiers to patrol the reserves and hunt for poachers. It will also fill empty park ranger posts, establish eco-tourism guidelines to benefit local populations and speed up projects to relocate villages from inside the new tiger reserves.
Many impoverished villagers take on lucrative work for poaching gangs. Some 250 villages - an estimated 200,000 people - will be relocated under the plan, and each relocated family will be given 1 million rupees - about $25,600 - the government said.
by Iain Rogers
Fri Feb 1, 2008
BERLIN (Reuters) - A German medical student got some unexpected practical experience at the zoo when she gave the kiss of life to a baby tiger choking on a piece of meat, the zoo director said Friday.
The student was passing the enclosure with her toddler son on a visit several weeks ago when she noticed the 4-month-old tiger choking and offered her assistance to the helpless keeper, said Andreas Jacob, director of the zoo in the eastern German city of Halle.
"The tiger tried to eat a piece of meat that was too big and started choking and shaking and then fell over," the student, Janine Bauer, told MDR radio.
"We got the piece out but he wasn't breathing so I tried mouth-to-mouth and heart massage," she added. "After 3-5 minutes he came to, thank God."
The zoo, which held a ceremony Friday to thank Bauer, has decided to call the tiger Johann, after her one-year-old son.
New York Times
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: February 2, 2008
DUBLIN — There is something missing from this otherwise typical bustling cityscape. There are taxis and buses. There are hip bars and pollution. Every other person is talking into a cellphone. But there are no plastic shopping bags, the ubiquitous symbol of urban life.
In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.
Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.
“When my roommate brings one in the flat it annoys the hell out of me,” said Edel Egan, a photographer, carrying groceries last week in a red backpack.
Drowning in a sea of plastic bags, countries from China to Australia, cities from San Francisco to New York have in the past year adopted a flurry of laws and regulations to address the problem, so far with mixed success. The New York City Council, for example, in the face of stiff resistance from business interests, passed a measure requiring only that stores that hand out plastic bags take them back for recycling.
But in the parking lot of a Superquinn Market, Ireland’s largest grocery chain, it is clear that the country is well into the post-plastic-bag era. “I used to get half a dozen with every shop. Now I’d never ever buy one,” said Cathal McKeown, 40, a civil servant carrying two large black cloth bags bearing the bright green Superquinn motto. “If I forgot these, I’d just take the cart of groceries and put them loose in the boot of the car, rather than buy a bag.”
Gerry McCartney, 50, a data processor, has also switched to cloth. “The tax is not so much, but it completely changed a very bad habit,” he said. “Now you never see plastic.”
In January almost 42 billion plastic bags were used worldwide, according to reusablebags.com; the figure increases by more than half a million bags every minute. A vast majority are not reused, ending up as waste — in landfills or as litter. Because plastic bags are light and compressible, they constitute only 2 percent of landfill, but since most are not biodegradable, they will remain there.
In a few countries, including Germany, grocers have long charged a nominal fee for plastic bags, and cloth carrier bags are common. But they are the exception.
In the past few months, several countries have announced plans to eliminate the bags. Bangladesh and some African nations have sought to ban them because they clog fragile sewerage systems, creating a health hazard. Starting this summer, China will prohibit sellers from handing out free plastic shopping bags, but the price they should charge is not specified, and there is little capacity for enforcement. Australia says it wants to end free plastic bags by the end of the year, but has not decided how.
Efforts to tax plastic bags have failed in many places because of heated opposition from manufacturers as well as from merchants, who have said a tax would be bad for business. In Britain, Los Angeles and San Francisco, proposed taxes failed to gain political approval, though San Francisco passed a ban last year. Some countries, like Italy, have settled for voluntary participation.
But there were no plastic bag makers in Ireland (most bags here came from China), and a forceful environment minister gave reluctant shopkeepers little wiggle room, making it illegal for them to pay for the bags on behalf of customers. The government collects the tax, which finances environmental enforcement and cleanup programs.
Furthermore, the environment minister told shopkeepers that if they changed from plastic to paper, he would tax those bags, too.
While paper bags, which degrade, are in some ways better for the environment, studies suggest that more greenhouse gases are released in their manufacture and transportation than in the production of plastic bags.
Today, Ireland’s retailers are great promoters of taxing the bags. “I spent many months arguing against this tax with the minister; I thought customers wouldn’t accept it,” said Senator Feargal Quinn, founder of the Superquinn chain. “But I have become a big, big enthusiast.”
Mr. Quinn is also president of EuroCommerce, a group representing six million European retailers. In that capacity, he has encouraged a plastic bag tax in other countries. But members are not buying it. “They say: ‘Oh, no, no. It wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t be acceptable in our country,’ ” Mr. Quinn said.
As nations fail to act decisively, some environmentally conscious chains have moved in with their own policies. Whole Foods Market announced in January that its stores would no longer offer disposable plastic bags, using recycled paper or cloth instead, and many chains are starting to charge customers for plastic bags.
But such ad hoc efforts are unlikely to have the impact of a national tax. Mr. Quinn said that when his Superquinn stores tried a decade ago to charge 1 cent for plastic bags, customers rebelled. He found himself standing at the cash register buying bags for customers with change from his own pocket to prevent them from going elsewhere.
After five years of the plastic bag tax, Ireland has changed the image of cloth bags, a feat advocates hope to achieve in the United States. Vincent Cobb, the president of reusablebags.com, who founded the company four years ago to promote the issue, said: “Using cloth bags has been seen as an extreme act of a crazed environmentalist. We want it to be seen as something a smart, progressive person would carry.”
Some things worked to Ireland’s advantage. Almost all markets are part of chains that are highly computerized, with cash registers that already collect a national sales tax, so adding the bag tax involved a minimum of reprogramming, and there was little room for evasion.
The country also has a young, flexible population that has proved to be a good testing ground for innovation, from cellphone services to nonsmoking laws. Despite these favorable conditions, Ireland still ended up raising the bag tax 50 percent, after officials noted that consumption was rising slightly.
Ireland has moved on with the tax concept, proposing similar taxes on customers for A.T.M. receipts and chewing gum. (The sidewalks of Dublin are dotted with old wads.) The gum tax has been avoided for the time being because the chewing gum giant Wrigley agreed to create a public cleanup fund as an alternative. This year, the government plans to ban conventional light bulbs, making only low-energy, long-life fluorescent bulbs available.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
SYDNEY, Australia -- An Australian retiree won a $1.8 million lottery prize, then lost it, and then won it again Wednesday through a court ruling.
Werner Reinhold bought the lottery ticket at a newsstand in Australia's largest city of Sydney on Sept. 19, 1995. His original ticket did not print correctly, so he asked for a new one, which turned out to be the winner.
But when Reinhold, now 73, went back to claim the $1.8 million jackpot, he discovered that the replacement ticket had been canceled, not the misprinted original, and was unable to claim the prize.
He sued NSW Lotteries, which oversees lottery tickets in New South Wales state, and the newsstand which sold him the ticket.
Supreme Court Judge Reginald Barrett awarded Reinhold $1.8 million in damages, citing negligence and breach of contract by the newsstand and the state lottery company. Barrett had not yet ruled on what portion of the award each party should pay.
By BRIAN BERGSTEIN
AP Technology Writer
Fri Jan 25, 2008
At dusk on New Year's Eve, Erika Gunderson got into a taxi in New York City and entered a digital-age mystery.
Sitting on the back seat was a nice Canon digital camera. Gunderson asked the driver which previous passenger might have left it, but the cabbie didn't seem to care. So Gunderson brought it home and showed it to her fiance, Brian Ascher. They decided that the only right thing to do was to find the owner.
But how? The only clues were the pictures on the camera: typical tourist snapshots, complete with a visit to the Statue of Liberty. How could they find a stranger among the huddled masses?
Gunderson is busy in finance for Bear Stearns Cos., so the detective quest fell to Ascher, a 26-year-old law student at New York University. He was on winter break and eager to put off writing a paper about climate change treaties.
He checked whether anyone had reported a matching missing camera to the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission. No dice. He placed ads in lost-and-found sections of Craigslist but got just one response — from a couple in Brazil who had lost a camera in a cab on Oct. 12, not Dec. 31.
"I guess they thought their camera had been riding around in a taxi for two months," Ascher recalls now, chuckling at the notion that such a thing would be possible in New York.
The 350 pictures and two videos on the camera showed several adults, an older woman and three children. Half put them at New York sites like the Empire State Building. The other half had the group enjoying warm weather and frolicking at kid-friendly theme parks.
Ascher easily pinpointed Florida. The group had stood in front of a sign indicating Clearwater, Fla., and posed at Bob Heilman's Beachcomber Restaurant there.
They also took a pirate-themed boat ride where the kids got mustaches painted on their faces. Ascher zoomed in on the group to see name tags on their shirts. He spotted an Alan, an Eileen, a male Noel and a female Noelle, plus a Ciarnan. Under their names was written "IRE."
When Ascher checked the videos, he saw nothing telling, just the children dancing and swimming. But in the background, he heard Irish accents.
OK, Ascher figured, the camera's owner is from Ireland.
Ascher called Canon's Ireland division to see if anyone had registered the $500 camera's serial number. No such luck. He posted ads on Irish Web sites. Nothing.
He checked the date stamp on the photos from Bob Heilman's and called to inquire whether anyone remembered serving a big Irish group that day. Without the diners' last names, there was no way to check. It's a nice thing you're trying, the manager told Ascher, but you probably just found yourself a new camera.
Enter some fresh eyes. Ascher's mother, Nancy, and sister, Emily Rann, scoured the pictures for clues he might have missed. Nancy was particularly confident, having reunited people with their lost belongings before. She once found a California woman's wallet in a cab in Florence, Italy, and spent all day on her trail before making a handover at an American Express office.
"I thought, with all this data in the camera, there's no way we're not going to get it back to them," Nancy Ascher says now. "I was hoping it wasn't going to take a trip to Ireland, flashing their pictures everywhere."
Ascher's mother and his sister noticed that one of the pictures showed a doorman helping someone into a New York taxi. Zooming tight on the doorman's uniform, they made out the logo of the Radisson Hotel.
After several phone calls and a visit to the hotel to show the pictures around, Nancy Ascher persuaded an employee to search the Radisson's guest records by first name and country of residence. Indeed, a Noel from Ireland had stayed there on the date stamped on the photo. Nancy Ascher charmed the hotel employee into sharing the guest's e-mail address.
Wonderful.
Except that when Noel responded to Brian Ascher, he said he hadn't lost a camera.
By now, school was resuming, and Ascher was prepared to give the camera to his mom so she could take over. She had figured out the name of the Florida pirate-boat cruise and was trying to reach its operator.
But first Ascher took a final look at the photographs.
He pored over some from Dec. 30 that didn't include the children. The photos showed signs for bars in Manhattan's East Village: The Thirsty Scholar, Telephone Bar, Burp Castle. There also were multiple interior shots of a tavern, but they didn't seem to fit with what Ascher knew of those other three bars.
Then he stopped on another picture, showing two people outside an apartment building. Seemingly accidentally included in the picture was something Ascher had missed the first time: an awning in the background that read "Standings." Aha! Standings is a bar next to Burp Castle. Ascher checked its Web site, and the interior matched the pictures on the camera.
Ascher found Standings' owner, who reached the bartender who had worked Dec. 30. Yes, he recalled an Irish group. Especially because one of the women was a big tipper and said she worked at another New York City bar, Playwrights. The Standings bartender called Playwrights to ask which employees had been in his bar.
Ascher soon got an e-mail from a woman named Sarah Casey, whose sister Jeanette works at Playwrights. Suddenly everything Ascher had seen on the camera came to life.
The Caseys recently had hosted relatives and friends from Ireland. The group included their friend Alan Murphy, who had journeyed to Florida with family before heading to New York, where the clan stayed at the Radisson. (Their Noel was not the Noel whom Ascher e-mailed.) Murphy ended the trip kicking himself for leaving his camera in a cab in the twilight on New Year's Eve.
Sarah Casey agreed to send it to him. It didn't go to Ireland but to Sydney, Australia, where Murphy lives now.
Murphy, an insurance underwriter, had been devastated to lose the pictures from a trip he had planned for years. It was Jan. 10 — his 34th birthday — when he heard he would be getting the photos back. "I was over the moon," he says now. "Best present ever."
"I owe you one," he wrote to Ascher. "It's good to know there are some honest people left in the world."
New York Times
By Andrew Martin
January 23, 2008
The Whole Foods Market chain said Tuesday that it would stop offering plastic grocery bags, giving customers instead a choice between recycled paper or reusable bags.
A rising number of governments and retailers are banning plastic bags, or discouraging their use, because of concerns about their environmental impact. San Francisco banned plastic bags last year unless they are of a type that breaks down easily. China announced a crackdown on plastic bags a few weeks ago, while other governments, including New York City’s, are making sure retailers offer plastic bag recycling.
Whole Foods officials said they had hoped to eliminate plastic bags for some time but had to decide how to make it work in the chain’s 270 stores.
A. C. Gallo, the company’s co-president and chief operating officer, said Whole Foods tried to get customers to buy reusable bags for several years but “it really never caught on.” That changed when the grocery chain began offering reusable bags for 99 cents, he said.
In addition, he said, Whole Foods was given a test run of sorts when San Francisco banned plastic bags last year. The number of paper bags used in the San Francisco stores increased a mere 10 percent, he said, suggesting that some customers switched to reusable bags.
Two other trial runs, in Toronto and in Austin, Tex., also went well enough that Whole Foods executives felt confident broadening the plastic bag ban to all its stores. It will take effect by April 22, Earth Day.
Whole Foods officials estimate that the store distributes 150 million plastic bags a year.
“The fact of plastic bags is they are not something that has been around forever,” said Michael Besancon, a regional president of Whole Foods and the leader of an environmental task force. “It was paper for many, many years. It’s not really a hardship.”
Plastic bags have become ubiquitous because they are lightweight, cheap and functional. Critics complain that the bags are bad for the environment because they are made from petroleum, are typically tossed after one use, fill landfills, and float into trees, rooftops, roadways and oceans.
They also do not break down easily in a landfill.
An industry organization called the Progressive Bag Alliance, however, counters on its Web site that plastic bags take less energy to produce than paper bags and generate less waste, a position backed by at least one study of the issue. The group also argues that virtually nothing decomposes in modern landfills, including paper and plastic.
The Whole Foods decision is “a bold move, without a doubt,” said Allen Hershkowitz, director of the municipal waste program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. He noted that Americans use 50 billion to 80 billion plastic bags a year.
He acknowledged that paper bags can also harm the environment. But he described Whole Foods Market’s use of bags made from recycled paper as an environmental “winner.”
Whole Foods is a relatively small retailer, but has been influential in the grocery business. Major grocery chains have copied Whole Foods by sprucing up produce sections and offering a wider variety of natural and organic products. The company’s move may prompt other chains to take a look at the bag issue.
Tara Raddohl, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said her company began selling reusable bags in October and was looking to achieve a goal of zero waste.
“Generally speaking, many of our retail competitors as well as ourselves are looking at these options, and how feasible this is, and how this will be received by the consumer,” she said.
