Thumbprints?

This article is initially funny. As you read it, however, you will become more and more incensed with corporate arrogance and this bank's cavalier attitude towards people:

Bank insisted on thumbprint from armless man

The Americans with Disabilities Act will be 20 years old next year, and Steve Valdez is still wondering when a Bank of America branch near his Tampa, Fla., home is going to hear about it.

The 54-year-old Hillsborough County employee told TODAY’s Lester Holt Monday in New York he is still irked by what happened to him recently when he went into the branch, where his wife has an account, to cash a check made out to her. The teller and branch manager refused to cash the check because he didn’t have an account there and he couldn’t give them a thumbprint to confirm his identity.

The kicker is they wouldn’t accept his reason for not providing the thumbprint: He doesn't have any thumbs, or arms for that matter, because of a birth defect.

Even when he offered two forms of photo identification, the teller wouldn’t budge. He was told company policy required the thumbprint. If he wanted to cash the check, either his wife could come in to cash the check or he could open an account.

... Valdez, who functions with two prosthetic arms, is not the sort to complain about his disability. In his entire life, he said, he’d never found it necessary to speak up about being discriminated against. But this time, the bank went too far, he said.

Read the entire article here.

Deal or No Deal?

From this site:

In one of those inspired bits of research we love so much, a team at Duke University trained a group of rhesus macaques to play a game based on Deal or No Deal.

The researchers gave the macaques a choice of eight white squares to pick up. Underneath each was a colour representing a prize, with green bringing the best reward - a sugary drink. After picking a square, the animals were shown the prizes they had passed up. ...

Brain scans revealed activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a region known to monitor the consequences of actions when the monkeys won a prize. But the same area also lit up when they were shown what they had missed, indicating that they were thinking about what might have been.

"This is the first evidence that monkeys, like people, have 'would-have, could-have, should-have' thoughts," said Ben Hayden, a researcher at the Duke University Medical Center and lead author of the study.

Even the macaques got sucked into that troubling, stressful, "what if" thinking. Wow!

A sign of the times

The box of crackers Debra Rogoff bought from the grocery store had some crackerjack in it — an envelope stuffed with $10,000.

Yet the Irvine woman was more curious than ecstatic about her daughter's find. After all, who would leave money in such a place?

"We just thought, 'This is someone's money,'" she said. "We would never feel good about spending it."

Rather than go on a shopping spree, the family called police and was initially told the money could be part of a drug drop.

Police later heard from store managers at Whole Foods in Tustin that an elderly woman had come in a few days earlier, hysterical because she had mistakenly returned a box of crackers with her life savings inside. In a mix-up the store restocked the box rather than composting it.

The Lake Forest woman, whose identity was not released, had lost faith in her bank and decided the box would be a safer place for the money.

Luckily for her, the box of Annie's Sour Cream and Onion Cheddar Bunny crackers were bought by the Rogoffs, who discovered the crisp $100 bills in an unmarked white envelope on Oct. 10.

The Rogoffs never heard from the woman and didn't receive a reward, but Rogoff did return to Whole Foods a couple weeks later.

"I asked them if I could have another box of crackers," she said with a laugh. The store obliged.

From the Associated Press.

Thank goodness criminals can be so stupid!

From the Associated Press:

Memo to anyone planning a drug store robbery: don't lock your keys in the getaway vehicle.

Police said John Wilkinson, 24, of Big Spring, did just that after he allegedly robbed the Stanton Drug Store of Zanax and hydrocodine.

They said Wilkinson used a caulking gun, wrapped in a dark cloth, to get the drugs Thursday afternoon.

Afterward, he allegedly headed back to his vehicle, which was parked and running in front of the drug store, and discovered he was locked out, the Midland Reporter-Telegram reported in its online edition Thursday.

Stanton Police Chief Mike Adams said Wilkinson then tried to get away on foot. Police, who thought he had a gun, shot him in the top of his shoulder during the short chase.

Just focused on the begonias

What's growing in YOUR garden?

A 73-year-old Dutch man was astonished to learn from police that the begonias he had lovingly tended on his doorstep concealed a secret marijuana plantation.

"Police officers suddenly noticed marijuana plants sprouting from his begonias," a police spokeswoman in The Hague said on Friday.

The Hague pensioner promised to destroy the marijuana plants, which he believes were planted by local youngsters, while preserving his begonias.

Earlier this month the Dutch government set up a task force to crack down on marijuana cultivation in the country.

Growing marijuana is illegal in the Netherlands, but sales of it and other cannabis-related soft drugs in coffee shops have been tolerated for decades.

--from Reuters

Not needles in a haystack ....

... but diamonds in a landfill?

From MSNBC:

A Staten Island jeweler has gotten her 3-carat diamond earrings back after she, her husband and city sanitation employees sorted through a smelly heap of garbage. The studs were in a small jar of cleaning solution, which a worker at the couple's jewelry store had accidentally thrown away ...

Ewww!

Commemorate the mess

From the Associated Press, via Yahoo News:

A measure seeking to commemorate President Bush's years in office by slapping his name on a San Francisco sewage plant has qualified for the November ballot.

The measure certified Thursday would rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.

Supporters say the idea is to commemorate the mess they claim Bush has left behind by actions such as the war in Iraq.

Local Republicans say the plan stinks and they will oppose it.

What Bush will be remembered for?

from a Table Talk at Salon:

He got some brush cleared. He lowered the bar for the next president. He almost succeeded in uniting the Democratic Party. No one has ever been able to do that.

How can you call him a failure when he's achieved all that while taking a record number of vacation days?

Call him a failure, indeed!