BDC Now: The World’s Greatest Lost & Found Involves Puppies and Amsterdam
What’s the one thing missing from the average airport experience? No, not comfortable seating or attentive customer service. It’s puppies bringing you stuff you forgot on the plane. That, a star from The Jersey Shore is shockingly in legal trouble, and much more, today on BDC Now.
We Can Finally Play Fetch in An Airport!
Intentionally losing your personal belongings may sound like a silly idea, but what if we told you that doing so could earn you an interaction with a puppy? Pretty tempting, right? Well, if you’re up for it, just book a quick flight over to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and leave your iPhone or teddy bear or whatever in your seat when you disembark. If there’s any truth to the airport’s new promotional video for its lost and found service, you’ll have a furry, four-legged friend at your feet in a matter of minutes. And here’s the bonus: Your personal item will be in his jacket pocket! So go ahead: Ignore those announcements security keeps making and pay a little less attention to your personal belongings. We’ll have lost and found puppies at every airport in the world in no time!
Little Secret About Fast Food Drive Thru’s: You Need a Car
Fast food restaurants that are open after midnight exist for two reasons: Feeding truckers and giving the rest of us the chance to make one last mistake before going to sleep. Most of the time, that mistake is innocently ingesting thousands of calories in an unhealthy effort to soak up a night of drinking. But earlier this week, one man in Oklahoma City did something far worse than downing a burger and fries at 1 a.m. When Erik Aguilar was denied service while trying to walk through a McDonald’s drive thru lane, he allegedly decided that if he needed a car to get his Big Mac, then he would take the car from the person behind him. Police say Aguilar went up to Lisa Woods’ car, opened her door, grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her out of the vehicle before getting behind the wheel and taking off. He crashed the car a few miles away and police arrested him for robbery, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, and attempting to elude an officer. What we don’t get is why he went to all that trouble. The community of late-night fast food customers is generally pretty friendly – if you’re ever in a drive thru without a car, most of the time you can just ask the person behind you to order on your behalf.
When It Comes to Internet Surveillance, Australia’s Got Nothing to Hide
If you thought the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program was bad, wait until you get a load of what Australia is doing. According to the Sunday Morning Herald, the Australian government is likely going to pass new legislation that could literally let them “monitor the entire Australian Internet.’’ And while it might sound eerily similar to what the NSA could be capable of doing, the big distinction is that at least the NSA tried to hide it. The Australian government is just passing this bill out in the open, in front of everybody. The report from The Herald says that things get sketchy because the law allows the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to monitor “computer networks,’’ which, if you know anything about computers, describes pretty much exactly what the Internet is. The report even quoted a digital rights advocate as saying, “A network can essentially be anything from three computers on a Wi-Fi modem to potentially an entire corporate network or an entire internet service provider network or at the extreme end the whole internet.’’ So yeah, if you’re headed to Australia any time soon, you might want to stay off the computers.
#ThankAPoliceOfficerDay Goes As Well As You’d Expect
When National Thank a Police Officer Day crept up on the calendar earlier this week, it would have been easy to just keep our blinders on and give it the zero attention it deserves most years. But in 2014, a year frought with a fair amount of awful news stories involving police, “NTAPOD’’ deserves a little attention, if only for the responses it elicited. For example: “#ThankAPoliceOfficerDay Thank you for providing an ongoing example of militarized fascism in the United States’’ and “#ThankAPoliceOfficerDay thank you for confirming my worst suspicions about you on a weekly basis.’’ You can read the rest here, but we’re going to go out on a limb and guess that this isn’t exactly what The Whole Truth Project had in mind when they issued a social media call out in honor of the day. Haven’t these people heard of #MyNYPD? That initiative was launched back in April and the hate is still pouring in.
We Got a Situation Here
Karmically speaking, when you make millions of dollars by letting cameras follow you around as you get drunk, argue with your roommates, and slam your head into walls, there’s probably a comeuppance in your future. “Jersey Shore’’ star Mike “The Situation’’ Sorrentino is learning that this week as he faces charges of filing nearly $9 million in fraudulent tax returns. Authorities are charging him and his brother with conspiracy to defraud the United States, filing false returns, and failing to file taxes after the duo allegedly understated their income for a number of years and attempted to file personal purchases as business expenses. Each charge’s maximum sentence carries with it the possibility of jail time, which could mean yet another reality television star ending up almost exactly where most of us would expect him to. But since it looks like Sorrentino is planning on fighting these charges, we do have one piece of advice: Don’t use the same strategy you used against Ronny in Italy.
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