The Awesome Foundation has about twenty
chapters around the world, each of
which provide monthly $1,000 grants to a someone in order to do something
awesome.
There is a Melbourne chapter. Previous
grant recipients include:
Yesterday there
was
a news
story about a man who committed a bank robbery for only one dollar.
In North Carolina, on the morning of June 9th, James Verone walked into a bank
and handed the teller a note that read, “This is a bank robbery. Please only
give me one dollar.” Once given his meagre loot, he said, “I’ll be sitting
right over there in the chair waiting for the police.”
And why would he do this? In the hopes of receiving health care in prison. Mr.
Verone has some serious health problems, no insurance, and is unable to work.
Having exhausted his savings, he decided this was his best option, calmly put
his affairs in order and went for a walk to a bank.
It’s one of those stories that gives me the impulse to smugly sit here around
the other side of the planet, shake my head and think, “Only in America.” But
there are disenfranchised and desperate people in any society.
Last year I was going into the city a few evenings a month for various user
group meetings and the like. I was surprised by often being approached by
homeless or street people asking for any spare change.
In the past, I’d tended to give these people short shrift and keep walking, but
a friend of mine turned me around on this one evening when he was approached by
a man who was asking for some money so he would have a safe place to sleep that
night. He talked with the man for a little bit, gave him the few dollars he had
in his pocket and wished him luck.
I gave what is probably the usual reaction. “Hey, you don’t know why he
really wants that. He’s probably gonna go drink it or shoot up or something.”
His response realigned my thinking. He said that here was somebody in front of
him who was in such desperation that he would approach strangers in the street,
asking for help. Had swallowed their pride and needed to beg. The very absolute
least you can do is take them at face value and give them a few bucks.
Shrugging he concluded, “Never miss an opportunity to practice compassion.”
Mr. Verone’s heist reminded me of another story I heard not so long ago. In the
early 1900’s the Mayor of New York, Fiorello
LaGuardia had a habit of
showing up at a municipal court and presiding as judge. An opportunity that not
many Mayors availed themselves of.
The story goes that this particular night during the Great Depression, and old
woman was being charged for stealing a loaf of bread. She told the mayor that
she did it because her two grandchildren were starving. The shopkeeper refused
to drop the charges, wanting her as an example because it was a “real bad
neighbourhood.”
His hands tied, LaGuardia charged the woman a fine of ten dollars. As he was
pronouncing this judgement though, he took off his hat, threw in ten dollars,
and announced this he was remitting the fine. Not only that, but he fined
everyone in the courtroom fifty cents for living in a town where a person has
to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat.
The hat was passed to the bailiff, who used it to collect the fines from
seventy odd people in the courtroom that evening: petty criminals, traffic
offenders, a few lawyers, and one narked shopkeeper. The bewildered grandmother
was handed the collection and sent home to her family.
“Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm living public opinion.”
In honour of today (March 14) being Pi
Day, a musical interpretation of Pi to 31
decimal places by Michael John Blake:
And if you think you can do better, head over to
http://pi.highsign.de/ and make your own composition!
Pi, represented by the Greek letter π, is of course the ratio of the
circumference of a circle to its diameter, and is also the ratio of a circle’s
area to the square of its radius. Ever so versatile, the number π is used in
all kinds of maths. Geometry and trigonometry obviously, but also calculus,
physics, statistical probability and even chaos theory.
Celebrated in song and poem, there was even a movie called
Pi about a number theorist who
tried to understand the entire world through numbers and ended up drilling a
hole in his head (an impulse I’ve often shared during my career working with
computers.)
(Click image for a larger version.)
So do something today in celebration of the wonder of π. For Aussies, a meat
pie for lunch would be fitting. You could order a pizza (sometimes called a
pie), set your desktop wallpaper to the image above, read up about Pi on
wikipedia, try and memorise the
digits of π (the world record is 42,195
digits), or just run around in a circle like we do most days.
One of our cats has a bib-like cloth attached to his collar these days to stop
him catching birds. It is suppose to interfere with his stalking and so far
it's worked.
The other cats in the neighbourhood do point at him and laugh and call him a
kitteh [sic], but he’s reaped his own reward as far as I’m concerned as he
kept bringing birds home and hiding them in the house…
Anyway, just now a nice old man knocked on my door because he saw Kismet with
this thing on his collar and was concerned it was something stuck in his collar
and might be choking him.
I explained what it was and assured the man that if anybody was going to have
the pleasure of throttling that bloody cat it would be me and not some
inanimate piece of cloth.
A project to
completely cover a car in macarons (because a car covered in
macarons
is awesome!)
One of our cats has a bib-like cloth attached to his collar these days to stop
him catching birds. It is suppose to interfere with his stalking and so far
it's worked.
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