Mum's plea for parking help sparks wave of support
A mother in Canada was told to get her baby to the ER immediately when ultrasounds revealed a loop in his bowels filled with air and fluid. But Kaylee Goemans, a mother of three who'd lost her job when she was 28 weeks pregnant, couldn't afford the hospital's $15 parking fee so she fed a street meter with enough change to get her through four hours, thinking she'd be out with time to spare. When that proved wrong, Goemans turned to Facebook - specifically, a group of local mothers. And they rallied: over the next several hours, five women went to Goemans' car in Barrie, Ontario, in a tag-team effort that fed the meter, and 100 people left encouraging comments and offers to run errands or drop off coffee or food. "It's a rough world right now and we only have each other in it," Goemans told local media. "We need to show the next generation how important it is to help others who need it."
'Loyalty' deal carries a sting
Mike was considering changing his electricity supplier, but his current supplier offered him a $200 credit retention incentive to stay for a contracted period of a further 18 months. "I calculated that this was more than what I would have saved by changing suppliers, so I accepted the offer," he writes. "Then three months later, my supplier then had a general rate increase and put their charges up. If I was to now change suppliers, they would require me to repay the $200 credit. They think this is quite fair, even though they had contracted me in for 18 months. They say the credit was a loyalty incentive only and that there was no mention of holding the rates for the duration of the contract period. Whereas I automatically assumed that the status quo would have remained for the period of the contracted term. I think that this was very much a one-sided deal. I would be interested to know what some of your readers think."
Gardener hits on a bloody fine solution
Ralph Farrar suffered from haemochromatosis, which meant his blood accumulated too much iron, according to a Newsweek story published in 1963. The treatment was to have a pint of blood taken from him every week. This blood couldn't be used for other patients. So Farrar used it on his roses as an "iron-rich fertiliser instead of the commercial rose food containing dried animal blood. After eight years of weekly blood-drainings his condition began to improve, so much so that he only had to have blood taken once every two months". No word on what happened to his roses as a result.
A reader writes: "This Huff Po blogger equates her traffic stop in NZ to that of Sandra Bland's. I don't think people end up dead after being stopped and breathalysed in NZ". Read it here...
The Onion: "I can easily interpret any snide remark as a potential threat to my safety."
Video: Andrew Rodley from Snap Information Technologies Ltd got a few pages into the submissions for the NZ Flag Consideration Project, but it was long and tedious, so he made a video showing every flag design (all 10,293 of them) in rapid fire!
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