Please Engage Brain When Using SmartPhone

In America – the land of opportunity – the best way to fend off the embarrassment caused by your own stupidity is to find someone to drag through court.
In the case of Lauren Rosenberg, struck by a car after walking into a busy flow of traffic in Utah, she's dumping the blame for her 'lack of situational awareness' squarely on the shoulders of Google Maps!
According to her, Google Maps told her to walk along busy State Route 224 to reach her destination. But she says the map didn't warn her it was a high-speed road with no pedestrian paths. It obviously didn't tell her to open her eyes either...duuhh!
Rosenberg, trying to weasel US$118,000 from Google to cover medical bills and loss of income, says the warning on the PC version of Google Maps (as you can see in the picture, in yellow highlight) is not on the portable version she was seeing on her ironically-named BlackBerry smartphone...

And to cover all her money-grubbing options, she's also suing the motorist who struck her, for "severe permanent physical, emotional, and mental injuries"... though her mental state may well have existed prior this incident!
Do all instructions need to add: "Please use brain when following these directions"?

Dunkirk: 70 Years Later

This week is the 70th.anniversary of the Dunkirk evacuation: the heroic rescue of Allied soldiers from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk, France, between 26 May - 04 June 1940.
Though initially it looked hopeless, by the end of the nine-day 'Operation Dynamo', 338,000+ soldiers had been rescued by a hastily-assembled fleet of 850 boats.
Many of the troops were able to embark from the harbour's protective mole onto destroyers and other large ships, while others waded from the beaches toward the ships, waiting for hours shoulder-deep in water to board and be ferried out to the larger ships.
Thousands were carried back to England by the famous "little ships of Dunkirk", a now-legendary flotilla of merchant marine boats, fishing boats, pleasure craft and lifeboats. The smallest of this flotilla was the 15-foot fishing boat Tamzine, now in the Imperial War Museum.
The "miracle of the little ships" is a prominent folk memory in Britain, and the Dunkirk Spirit lives on in the British psyche.
My father was one of the lucky last to be rescued, on the final day. A very strong competitive swimmer, he was picked up by a boat several miles off the French coast, heading towards England, and arrived in Margate in the early hours of his birthday.
Freedom: no-one gets a better 21st.birthday present than that!

Curtain Down

After five decades of hard living, two Oscar nominations and a hundred films, US actor Dennis Hopper has died of prostate cancer at 74. Hopper's career – in such movies as Apocalypse Now, Easy Rider and Speed – was one of the longest in an industry notorious for chewing up its stars. His private life was at times as chaotic as the wild-eyed mad villains he specialised in portraying. He married five times - one of those lasting just eight days! He received a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame last March.
...and on the eve of the launch of TVNZ's Heartland (revisiting classic old kiwi tv shows), one of New Zealand's best known actresses Dame Pat Evison OBE has died after a long illness at 85. She trained at London's Old Vic Theatre, returned to NZ to direct, before acting on stage, radio and TV in Oz and NZ. She is probably best known for her roles in the Australian TV series Prisoner and The Flying Doctors. She was in the landmark 1970s NZ drama Pukemanu, and the Close to Home series. Her film appearances included Grampire and Bad Blood.