Senior Discount

After shopping in Johnson City yesterday, we went to the McDonald’s next to the mall. This doesn’t happen very often, but circumstances conspired against us and we like their coffee. I ordered two coffees, one tasty apple pie in a cardboard box, and a cheeseburger for Gerda who, every other year or so craves a McDonald’s cheeseburger like a pregnant woman craves pickled lychee nuts. If they ever run out of cardboard boxes for the tasty apple pies, their hamburger buns would be a viable substitute. The bill for all this seemed small. When I paid, I learned a couple of things. It is cheaper to get two tasty apple pies than one. It could be something to do with the two coffees I had ordered. The kid behind the counter couldn’t explain why two pies were cheaper than one. He didn’t try to reason out why this was, and he didn’t point to the register and lay blame on the machine. He simply and happily accepted this as a fact of life. My estimation of his intelligence went up on the spot. The second surprise was when the kid assumed a fact not in evidence and gave me the “senior discount” on the coffee. I wanted to give him another dollar and insist he charge me full price for the coffee. But I kept my money. I had just learned something from the kid on the other side of the counter.

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A Christmas Party Time Saver

Another reason I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.

Today in 1935 – The world’s first modern frontal leukotomy is performed in a Lisbon hospital by Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz.

 

Moniz’s leukotomy (or leucotomy, from the Greek for “cutting white,” in this case the brain’s white matter) soon became popularly known as the lobotomy. It was not, however, the surgical procedure now generally associated with lobotomies. Rather, Moniz drilled two holes in the patient’s skull and injected pure alcohol into the frontal lobes of the brain to destroy the tissue, in an effort to alter the patient’s behavior.

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