Man Finds $45,000 Squirreled Away in Garage, Returns It All to Previous Owner

This can only be proof that the world still has some really decent people in it.

In one recently reported story, a man found $45,000 hidden away in a home into which he and his family recently moved — and gave it all back.

This happened in Salt Lake City, in a suburb titled Bountiful. The name of the suburb would certainly have appeared to what the man in question ventured into when he found seven boxes full of money hidden in the garage of the house had recently bought. But the man thought that the previous owner might have had a different purpose in mind.

Seems the previous owner was a man who saved all that money over the years. The man and his wife lived in the house for many years, until his wife died, in 2005. The man lived on a few years, dying in 2010. His children now own the house.

The return-the-money man, the new owner of the house, said he could envision what he thought the hide-the-money man, the previous owner would have wanted — to give the money to his children. One of the man's sons recalled that his father did indeed like to squirrel money away but that he had no idea the amount of hidden cash would be that much.

Anyway, all of the money is now in the hands of the children of the previous owner. As the new owner said, "I felt like I got to write a chapter in his life, a chapter he wasn't able to finish and see it through to its conclusion."

So the guy, who had the chance to quietly spend the $45,000 on his own wife and kids, gave it all back to the rightful owners. As it should be.

Cats to Join the iPad Generation

Didn't know this was an option, and I feel a bit left out on behalf of all the dogs (and dog owners) out there … apparently, you will soon be able to buy an app for your cat.

Now, this assumes two things: you have an iPad and you have a cat. I guess, technically, you don't have to own a cat; you merely have to have access to a cat. You might be a cat-sitter or have a neighbor who has a cat, or you might be one of those people who takes cats in off the street, gives them food and water, lets them sleep on your floor or furniture during the day, then sends them back to the owners at night.

Bottom line: In order to get the full effect of this new wonderful suite of applications from Friskies (Who else?), you have to put a cat and an iPad in the same room and convince the former to access the latter. Good luck.

So the Friskies folks have done their homework, apparently, reporting that they've designed the apps with colors, movements, and shapes that cats will really take to — meaning they'll focus for more than two seconds on them before turning away and back into Catworld. One of the games is Cat Fishing and feature, unsurprisingly, fish that move around the screen. (This would be a good opportunity to reassure all of us that the screens are allegedly strong enough to survive a few swipes from cats' claws. I would think that the iPad would be more prone to being batted about, but never mind.)

iPhone users take heart: Friskies has something for you, too, an app called Here Kitty Kitty, which emits sounds familiar to cats' desires, such as the chirping of a bird or the opening of a food tin. Small-time stuff, that, but it's still all within the realm of cat-friendly applications for your iCompanion. All I can say is, "Wow!"

Check out the fun below.

One Man Running, 3,000 Miles, All by Himself

Dean Karnazes has done it again. This time, his feat was even more remarkable.

Karnazes, the ultra runner perhaps most famous for his 50 marathons in 50 days in all 50 states, can now say that he has run across the country, literally. He began at Disneyland on February 25. He finished in New York City 76 days later. In between, he crossed 16 states and the District of Columbia, averaging 40-50 miles a day and racking up more than 3,000 miles in the process.

And what a process it was. He went through 50 pairs of shoes. He surely burned hundreds of thousands of calories, running 8-15 hours a day.

Promoting his trek across America were the hosts and producers of "Live! With Regis and Kelly." An associated website tracked the runner's progress day by day. Karnazes stopped by the studio as part of his finish flourish, giving a quick hug to hosts Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa and basking in the cheers of the studio audience. There to greet him also were his wife, Julie, and Nick, his 13-year-old son.

The ultra-ultra-ultra-ultra run was part of a drive to benefit the nonprofit Action for Healthy Kids, which aims to help eradicate childhood obesity. Along the way also, Karanazes took part in a host of 5K runs, the entrance fees from which went to the charity, to the tune of nearly $180,000.

What's next for this hero of road? Stay tuned.

Fewer TVs at Home? Bring It On!

The number of televisions in American households has dropped. Big deal.

Do we really need to know that 98.9 percent of American homes had TVs a year before 96.7 percent did? Is that a significant drop? It's still one hell of a lot of televisions, all of them on all the time.

Television manufacturers — not to mention television networks — will, no doubt, be jumping up and down, pointing to the (gasp) precipitous drop in viewership. For surely that's what a drop in the number of TV sets means, doesn't it? Isn't viewership going down simply because fewer sets are being watched?

Well, not necessarily. More and more people are getting their TV fix online or certainly on their computers. Larger and larger computer screens mean easier and easier on the eyes for watching movies and TV. Even laptops are getting large enough to command viewing for shorter-length movies and certainly hour-long dramas like CSI.

Anyone heard of YouTube? Good. That's one big chunk of that 2.2 percent drop. How about Netflix and Hulu? Streamers, both, and they are part of that 2.2 percent drop as well.

But does this mean that people are getting off their couches and exercising or playing with their children or other things that will stave off heart attacks and high blood pressures? Possibly but equally possibly not. For if you can watch a movie on your laptop and you do watch a movie on your laptop, you're still in that dreaded sedentary position that gets you into trouble if you're in it for too long.

Yes, TV is great. It's great to watch world events unfold live. It's great (for some) to watch talking heads shouting at each other, in the kind of bread and circuses theater that would have made the Romans proud. It's great to be entertained and informed and made mirthful and made sad and all the rest of the reasons we watch TV.

But it's not great to do these things at the expense of our health or our insanity. Enough said.

Running legend Grete Waitz dead at 57

The sporting word has lost a giant. Grete Waitz, one of the running world's most famous names, has died of cancer. She was 57.

A native of Oslo, Norway, she died there, with her husband, Jack, at her side. It was Jack who talked her into running long distances in the first place.

A world record-holder in the 3,000 meters, Waitz got an invitation to run the New York City Marathon in 1978. Her role was the "rabbit," the early pace-setter who peels off late in the race and lets the expected challengers battle it out for ultimate victory. It was her first marathon.

Waitz never really relinquished her rabbit role, fighting through her suffering to win the race in world record time, shaving a full two minutes off the existing fastest time for the distance. She took the lead at the 18-mile mark and ran a "negative split" — the second half faster than the first.

It was the first of nine wins in New York. That record still stands. It is far and away the record. The most a man has won is four. That was Bill Rodgers.

Waitz also won the London Marathon twice and the high-profile Stockholm Marathon once. From 1978 to 1988, she entered 19 other marathons around the world and won 13 of them. She broke the world record three times.

She was successful in world championships as well, taking out gold in 1983 and silver at the 1984 L.A. Olympics.

Waitz also excelled in cross country, winning five gold medals at the IAAF World Cross Country Championships (in 1978-1981 and 1983).

She was a pioneer in her sport, a super-fast runner who brought recognition and prestige to a sport that had little funding, especially for women. As a result, her native country has an annual race named after her. The New York Road Runners have an annual half marathon named after her as well.

Her fame transcends running events as well: A statue of her stands at the Norway pavilion at Walt Disney World Resort and outside the Bislett Stadium in Oslo. She has even appeared on a set of postage stamps.

An excellent multimedia show is here.

$1 Million Ring at Costco, at a Bargain Price

OK, so we need some more bottled water, a big bag of corn chips for the weekend's party, some meat for the BBQ, some more chocolate chips so we can make some cookies for the BBQ dessert, and … oh, yes, Happy Anniversary!

Don't look now, but I've just bought you a $1 million ring … at Costco.

Yes, I'm the one person to have bought this Excellent cut diamond solitaire ring. Hope you like it — we'll be paying it off until 2167, unless we win the lottery, which reminds me … we need to stop at the convenience store on the way home because Costco doesn't sell lottery tickets.

I think I remember that your ring size is 7. If that isn't it, then we'll have to wait a couple of days until the good folks at Costco get the ring resized.

What's that? You want to know if it was a bargain? What kind of question is that? It was on sale, naturally, marked down from $1.6 million. So really, like everything else at Costco, it's a bargain. We just didn't get 24.

O Big Yellow Bear, Where Art Thou?

What's big and yellow and worth $9 million? Not some unnamed celebrity, but I like the way you think.

No, this is a giant bear with a lamp on its head, a piece of art from a Swiss artist Urs Fischer that will be displayed in midtown Manhattan for five months while the people of New York City decide how to get rid of it.

The bear, which is 23 feet high and weighs in at 35,000 pounds, is a bright shade of yellow with a black lamp affixed to its head.

Yes, it's art. No, you can't afford it.


This large furry friend with black button eyes is being auctioned off, of course, as are many great works of art, be they teddy bears or not, by Christie's, the venerable auctioneer that knows a thing or two about soup cans, comic books, and sculpture gardens.

The piece, which goes by the name Untitled Lamp/Bear, is expected to sell for $9 million, as reported by Christie's after officials there ran some sort of random fee-generation software subroutine to discover how much someone or some group of people would actually pay for such a thing.

You might want to pay attention to who buys it because the lamp has a light in it that — you guessed it — lights up, basking all beneath it in a rosy glow of, well, light.