Quick Takes: Wheeled away

It’s a deal that should have smelled funky at the time. A man posing as a French distributor of high-end dairy products made off with nearly 50,000 pounds of rare artisanal cheeses after conning a London cheese­monger. Officials with Neal’s Yard Dairy in London announced the theft on social media Oct. 25, saying the con artist swindled the cheese retailer and wholesaler out of more than 950 wheels of award-winning cheddar worth roughly $390,000. “The high monetary value of these cheeses likely made them a particular target for the thieves,” a company spokesman said. Officials with Neal’s Yard Dairy said it would still pay its artisanal suppliers despite its financial loss. The heist drew the attention of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who told his fans on Instagram to be on the lookout for “lorry loads of very posh cheese” being sold for cheap. A few days later, Neal’s Yard Dairy posted on social media that police had arrested a 63-year-old suspect. Cheddar cheese, like the stolen product, gets its name from a town in South West England where it originated. And while most in the United States see cheddar as a grocery staple, many English manufacturers still produce the sharp cheese as a specialty artisanal product.

Astronomical sum

Google won’t be paying any fines to the Russian government anytime soon, but if it does, the company will need a bigger check. The sum of the fine issued by a Russian court has reached approximately $20 decillion (a 2 followed by 34 zeros), according to the Moscow Arbitration Court in October. The Russian court first imposed the fine—which now exceeds global GDP—after YouTube, Google’s video platform, blocked a Russian channel in 2020 in order to comply with U.S. sanctions. YouTube blocked more Russian propaganda channels after the nation invaded Ukraine in 2022. The court’s ruling states that the fine doubles weekly with no upper limit.

A feat by foot

The first thing Anton Nootenboom did when he strolled into Times Square in New York City was put on some shoes and socks. On Nov. 2, the Dutch national finished a 260-day, 3,100-mile journey from Los Angeles to New York and set a Guinness World Record for longest barefoot walk. “The first month or so was the most interesting because my skin was still pretty soft,” he told the New York Post. Nootenboom, who made the journey to raise awareness for men’s mental health, also reclaimed his Guinness title after someone broke his 2021 record.

Halloween trick, no treat

Thousands of Irish revelers left an Oct. 31 Halloween parade in Dublin dispirited when the entertainment failed to appear. Locals had come to watch one of Ireland’s theater groups put on a giant puppet parade, which was advertised on the holiday events website MySpiritHalloween.com. But when the parade failed to materialize, many attendees believed the performers had ghosted them. In fact, the theater group had never planned a parade, and the event announcement was on the Pakistan-based website by mistake. Website owner Nazir Ali told The Irish Times the error wasn’t an intentional hoax: “We are highly embarrassed and highly depressed, and very sorry.”

Dispensable expenses

The United States Air Force got taken to the cleaners by wildly overpaying for soap dispensers and other aircraft parts, according to an Oct. 29 inspector general’s report. The report detailed how the Air Force allegedly overpaid defense contractor Boeing by $149,072 for soap dispensers that were part of a larger spare parts order for the branch’s C-17 cargo jets. While the total number of soap dispensers ordered from Boeing is redacted from the report, the review indicates the Air Force paid nearly 80 times more than the cost of a commercially available substitute. According to the Department of Defense, the overpayments on spare parts for the C-17 cost the government nearly $1 million.

Freedom to fix

Expect even more ice cream under the golden arches. On Oct. 25, the U.S. Copyright Office granted an exemption giving businesses like McDonald’s a “right to repair” retail food equipment. McDonald’s soft-serve ice cream machines have frustrated customers in recent years because of frequent breakdowns and long outages. Ice-cream-loving patrons even created the website McBroken.com—which attempts to create a real-time map of McDonald’s ice cream machine outages across the country. Previously, only the manufacturer could perform equipment repairs, but franchises would typically have to wait 90 days for a service appointment. Franchises can now seek alternatives to get their broken machines swirling again.

Tricky tortoise

Even with two months to roam, a pet tortoise didn’t get far. In August, Cherrie Zaidi left her two African spurred tortoises—Phineas and Ferb—outside in her Piedmont, Okla., yard only to discover later that Ferb managed to slip beyond the fence and into the wild. The Zaidi family recruited neighbors to search the area to no avail. But on Oct. 24, Zaidi’s husband spotted what looked like a patch of grass moving just beyond their fence line. It was Ferb, who during nine weeks on the lam had managed to wander only 100 feet away.