The suspect walked out of a Victoria Secret store with 160 bras
BONITA SPRINGS, Fla. - There’s a bra bandit on the loose in southwest Florida. The Lee County Sheriff’s Office was searching for an individual they say stole 160 bras valued at nearly $6,000 on Thursday from a Victoria Secret store, the latest in a string of bra burglaries in the area.
Since February, authorities say 452 bras valued at nearly $19,000 have been stolen from two of the chain’s southwest Florida locations. Six different bra thefts at the stores have been reported during that time.
Investigators said a female customer walked into the store Thursday and immediately went to a four-drawer cabinet with new bras of the PINK brand name. The store manager told deputies the woman waited until employees were busy helping customers and then thrust the bras into a bag and exited the store.
smoot
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - The father of a measurement known as the “Smoot” returned Saturday to be honored at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the school where he and his fraternity brothers invented it 50 years ago.
Oliver Smoot was the shortest pledge in the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity in 1958 when its members decided to lay him on the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge. After discovering Smoot measured 5 feet 7, they marked the bridge in those increments, with an eventually exhausted Smoot getting up and down for each new measurement.
They soon determined the bridge was 364.4 Smoots long.
Today, Google.com’s calculator function can convert any measurement into Smoots.
The original Smoot, who later became chairman of the American National Standards Institute, spoke Saturday at “Smoot Celebration Day” at MIT and received a plaque. The plaque will be installed on the bridge this year.
“This plaque will brighten the lives of windblown pedestrians,” MIT President Susan Hockfield said during the presentation.
Smoot said the freshmen who repaint the Smoot markers on the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge every year may not appreciate how good they have it.
“For years, the police departments of Boston and Cambridge took this as an infraction and would chase the guys repainting the marks — but they called a truce,” Smoot said. “I’m not sure if they tell the freshmen that at least you won’t get hauled into jail.”
