Waiter receives $5000 tip, and more

Waiter receives $5000 tip

After a thunderstorm destroyed his Nissan beyond repair, Greg Rubar was taking buses and arriving late to his shift as a server at an Italian restaurant in Houston. A pair of his regular customers noticed. When he walked in one day last month, the couple was waiting for him over a modest meal of potato cabbage soup and wine. Along with $26 for the bill, the man slipped Rubar a white envelope and said, “Go buy yourself a car.” Rubar thanked him, but only later opened it to find $5,000 in $100 bills. “He told me he wasn’t going to tip me for a while,” Rubar said.

6-year-old advances to national spelling bee

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Lori Anne Madison, a 6-year-old from a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., this week became the youngest contestant ever in the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The homeschooled prodigy, who was reading chapter books at the age of 2½ and plans to be an astrobiologist, won her spot by spelling the word “vaquero” in a regional qualifying round. Her favorite word is “sprachgefühl,” which she can spell forward and backward. While proud of her accomplishment, she’s bridling some under all the attention. “I asked for no interviews,” she said, “but the media seems to be disobeying me.”

Stray dog finds a home with cyclists

A doughty stray dog managed to tag along with a team of cyclists for more than 1,000 miles through the mountains of western China. Zhang Heng, a young student, first encountered the white fuzzy creature lying on a street in southern Sichuan province. He fed her and she followed, even bounding up the ten 13,000-plus-foot mountains on their 24-day trip to the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. Zhang put her on the back of his bike during rapid descents so she wouldn’t fall behind, and said he planned to keep the dog. “She’s been a stray on the road for a long time,” he said. “She needs a home.”