We live in a world that’s pretty crappy sometimes, and the current world political situation just makes things look even bleaker.  It’s so nice, then, to occasionally see a few stories that can warm your heart and make you feel good inside.  In that spirit, I briefly describe a couple of happy tales that I stumbled across on the ‘tubes’ this week…

First, a human interest story, via Hawty McBloggy: many of us have suffered through the pain of sending our XBox360s back to Microsoft for repair, but a young man named Nathaniel had a particularly painful encounter.  He had taken the time to get his XBox autographed by countless members of the game development community, and it was therefore unique.  The folks at Microsoft promised him they would take care of his prized possession, but when it returned, it had been wiped clean.

Enter Bungie Studios, the makers of the popular HALO series.  Though they had nothing to do with the mistake at Microsoft, but they wanted to help make things right for poor Nathaniel, so they collected together an enormous ‘swag bag’ of autographed goodies to send to him, including an excellent HALO helmet autographed by pretty much the entire studio staff:

Though in the end it doesn’t completely replace the hard-earned signatures that Nathaniel had on his XBox, I’m sure the collection takes a bit of the sting away!

The second story comes from CNN, and it an amazing story of cross-species altruism.  I’ve discussed a bit of animal intelligence before, as it is a favorite topic of mine, but this story is extraordinary.  In New Zealand, a pair of pygmy sperm whales had become disoriented and had beached themselves.  Though local rescuers freed them from the beach, the whales then proceeded to get stranded several times on a sandbar further out.  It was looking that the whales would have to be put down to spare them a prolonged death.

At this point, a bottlenose dolphin named Moko came to the rescue!  Moko is a regular visitor to that particular beach and spends plenty of time swimming and playing with humans.  Moko led the whales away from the danger spot and through a channel out to open water.

To quote CNN, ” After the rescue, Moko returned to the beach and joined in games with local residents.”