The winners and the losers

• Loser: The sad tale of an overly hungry couple dominating the beef line at Chuck-A-Rama seems to have dominated casual conversation this week. While the restaurant now has apologized for telling Sui Amaama and his wife, Isabelle Leota, they had, in fact, had all they could eat, it wasn't clear whether the couple was accepting it.

It would be hard to have scripted a worse way to handle this situation, from all ends. The restaurant manager's decision to get tough landed his employer some big-time bad publicity, and the couple's insistence on taking a 19th slice of roast beef showed a lack of courtesy toward other customers. The entire incident has become a metaphor for the American stereotypes of gluttony and incivility — the kind of thing that, together with an unfortunate breast-feeding blowup at another local restaurant a few months ago — foreigners love to laugh at.

• Winner: If a Provo woman heals as expected, she will be the first recipient of an artificial cornea in the Intermountain region, and that's good news for anyone else who has lost sight and whose body rejects donor corneas. The woman, Marilyn Riding, underwent surgery this week at the John A. Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah. She had been able to see only shadows through her left eye. If all goes well, her sight in that eye will be 20/200, instead.

Modern medicine is indeed providing a "vision" of hope for more and more people as time goes on.

• Winner: The World War II Memorial opened to the public this week in Washington. Frankly, it's about time. Today, it is common to hear the people who fought that conflict referred to as "The greatest generation." As time marches on, their collective contribution, during one of the world's darkest hours ever, will grow only more remarkable. They rallied to a cause and sacrificed greatly to ensure freedom for those who followed.

If that isn't worth a memorial, nothing is.