Have a Happy Halloween

Just not too happy, if you know what I mean. Me, I'll be passing out candy to the kids while trying not to be too horrified by what the little girls are wearing these days.

Ewwwwwwwwww

Sexually abusing a corpse is just plain wrong, but if you're going to do it, at least pick one that's not quite so...well...you'll see what I'm getting at...

A Teaneck hospital lab technician has been jailed after being accused of sexually abusing the corpse of a 92-year-old woman, authorities say.

Authorities said a security guard allegedly saw Anthony Merino, 24, of Manhattan, engaging in sexual activity with the body in the Holy Name Hospital morgue on Sunday.

Bergen County officials charged Merino with desecrating human remains, which is punishable by up to 10 years in state prison.

[...]

Merino, who had only worked at Holy Name as a per diem employee for 14 days, was immediately fired, the hospital said in a statement. The woman's next of kin also were informed after his arrest.

Am I the only one who has the horrible feeling that this was the express reason that Merino took this job?

Im in ur yard...

...selabratin mah burfday.

Dead drunk

Man, don't you just hate it when you pass out and people mistake you for a corpse?

Passengers on a German train mistook a Halloween reveler dressed up as a gore-covered zombie for a murder victim and called the police.

The 24-year-old man fell into a drunken slumber on his way home from a Halloween party in Hamburg, police in the northern town of Bad Segeberg said Monday.

Believing his hands and face were smeared with blood, passengers alerted police after getting no response from him.

A first aid team called to the scene soon cleared up the confusion. Police told the man to remove his make-up after which he was allowed to continue his journey.

Well, on the bright side, I guess that means he had a really, really good costume.

We are family

It's usually nice when families can do things together, but in this case, not so much:

A couple, first the husband, then his wife, were arrested on Saturday on drunken driving charges. Police told The Ann Arbor News that they first stopped the man and gave him a preliminary breath test after watching him run a red light.

Police said the test registered a 0.11, three points over the legal limit of .08. The man had his 12-year-old son in the car.

Police told the boy to call his mother to pick him up. But after she arrived with her 9-year-old daughter in the car, she also appeared to have been drinking, police said.

There's no word on whether or not the kids were subsequently picked up by their drunk grandparents.

Dysfunctional isn't a strong enough word

Not when it comes to this family, anyway.

A 39-year-old woman forcefully had her 13-year-old daughter's genitalia pierced to make it uncomfortable for her to have sex, the girl told jurors in her mother's child abuse trial.

The girl, now 16, told jurors Wednesday that her mother asked a tattoo artist friend in 2004 to shave the girl's head to make her unattractive to boys and later held her down for the piercing.

"She was trying to protect me, but it hurt me," the girl testified. "It not only hurt me physically, but it hurt me mentally. ... That's emotionally scarring. That's physical abuse."

Prosecutor Steve Maresca said the mother called on a friend to shave the girl's head and do the piercing after realizing that she had been having sex, including with the mother's boyfriend.

Should there be any family reunions in the future (which seems unlikely, at this juncture) they're going to be awkward.

Drastic measures

Now, I've never participated in a hunger strike, but I'm pretty sure you don't have to do something like this in order for it to be effective:

Prostitutes in the Bolivian city of El Alto sewed their lips together Wednesday as part of a hunger strike to demand that the mayor reopen brothels and bars ordered closed after violent protests by residents last week.

"We are fighting for the right to work and for our families' survival," Lily Cortez, leader of the El Alto Association of Nighttime Workers, told local television.

Well, I guess that means she didn't sew her mouth shut. Way to show your commitment to the cause, Lily.

Speechless

I'm not even going to make a joke about this, seeing as how I couldn't possibly think of anything to say that would be funnier than the article itself:

An Australian barmaid has been fined for crushing beer cans between her bare breasts while an off-duty colleague has been fined for hanging spoons from her friend's nipples, police said Wednesday.

Police in Western Australia said the 31-year old barmaid pleaded guilty in the local magistrate's court to twice exposing her breasts to patrons at the Premier Hotel in Pinjarra, south of the state capital, Perth.

The woman "is alleged to have also crushed beer cans between her breasts during one of the offences," in breach of hotel licensing laws, police from the Peel district of Western Australia said in a statement.

The barmaid and the hotel manager were both fined A$1,000 ($900), while an off-duty barmaid was fined A$500 for helping to hang spoons from the woman's nipples, police said.

Uhhhhhhh...okay.

Japan, again

Man oh man, I love those crazy, mixed up islands floating out there in the Pacific Ocean that the world knows as Japan:

Did you just grope me? Shall we head to the police? That's the message women are flashing on their cell phones with a popular program designed to ward off wandering hands in Japan's congested commuter trains.

"Anti-Groping Appli" by games developer Takahashi was released in late 2005 but has only recently climbed up popularity rankings, reaching No. 7 in this week's top-10 cell phone applications list compiled by Web-based publisher Spicy Soft Corp.

The application flashes increasingly threatening messages in bold print on the phone's screen to show to the offender: "Excuse me, did you just grope me?" "Groping is a crime," and finally, "Shall we head to the police?"

Users press an "Anger" icon in the program to progress to the next threat. A warning chime accompanies the messages.

The application, which can be downloaded for free on Web-enabled phones, is for women who want to scare away perverts with minimum hassle and without attracting attention, according to Takahashi's Web site.

I don't know if pepper spray is legal in Japan, but I guess it would be problematic to unleash a cloud of the stuff in a crowded subway car. It's an interesting cultural difference, though, that Japanese women would want to "scare away perverts with minimum hassle and without attracting attention," whereas American women are taught to make noise and attract people's attention when something like that happens. Notice also how polite even the "angry" message is: "Did you just grope me? Shall we head to the police?" If it didn't involve sexual assault, I'd say that was cute.

You so crazy! No, really.

You know how some women are kind of crazy, but in a hot, sexy way? Well, this one sounds like she's just plain crazy:

A woman who stabbed her tied-up lover so she could drink his blood has been sentenced to 10 years in prison. Tiffany Sutton told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge David Udall that she was sorry for the incident and said she never meant to hurt anyone, but received the stiff sentence anyway after he called the crime especially heinous.

Sutton, 24, pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in August. She was arrested by Tempe police in February after she repeatedly stabbed her lover during an alcohol- and drug-fueled sexual tryst.

According to police reports, the victim, 46-year-old Robert McDaniel, agreed to be tied up during sex but became alarmed and asked to be untied when Sutton pulled out a knife and said she liked to drink blood. Sutton then attacked him, slicing his leg, puncturing his arm, shoulder and back and cutting his neck and stomach. When he escaped, she chased him with a pickax.

Now, I'm thinking Miss Sutton probably manifested some signs of instability before she tied up the victim (i.e. the alcohol and drugs), which leads me to believe he was something of a dumbass.

Now comes the least surprising part of the story:

Sutton's attorney, Elizabeth Houck, told the judge at Tuesday's hearing that she suffers from a personality disorder that causes instability and has taken responsibility for her actions, according to the East Valley Tribune. [my emphasis]

Personality disorder? Instability? No, you don't say! She also thought she was a vampire, which is not at all insane.

Going on the road

Leave it to the clever Japanese to take peeing in a bottle to the next level:

If you're stuck in traffic when Mother Nature calls, Japan's Kaneko Sangyo Co. has developed the loo for you.

The manufacturer of plastic car accessories drew back the curtain on Tuesday on its new portable toilet for cars.

The toilet comes with a curtain large enough to conceal users and a plastic bag to collect waste.

"The commode will come in handy during major disasters such as earthquakes or when you are caught in a traffic jam," a company official told reporters, according to Kyodo News.

I had no idea that traffic jams in Japan were disasters of the same magnitude as earthquakes. I guess we should all quit griping about the traffic here in L.A.

Not on fire

Although the rest of Southern California seems to be going up in flames, we're doing okay here. I've had distant relatives calling today, wondering if the house was being threatened by the fires. I was able to reassure them that we're just fine. Going outside for a smoke has become somewhat less appealing, though, because it "smells like camping," as my astute brother put it. There's so much smoke in the air that it starts to hurt your eyes after a few minutes.

She almost makes Britney look like a fit mother

Drunk driving is bad enough, but it takes a special kind of moron to drive around drunk with your little kids in the car.

An 8-year-old boy riding in a car with his mom called 911 several times to report that she wasn't "acting normal," leading to her arrest for investigation of drunken driving and other charges, authorities said.

Paulette Lynn Spears, 33, was arrested Saturday after she drove to a fire station and said she had a medical problem.

Guided by her son's description of what he could see from the car, as well as by global positioning technology to track the phone calls, deputies arrived at the station less than a minute later.

"He said 'I don't know where we are, and Mom's not acting normal,'" sheriff's Sgt. Randon M. Walker said.

At one point, Spears took a cellular telephone from the boy, told the dispatcher not to worry and hung up, Walker said. The boy called back, and again his mother cut short the call, Walker said.

"The mother kept interrupting the 8-year-old," he said. "It happened at least twice."

At one point, Walker said, Spears apparently bit the boy's hand to get the telephone away from him.

There was also a five-year-old in the car, but there's no word on whether or not she bit that child, too. Thankfully, the kids have been taken away from her.

So long, top 25

Damnit, damnit, damnit.

Fleaing the police

Oh, God, I can practically feel them crawling on my skin!

Four officers investigating a burglary were attacked, not by a fleeing burglar, but a swarm of fleas in a filth-ridden vacant house. The tiny, biting attackers were so overwhelming that the South Bend patrolmen had to be decontaminated and ended up being sent home early from their shifts.

"They were all over the place — in our socks and even in our shorts. It was disgusting," said Cpl. Ken Stuart.

To avoid infesting their squad cars, the police station or relatives, Stuart, Cpl. Chris Slager and Patrolman Paul Strabavy endured a lengthy flea decontamination process.

A van took them back to the station, where the men showered with flea/lice shampoo and soap. A wife of one of the officers brought them spare clothes.

I can only imagine how filthy that house must have been. I guess the bright side, though, is that if anybody actually did break into the house, they were probably infested with the little bloodsuckers, too.

Cleaning the scene of the crime

Man, I just love it when some dirtbag gets his comeuppance.

A burglar in Montgomery chose the wrong family to mess with, literally. Adrian and Tiffany McKinnon returned home on Tuesday after a week away to find that thieves had emptied almost everything the family of five owned, Tiffany McKinnon said through tears.

"Tears just rolled down my face as I walked in and saw everything gone and piles of trash all over my home," she said.

Adrian McKinnon sent his wife to see her sister while he inspected the piles left behind. As he walked back into the sunroom, a man walked through the back door straight into him, Tiffany McKinnon told the Montgomery Advertiser in a story Thursday.

"My husband Adrian caught the thief red-handed in our home," she said. "And what is even crazier, the man even had my husband's hat sitting right on his head."

Adrian McKinnon held the suspect, 33-year-old Tajuan Bullock, at gunpoint and told him to sit on the floor until he decided what to do.

"We made this man clean up all the mess he made, piles of stuff, he had thrown out of my drawers and cabinets onto the floor," Tiffany McKinnon said.

When police arrived, Bullock complained about being forced to clean the home at gunpoint.

"This man had the nerve to raise sand about us making him clean up the mess he made in my house," she said. "The police officer laughed at him when he complained and said anybody else would have shot him dead."

That's actually how my mom used to make me clean up my room, and trust me, complaining doesn't help.

Ah, nostalgia

I'm not generally a fan of theme restaurants, but this is ridiculous:

At the door of the Commune Mess Hall restaurant, a young woman in loose-fitting army fatigues and a cap, with a red "Serve the People" armband and braided pigtails, greets customers.

"Welcome, Comrade! How many?" she chirps.

Huge portraits of Engels, Marx, Mao, Lenin and Stalin adorn a back wall and Chinese propaganda posters hang on pillars and side walls, showing chipper workers, peasants and soldiers toiling.

Blocky, red characters painted on the rafters implore: "Be self-reliant, work arduously" and "Use your own two hands to have ample food and clothing."

The eatery here in the capital of the booming southern province of Guangdong is a throwback to the Mao era, modeled on the communes that dotted the countryside from the 1950s to 70s.

Staff dressed like the Red Guards of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution serve peasant fare. Revolutionary songs play in the background.

Scores of similar restaurants have opened around the country, recalling a turbulent period in China's modern history that many remember with bitterness but which also evokes feelings of nostalgia for what some say was a simpler time.

They are perhaps the Chinese equivalent of America's milkshake and hamburger drive-ins with Motown classics on the jukebox.

Yeah, but at the end of your meal at those drive-ins, the authorities don't pack your kids off to work in the countryside to work on a collective farm and they don't have massive purges of, say, Eisenhower's or JFK's political rivals.

To be fair, I did eat at Medieval Times once when I was a kid, and they didn't examine the harsher realities of life in the Dark Ages there, either.

Head of the class goes missing

I'm not talking about a kidnapped honor student, but an actual head:

University of Illinois officials will take a closer look at this year's Halloween displays for a donated human skull that is missing from the anthropology department.

Students examined the skull in an undergraduate class on human osteology, or the study of bones, said Steven Leigh, head of the anthropology department.

"It's very difficult to get such materials," Leigh told the (Carbondale) Southern Illinoisan. "If people insist on stealing them, we will run out."

The skull has been gone for about a month and was probably taken from a first-floor classroom at Davenport Hall, Leigh said. The department waited to report the loss to campus police until this week to make sure it was not being used in another class or for research.

The theft was uncommon, said Leigh and University of Illinois Police Lt. Roy Acree.

"I don't know what you would do with a human skull other than treat it as a Halloween decoration," Acree said. "It was sitting there and somebody probably thought it would be cool to have in a dorm room or apartment and took it."

If I was in charge of the investigation, I'd start by searching in the apartments or dorm rooms of any goth kids in the class.

Well, I guess it's that time of year

True story. Earlier this evening, I was in one of the bedrooms sorting laundry that needed to be washed. I went to the closet to get some more laundry out of a hamper, and I noticed that someone had left the light on in the bathroom, which is across from the closet, so I turned the light off. I went back to sorting the laundry, and when I finished, I went to turn off the lights. The light switch is between the closet and the bathroom, where the light was back on. The thing was, nobody had been in the room the whole time except me.

I tell you, that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Moron on the lawn

In Animal House, Dean Wormer famously told Flounder that "Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life." I don't know if this guy is fat, but he's sure got the other two covered.

A man who was out on bail following a drunken driving arrest is back behind bars after he was caught drinking a 12-pack of beer on the Douglas County Courthouse lawn. Martin Ruiz asked the judge to release him on his own recognizance, promising not to drink another beer or drive.

But Judge Michael Gibbons set his bail at $100,000 on Monday, saying he was surprised Ruiz was released on recognizance the first time.

I mean, couldn't this dumbass find anywhere other than the courthouse lawn to get trashed?

"Skylarking"

Hmmmmm...I wonder what the neighbor had to say about this:

An Australian man, clad only in underwear, fell nine stories while trying to build a makeshift plank bridge into a neighbor's flat, but lived to tell the tale.

The bridge collapsed just after midnight Tuesday sending the 35-year-old man plummeting into a building structure below, police in Western Australia state said.

"He was skylarking around, building planks across to his neighbor's place when it happened. He was very lucky. It was an iron and timber structure, possibly a pergola, that cushioned his fall," police spokeswoman Ros Weatherall said.

Funny, but I wouldn't usually think of something made of iron and wood as something that would really "cushion" a fall.

But, more importantly, why was he doing this in his underpants?

I always feel like somebody's watching me

If you're not at all creeped out by people watching you while you eat and messing with you in subtle ways, I know just the place:

Does service with a scowl put you off at lunch? Will you eat more greens if you are surrounded by plants? Does romantic, pink lighting encourage you to linger over your fruit salad?

A new research center -- dubbed the "restaurant of the future" -- at the Dutch university of Wageningen hopes to help answer these questions and more by tracking diners with dozens of unobtrusive cameras and monitoring their eating habits.

"We want to find out what influences people: colors, taste, personnel. We try to focus on one stimulus, like light," said Rene Koster, head of the Center for Innovative Consumer Studies, as overhead bulbs switched through green, red, orange and blue.

"This restaurant is a playground of possibilities. We can ask the staff to be less friendly and visible or the reverse," he said. "The changes must be small. If you were making changes every day it would be too disruptive. People wouldn't like it."

Gee, I wonder what the result will be when they tell the staff to be less friendly.

Anyway, you've got to love the audacity of this project. Most of the time, when you're participating in research, they pay you to participate, not the other way around.

Cola wars

It's nice to know that sometimes, life really does imitate comedy:

The long-standing rivalry between Coke and Pepsi took a physical turn Friday when a Pepsi deliveryman allegedly punched his Coke counterpart in the face at a western Pennsylvania Wal-Mart, state police said.

The two deliverymen were "apparently bickering back and forth" while unloading their wares at the Indiana County store, police said. When the Coke deliveryman left the store, his counterpart allegedly punched him in the face three times, breaking his nose and giving him a black eye, police said.

Tune in next week when the employees of a McDonald's "throw down" with the crew from a Burger King across the street.

"Thank you, Al Gore! You're super awesome!"

Yeah, whatever.

Update: Iowahawk shares some of the perks that come with the prize.

Would you do me a favor?

Gee, who would have thought that doing something like this in a mall restroom could get you in trouble?

A man who was apparently worried about a random drug test asked an 11-year-old boy at a mall for a urine sample.

White Plains Police say Marcos Delacruz, 42, was charged with endangering the welfare of a child. He was arrested several hours after the incident in the men's room at the mall on Wednesday.

Deputy Public Safety Commissioner Daniel Jackson said Delacruz took the sample to his appointment with his probation officer.

The 11-year-old boy told his mother that a man in the men's room had asked him to urinate in a bottle. The mom called police and the boy described the man.

You know what would have been hilarious? If the kid had been really, really high when he gave the guy the sample.

Jimmah spews to foreigners

Check out History's Greatest Monster bashing the Vice President on the Beeb:

"He's a militant who avoided any service of his own in the military and he has been most forceful in the last 10 years or more in fulfilling some of his more ancient commitments that the United States has a right to inject its power through military means in other parts of the world," Carter told the BBC World News America in an interview to air later on Wednesday.

First of all, we've got the "chickenhawk" thing going on, which is real original, not to mention very grown up. It's refreshing to see that such an "elder statesman" is taking his cues from the nutroots and moonbat trolls. Then, we have the "his more ancient commitments" remark. Can anybody tell me what that even means? I'd say he's finally lost his mind, but the rest of that joke writes itself.

In closing, I'd just like to ask a simple question: How much friggin' cocaine did you people have to do during the seventies to elect this jagoff? I mean, seriously, that's the only semi-rational explanation I can think of for why this joke of a man ever got elected.

Real Dolls hitting the big screen?

I just saw a commercial for this. Um, is it just me, or does that look like it's going to be an incredibly creepy movie?

Robot shopping carts to annoy Limeys

Since people apparently can't be trusted to make intelligent decisions on their own, British shopping carts (called trolleys over there in that crazy language they speak) will soon begin hectoring them about various issues:

Supermarket shoppers may soon be cruising the aisles with "intelligent" trolleys that warn them if they're buying too much junk food, technology experts say.

While many would be happy enough if they could simply get their trolley to go in a straight line, the high-tech model will be fitted with a computer screen and barcode scanner.

It will read each product's individual code to give customers information about calories, nutrition, ethical sourcing and the environment.

Um, who exactly is going to decide which products are "ethical" and which are good for the environment? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess left-leaning government bureaucrats.

Dear old mom

You know, it's important for parents to be involved with their kids' activities, but this seems like a pretty bad idea:

A 43-year-old woman has been charged with a felony after prosecutors said she helped her son make pipe bombs in her home.

Rae Lynn Funston was charged Tuesday in District Court with felony possession of explosives. She is jailed on $25,000 bail. Police said she told them she purchased the PVC pipe and helped her son make the explosives.

Court records said a juvenile probation officer was conducting a routine search of the Funston residence, which is a condition of her 16-year-old son's probation, when he found the pipe bombs in the boy's room.

My mom never helped me to put together any bombs. Grandpa was the family's explosives expert, so that task fell to him, usually.

Perhaps she's never met any men

I love this story, not for the subject matter (okay, a little bit for that) but for the punchline the artist unwittingly provides at the end:

Tamera Bremer titled the life-size nude self-portrait she laboriously wove into a rug "the sexy sex: all-nude review rug one." Somebody apparently found it fetching, and late Monday it vanished from an exhibit floor at Linfield College.

Bremer said the latch-hook work took thousands of hours and she valued it in the five-figure range.

It was the first in a five-rug project the Portland artist, an adjunct professor at Linfield, has in the works.

The curvy cutout was fashioned from monk's cloth, a heavy cotton, and hand-painted in 10 colors on alpaca yarn.

"I don't understand why anyone would want to steal something like this," she said. "Whoever did it doesn't understand what they've done. It's my life's work."

What's not to understand? It's a rug with a picture of a naked lady on it. I mean, sure, you could just download porn from the internet (or so I'm told) but that doesn't really provide you with a conversation piece like the naked lady rug.

The heebiest of jeebies

This is probably the creepiest thing I've read in a long, long time:

A Russian man accused of murdering 49 people asked a court on Tuesday to add another eleven victims to his tally, and told a jury when he first strangled a man it was like falling in love for the first time.

Supermarket worker Alexander Pichushkin, 33, has been branded the 'chessboard murderer' by Russian newspapers because he hoped to put a coin on every square of a 64-place chessboard for each murder.

"A first killing is like your first love. You never forget it," he said from a cage in the courtroom, after explaining how he started killing at age 18 with the murder of a classmate.

Pichushkin said he had suggested to his classmate that they kill someone, but when his friend refused, "I sent him to heaven." He then smirked at the jury.

"The closer a person is to you, and the better you know them, the more pleasurable it is to kill them," he said.

Didn't O.J. Simpson say something like if he had killed his ex-wife, it would have been because he loved her too much? Hmmmmmmm...

That was weird

I just went outside to savor the last cigarette of the night before going to bed, and it smelled like french fries outside. In fact, it smelled just like the way it smells when you drive past a McDonalds when they're cooking up a batch of fries. The nearest McDonalds is at least a mile away, and there wasn't any wind out there to speak of. Bizarre.

Driven to distraction

I wonder what would possess someone to wake up one day and think that this was a good idea:

Police responded to a woman's complaint on Friday that a naked man was repeatedly driving by in a van and masturbating.

The woman gave police the license plate number, and records showed the van belonged to Spokane Police Officer Sherilyn Redmon. Redmon said she left the van at a Chrysler dealership for servicing.

Police found the van back at the dealership and arrested an employee accused of taking it on a 16-mile test drive.

I certainly hope the dealership offered to clean the van's interior free of charge.

Cable guy

This is a story so awful that I almost feel bad about making jokes about it. Almost.

A thief in Germany was charred beyond recognition by a 10,000 volt electric shock when he tried to steal a live copper cable, authorities said Monday.

Police in the western city of Duisburg found the 32-year-old man's blackened remains by a set of cable cutters and pile of non-live cables he had already stolen.

Only because one of his hands survived incineration were officers able to identify the man as German of Kazakh origin.

Shocking. [rimshot] Anyway, I wonder how they found his body. My guess would be the smell.

Pathetic

Way to roll over and die there, Angels. I guess I'll be rooting for the Tribe to beat the chowder-swilling, Kennedy-electing morons of Red Sox Nation.

Mama's boy

Growing up, I always knew I could count on my mom for support, but she never did anything like this:

Jacksonville authorities say a mother pulled out a gun at a school bus stop because her son was being bullied. The police report says 40-year-old Johnna Briggs pointed the gun at other students getting off the bus and said, "Does anyone have something to say?"

Her son was being bullied on the school bus and authorities say she wanted to put an end to it.

Well, I'd say that will either put an end to it or will give the kids something new to tease her son about. Namely that his mom is a crazy bitch.

10 random songs from my Windows Media Player

These are the last ten songs my computer decided to play. Feel free to leave your list from your media player or iPod in the comments. And, yes, I stole this idea from Jeff G.

1. Gene Pitney - "Town Without Pity"
2. The Smiths - "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want"
3. Pet Shop Boys - "Domino Dancing"
4. The Who - "The Kids Are Alright"
5. Fine Young Cannibals - "Suspicious Minds"
6. Tom Tom Club - "Genius of Love"
7. Massive Attack - "Protection"
8. Happy Mondays - "Wrote For Luck"
9. Scorpions - "Rock You Like a Hurricane"
10. Madness - "The Prince"

Busted

I understand that courthouse security is important, but this is just begging for a lawsuit:

Security guards refused to allow a woman into a federal courthouse until she removed a bra that triggered a metal detector.

Lori Plato said she and her husband, Owen Plato, were stunned when U.S. Marshals Service employees asked her to remove her bra after the underwire supports set off the alarm.

"I asked if I could go into the bathroom because they didn't have a privacy screen and no women security officers were available," Plato said Wednesday. "They said, 'No.'

"I wasn't carrying a shank in my bra. If it's so dangerous, why did they give it back and let me put it on?"

Patrick McDonald, the U.S. Marshal in Boise, said appropriate security protocols were followed in the Sept. 20 matter, and guards suggested she simply remove the bra in her car outside, or find a restaurant bathroom.

"She's inflating it," McDonald said. "All of a sudden she just took it off. It wasn't anything we wanted to happen and it wasn't anything we asked for her to do. She did it so fast."

I'm pretty sure I've read those last three sentences, or some quite like them, someplace else. Hmmmm...

Gratitude

It's nice when you get a thank you note recognizing your thoughtfulness, but isn't the giving the important part? Apparently not for this guy:

A disgruntled Japanese worker smashed up his employer's office in a fit of pique after his boss ignored his gift of jelly desserts, a national paper said on Thursday.

An Osaka court heard that the 31-year-old man, who worked for an online clothing sales company, had given the company president a box of jellies in the summer as a mark of gratitude after landing the job, the English-language Asahi Shimbun said.

Many Japanese maintain a tradition of sending gifts to important business contacts in summer and winter.

When the employee realized that his boss had left the box of jellies unopened under his desk, he smashed 22 computers in the office with a truncheon, the paper said. No one was injured in the incident.

I wonder if Japanese customs dictate that he should send an apology gift.

Aren't toasters a little more traditional?

My bank offers free checking and fee-free ATMs, but they don't offer anything like this:

A Thai bank is pitching into the battle against HIV/AIDS and handing out condoms to customers too shy to get them at the shop.

But they'll be comfortable about getting them from bank tellers?

Despite Bangkok's reputation as one of the world's sex industry centers, Thailand is a generally conservative country.

Kasikorn Bank launched the "Condoms for Confidence" campaign at 600 branches nationwide and said it would start giving out the sheaths, branded K-Condom and K-Excellence, later this month.

"HIV/AIDS is returning to Thailand since the government awareness campaign started 20 years ago has fizzled out," said a bank spokesman who declined to be identified.

"We want the teenagers to be aware of the problem."

Because there's nothing like the banking industry to spread AIDS awareness among teenagers.

Showing your ass

In retrospect, I think this guy probably wishes he had been able to keep his pants on. Twice.

Mooning a police officer was community activist Steven Lee Myrick's undoing. Myrick, 41, was convicted by a jury Tuesday of raping a Hawthorne woman during a burglary seven years ago.

The crime was unsolved until he exposed his bare buttocks years later and a DNA sample collected by officers linked him to the rape.

Jurors deliberated less than a day before finding Myrick guilty of residential burglary and two counts of rape.

He faces multiple life terms when sentenced Nov. 5 because jurors found true special allegations that a gun was used, the burglary was gang-related and the rape occurred during a burglary while the victim was tied up, Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Jodi Link said.

[...]

After Myrick was convicted of mooning officers outside his Watts housing project during a demonstration, he was required to submit a DNA sample for a law enforcement database.

Where he's likely to end up, I'm sure he'll want to keep his pants on as much as possible.

Probably not a popular vacation destination

I wonder where the animal rights wackos come down on this one:

Two centuries after rats first landed on a remote Aleutian island from a shipwreck, wildlife managers in Alaska are plotting how to evict the non-native rodent from the island that bears their name.

Rat Island, like many other treeless, volcanic islands in the 1,000-mile (1,609-km) long Aleutian chain, is infested with rats that have proved devastating to wild birds that build nests in the earth or in rocky cliffs.

"They pretty much made the island worthless for a lot of wildlife," said Art Sowls, a biologist with the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, which sprawls across the Aleutians and other Alaska islands.

Rodents have reigned at Rat Island at the western end of the Aleutians since the 1780 shipwreck of a Japanese sailing ship, wreaking havoc on millions of seabirds with no natural defenses against land predators.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the Maritime refuge, is drawing up plans to wipe out Rat Island's rats. A formal proposal is expected in about a month, according to Sowls.

Well, on the one hand, you've got rats, which are animals, yes, but not very lovable. Then, you've got the wild birds, which are probably endangered or something. A no-brainer for the rest of us, but you've got to wonder about the folks at PETA. Will they be chaining themselves to Rat Island for a big "Save the Rats" protest?

Not art

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I think that most modern art is complete and utter crap. Were I in London, I'd be sure to voice that opinion:

Pickled cows, elephant dung paintings and a transvestite potter -- The Turner Prize deserves its reputation as one of art's most controversial awards.

Now art lovers can decide for themselves if the prize rewards pretentious twaddle or cutting edge British art. Almost a quarter of a century of Turner prizewinners went on display on Monday at London's Tate Britain museum.

I think "pretentious twaddle" is probably being generous.

The Turner enrages traditionalists who argue that it is a travesty of modern art, but the show attracts up to 120,000 visitors a year intrigued to see what all the fuss is about.

In 1995, the "Bad Boy" of British contemporary art Damien Hirst won with a pickled cow. In 2003, transvestite potter Grayson Perry wore a frilly Shirley Temple dress to accept his award. Chris Ofili used elephant dung to adorn his 1998 winning entries.

The latter being, quite literally, crap.

Whatever happened to people painting pictures of...things or people? That was nice. You know what else was nice about those days? Artists not using bodily fluids or animal crap in their work. Yeah.