According to the BBC (thanks, James), a judge in Northern Ireland has agreed to give a 16-year-old "one last chance" after the boy failed a drug test that showed he had (gasp!) consumed cannabis. After the boy's solicitor argued that his client was "bored" in school (presumably to explain why he had consumed cannabis) but did have an interest in art (also relevant), the judge decided to put that to the test.
He granted bail, but said the boy would have to come to court for three days and draw lawyers. (Jail sounds better, frankly.) "You must bring with you a sketch pad and a pencil and you can draw me and the solicitors for two hours each day. Only me and the solicitors, and I will review the matter on Wednesday," the judge said.
My guess is that the judge is testing the solicitor's claim that if only the defendant were properly motivated, he could refrain from consuming cannabis, and that exercising his interest in art would be one way to motivate him. "If you look stoned you will be arrested," he told the boy, which I think supports the aforementioned guess.
As always when I mention attorney advertising I'm only endorsing (or mocking) the ad itself, and don't have a position about whatever it's advertising. So having said that, I think Danny Trejo is awesome and that this is a pretty funny ad.
Even the disclaimer is pretty good: "Danny Trejo is not an attorney or a client. He's a paid badass."
I was also amused by the understandable but rather stark contrast between that ad and the one he did for the Spanish-language market:
I'm a big fan of having him wear a shirt and so forth, but don't think they needed to take out all the jokes. Anyway, that's advertising for you.
You may know James Bergener as "Sweet James" Bergener, according to these other YouTube videos that are based on Bergener's radio advertising on stations in the L.A. area. I watched a few of those videos and they made me laugh, too, so these seem to be pretty good examples of the genre.
It's illegal in Florida to harass or disturb a manatee, as it should be because the manatee is an endangered species, and as it must be because they can't defend themselves. Neither of those factors applies to alligators. So if somebody wants to jump out of a tour boat to fulfill his lifelong dream of "swimming with the gators," he should be free to do that, or at least not charged with some made-up crime should he somehow survive. So I personally see this arrest as yet another misuse of the vague "disorderly conduct" charge.
The report on that item notes that after the incident, the guide "assured the tour guests that the event was highly unusual and continued his tour." I don't know. If you think your tour guests need to be "assured" it's highly unlikely that they, too, will spontaneously leap out of the boat at the first sign of an alligator, you should probably head back to base.
Also not sure I agree with pressing "mischief" charges against the Canadian who tied 110 helium balloons to a lawn chair so he could jump out of it while flying over the Calgary Stampede as a publicity stunt. He did have a parachute (although who cares) and he didn't endanger people at the Stampede (because he missed). Supposedly the charges were based on a potential risk to other third parties, because although the guy claimed the stunt followed "months of planning" he apparently didn't consider what might happen to the lawn chair once he jumped out. (As of July 7, its whereabouts were still unknown.) I guess it might have posed a risk to air traffic, and police said they expected the man to be charged under the federal Aeronautics Act as well. So, fine.
"Man Robs Bank With Sex Toy," declared most of the headlines on this item, which made me wonder why a teller would give money to someone "armed" with a sex toy. Turned out that he wasn't just waving it around, he used it along with some cables and duct tape to make a fake bomb. My next question was, why a sex toy, but then nothing else really came to mind that would look much like a stick of dynamite if you wrapped it in duct tape (other than a stick of dynamite). I guess all my questions have been answered on that one.
Last month a New Mexico man was charged with burglary after a woman found him in her kitchen baking a potato in her microwave. "She asked him what he was doing there, and he told her he was making a potato," said the police report. He had also wiped down a countertop and raked up the leaves in her front yard, so, yeah, not the worst burglary ever.
According to this brief report, the Magna Carta, that mighty charter of liberties intended to protect the rights of wealthy nobles to exploit others without too much interference from the King, has been cited over 800 years after its signing to support a Missouri lawsuit contending municipal-court defendants should not have to pay a $3 fee to support the Sheriff's Retirement Fund. That's how the law works, you guys.
This question is prompted by a paragraph in Randall Munroe's what if? post the other day entitled "What if New Horizons hit my car?" (in turn based on a question by Robin Sheat). The answer to that question was, "it would be pretty bad for both vehicles," although as is so often the case it's not so much the answer but the explanation.
Bad news for your Corolla (Image: NASA)
But as long as we're talking about the answer, it would in fact be pretty bad. The New Horizons spacecraft weighs over 1,000 pounds (478 kg), and is about the size and weight of a concert grand piano. And while it would be bad if a grand piano hit your car, it'd be worse if the grand piano were traveling at over 30,000 miles per hour. (That's almost 50,000 kilometers per hour, but somehow kph is still less impressive.) Moving at more than eight miles (or 14 km) every second,New Horizons is one of the fastest objects the species has ever created.
And you parked right in front of it. Nice job, genius.
Oh, also, it's powered by a nuclear generator, so the tiny pieces of your car that are now on their way to the Kuiper Belt are also radioactive.
Randall included a couple of legal points in his analysis, concluding that—and this is the good news—(1) NASA would have to pay for your car and (2) because you wouldn't be at fault, in most states your insurer would be legally prohibited from raising your premiums. I think those answers are both right if we assume, as he does, that your car was parked at home and New Horizons was rather dramatically off course. I want to assume, though, that your car was orbiting Pluto.
Sometimes you write something you really like. And since you're kind of on a roll you don't stop to save it after every frickin' paragraph because you'd like to think that maybe the wifi network you're on is advanced enough that it could maintain a signal for up to 20 minutes at a time without wigging out. But it isn't, apparently, and so when it locks up you lose all that work and you get discouraged and hang it up for the day. Or maybe you just don't have time to finish it. But in either case, you had already saved the link to the news item itself and so you leave the thing sitting there in the the draft folder because you might go back to it later. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. Life goes on. New and even stupider things happen every day. They must also be addressed. And so your draft folder grows. Maybe you've been doing this long enough now that for various reasons you have well over 300 posts in your draft folder, dating back several years. (That's really not relevant here, but I just counted them and it seems like a lot.) The reality is that some things that are lost will never be recovered, some work will never be finished, and you just have to accept that and move on.
But sometimes you learn later that the guy who was dancing on the roof of a police car, about whom you had written something that you recall you liked a lot but was completely lost due to network problems, because we can somehow get a consistent signal from Pluto for Christ's sake but not from across the room, said he was doing that dance because he was trying to summon the Sheriff of Nottingham to help him rescue some kids from a bunch of vampires.
That is one way something might make it out of the draft folder.
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In June, the gentleman in the clip below was arrested after he was seen dancing on the roof of an official vehicle of the local sheriff's department, while it was parked in the driveway of the sergeant to whom it was assigned. Happily, this was captured by a surveillance camera that also records audio. This really improves the clip, as it can be heard that the guy was dancing to "Rich Girl" by Hall & Oates and then "Goodbye Stranger" by Supertramp. For a while he's just dancing, but then he pulls one of the windshield wipers off, which is not cool. He then grabbed an American flag from a house across the street and began waving it around, which is less uncool but still not okay, under the circumstances. Not long after that, police arrive.
A brief chase ensues.
According to a probable-cause statement posted byThe Smoking Gun (thanks, Steven), the suspect was "clear and alert when advising that he had not taken any recreational drugs or alcohol, and was not currently diagnosed with any mental health conditions." He then advised that he had come to that location "because when he opened his front door, a woman with fangs was threatening him, and that a human sacrifice was about to occur involving vampires. Therefore, [he] made the conscious decision to get the Sheriff of Nottingham to help him stop the slaughter of small children."
The suspect then invoked his Miranda rights and refused to answer any further questions.
The report doesn't say whether the man was in fact under the influence of something (drugs, alcohol, or vampires) at the time of the incident, but feel free to speculate.
