Lowering the Bar

Sasquatch Goes to Harvard

Well, it's disturbing enough that Harvard's law library actually houses a copy of this book (and that someone has it checked out when they should be studying), but now here it is on Joseph Story's lap.

"Listen, I wrote Martin v. Hunter's Lessee.
I don't have to put up with this crap."

Joseph Story, of course, was the inventor of the mullet, but he also found time to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1811 until 1845. (He was only 32 when he was appointed, still the youngest ever.) He did indeed write Martin v. Hunter's Lessee, in which the Court informed Virginia that oh yeah, it did so have jurisdiction to hear appeals of state-court decisions on federal issues. He also wrote the decision in The Amistad case, was a professor at Harvard while he was on the Court, and was a very successful author as well.

Whatever. My book is funnier than Commentaries on the Law of Bailments, or at least I hope it is.

Many thanks to Rebecca for the picture.

Assorted Stupidity #60

• Faced with drug-possession charges, said the prosecutor in this case, the defendant claimed that police had planted the drugs in his car. Well, that's certainly possible. He continued, "Of the drugs stuck to his testicles, [defendant] denied any knowledge." Well, that certainly isn't.

• A deathbed confession may help you get right with the Lord, but here's the problem: you might not die.

• According to this report, somebody stole a dead cat and a frying pan from a freezer in Den Helder, the Netherlands. It seems unlikely that the motive was hunger, though, because "various snacks in the freezer remained untouched." Mainly I wanted to mention this item because the subject line of the email in which I got it read, "thinking of you." And you know what? I'm okay with that.

• As several of you noted, the guy who claimed that exorbitant hotel prices caused him dental problems (see "Price Gouging Blamed for Broken Tooth" (Feb. 24)) has a history. He's been associated with Orly Taitz, for one thing (generally not a sign of either good sense or competence), and while he does have a law degree he has been disbarred in at least three jurisdictions as a result of a felony conviction in Texas.

• By the way, that complaint alleged that the plaintiff "suffered physical hardship and anguish to the point that he ground his teeth and broke his tooth in reaction to [the defendant's] fraudulent and price gouging behavior...." So yeah, that probably is the same guy that's worked with Orly Taitz.

• The guy who tried to rob the dressing room of "Thunder From Down Under" messed with the wrong group of male exotic dancers, that's for sure.

Losing Plaintiff Hits Defendant With a Truck

Not only is this a crime, it'll still end up being more expensive than an appeal. Although a lot quicker.

Braden Robinson had accused the victim of kidnapping, torturing, and killing one of Robinson's relatives, who had supposedly owned part of the Barq's Root Beer company. After he was, not too surprisingly, "unable to come up with any evidence to back up his outlandish claim," a judge in Orleans Parish dismissed his case last September and ordered him to pay $100,000 (I assume on some sort of a counterclaim). When he heard about this—he'd been excluded from the courtroom for causing disturbances—he drove over to the courthouse and ambushed the defendant with his truck. The defendant was seriously injured, but lived.

Robinson drove away, but showed up later that day at a local hospital with a gun and took someone hostage. He was charged with aggravated assault for that incident, but at some point was set free on bail.

This is just coming up now because Robinson wasn't charged with the hit-and-run until just recently—six months after the fact. Seems like they could have closed that case a little earlier, because the victim told them that Robinson was probably the guy who hit him, Robinson had a motive, and he also got into an armed standoff with police later that same day.

Granted, those probably weren't the only crimes in New Orleans that day, but it doesn't seem too hard to connect those dots, either.

The TSA and the Scent Grenade, Part II: Spicebomb! [Correction]

The term "scent grenade" didn't occur to me until this morning, or else I would have used it yesterday ("TSA Confuses Perfume Bottle With a Grenade"), but better late than never. (Turns out I'm not the first to think of it, unfortunately, but I'll come back to that.)

A reader informed me (thanks, Chris) that there is at least one other perfume bottle out there that would terrify the TSA even more than Jimmy Choo's. In fact, this one (designed for men) is expressly modeled after a hand grenade and is even called Spicebomb! (italics and exclamation point mine).

Behold it.

Again we see the iconic "pineapple" grenade shape and styling, but this one actually has a pin to pull, and it also comes in scarier gray and black. In terms of distinguishing it from a real grenade, though, my rule of thumb from yesterday still works:

DOES ITEM SPRAY SOMETHING THAT SMELLS NICE WHEN YOU PUSH DOWN ON THE TOP?

YES=NOT GRENADE.

NO=POSSIBLE GRENADE (FURTHER INVESTIGATION NEEDED).

But just imagine how seeing someone waving this bottle around on an aircraft might panic the passengers into ... well, they'd either see it was perfume and ignore him or get up and beat the crap out of the guy with the "grenade," just like they did with the shoe and underwear bombers. Thanks, TSA, but we'll handle it.

I think the most dangerous thing about Spicebomb might be the ad copy. View it below—if you dare: 

In 2005, Viktor&Rolf launched its first bomb: a profusion of flowers in a feminine perfume, sensual to the point of excess—Flowerbomb. Today, it is the turn of the masculine codes of perfumery to be dynamited: Spicebomb offers us the promise of a concentrate with an explosive personality. Deliberately powerful, exaggeratedly sensual, decidedly audacious. 

The bottle, a reworked custom-built grenade for a perfume made up of explosive scents, is encircled by a black band that cannot contain the force of the fragrance. An olfactory explosion is ineluctable.

An explosive encounter between two accords with detonating tones: the first, explosive, fuses zesty, fresh notes while the cold spices leave their icy bite. The second, addictive, combines a middle note of incandescent spices with a wholly masculine combination of leather and tobacco as well as the brute force of vetiver. 

Wow, that is some absolutely terrifying nonsense. Who are these mysterious Germans anyway and why are they planning to dynamite the masculine codes of perfumery? I didn't even know there were masculine codes of perfumery and now these anarchists want to blow them up! If the black band is not strong enough to contain this fragrance, don't they need to use something stronger? I'd advise them to do so if they don't want to get sued for designing a defective product, once the olfactory explosions start happening.

There is such a thing as a "scent grenade," I just learned, but that term seems to be mostly used in hunting; one apparently throws a scent grenade to attract a desired animal to that area in order to more easily kill it. For example, consider the "Rut Grenade":

Once upon a time the hunter had to go into the Kill zone to place his or her Deer scents or urine. Any good Hunter knows the less human and unnatural scents in the area the better. The Rut grenade makes it possible to throw the whitetail deer Scents or "Estrous Rich" urine into an untainted hunting area without leaving unwanted and unnatural scent that could SPOOK the Whitetail of your Dreams away.

The company currently offers three fascinating scents: "Scorching Doe" (made with the urine of a doe in heat), "Buck Confrontation" (made with the urine of a male deer), and "All Season Anytime" (a "curiosity scent" with notes of vanilla and apple). The future target smells what it desires and is enticed into the kill zone.

I guess to be honest about it, Flowerbomb and Spicebomb are designed to do basically the same thing, though for very different purposes (and mostly different ingredients). So maybe it's ultimately a good thing that the TSA is trying to keep one of these from being detonated on a plane.

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Correction: A source in The Netherlands (thanks, Marijn) wanted to clarify that Viktor and Rolf are not "mysterious Germans," they are well-known Dutch fashion designers, and indeed they are. The first draft of that sentence actually referred only to the "Teutonic-sounding names" or something like that, the point being that such names sound slightly scary to a native English speaker, or at least scarier than, let's say, French names. The actual nationality was not especially relevant to that joke as phrased, so I did not look it up. But I ended up referring to them as "Germans," and although that is the same joke, the change did create an inaccuracy.

I would like to apologize to Viktor, Rolf, Viktor&Rolf, and the people of The Netherlands for this unintended error. This should not be interpreted as any sort of apology to the writer and/or translator of the ad copy above, however, because that remains utterly ridiculous.

TSA Confuses Perfume Bottle With a Grenade

The fact that some TSA employees are idiots does not mean they are all idiots. But wow, some of them are utter and complete idiots.

Last week's idiocy, or at least the one on Friday, was the confiscation of a bottle of Jimmy Choo perfume that, to an idiot, looks kind of like a grenade. At least I infer that from the reaction of TSA agents at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, who—and you realize I don't make any of this stuff up, but I still feel the need to mention that I'm not making this one up—shut down a checkpoint for an hour and called in a bomb expert to examine a bottle of perfume.

See, here's what an actual grenade looks like, or at least what one looked like in World War II. This is probably the kind that most of us think of when we think "grenade." The shell of the grenade has grooves in it to make sure there are lots of deadly fragments when it explodes [edit: or maybe to make it easier to grip], which gives it the distinctive "pineapple" shape. Not all grenades have that—most today are round and smooth—but I'm guessing this is what confused the idiots.

A bottle of Jimmy Choo perfume also has grooves in it, sort of, and is also sort of vaguely grenade-shaped. But there's no pin to pull, no lever to keep it from blowing up before you throw it, and it's made of glass. I did a little research, and I didn't find any other grenades made of glass, possibly because that would be a stupid *$%@ing thing to make a grenade out of. But probably the easiest way to distinguish a bottle of Jimmy Choo perfume from a grenade is this: grenades typically do not come with a spray top THAT SQUIRTS OUT SOMETHING THAT SMELLS NICE.

It's a pretty good rule of thumb. Really.

Lois Lewis, whose perfume caused the crisis, is a record promoter for country-music acts. She probably is not with al Qaeda; for one thing I doubt any of them could tolerate country music for long. (Although Osama bin Laden did have a cowboy hat.) She is a member of another questionable organization, though: PreCheck, the extortion scheme program where the TSA will let you pay it $85 to be groped less often. According to this TSA report, $14.50 of that fee pays for the FBI to run a criminal-records check, and the other $70.50 (83%) goes to the TSA for administration. What is the TSA actually doing, besides paying itself to administrate? Hard to say. There are several major line items here that have something to do with "vetting" applicants. But shouldn't the FBI be doing that, not these numbskulls? And if the FBI is doing that, why does the TSA get most of the fee?

Anyway, here's the thing: the TSA estimates it will collect $65 million over five years for the PreCheck program, about $54 million of which it will keep, and at least based on Lewis's experience that money will get you exactly nothing at all. If they won't even trust you with a glass bottle of perfume, what the F did you pay 85 dollars for?

The TSA's position is apparently that this was not a case of mistaking a perfume bottle for a grenade. No, it was about the policy of excluding items that look like weapons not because they are dangerous but because they could be perceived as such. "They said if as a passenger you were to get on an airplane and you were to wave this around," Lewis said, "that people could maybe construe that as you making some sort of a threat." First, if that's what really happened, why the bomb expert? Was he a replica-bomb expert? Please. Second, what the TSA is evidently saying now is that they're not the idiots—it's you. If someone were to get up and start waving a bottle of Jimmy Choo perfume around, they seem to think, you will panic because you are too stupid to distinguish between that bottle and a grenade. And so they must protect you (at your expense) from your own stupidity.

They may also relieve you of your valuables while they're at it, of course. The "bomb expert" kept the bottle of perfume, which cost $83. Probably running a bunch of tests on it right now.

Stupid Warning Shows Up on Leprechaun Hat

Here's yet another example of California's Prop 65 "warning" label, which has become ubiquitous and therefore pointless for reasons I semi-explained a while back when somebody wanted it put on all cooked meat:

That appeared on Mia Matsumiya's Twitter feed with the message, "[Expletive]. I seriously regret not reading the label before wearing this leprechaun hat on my uterus! Happy St. Pat's."

First, if anyone wants to take a stab at calculating how long you'd have to wear one of these (on any body part) before it would measurably increase the risk of "cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm," please let me know the number of millennia you end up with. (If the thing turns out to be made of plutonium-laced asbestos, consider my opinion revised. Otherwise, not.) Second, anybody who wears a leprechaun hat 24/7/365, or frankly on any day other than March 17, should probably not be allowed to reproduce anyway. So that solves that problem.

Dear Falkland Islanders Who Want to Buy My Book

I have no idea what it would cost to ship it there from the U.S. otherwise, but I have just learned that if you buy from the Book Depository.co.uk, they will ship it to you for free. The base price is about ten percent higher than on Amazon's U.S. site, but unless you are going to spend $125 total and thereby get free AmazonGlobal Saver shipping, it would still be cheaper overall.

Plus, it looks like Amazon won't even ship to the Falkland Islands. WTF, Amazon? Why no love for the Falklands? (Actually, the Book Depository is apparently now owned by Amazon.com, so maybe Amazon bought the company to make sure Falkland Islanders could get all the books they want.)

Here's the complete list of countries to which the Book Depository says it will ship for free:

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A - Andorra, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Aruba, Australia, Austria

B - Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bermuda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Brunei Darrusalam, Bulgaria

C - Canada, Cayman Islands, Chile, China, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Comoros, Cook Islands, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic

D - Denmark, Dominica, Dominican Republic

E - Estonia, El Salvador

F - Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Finland, France

G - Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Greenland, Grenada, Guadaloupe, Guam, Guatemala

H - Hong Kong, Hungary

I - Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy

J - Jamaica, Japan, Jordan

L - Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg

M - Macau, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta, Martinique, Mauritius, Mexico, Monaco, Montenegro

N - Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Norway

O - Oman

P - Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico

Q - Qatar

R - Reunion, Romania, Russia

S - Saint Helena, Saint Lucia, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saint Vincent and The Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Seychelles, Singapore, Slovarunkia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland

T - Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey

U - Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, US Virgin Islands

V - Vanuatu, Vatican City, Vietnam

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The Book Depository also has this cool map with little signs that pop up whenever people in that country buy a book from it (not technically "live," it appears, but within the last 30 minutes). Boom! Someone in Singapore just bought The Dinosaur that Pooped Christmas. Bam! Someone in Australia just bought Carnival of Felting. Boom—The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance? Anyone? How about you, Dominica? I'm sorry I didn't realize you were an actual country. I had you confused with the Dominican Republic. No hard feelings? Cocos Islands? Réunion? You're even more remote than the Falklands! What a deal!

Slovarunkia? No, sorry, you actually don't exist. I just cut-and-pasted the whole list, and how "Slovakia" got changed to "Slovarunkia" during that process is—like the existence of a book called Carnival of Felting—something else I can't explain. But I kind of liked it, so I left it that way.

Complaints about this blog or The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance should be directed to Posting Box 3827, Slovarunkia City, Slovarunkia, until further notice.

Model Teed Off at Man Who Teed Off on Her

Look, I'm not trying to tell you how to live your life, I'm just suggesting that it's a bad idea to put sharp or explosive objects in your butt. Time after time we have seen that does not turn out well (e.g., this). But it's up to you.

As numerous sources have reported, Playboy model Liz Dickson is suing Playboy Enterprises and a TV-show host who she alleges hit her in the ... hip? ... with a golf club during a photo shoot. According to the complaint (via Deadspin), the idea was to take a picture of her on a golf course with a tee between her buttocks and with a golfer pretending to be about to swing at the ball placed thereon. She alleges that he (1) did not pretend as he was supposed to do, and (2) he struck her in the hip/buttock causing her serious and to some extent permanent injuries. She is demanding a total of $500,000 plus punitive damages in the (unlikely) event the defendants are found to have acted intentionally.

TMZ of course has obtained video of the incident (also posted by Deadspin), but it's so shaky it's hard to tell whether she's laughing or yelling in pain. (Laughter wouldn't necessarily mean she wasn't injured, of course.) I watched it quite a few times, just in an effort to figure that out, but to no avail.

"Bound by Honor to Defy a Judge ... and Eat a Document"

That's how Richard Masten felt on Friday, according to Ari Odzer of NBC6 in South Florida. And that's why, as you can see, Masten did indeed eat a document in defiance of a judge's order to turn it over.

Masten, a former police chief, is now the executive director of Miami-Dade Crime Stoppers, which collects thousands of anonymous tips every year in an effort to help law enforcement. According to the report, Masten was ordered by a judge to turn over this particular tip after it was requested by a defendant's attorney. He wasn't required to turn over the source's name, but apparently felt that it would be too easy for the defendant to figure out who the source was based on the information in the tip.

So down it went.

Masten said he ate the document out of a sense of obligation to the Crime Stoppers project and those who contribute to it:

"We promise the people who give us information to solve murders, serious violent crimes in this community, that they can call with an assurance that they will remain anonymous and that nothing about them or their information would ever be compromised," [Masten] said. "The case today started creeping into that... it’s not going to happen on my watch and I understood the consequences."

Of course, most evidence-eaters do it to protect themselves, but here even the defense attorney conceded that Masten was doing something he believed to be noble. He might have jumped the gun a little, though, because the judge might have been willing and able to come up with something that would protect the source's identity while still allowing the accused to defend herself. His consumption of the document deprived her of the ability to do that.

At least temporarily. As I mentioned back in 2007 after a legislator ate a bill in an effort to stop it from passing, this kind of thing is a meaningful gesture but its effectiveness depends on whether there's another copy, and there typically is. Here the information is presumably in Crime Stoppers' files, and so unless it is willing to purge that, too, eating the physical document is only a temporary measure. And doing it in defiance of a court order is, unfortunately, contempt of court.

Masten will be back in court next week to learn what the penalty will be. He reportedly could get up to two weeks in jail, but he said he was prepared for that. "I'll bring a toothbrush and some pajamas," he said.

Via the excellent @_FloridaMan Twitter feed, although the Florida man in this particular case was not up to the kind of shenanigans normally being reported there.

Good Riddance to Hampton, Florida?

The New York Times reported on March 10 that the Florida Legislature may abolish the town of Hampton, a one-square-mile craphole northeast of Gainesville that until now was known, if at all, only for being one of the nation's worst speed traps. State officials started a criminal investigation after an audit of the town's government "uncovered reams of financial irregularities, shoddy record-keeping and missing funds."

The state representative for the area ordered the audit, which he said was not in any way related to the fact that he got a speeding ticket there in 2011.

Hampton has existed, for whatever reason, since about 1925. Home to fewer than 500 people, it is located east of Highway 301 in north-central Florida. Some would say, actually, that it is located on Highway 301, as a result of an amendment to the town's borders in the mid-1990s. See if you can spot the amendment on the map below:

Hint: it is on the west side of town.

There is no question (not that you questioned it) that the town extruded this tentacle for the sole purpose of picking travelers' pockets: the NYT article says that a former mayor admitted helping to arrange the annexation "to help fill city coffers." The speed limit coincidentally dips from 65 to 55 when the highway enters that .2-mile "part of town," making "criminals" out of people who don't notice the change. A lot of people. According to the Times, during 2011 and 2012 alone the town's officers wrote 12,698 tickets, an average of 17 people every day who regretted the 12 seconds or so they spent transiting West Hampton. The town took in $419,624 in fines during that time, but still operated at a deficit.

Photo by Edward Linsmier for the NYT

Where'd all that money go? This guy might know where some of it went. He's the most recent mayor, and he's wearing an orange jumpsuit for a reason (drug charges). The town's three staff members resigned in February, and so has the police chief, who at one point was employing 17 officers ("a word loosely applied here," said the Times) for a town of 477 people. The county sheriff said he did not know how many of the 17 were actually police officers or whether any of them were actually trained in radar detection. The chief is one of the investigation's primary targets, according to the report.

The investigation also involves water, which is the one utility controlled by town government. Not only did it do a poor job of supplying water, the utility's financial records evidently left something to be desired. "The reason ... that no water meter logbooks before April 2012 could be found," the Times reported, "was that they were 'lost in a swamp,' the result of a car accident involving the water utility operator." (He forgot to file an accident report, it turns out, probably due to swamp trauma.) According to the sheriff, some residents said they were threatened with having their water turned off if they made trouble.

The town apparently has about 30 days to come up with a plan, or else the legislature is likely to dissolve it, which would make it part of surrounding Bradford County. That would presumably take care of the speed-trap tentacle, which is currently non-functional anyway due to lack of police "officers" to staff it.

"We are just trying to fix things that happened," said one of the five city councilmen, ironically (or not) named "Frantz Innocent." (Nobody's really to blame, you see—once again it's the fault of these things that keep happening. When will someone do something about the things?! They are getting away with murder.) "If you want to go poking around looking for something," Mr. Innocent continued, "you can always find something wrong." (It's the pokers' fault, too.)