Beyond Beyond the Fringe category archive

He wants the culprit to get his more-than-just desserts.

A Pennsylvania man called cops last night (that would be last Thursday–ed.) to report that his Strawberry-flavored Jell-O snack was stolen from the break room refrigerator at his workplace.

Not a mushroom cloud, a cloud of mushrooms . . .

But the high-protein, brown-capped fungus has spawned what media are calling a “mushroom mafia” of professional, determined foragers. Last week near the western German town of Bad Münstereifel, four of them in a car allegedly rammed a forestry worker who had tried to stop them.

He rolled off the hood of the car and was hurled to the ground. “While the forestry official struggled to his feet, the car reversed back toward him, rolled onto his foot and stopped,” police said in a statement. The man was injured and had to see a doctor — but police arrived and got personal details about the men, who now face criminal charges.

This is just weird.

A Minnesota law that bars advising or encouraging suicide violates the U.S. Constitution’s free speech protections, the state Court of Appeals ruled Monday in an unpublished opinion.

The law “chills a significant amount of protected speech that does not bear a necessary relationship” to the state’s goal of preventing suicide, a three-judge panel of the court said.

In a footnote, the court said the term “encourages” in the law “plausibly encompasses urging” suicide, but it is “not necessarily” the same as causing someone to commit suicide through “undue influence or distress.” The latter would likely be unprotected speech, the court said.

The story goes on to detail the story of the individual whose suicide led to the case.

Afterthought:

Though I cannot approve of persons who recommend suicide, I do seriously doubt that their recommendations would sway anyone who wasn’t already suicidal.

I can understand that persons who suffer could suffer so much that they see no end to their misery and choose to end it.

I pray God I never face that choice.

I wish to die as my grandfather did.

He went to bed, with his boots off, and never woke up.

My brother (I was five, he was three) went to his house the next morning (it was on the corner of the farm and we used to walk there from time to time) and could not gain entrance.

So my grandfather was found, at the end of his time in his own bed, not wired to beeping machines, with peace and dignity, as a good life should end.

At Tampabay.com, Dan DeWitt tries to understand teabag theorizing. A nugget:

So let’s look at Hanson’s suggestions for saving money, which he helpfully condensed into a document presented to County Administrator Len Sossamon last week.

It contained the results of a survey of “citizens,” who I’m guessing (Hanson declined the chance to tell me for sure) consist of a few fellow members of the Glenn Beck fan club and who I know are stunningly ill-informed.

For example, they classify fire protection as “one more non-essential service when it comes to protecting our rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Read the rest.

It’s important to know how these folks think.

I’m torn.

On the one hand, considering that everyone has at least one naked body, I’m having trouble figuring out what all the fuss is about.

On the other hand, the sights might be just too haunting.

If you can’t let people run naked through a haunted house on your own property in Berks County’s Spring and Sinking Spring townships, well, what can you do?

Maybe just host a boring, regular haunting house.

That’s the conundrum facing Patrick Konopelski, the owner of a Halloween attraction called Shocktoberfest’s Naked and Scared Challenge, after disapproving reaction to his idea about the “naked” part.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

For that matter, you wouldn’t want to.

Daniel Ruth reviews the bigoted racist responses to the selection of an American of Indian descent as Miss America (which have been well covered elsewhere in these electrons), and has a wonder.

An attractive, young, intelligent, well-educated native-born woman representing all the things that are admirable about this country happens to come out on top in a dated beauty contest. Instead of enjoying her moment in the Atlantic City surf, she finds herself accused of lacking American values and being an enemy of the state to boot.

What is wrong with so many people in this country?

The other day, the great Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, bemoaning the nation’s apparent lack of interest in any remote semblance of reasonable gun control in the face of repeated mass shooting deaths, raised an elegantly simple point.

Is America crazy?

It’s a reasonable question. But, with all due respect to Pitts, it would seem there is another question to raise.

When a Miss America contestant can generate such a groundswell of hatred, vitriol and ignorant accusations, is America stupid?

Follow the link.

In the Roanoke Times, Tim Harvey suggests that we shouldn’t take Miley Cyrusly.*

Is there anything more to the story than this? Between pop stars and reality TV, our culture has honed the fine art of creating celebrities who contribute virtually nothing to our society but their own celebrity. We feed that beast by our willingness to watch them for an hour on cable. And then, when our attention inevitably wanes, along comes the next shocking act to capture everyone’s attention again. And the cycle repeats.

The author of Ecclesiastes was way ahead of us on this one when he wrote:

What has been will be again,

what has been done will be done again;

there is nothing new under the sun.

Read the rest, in which he suggests some things worth worrying about.

_______________

*I know. That was soooooo last week.

Electronic vehicle unlock clicker goes very wrong.

There are certain things I prefer not to run with buttons even as I tend to wind up every day on LQ.

Unlocking my vehicle’s doors and operating the windows are two of them. I fear, though, that the next time I buy a vehicle, it will come with an extra superfluous layer of buttons and screens, just because it can.

And, no, I don’t want GPS built into my vehicle.

I’m old.

I know how to read a map.

It’s really not all that difficult. And, actually, it’s kind of fun. You see stuff that doesn’t fit on that screen.

. . . you wouldn’t need to bet to make it interesting.

Poker may be a game of skill, but that does not protect a man who hosted games of “Texas Hold ‘Em” from being prosecuted under an anti-gambling law, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

The ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York reversed a decision last year that said Lawrence DiCristina could not be prosecuted because “Texas Hold ‘Em” was a game of skill rather than chance.

Bennett Cerf, in one of his books, told the story of a small town in the old west that outlawed gambling (in those days, faro was the game of choice) and promptly had some professional gamblers arrested. The gamblers protested that it was a game of skill.

Defense counsel suggested a fair (faro?) test to determine whether faro was a game of chance or one of skill. Three townsfolk representing the “game of chance” position squared off against three of the professional gamblers . . . .

Charges were dropped.

Bringing new meaning to the term “copping a feel.”

Lawyer representing women who faced “unconstitutional” cavity searches of their genitals at traffic stops in Texas last year have said that the practice is essentially standard practice in many jurisdictions.

In two separate cases last year, four women said that they were humiliated with illegal cavity searches on the side of Texas highways. Angel Dobbs, 38, and her 24-year-old niece, Ashley Dobbs were searched after a trooper saw them throw a cigarette butt out the car window. And Brandy Hamilton, 27, and Alexandria Randle, 26, were searched after a trooper claimed he smelled marijuana.

Official police dashboard XXX video at the link.

Via TWIB.

In all fairness, folks who pay attention to news about such things have long known that computerized medical devices have little or no security features. Most of them were designed with no thought whatsoever of security.

Sixty-year-old three-star Chief Douglas Zeigler, head of the NYPD’s Community Affairs Bureau, gets stopped and frisked by two NYPD officers who refused to believe his police identification credentials.

Via Zandar at TWIB.

Well, at least someone is learning a trade.

Sixteen University of Georgia students and four students from other schools who are accused of manufacturing and distributing fake IDs have been indicted by a Clarke County grand jury.

The ring was led by two roommates who provided door-to-door services, the Athens Banner-Herald (http://bit.ly/13z1yQU) reported Thursday.

Campus couriers were used to take customers’ photos in their dorm rooms, collect personal information for the IDs and deliver the finished products for between $50 and $100, investigators said.

I once had a neighbor lady who worked at a store owned by a major national retail chain (I won’t say who it is, but it’s the same outfit into whose door I shall not traverse again because of the incompetence of the management–decidedly not of the techs, but of the management–of its appliance repair business).

She had a special transparent plastic purse for work.

It was part of the outfit’s “anti-inventory-shrinkage” initiative.

Regular purses were verboten.

Her employer had decided that all employees were, more than anything else, potential thieves.

The NFL has decided that it digs that scene and can share that space.

Not to discount secret government surveillance, I do believe we should pay more attention to secret private surveillance.

For example, from Tambabay dot com:

Bond Auto Sales at 5755 34th St. N in St. Petersburg has been accused in three recent lawsuits of placing GPS devices on cars without telling buyers.

When customers successfully paid off their loans, they were invited back for a free “safety check,” the lawsuits say. Then, employees would remove the secret devices.

Much more at the link.

Afterthought:

Frankly, I trust the Feds a lot more than I trust either the Zuckerborg or Crazy Charley’s Jalopy World down the street there, on the left.

Indeed.

Odd, and somehow too true to be funny (warning: language).

One small jump for a shark, one giant leap for shark-kind.

A 300-pound, 8-foot long mako shark leaped into a boat piloted by two anglers off the New Jersey coast off Manasquan and started gobbling up anything in its path including a broomstick and cushions, according to a news report.

Through a website, sacpickup.com, Barton charges men $225 for 15 hours of instruction in how to pick up women. After talking about the principles, he said, he takes two to six men into the field – the mall, coffee shops and bars – to put what they’ve learned into practice.

On April 11, Barton and his group were asked to leave Arden Fair when some women complained after being contacted by his students, said Steve Reed, chief of mall security.

“The line is crossed when there is a complaint,” Reed said.

This fellow went to the mall yesterday, not to pick up, but the get picked up by the cops as an act of civil disobedience.

Mall management played it smart; in the absence of any complaints, they ignored him.

Aside:

Words have meaning.

“Picking up” a woman is not the same as “meeting” one.

Don’t get me started on a skeevy business based on teaching manipulation.