Beyond Beyond the Fringe category archive

Celebrating their Southern heritage:

State (North Carolina–ed.) election officials are looking into reports that a truck pulled into the parking lot outside an early voting site this morning in Goldsboro towing a trailer displaying effigies of President Barack Obama, Gov. Bev Perdue and other officials, all hanging from nooses.

The contraption, which also showed effigies of a judge and law enforcement officials, was reportedly displayed outside the Wayne County Public Library on Ash Street, a one-stop early voting site.

This will take all the fun out of t-ping your 10th-grade English teacher’s front lawn.

GPS technology, widely used to provide motorists with directions, is now being used to track the movements of entire families.

Snap Secure, a smartphone security app created by Princeton, N.J.-based cloud service applications company Snap My Life, already functioned to control who children talk to by phone, text with and what they browse online.

The app, which comes with a $5.99-per-month subscription, is one of dozens of products developed by tech companies specifically for parents to monitor children’s locations. Snap Secure has rolled out new features just in time for Halloween that takes the surveillance up a notch by allowing parents to set perimeters on a GPS-enabled map that limits where a child is permitted to travel. If a kid steps outside of the marked area, parents receive a notification and can check the map to see just how far the child has strayed.

All seriousness aside, we seem to have a generation of paranoiac papas and meddling mamas. Maybe it was ever so, but cyber-stalking one’s own kids adds a new dimension.

I suspect that, if this practice grows, it will spur kids to defy the surveillance to do things which, if they weren’t relentlessly spied on, they might not otherwise do.

Some Arizonans are determined to despoil it. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

There’s a potentially harmful initiative on the November ballot that asks voters to amend the Arizona Constitution in an attempt to take jurisdiction over the Grand Canyon. That’s right, Arizona lawmakers want to lay claim to one of the seven natural wonders of the world so they can open up millions of acres to livestock grazing, logging, mining and who knows what else.

I’ve been there twice, once to the South Rim and once to the much-less-visited North Rim.

I find this effort appalling and barbarous.

In case you’re wondering what’s wrong with Biblical literalism . . . .

A DeKalb County father says the Bible made him do it.

Benjamin Edetanlen was sentenced to 18 years in prison Wednesday for beating his 5-month-old son to death.

Edetanlen’s defense is that he adhered to Proverbs: 13, which taught him “Spare the rod. Spoil the child.” But prosecutors said he went too far and his discipline killed his 5-month-old child in his home in 2004.

Dunaj, 34, was making what she expects will be the last trip of her life (she has leukemia–ed.) on Oct. 2 as she traveled through Seattle en route to Hawaii.

The Roseville, Mich., woman thought she had prepared by calling the airline ahead of time, asking for a wheelchair, carrying documentation for her feeding tubes and making sure she had prescriptions for all her medications, including five bags of saline solution. But Dunaj said she received a full pat-down in the security line at Seattle-Tacoma Airport and had to lift her shirt and pull back bandages so agents could get a good look. She said everyone else in line got a look, too.

The story reports that the TSA claims all procedures were followed, followed by a resounding “no further comment.”

TSA: Voyeurs and mashers, apply within.

Not a job I’d fancy–The Sacramento Bee profiles the Ramirez Rattlesnake Removal company. A nugget:

The Ramirez brothers have removed snakes tucked behind toilets, coiled in bedrooms and lurking under TVs. More times than they would like, they’ve come face to face with rattlers in the narrow spaces under houses while crawling on their bellies.

A Gwinnett County sheriff’s deputy was allegedly driving drunk when he rolled his patrol car early Wednesday in Walton County.

(Couldn’t resist.)

There has been a rash of thefts of catalytic converters, most from new cars at dealerships, in these parts.

The most popular target are those out-sized monsters, Toyota Tundras, because it’s easy to get under them:

The same was true at Checkered Flag Toyota on Virginia Beach Boulevard. A security guard foiled a theft while it was under way on the night of Aug. 11.

The security guard heard clanking in the back parking lot. She yelled that she was calling the police, and a man ran away. He left behind 13 catalytic converters under a row of Tundras, according to Josh Hamilton, the dealership manager.

Hamilton speculated that the man may have unbolted the parts with a power drill or a ratchet set. The parts were intact and placed, rather than dropped, on the ground, he said.

My advice would be trade in your Tundra for something that needs only one parking space, like a small Winnebago.

In my local rag, Mike Gruss dissects his “favorite Craig’s List ad of the year.” Here’s the ad; follow the link for the dissection.

looking forsome one who can pretend or play my wife for a day to attend some formal dinners will provide dress and you can keep the dress after the event or two.. will pay 100 dollars cash must be at least 18 thanks and real female of course please send pic of some sort and contact number …must be willing to wear something nice hold my hand and stuff…to act like we are in love..because this formmal dinner is immportant..You just need to be a nice looking clean …race white or asian looking

I miss the classifieds.

Warning: Language.

Republican physics, from Valerie XVX, via Contradict Me.

Back in the olden days, when I was a young ‘un and almost everyone read Readers Digest, there was a joke that doctors subscribed to that magazine so they could see the disease article of the month and prepare for the monthly onslaught of Readers Digest subscribers convinced they were about to die.

The disease of the month usually had three characteristics:

• It was a real and often deadly and scary disease.
• It was very very rare.
• Most of the persons who diagnosed themselves as having it were somewhere between delusional and nutters and frequently at least mildly narcissistic.

Later, a large number of persons I knew claimed with much authority and no doctor’s diagnosis that they suffered from hypoglycemia, though the truth was that most of them just ate too much of the wrong things too often.

At Science Two dot Oh, Hank Campbell spots a new trendy disease of the month. (I used to know someone who actually had this ailment. In real life, it is not something to be taken casually.)

Via ABL.

Congressman Steve King (R-Not the Humane Society) on dog-fighting:

KING: When the legislation that passed in the farm bill that says that it’s a federal crime to watch animals fight or to induce someone else to watch an animal fight but it’s not a federal crime to induce somebody to watch people fighting, there’s something wrong with the priorities of people that think like that.

There may be an argument that there’s a larger context to this quotation, but, honest to Pete, what could give this “context”?

Warning: Mild language.

My friend went to a travel website to investigate flights to Europe.

Upon connecting, she was presented with a message that said, “Welcome back, [name], thanks for visiting.”

She said, “I’ve never been here before” (and a few other things).

I looked up from editing the pictures in the previous post and saw that the site was displaying her Facebook profile picture. Clearly, the site was reading one of those long-term Facebook stalker cookies.

You know, really, this is not right. It is corporate cyber-stalking. It is evil.

Read more »

H/T Susan for the picture.

Bailed from the pound pending trial.

A 2-year-old St. Bernard with a history of biting people was released Tuesday from Animal Services on a $2,500 bond – a decision a judge called “breaking new ground.”

In court, the dog’s pro bono attorney personally guaranteed Alchemy would be returned to Chesapeake for his June 21 trial. Until then, the 150-pound dog will live in an animal sanctuary in Knotts Island, N.C., according to Rich Rosenthal of The Lexus Project.

The prosecutor was taken ill, hence the postponement.