Where's Angle-Grinder Man when you need him?
The good news: The unmarked car of Hoboken Police Chief Carmen LaBruno was so well-disguised that even one of the city's own parking-enforcement officers didn't recognize it as a police car, despite the three antennas, two radios and sign identifying it as a police vehicle.
The bad news: The car got the boot, just like 4,735 other cars so far this year in Hoboken.
posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @3:52 PM
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11.10.03  |
A hero with a hyphen, a hatemonger in the hospital
Sallie Lynch gets credit for spotting today's featured celebrity: Angle-Grinder Man, who describes himself as "the world’s first wheel-clamp and speed camera vigilante cum subversive superhero philanthropist entertainer type personage." A bit wordy, but hey, at least he has sense enough to hyphenate the compound modifier in his name. He also has an angle grinder, i.e. portable saw, that he uses to free illegally parked cars from law-enforcement boots. AND he has his very own superhero costume with "AGM" (no hyphen) across the front.
Speaking of people who might be having difficulties with the law, another celebrity gets an honorable mention today: professional hatemonger Rush Limbaugh announced today he's going off the air and into rehab for his addiction to painkillers. We hope the third time will be the charm, and we wish there were a detox clinic for hatefulness he could check into immediately afterward.
posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @5:06 PM
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10.10.03 |
House votes 399-0 to end disgraceful practice of charging injured veterans for hospital meals
It's time once again to contact the two Senators from your state and urge them to introduce, cosponsor, or otherwise support a Senate version of H.R. 2998, so that the United States of America can stop sending servicepeople wounded in combat bills for their hospital meals. Apparently that's been the law for most of my lifetime, but Rep. C.W Bill Young (R-Florida) found out about it from his wife, Beverly, who learned about the meal charges while doing volunteer work with injured veterans. Rep. Young and 255 other cosponsors introduced a bill to fix the problem, and yesterday the House passed it, 399-0. The Youngs even dug into their own pockets to pay a $210.60 bill (at $8.10 per day) for a Marine reservist who lost part of his foot in Iraq.
posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @10:35 AM
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9.10.03 |
You get what you vote for
Cafeful what you vote for, California: you might just get it. Now you've got a governor who thinks there should be infrastructure in the water supply.
"...The fact of the matter is that we need a lot of infrastructures in California. Infrastructure with highways and with the transportation, railroads. Infrastructure with our water supply, infrastructure with our ports. We need that."
Candidate, now Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, answering a Sept. 25 debate question that had been supplied to candidates in advance, giving them plenty of time to look up the word "infrastructure."
posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @6:22 AM
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8.10.03 |
Fashionably late
Plan A for today was to take the camera out to the waterfront to photograph the departures of the Rotterdam and the Queen Elizabeth 2, scheduled for 4 and 4:45 p.m. respectively. But you know what it's like trying to back out into heavy traffic. Plan B was to rely on the trusty Towercam to capture the moment in pictures.
The QE2 finally made it out, but by the time she reached the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, The Rotterdam was still in port.
Bon voyage to them both, and to our former neighbors Ariel and Susanna as they head for their new home in Paris.
posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @6:58 PM
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7.10.03 |
Tiger-taming and other bad ideas
I hope Roy Horn recovers fully and goes on to lead a long and happy life. I hope Siegfried Fischbacher also survives the trauma of watching his partner mauled by one of their colleagues, a colleague who happens to be a seven-year-old, 600-pound white tiger. But when I heard one of the TV talking heads this morning asking, "What went wrong the other night in Las Vegas?" I found myself nearly as exasperatedly apoplectic as Donald Rumsfeld himself.
"Wha-wh-wha-wh-wh-what went WRONG?" I bellowed. "You take a creature that does not live in the desert, nowhere on earth, unless you want to count the few survivors living in deserts that were once forests, you take this animal and you put him not only in the desert but inside an air-conditioned casino in the desert, with flashing lights and amplified sound and crowds of people, and you put that animal through six shows a week, 45 weeks a year, and then you wonder what went wrong on the one occasion that the tiger behaves exactly like a tiger?"
But Montecore the Las Vegas performing feline was not the only tiger to make the news in the past few days. On Saturday a team of New York City police officers, including a sharpshooter who rappelled down from the roof to shoot the target with a tranquilizer gun, captured/rescued another large tiger (estimated weight: 450 pounds) that was living in a public-housing complex in Harlem. Although neighbors had complained about the smell of urine coming from the apartment and reported the odd behavior of the apartment's human resident, who bought armloads of chicken parts every day at the local grocery, it wasn't until that resident, Antoine Yates, went to the hospital with what he said were dog bites, that the authorities suspected something wasn't right. One of the tiger's roommates there in the Drew Hamilton Houses, a caiman alligator, was also captured/rescued, his mouth duct-taped shut.
Speaking of feeding the animals, The Mirage hotel-casino in Las Vegas has told the approximately 260 employees of the Siegfried & Roy show that they should find other jobs. Some of those 260+ people were responsible for making sure the animals were fed. If those people are no longer being paid to do that, then who IS feeding the animals? They can't just line up at the buffet with everybody else, with or without duct-taped mouths.
Lining up at the buffet does have some advantages over being spoon-fed, however, particularly when it comes to news. While the general rule in both reporting and consuming news is "the more sources, the better," there are a few who prefer the opposite approach:
In a Sept. 22 interview with Fox News, (as reported by the Associated Press) "(George W.) Bush said he insulates himself from the 'opinions' that seep into news coverage by getting his news from his own aides. He said he scans headlines, but rarely reads news stories. 'I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news,' the president said. 'And the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.' "
By becoming so dependent on his closest advisors for information from the outside world, Mr. Bush is starting to resemble one of his predecessors, a Democrat at that, albeit a fellow Texan: President Lyndon B. Johnson used the same approach regarding the Vietnam war, and he was widely criticized for leaning on the likes of Walt Rostow for information rather than sorting it out for himself.
Mr. Bush seems not to have consulted his advisors, however, when he composed this ode to his wife, shown here in both English and Czech (thanks to our European Bureau Chief, Jesse Lynch, for spotting it). Somebody send that man a National Writers Union membership application.
posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @10:20 AM
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6.10.03 |
Birds welcome the Dawn
We saw no sign of the usual contingent of tugboats this morning when the Norwegian Dawn arrived, but at least there were birds to welcome her to New York.
The Golden Princess was already in port when the Dawn arrived; both have already headed back out to sea, but don't worry, you can still keep up with their travels via their live webcams:
Norwegian Dawn webcam
Golden Princess webcam
posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @6:35 PM
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5.10.03 |
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