Listen up, kids. This is why the friendly officers always tell you to wear your seatbelt whenever you’re in a car. Either that or it’s why they tell you not to tool around town with your drugs in your lap. Either way, the point I’m trying to make here is that making life decisions the way this guy makes life decisions isn’t going to end well for you.

Police were conducting seatbelt checks on Upper James Street on the ramp heading up to the Lincoln Alexander Parkway around 11:30 a.m. when one officer noticed a driver with his belt undone and loose marijuana strewn across his lap.
“He also had a baggie of marijuana next to his leg,” said Staff Sgt. Mark Cox.
When police arrested the man, they said he was in possession of 14 grams of marijuana, along with 2.4 grams of cocaine, 123 grams of hash, a “large quantity of cash” and a replica firearm.

The street value of all of this is about $6500, according to police types who would know these things. It also adds up to a charge of possession of a controlled substance. Wait, just one?

If I told you that a hunt for some missing macaroni and cheese and a spilled beer lead to a knife in the gut from one brother to another, what state would you guess this happened in? I’ll give you a hint. It starts with F and ends with lorida.

A witness told deputies in Volusia County, Fla. that Randy and his brother, 47-year-old Edward Zipperer, started arguing over Randy’s missing macaroni and cheese, the Daytona Beach News-Journal reported. His younger brother helped him look, but during the mac-hunt, Edward knocked over a beer Randy had been drinking.
The spill allegedly made Randy even angrier, and deputies say he began waving around a knife that wound up inserted in his brother’s stomach.

The elder Zipperer didn’t admit to the stabbing when police arrived, but did offer that “I poked him a little with the knife, but I didn’t mean to.”

That was close enough for the authorities, who charged him with aggravated battery and obstructing an officer without violence.

Here’s a thief with some pretty horrible timing. He thought he was going to get away with a BMW right out of a guy’s driveway, but he happened to be getting ready to take it just as its owner remembered that he’d forgotten to lock it a few minutes earlier.

“Approximately 15 minutes, I remembered my car being unlocked — I never leave it unlocked — so I reached out the front door with my remote key and locked my car. Unbeknownst to me, I had just locked a thief in my car,” said Dave Spiers, inadvertent burglar catcher.

He didn’t discover what was going on until a few minutes later when the alarm went off. It was set off by the thief kicking out the window and escaping on a bicycle. What’s with bringing bikes to car thefts, anyway?

His escape was short lived, however, since he helpfully made himself pretty easy to catch.

At the scene, Spiers not only found his broken window and a man quickly cycling into the night, but also some change, the guy’s keys and a wallet complete with his ID.

The police, as one would hope in such a gimme case, have him now. He’s been charged with mischief over $5,000. His name has not been released, and hopefully neither has the rest of him.

Having never tried it, I have no idea how simple identity theft is. Given the frequency with which it occurs, however, I assume that it must be relatively easy. But easy as it may be, it appears to still be too difficult for some.

Today, some equals an unidentified person or persons that police have not yet managed to locate.

They got the identity theft part right, managing to lift card info from a family in Anchorage, Alaska. They also seem to have had the buy as much stuff as you can before the victim or victim’s bank catches on and stops the gravy train in its tracks thing figured out, since they managed to buy somewhere in the neighbourhood of $5,000 worth of everything under the sun in an hour, give or take.

But it’s here that things head sideways.

The rule of scoop up as much ill gotten merch as possible, at least as I understand it, goes that when you place your orders, you should change the shipping details so that said merch goes to you and not to the person who’s money you’re spending. Somehow, this genius/geniuses kinda forgot that part.

Here are some of the “gifts” shipped to the Linfords’ home, according to the Daily News:

• A JVC car stereo
• A radar detector
• A baseball bat signed by Chipper Jones
• An autographed portrait of Dale Earnhardt, Jr.
• Several North Face jackets
• A linen scrapbook
• Women’s jackets from a store in New Jersey
• Martials arts gloves and shin pads

There was also an attempt made to join a fruit of the month club, but so far none has come in the mail.

But wait Steve, you say. What if whoever did this sent the goods to the victim on purpose? What if the plan was to mail them there, then swipe them from the porch?

Well, I reply. That seems pretty risky, but it’s certainly not unheard of. I might even be able to go along with it if not for one thing.

…the Daily News notes that Susie Linford traced the orders back to phone numbers and IP addresses in Kansas and Illinois…

Both of those places are a few thousand miles away from where the packages landed, so that’s a long run back and forth.

Numbers and addresses in Kansas and Illinois are so far all that investigators have to go on, but hopefully they can eventually round these clowns up.

When I saw the headline Meal in a Jar, my mind immediately jumped to some of the similarly named culinary classics that have been featured in this space through the years. But reading the article, my mind changed pretty quickly. This sounds like a really awesome idea. I immediately thought of Carin and how perfect an answer these could be on days when there are no leftovers for her to take to the office. No more settling for so so building pizza or having to hope she doesn’t miss the lunch lady cart.

The mason jar has long been linked with canning and preserving fresh foods, but a local company is turning that concept on its head by providing meals on the go for those looking for healthy options but don’t have the time to prepare it.
Meal in a Jar started in January when local health, wellness and fitness guru Irene Divaris was on social media site Pinterest and saw what turned out to be a workable solution to the conundrum of providing healthy lunches for your family when time is a factor.
“We were having a family situation of not being able to get lunches out on time, and I just decided to make a lunch very quickly and there just happened to be a mason jar right in front of me,” said Divaris. “My brain went to the picture I remembered seeing and I built it. I put it on Facebook because it was so pretty.”
She saw how people were putting together whole meals in glass mason jars, layered with colours and nutrition, to be opened up and eaten later that day or week. The goodness and freshness was preserved and it satisfied her desire to provide better nutritional options for her family.
“It just took off from there,” said Divaris. “It’s visual and you can see exactly what you’re eating.

“I got 12 different jars and built 12 different meals, and as I was finishing them I was putting them on a Facebook page called Meal in a Jar because I couldn’t think of anything else.”

She’s teamed up with a business student and they’re now selling these at a few stores around KW. There are plans to expand into more places here and into some nearby towns.

The menu has grown to feature items like mulligatawny soup, a lentil salad with brown rice and chicken, a Greek salad with chicken and quinoa, and zucchini Bolognese. The menu features both hot and cold options.

That sounds pretty great. I’m hungry now.

In a shocking turn of events, a government has gotten its math wrong. Weird, eh? That never happens.

So what went wrong this time? Well, it seems that the savings we can expect from getting rid of pennies are about $7 million less annually than Jim Flaherty said they would be, at least over the next six years.

Honestly though, I can’t be mad at this. The country is still saving money and we don’t have to use pennies as cash anymore. We still win, just a little slower than anticipated.

Here’s how the math works.
It’s expected to cost $53 million to pay the banks for the face value of the coins, as well as another $27 million in handling and administration costs by the Royal Canadian Mint.
Recycling the zinc and copper from melted-down pennies will bring in about $42.5 million in revenue, leaving the government in the red at just over $38 million.
Adding the $11 million in annual savings from not minting any more pennies gives the government annual savings of almost $4 million per year.

On the surface it seems obvious who the evil twin is in this family, but on the other hand, the other one did eat all the ranch dressing. Totally not cool.

Ocala police officer Kristen Whitston went to the area of Northwest 12th Street and Northwest 12th Avenue and found one of the 17-year-old twins sitting on the sidewalk holding her head, which was bleeding. The girl said she and her sister were arguing because she had eaten the ranch dressing and her twin threw a plate that hit her in the head. She said as they were fighting, her sister stabbed her with a fork on the top her head, in her breast, on her right hand and in her back, according to reports.

The injured twin was taken to hospital. the crazy twin was taken to jail, where her rampage apparently continued. I guess they were all out of dressing there, too.

I was thinking to myself the other day that it had been a while since United Airlines broke anything. Have they finally started to shape up or have I just not been on the ball enough, I wondered. Of course, this being United, the answer is a resounding column B.

An English Springer Spaniel named Hendrix ended up taking a serious detour on his way from New Jersey to Phoenix this week.
He ended up in Ireland after being put on the wrong flight.
United Airlines spokesperson Megan McCarthy says the 6-year-old dog was travelling in cargo Thursday when the mix-up happened. When the error was realized, she says the airline took immediate steps to get Hendrix back to his owner.

On the bright side, at least they didn’t kill him. He was safely returned and his owner was offered a full refund.

Someone else has gone all Roger Stephens on a screaming kid, but apparently Joe Hundley decided to raise the bar by also being a drunken racist.

The boy’s mother, Jessica Bennett, 33, told the FBI their flight was on final descent into Atlanta when her 19-month-old son started to cry due to the altitude change. Hundley “told her to shut that (N-word) baby up,” FBI special agent Daron Cheney said in a sworn statement. She said Hundley then slapped him in the face, scratching the boy below his right eye and causing him to scream even louder.
Bennett told Twin Cities television stations Saturday that the incident has caused her family a great deal of trauma and that her son, Jonah, had been outgoing but had turned apprehensive of strangers.
Hundley became increasingly obnoxious and appeared intoxicated during the flight and complained that her son was too big to sit on her lap, she said.
“He reeked of alcohol,” Bennett told KARE-TV. “He was belligerent, and I was uncomfortable.”
Bennett said she was shocked by the racial slur she says Hundley used when Jonah started crying.
“And I said, ‘What did you say?’ because I couldn’t believe that he would say that,” she told WCCO-TV. “He fell onto my face and his mouth was in my ear and he said it again but even more hateful. And he’s on my face, so I pushed him away.”
Bennett and her husband are white, while Jonah, whom they adopted, is black.

If you’re planning on smuggling a phone into jail with you via the good old Hershey Express, always always always remember to turn it off before packing it. Remember, not expecting a call doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not going to get one.

The Agence France-Presse reports that the 58-year-old convict had concealed the phone, along with a hands-free headset, in his body cavity.
The items were discovered when prison guards at Welikada jail in Colombo, Sri Lanka, heard a suspicious ringing.
“Guards knew he had a phone at the wrong end,” an unidentified guard told the AFP.