Either Emmanuel Augustine shouldn’t hold his breath waiting for that big promotion to detective, or they’ve got some really good undercover officers in Harris County, Texas’ Precinct 4 Constable’s Office. How good? Good enough that they managed to net a patrol deputy with 5 years of service to Harris County, Texas’ Precinct 4 Constable’s Office by the name of Emmanuel Augustine during one of their prostitution stings.

Augustine allegedly approached an undercover female officer early Wednesday morning by Imperial Valley. Authorities say he offered to pay the female officer $10 for a sex act.

Augustine, who was off-duty at the time of the alleged incident, was partially dressed in his uniform, police said.

I admit I don’t know a whole lot about prostitution, but 10 bucks!?

Augustine was charged with solicitation of prostitution and has been suspended without pay. If convicted,he could face 180 days in jail, a $2000 fine or both. One would also hope he’d be out of a job, but there’s a reason it tends to be big news when a cop gets fired.

I’ve learned that expecting the general public to be able to tell a parody from the real thing can sometimes be a lot to ask, but shouldn’t we all be able to expect better from a police chief?

Annapolis Police Chief Michael A. Pristoop thought he came prepared when he testified before a Maryland state Senate panel on Tuesday about the perils of legalizing marijuana.

In researching his testimony against two bills before the Judicial Proceedings Committee, Pristoop said, he had found a news article to illustrate the risks of legalization: 37 people in Colorado, he said, had died of marijuana oversdoses on the very day that the state legalized pot.

“When he said it, everyone in the room dropped their laptops,” Sen. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Montgomery) said in an e-mail.

Trouble is, the facts were about as close to the truth as oregano is to pot. After a quick Google search on his laptop, Raskin — the sponsor of the legalization bill that was the subject of the Senate hearing — advised the chief that the Colorado overdose story, despite its deadpan delivery, had been made up for laughs by The Daily Currant, an online comedy magazine.

“I had not seen the spoof before, but it was self-evidently a parody,” Raskin said. “In the absence of real data, Internet hoaxes are becoming marijuana Prohibition’s last stand.”

Chief Pristoop apologized for falling for what he called an “urban legend,” which is one way to look at it, I suppose. I always thought urban legends were things that could possibly have happened in real life and not blatant satire, but perhaps I’ve been tricked by something in one of those stupid dictionaries. Calling this an urban legend is a bit like saying that Weird Al has made his living urban legending the popular music of the last 30 plus years.

So, how did you celebrate Canada’s big gold medal hockey win on Sunday? Did you drink a few beers? Clap? Yell? Cheer? Scream? Accidentally mash your man parts into a fire hydrant?

Rob Ford runs groin-first into fire hydrant while celebrating Canada’s gold medal in hockey

For the second straight time, Rob Ford’s celebration of a Canadian gold medal in hockey has become an international viral sensation. While he impressed Toronto by going airborne when the women’s team made a miraculous comeback over the United States, his excitement over the men’s victory was a little less graceful and a lot more painful.

The National Post‘s Darren Calabrese caught the moment Ford ran groin-first into a fire hydrant while frolicking with revellers in Maple Leaf Square in Toronto. Ford caught Canada’s 3-0 win over Sweden in Real Sports bar and was mobbed when he joined the celebrations outside.

Funny as that is, the time he ran into the camera is pretty hard to beat.

Yup, still my favourite.

This is a pretty cool concept. To all the people who say Braille printers can’t be made cheaper, I say here, have a real live working Lego Braille printer.

Sure, for now it only does the letters a-z, but that’s one amazing start, and one smart kid. Plus, he’s making it open source, which means anybody can make it even more awesome.

Now, how long until Shubham Banerjee wins some huge science award or patents some more cool things? Look what he did at 12 years old!

Concordia University (not the one in Montreal, the one in Chicago) is looking for a new director of public safety after it was forced to fire what was until recently its current one after he was caught trying to fill the shoes of one of his female coworkers, so to speak.

A female employee reported seeing Margis exiting her office while buttoning his pants and fastening his belt two days earlier, according to a police report. After he left, she discovered semen in one of her shoes, O’Shea said.

Upon questioning, Margis admitted to the lewd act, O’Shea said. Margis and the woman were never romantically involved, O’Shea said.

Timothy Margis, 38, was arrested and charged with misdemeanor public indecency and disorderly conduct. He was released (a feeling with which he is doubtless familiar) on $150 bail.

Hey Brad. Is it me, or does this sound like something our dad could have done?

Cheryl Crausewell said neighborhood kids rolled her yard and house in the Hickory Ridge community on Saturday. She and her son worked to clean up the mess on Monday, but some of the toilet paper was still stuck in a magnolia tree.

She said they lit a piece of toilet paper on the magnolia tree with a lighter in an attempt to remove it, but wind blew the piece into the yard, setting the grass ablaze.

The same wind that, had they been patient and IQ enriched, would have harmlessly taken care of the problem.

“It just popped out into a little patch and we tried to put it out and it just kept going, so I was trying to keep it from going down the front porch and came down the bank and around the back of the house,” she said.

Within seconds, Crausewell said the fire spread to the backyard where the propane gas tank from a grill may have added fuel to the fire.

Everyone made it out safely, but they won’t be going back in any time soon as the home was destroyed in the blaze, which burned for more than 4 hours.

We like to throw around a lot of opinions here, but I’m gonna just go ahead and toss this one out as an unarguable fact, because seriously, who beyond this group of 100 or so complete shitheels would even think about disagreeing?

If you’re willing to wage war against a proposed women’s shelter because it’s going to be too close to your kids’ school and that’s bad and scary, you are pretty much an irredeemably terrible person.

But the land currently belongs to the Waterloo Catholic District School Board as part of the Christ the King Catholic Elementary School Grounds – and that doesn’t sit well with parents, some of whom don’t want their kids anywhere near a women’s shelter.

“This is the wrong location for it,” says Tanya Costello, who has a child at the school.

“I’m afraid that it could attract drug users and violent people into the environment with small, young children.”

More than 100 people have signed a petition against the shelter.

I understand not wanting your children *in* a women’s shelter. The circumstances that lead broken families there are often more awful than the so-called human beings who would fight against them having that option and nobody should ever have to go through those things. But near it? Are you morons for real? Have you not a clue about what these places actually are and actually do? For starters, there are cameras. There are also, and this is important, people working there who are trained to deal with the worst of the worst. There’s a reason why the news isn’t filled on a daily basis with tragic tales of crazed ex husbands getting into shelters and going on drug fueled rampages or even making off with some poor woman or a couple of kids. That reason is that it’s the sort of thing that just doesn’t happen, because there are people and procedures in place to make sure that it doesn’t. That’s why they call them shelters and not do whatever the fuck you wants or walk on ins.

This is think of the children nimbyism garbage at its worst, and if any of you are at all self-aware, I hope you’ll step back, take a few minutes to think about the message you’re sending to not only other people’s children but also your own and feel really, really embarrassed by and ashamed of yourselves.

Seriously, who comes up with this stuff? Who stands up in a meeting and says “I’ve got it, you guys! I can solve our fat people problem! You see, what we’re gonna do is wait until they’re 18, set a minimum butterball threshold and then text them every day to remind them that getting off the couch is something they really ought to consider.”

“But we can’t just go around texting people we think are fat…can we?”

“No, that’s the best part! They’re going to sign up for their daily scoldings voluntarily!”

“Hmmm. Interesting. How much is this going to cost?”

“Around 10 grand, give or take.”

“Perfect!”

“But isn’t this kind of silly? How do we expect people to sign up to be told that they’re too fat…”

“Shut up, Wilson! Nobody wants to hear your doom and gloom. We’re going ahead with it! Somebody fetch me the public’s checquebook!”

Stoke-on-Trent City Council is sending texts to obese people in the area to help motivate them to lose weight.

Over 100,000 people in the region are overweight or obese, the council said, and the texts are for those who are aged at least 18, have a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or over and who have proactively signed up to receive the motivational messages.

They will be sent daily texts, a weekly questionnaire and a follow-up questionnaire. A sample of 500 recipients will also have a telephone interview. All this, plus the licence for the NHS-owned Simple Telehealth text service is equal to £10,000.

Examples of the texts sent include ‘aim to eat a variety of fruit and vegetables each day’, ‘aim to eat regular meals and keep a check on snacks and drinks’ and ‘maybe walk to the shops or use the stairs more often’.

The texts may also ask questions, such as ‘are you pleased with the amount of exercise you’ve done in the last seven days, text yes or no’. If the respondents text yes, they get a reply like ‘that’s great, keep going’, or if the answer is negative, they get a text encouraging them to do more exercise.

Being cheated on and dumped is a pretty shitty feeling. And naturally, there are several ways one might react when it happens. Some folks cry out their eyes, some folks throw glasses, some folks throw back a few glasses, some yell and scream and still others take it all in stride and do their best to move on.

And then there are the Torz Reynolds’ of the world, who respond to such situations by cutting out the tattoo she got to celebrate the relationship and sending it by registered mail to her ex’s new house in a gift wrapped jar.

This is generally the part where I’d wonder aloud exactly what in the actual steaming fuck is wrong with this woman, but the simple fact that she up to this point had willingly roamed the earth with the words “Chopper’s Bitch” inked into her arm tells me basically everything I need to know.

Torz Reynolds thought her boyfriend, Stuart “Chopper” May, was moving out to take a job in Alaska. But she later found out he was staying in London and moving in with his new girlfriend, with whom he’d been having an affair for six months.

Reynolds, being sensible, decided to extract revenge by sawing off her “Chopper’s Bitch” tattoo from her arm with a scalpel and mailing the removed skin to May’s new home. The whole process, which also involved tweezers, took about an hour and a half.

“I can’t imagine what his reaction was,” she said. “I wish I could have been there to see it.”

If he had a reaction, he’s so far decided to keep it to himself. Whether that’s due to smart decision making or because it’s hard to talk while you’re hyperventilating with your head in a toilet is yet to be determined.

This kid has quite the future ahead of him in something or other, but I can’t decide if it’s going to be in a creative endeavour of some kind or in prison life. Either way, at 10 years old he’s already better at cover stories than most adults.

Early Wednesday morning while his parents were sleeping, the kid reportedly put his 18-month-old sister in the car and took off, hoping to make it to his grandparent’s house—some 38 miles away from the boy’s home in Dokka, Norway.

He made it about six miles before driving off the road into a ditch. He was found not long after by a snowplow driver, who called the cops.

“The boy told the snowplow driver that he was a dwarf and that he had forgotten his driver’s license at home,” said Baard Christiansen, a spokesman for the Vest Oppland police district, according to the Independent.

There were no injuries or damage to the car, and no charges have been filed. Whether or not there were any beatings issued by mom and dad was unfortunately not reported.