So that’s where all the nifty stuff we get for Christmas comes from.

A man is facing several charges after breaking into a home and making off with jewellery, cash, tools, alcohol, electronics, guns and ammunition. That man? Charles Santa.

I hope the police aren’t too hard on him. He may have done it for the sake of all of us, after all. Perhaps, sensing that the elves were running behind schedule and would never get everything built in time, he felt he had no choice but to take matters into his own hands and save Christmas. Sound crazy? Well, Santa did commit his heist in the middle of October, so you’re going to have a tough time convincing me that the timeline doesn’t add up.

Police raid drug houses every day, but it’s not every day they have to do so little legwork to catch the dealers.

While police were searching the house, a man knocked on the closed front door. When police asked who it was, he identified himself as a drug dealer. Officers opened the door and the surprised man assaulted an officer by pushing him, police say.
The driver of the waiting car fled immediately. The suspect threw a loaded .45 caliber hand gun into the snow as he ran from the house. The man was pursued and arrested.

I took a cab ride last night. I had one of those really nice, talkative drivers, so we had a pretty good conversation as we went.

At one point we started talking about jobs that people think are easy but really aren’t, and driving a taxi came up. I said I’d never consider that to be a walk in the park. Yeah sitting in a car and tooling around the city looks easy, but the hours are long, you always have to be pleasant no matter your mood and perhaps worst of all, you never know who you’re picking up next.

Later in the evening, I got home from a really really really fun Alan Doyle concert to find that Michelle had dropped this story in my lap. Such timing!

Just after 2 a.m. on Saturday night, a drunk woman was riding in a taxi with a number of other people near Upper Wentworth and Kingfisher Road, when she got sick and started vomiting inside the cab, police say.
After being told she would have to pay a cleaning fee, the woman became upset and started hurling vomit and assaulting the driver, police say.

The 24-year-old hammered hurl hurler tried to run, but was quickly located and charged with assault and mischief under $5000.

People: As nice as we are, we totally suck. And that’s why driving a cab or doing anything else with the public is hardly simple.

Having grown up on a steady diet of Unsolved Mysteries, America’s Most Wanted and pretty much anything with Bill Kurtis in it, I know that now and then a person might find herself in a situation where it feels like the only option left is to fake her own death. But for all the reasons I’ve seen it done, I can honestly say that to the best of my knowledge, because I don’t want to date this guy anymore is a new one. Even if we allow for the idea that her wannabe other half might have been a bit creepy and needs a lesson or 12 on how to take a fucking hint, this still seems a bit extreme and kinda dumb.

After a third date with the poor fellow whom she had met on an online dating site, Gray decided that she didn’t want to see him again. But when she tried to let him down gently, he didn’t get the hint. Even when she flat-out told him it wasn’t working, he persisted.
“He continued to message me and the day came when he sent one stating ‘I think we need to have a date tonight! I will be around your house in 30 minutes.'”

Totally gross, not to mention borderline stalker. But rather than take the conventional route and call the police which I’m aware doesn’t always work, she sent off a text.

“Hi there, this is Ann-Marie’s sister, I am really sorry to tell you but she was taken into hospital last night with a very serious illness, so she won’t be available for a while. Sorry about that, if or when she comes around and is feeling better I will get her to message you.”

If you’re slow, you’ll be surprised to learn that this didn’t work. It did, however, prompt him to ask which ward she was in and then try to find out for himself by going to the hospital when an answer was not forthcoming, because of course it did.

In a bit of a pickle, she felt she had no choice, and another message was sent.

“I am really sorry to tell you but we lost her last night.”

That seemed to do the trick, until our hero forgot the first rule of faking your own death. That rule, naturally, is don’t get caught…especially not by the guy you’re ditching as you continue to have conversations with others on the same dating site the two of you met on.

“He sent me a horrid message!” she told the Mirror. “Can’t say I blame him, really. I am currently engaged to be married and not dead!”

Not yet, at least.

Honestly, I’m not sure what’s worse here. Allison Voner shooting a video of herself near a courthouse using cocaine and heroin, illegally driving a car and ranting about her probation officer, her putting that video on Facebook for everyone to see including the aforementioned probation officer or her lawyer saying with a straight face that the judge should go easy on her because she did it all for the giggles.

Voner’s defence lawyer John Daly Jr. tried to explain away the video as being a joke.
“She frequently Facebooks out entertaining videos,” he argued. “It was meant as an entertaining video only. It was comedy.”

If Voner was a police officer, a stupid argument like that might have worked. But as a regular citizen, she ended up getting what she deserved in return for her efforts to entertain. Her probation was revoked, she was held on $5000 bail in relation to a different possession of heroin case, held without bail in a credit card fraud matter and also held on a warrant that was issued by another court for charges that weren’t specified.

Some guy taking a dump at a bus stop and then calmly leaving when his bus arrives really isn’t all that funny or out of the ordinary on its own, but the moment being captured on a security camera belonging to a store that sells toilets certainly ups the amusement factor, so let’s go with it, so to speak.

Gav Lall, owner of the nearby H2O Plus bathroom shop, captured the footage in the early hours of January 7 outside his premises in Blackheath, south east London.

He said: “I was completely disgusted – it’s not the sort of thing you would expect to see anywhere, really, especially outside a bathroom shop.

“We were alerted to the mess by a customer, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I checked our security footage.

“He even urinated on his mess too.

“Some people just don’t respect the public transport service.”

Some people would appear to include those from the city itself, since according to the article it took officials two days to clean it up.

Wait a minute, two days? Don’t even try telling me that wasn’t done on purpose.

I can’t remember how long it’s been since we’ve reported on somebody gnoshing on a police car, but today we give a big ‘ol VC hello to Staci Anne Spence, who has just set the clock back to zero.

The fun began when Spence, for reasons known only to her and possibly her victims, doused a couple with pepper spray as they slept in a van during the early hours of a Thursday morning a few short months ago. Police were called, Spence was identified and some deputies were sent to her home to arrest her for battery.

Upon their arrival, the officers were greeted by, and I’m quoting here, “profanity, racial slurs and uncooperativeness.” I love that whoever wrote that sentence felt that uncooperativeness needed inclusion, as though we’re usually greeted by profanity, racial slurs and a general sense of calm and good will. Or maybe uncooperativeness is just a quicker way of saying that Spence was able to get away from two of the cops and kick a third before finally being restrained.

And it was then that the hunger pangs kicked in, apparently.

She was put in leg restraints and placed on her stomach in the back of a deputy’s sport utility vehicle.
Upon arriving at the Bonner County Jail, deputies discovered that Spence had chewed through the seat’s upholstery and into the foam cushioning, the affidavit said. Replacing the Chevrolet Tahoe’s seat was estimated at more than $2,000.

Spence has been charged with malicious injury to property for chewing on the Chevy, battery for the spraying, battery on a law officer because you’re not supposed to kick those, driving under the influence (I guess she drove to the scene of the original assault?) and resisting arrest. Bail was set at $32000.

It was also noted that this wasn’t the first time that Spence had been arrested in fine fashion. When she was hauled in earlier in the year, police say that not only was she combative with them, but she also whipped out a beer and drank it once they got her into the police car. It’s not known if she was using it to wash down a chair in that case.

I’m posting this partly because holy shit this guy, and partly as a public service.

If this Khaled Hashem fellow claims he’s your “dentist”, your “dental surgeon”, a “doctor” or even that he’s just some guy you can go to because he’s qualified to perform dental work, no, he isn’t. He may have been any or all of those things at some point, but legally he can’t be any of them now. And really, that’s probably for the best.

According to the College, Hashem had been working in Ottawa since 1985.
He was cautioned in 1996 for not completing a procedure that was charged for, then twice again in 2011 for improper infection control and bookkeeping concerns.
Hashem then lost his licence for five months last year, again over health and financial concerns but also when he was found to have performed a partial, “substandard” root canal on a patient without her consent.

The incident that ultimately led to the loss of his licence happened March 24, 2012, according to the legal documents.
A 23-year-old female Carleton University student identified only as K.W. had lost her retainer, leaving her with a gap in her teeth.
She called two emergency clinics she found online and got a hold of Hashem, who told her to come into his clinic.
After she said she wanted a “full smile”, K.W. said they discussed “putting crowns in” and the procedure was done.
The legal documents describe what followed with K.W., Hashem and K.W.’s regular dentist, Dr. Tadeusz Henike:
“K.W. was able to observe her appearance, and became dissatisfied. To her, it looked like a piece of chewed up gum had been put into her mouth,” the disciplinary panel wrote.
“On inspection, Dr. Henike ‘thought the work looked a little rough’ … X-rays confirmed that these were someone else’s teeth.
“It was Dr. Henike’s evidence that he had never before encountered the situation of someone else’s teeth being cemented into a patient’s mouth … He informed K.W. that the dentist who had done this work had not met the standard of care in Ontario.
“K.W. testified that on learning that Dr. Henike suspected that these were human teeth, she was ‘completely disgusted and mortified.’”
Dr. Henike removed the tooth fragments and later called Hashem, who told him he did what he did because K.W. was “pleading for teeth.”

Right. the old because she asked me to defense. Just what you want to hear from the qualified professional who literally has your life in his hands.

Speaking of defenses, in this guy’s I can see where maybe the idea of transplanting a tooth might cross your mind for a fraction of a second. I mean hell, we do it with hearts and livers and kidneys and stuff all the time, and that’s way more dangerous! The problem is that the fraction of a second right before the one where your brain goes “transplant a tooth” should be the one where that same brain is all like “wouldn’t it be a horrible idea to…”

Nobody wants a DWI. But if you’re gonna get one you’re gonna get one, regardless of whether or not you succeed in your efforts to ingest the printout of your breathalyzer test results.

An officer arrested him after suspecting he had been drinking. The officer brought Desormes to the state police barracks, where he was given a breathalyzer test.
While the results were printing, Desormes grabbed the paperwork and tried to eat it, police said. The results said Desormes had a blood alcohol content of 0.13 percent.

It probably would have been easier to fight the charge in court, Ken. Those breathalyzers are notoriously flawed. Then again the same could perhaps be said for the type of fella who feels his best course of action when cornered is to snack on their output, so maybe just forget I said anything.

Kenneth Desormes, 40, was charged with driving while intoxicated, second-degree obstructing governmental administration and third-degree criminal tampering, all misdemeanors.

I saw this story of a dog who rides the bus to the dog park alone, and I smiled, even though I had lots of questions, which have been answered. None of them, by the way are how does she know where to get off? Both Tansy and Trix would indicate when we had arrived at our popular bus stops…sometimes, Tansy indicates at bus stops we’ve never gotten off the bus at, but we’ve walked past them. For example, she got very excited as the bus approached Weber and Fergus. Why? Well, there’s her pet food store, right there. We always walk there, never take the bus, but one day I was on a bus that went by, and she wanted me to know about it.

I wonder if a service dog has gotten on one of these buses when this pooch has taken a solo ride. Is she so good that she can avoid the temptation of another dog?

At any rate, that’s a smart beast who loves her some dog park time.