Fahrenheit 198451

Here’s some advice. Just don’t go to Britain. Don’t even go near it, and if you’re there, get out, if you can that is. Why? Cops want to increase surveillance to the point that if you even go in a direction that might suggest that you might be up to something, they will chase you down.

Apparently, all the CCTV’s aren’t good enough. So now, they want to centralize their data, make them good enough for face-recognition, and recognize patterns and start tracking the person who apparently fits the pattern. Are they going to get out the mechanical firehouse hounds of Fahrenheit 451?

And if you’re a kid in a British school, you might be RFID tagged like warehouse inventory. Isn’t that special?

I hope that the servers being used to store all this potential data die from overload before they can really use all this. IT’s too much!

Spineless Robber May Have Less Of A Spine Now

Wow. I’m sure the robber in this story wasn’t expecting to be shot in the neck by a 75-year-old blind man. I’m wondering if the shooter was Carey McWilliams’ grandfather. I guess that blind man was a good shot. The shootee is in serious condition with a bullet lodged close to his spine and they don’t know whether they should take it out or leave it in. Well, that’ll teach him to mess with an old man, that’s for sure. I still can’t believe the shooter was able to walk into another room, grab his gun, come back, threaten the dude, and shoot him. The robber really underestimated his opponent. Bad, bad mistake.

More Parental Disasters

I wouldn’t bother writing about this particular loser, except I know I’ve ranted about the number of crappy parents out there before.

He was driving drunk, in the wrong direction down a busy highway, with some open booze, in an uninsured car with an invalid license plate…oh, and his two-year-old daughter just hangin’ out in the back seat with no seatbelt or anything on. *Collapses in a heap.*

>Travelodge: A Good Naked Sleepwalk Isn’t Far Away

>Ok, sleepwalking must be on the extreme upswing, and wearing pyjamas must have gone out of fashion, because in the UK, Travelodge staff have been trained to deal with naked sleepwalkers. What I find the weirdest about this whole thing is sleepwalkers don’t just sleepwalk, they come out into the lobby asking for newspapers or wanting to chekc out. I think the most I managed to utter the one time I sleepwalked was something about Steve being a sneaky devil. I certainly had no idea where I was going, and managed to almost collide with my filing cabinet. I wouldn’t have made it to the hotel lobby. How do these folks get all the way to reception and manage whole sentences? And why are there so many? And why are they all naked?

Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest

Wow. This is just stupid. Not a single person in this story looks smart. Not a one.

Lets’ begin, well, at the beginning. It all started in the town of Swanville, Maine, when an 18-year-old woman decided that the only way to get rid of those bastard fleas would be to shave the cat. Appalled by this, her brother tried to stop her. What did he do? He tried to cut the chord that led from clippers to electricity. He didn’t try to unplug the clippers. No no no. Get a knife and hack the chord was his solution. Luckily for all involved, he failed, only succeeding in cutting himself, because she kicked him. He supposedly retaliated by choking her and pushing her down. She called 911 and said he hit her, and they’re looking for him through the woods, even with dogs!

Oh come on. Deploying tracking dogs for a scrap between siblings that she started? Give me a fucking break. I’m sure he’ll come home at some point and they can talk to him then.

My oh my, don’t visit Swanville, Maine. Your IQ might suffer for it.

Now That’s A Lucky Boy

Picture this. A three-year-old kid somehow gets out of his apartment at 3 a.m. and wanders into the street wearing only a diaper. It’s cold out. He ends up on a traffic island. He gets rescued by a sex-offender who was convicted of assaulting a four-year-old boy, and he is returned, unharmed, to his home.

That kid is one very, very, very lucky kid. Those parents seem a little slow, and are apparently facing child neglect charges. But holy crap that kid is lucky. Hopefully, he never gets loose again. He might not be so lucky next time.

These People Aren’t Smokin’ In The Brains Department

Most of this article was pretty uninteresting. It said that a lot of women in West Virginia smoke while pregnant. Apparently these women just don’t know it’s bad, and campaigns to bring them up to date on this just aren’t working. Other women are suffering from depression, so that wouldn’t be a really easy time to quit either. But there is actually a pocket of women who say they smoke while pregnant so their babies will be smaller and delivery will be easier.

Can I strangle these women? I hope they’re ready for the lifetime of consequences this could creat for them. Wow. that’s all I can say.

Hey Hidey Ho, Where’d The Old Lobster Go?

This has to be a setup. Somebody really wanted these lobsters to run wild and free. They had to have.

In the middle of the night in Stuttgart, Germany, dozens of lobsters who were going to be sold to people to be made into a nice dish made an escape from an Asian supermarket. This is what they had to do to get away.

  1. crawl out of their poorly secured crates.
  2. squeeze through the shutters at the front of the store.
  3. Slip out the front door, which had been left open by mistake!

Ok, I can understand the crates not being secured properly, maybe someone didn’t put the mesh on right, but who leaves the front doors of stores open by mistake?

Police were called when people noticed the lobsters running down the street, and they have been scooped up and sent to “an animal home” whatever that is. So maybe they won’t be dinner after all.

Weird. I can’t imagine looking out my window and seeing a bunch of lobsters scurrying down the street. That would be…hmmm…fishy? Yeah, that’s it.

The Bad Idea Graveyard Is Expanding

Let’s visit the graveyard of bad ideas again. If you look to your left, you’ll see the don’t touch me cell phone program, and…oh! What have we here? There’s a new resident! Strangely enough, its creators are also from Japan. It is the portable zebra Crossing crosswalk mat. I’m laughing too hard to speak. So this is their description.

* The Pedestrian’s Best Friend

The tyranny of the automobile makes life increasingly tough for ecoconscious pedestrians, and finding a safe place to cross can result in inconvenient diversions and wasted time. Now the pedestrian can fight back. When you’ve found the crossing point that best suits you, simply roll out the the Portable Zebra Crossing in front of you and cross confidently and in safety at your own pace. Warning: on busy roads where there is no break in the oncoming traffic, attempting to roll out the Portable Zebra Crossing can be hazardous.

And these folks are actually asking for money for this. I assume there is no risk-free trial period, and they’ll want their money *before*their customers try this ingenius little plan for the first time.