Month: April 2005

Roeper on tattoos:

You can’t call the tattoo craze a craze anymore, as it’s been going on for more than a decade and it crosses all demographics.

Still, one day it will ebb. Today’s 10-year-old will become tomorrow’s 20-year-old, who doesn’t want to have anything to do with what mom and dad think is cool. I can see a college kid in 2015 saying, “My mother has my name tattooed on her neck. I mean, is she old-fashioned or what?”

I have no tattoos and never got a piercing. I saw Larger than Life which features a retired circus painted lady. Elderly, and covered with tattoos. That was the future tattooed people have embraced, and they don’t know it.

Sink or swim: Neighborhood pools struggle to compete with public facilities:

Chesterfield, Manchester, Ballwin, Des Peres and other West County communities have built elaborate aquatic centers in recent years.

Those facilities are among the factors swamping some neighborhood and subdivision swimming pools, once the staple of the suburbs but now finding it tough to compete with the publicly funded pools.

You know, certain people condemn Wal-Mart for this sort of behavior. Local governments want to prove that their micromunicipality is as good as the next, so they waste tax money on these wet amusement parks and “invest” in a future of rising costs of maintenance for these facilities. Meanwhile, they raise our taxes to fund pension plans for police and government employees and to take care of other ongoing expenses for which the local government is short of funds.

All this to duplicate services offered by these private groups, local gyms, and the YMCAs.

When did the equation building waterparks = governance enter our civics textbooks? Probably when the governments found that they could just write it in.

Nugget from this story: Skydiver Dies After Striking Plane in Fla.:

Skydive DeLand, which organized the jump, said Saturday’s accident was not common. The death was the second involving the company this year.

Two deaths this year by April, and the accident wasn’t common? Brother, that’s too common to us consumers.

Ladies and gentlemen, watch what the authorities do to child molestors, because they will eventually take those same measures with other offenders.

• Registries and posting their names on the Internet? Already crept to prostitution and arsonists.
• Permanent institutionalization beyond the sentence imposed by the court.
• GPS tracking of previous offenders.

Because the crimes are so repellent, citizens will accept these measures and parents will clamor for them. But as the first item shows, once these rights are abrogated to protect the children, law makers and law enforcement officials will use those mechanisms to persecute other criminals who might commit the same crime in the future.

Sure, Westchester County only wants sex offenders to wear a bracelet; but sex offenders can take those off. Countdown to mandatory microchipping has begun.

O’Connor Dismisses Ado Over Int’l Law:

O’Connor, a Reagan appointee, participated in a lively one-hour discussion at the National Archives with Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen G. Breyer. She said if there is no controlling U.S. precedent or the viewpoint of states is unsettled, “of course we look at foreign law.”

“This is much ado about nothing,” she said in response to a question by moderator Tim Russert of NBC. “Our Constitution is one that evolves. What’s the best way to know? State legislatures — but it doesn’t hurt to know what other countries are doing.”

Our constitution has a mechanism in it for evolution. It’s the amendment process.

Any other evolution, a la reading the penumbras, emanations, and secret codes inherent in interpreting the rights derived from reading the third letter after every punctuation mark isn’t constitutional evolution. It’s judicial creationism.

(Link seen on Althouse.)

More women’s bodies protected by security cameras:

A San Francisco police officer is facing possible disciplinary action for allegedly using surveillance cameras at San Francisco International Airport to ogle women as they walked through the terminal, according to San Francisco Police Commission documents.

Oddly enough, he’s in the most trouble because apparently it wasn’t his turn at the cameras:

Police share the surveillance system with several agencies. When the Police Department traffic substation is controlling a camera, none of the other agencies is able to use that camera, the charging documents note.

Rossi allegedly spent a total of three hours manipulating six of the cameras.

He ignored coworkers’ warnings that he should not be using the cameras, saying “he did not care since he was not assigned to the substation he would not get in trouble,” according to the charging documents.

Here’s a feel-good story with a happy ending:

At first, Charles Kulage suspected a buddy was playing a joke by calling to verify his address and then saying his $4,296 federal tax refund check had been found at St. Peters’ recycling center.

But it wasn’t a joke. While sorting paper, a worker at the recycling center spotted the check Monday and saved it from destruction.

A happy ending until you consider how much attention workers pay to papers in the recycling bin.

This message brought to you by someone too paranoid for a shredder.