Author: Brian J. Noggle

A collector deliberately placed three valuable U.S. coins into circulation in New York in April 2006:

To help introduce more people to “the magic of coin collecting,” Scott A. Travers, a 44-year-old former vice president of the American Numismatic Association and author of The Coin Collector’s Survival Manual, decided to mark National Coin Week in mid-April 2006 by deliberately spending three valuable old pennies as he made routine purchases around Manhattan. “I’m planting a seed, and I hope that a new generation of people will come to appreciate the history that coins represent,” he
said.

The three coins Scott Travers planned to spend were all relatively low-mintage U.S. one-cent pieces nearly one hundred years old: a 1908-S Indian Head cent, and 1909-S VDB and 1914-D Lincoln cents.

Hey, it’s less than the Powerball but since I’m too stingy to drop change in the jar at Starbucks, I have a better chance at winning.

I don’t know about you, but I am having difficulty solving the following word problem, found in this article:

As recently as 1994, more than half of newspaper carriers 57 percent were under 18, often neighborhood kids, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

I blame my own English-degree-fueled mathematical incompetence.

Pennsylvania girl, 10, charged with tossing crack during drug raid:

A 10-year-old girl has been charged with evidence tampering after authorities say she tossed small bags of crack cocaine out of a window during a drug raid.

Kudos to the appropriate authorities for bringing this outlaw to justice! She was a dangerous villain, no doubt:

District Attorney Andy Jarbola said the girl had a “bad attitude” during police questioning.

“What’s so amazing about this investigation is how street-smart this 10-year-old child was,” he said. “She knew what she was doing.”

If she was a public school student, which might not be an easy assumption given the circumstances, I would have to commend her civics teacher for instilling the subtleties of evidence tampering and probably conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and false statements criminal charges to the child.

However, I think this is just a district attorney out for prosecutions for their own sake or worse, for the sake of furthering his career. Because from what I remember of my fifth grade year, my parents were paramount to my moral upbringing, and although they instilled me with a solid enough foundation of if the police can prosecute you for it, don’t do it, other children within the projects probably missed that. Without some other a priori religious or philosophical framework in place, perhaps this child thought that keeping mommy out of jail was a value worth preserving and that she had a moral imperative to defend her family life against arbitrary outsiders.

Jarbola said, “She knew what she was doing.” Indeed, it’s hard not to know what one’s doing when one is undertaking an action. This ten-year-old child was apparently throwing crack out of the window. The thing mommy stored or sold. Because the police were coming. I am sure that this was all within the child’s mind unless the mother was also a hypnotist. However, whether the child knew this was wrong is another matter. But not to Jarbola. Jarbola has actus reus, which is all The Man needs these days.

Frankly, I would like Jarbola to explain to the child why it’s wrong that Mommy is selling a product that alters the brain chemistry to willing consumers. That it’s illegal because it’s bad, and it’s bad because it’s illegal, or whatever simplicities and banalities Jarbola would use to back it up. Does Jarbola have an ethical idea for what, exactly, the ten-year-old child was doing so that he could explain it to her, or is it enough that what she was doing was illegal and she knew she was at a window, tossing baggies out?

Because frankly, I couldn’t explain it to her without resorting to the simple if the police can prosecute you for it, don’t do it dictum that I’ve outgrown as far as moral precepts go. As a practical guide, it’s handy, but if a child doesn’t adhere to it and cannot understand why drugs are evil and drug sellers, especially Mommy, are evil, it’s hard to convince me that the child knew what she was doing.

Perhaps we should count our blessings that Jarbola isn’t trowelling on additional charges like he would were she an adult: armed criminal evidence tampering if they found a gun on the premises, corrupting a minor (herself), and so on.

Regardless, I think Jarbola’s decision to charge the child and his facile summation discredit him as a prosecutor and, ultimately, as a man.

When a drunk man is in a woman’s home uninvited and is killed, is it acceptable or bad?

Man, that’s tricky. I mean, when the woman does it, it seems acceptable:

“She felt threatened,” says Lt. Lane Byers, Pickens County Sheriff’s Office. “She felt she could not leave the home to get away from him. And she felt she had to defend herself. She used a firearm to do so.”

But when cops do it, it doesn’t seem right:

City police officers shot a man twice with Tasers, then scuffled with him, a friend who witnessed the incident said Monday.

Hours after that Saturday scuffle, Nick Mamino Jr., 41, was dead.

When I read that last story, I reacted immediately with my standard, cops-misusing-tasers outrage, but seeing the first story so soon after has put the incidents into stark relief. In Collinsville, Illinois, the police came to a woman’s home where an unarmed man (with a history of armed criminal action) refuses to leave and runs back into the house. To lock himself into the bathroom and sob? To plead with the woman he loves who has just called the cops on him? Or to get a gun?

Given that and given the subtleties of the home-invader versus home-wouldn’t-leaver storylines that are only available the next day in the paper, I conclude the police were correct in trying to subdue him with less than lethal means which, unfortunately and accidentally, proved fatal to Mamino.

The woman who killed her home intruder will receive her recognition in Kim du Toit’s Department of Righteous Shootings. Meanwhile, the police in Collinsville will get pilloried for the crime of enforcing the law while law enforcement officials and for the ultimate results of Mamino’s suspect actions.

The British medical establishment has determined: Too Many ‘Self-Medicate’:

Dr Andrew McCulloch, chief executive of the foundation, said: “The research confirms our worries that people are drinking to cope with emotions and situations they can’t otherwise manage.

“Drinking alcohol is a very common and accepted way of coping – our culture allows us to use alcohol for ‘medicinal purposes’ or ‘dutch courage’ from an early age.

“But using alcohol to deal with anxiety and depression doesn’t work.”

No doubt the good doctor would prefer you try any of the handful of colorful brain chemistry-altering alternatives offered by prescription only. Using Prozac, Paxil, and so on to deal with anxiety or depression might work, might not work, or might make you suicidal. Kinda like whiskey, but more expensive and not available without a doctor’s visit.

Powerball jackpot: 1 ticket. 13 people.:

They used to chase dead-beat dads. Now they’re chasing dreams.

On Thursday, the Missouri Lottery announced the winners of the state’s largest Powerball jackpot ever, $224.2 million. The big winners, dubbed the Lucky 13, are employees with the Missouri Department of Social Services.

When interviewed, the winners said they wouldn’t work another day and that the lottery wouldn’t change them. Given their employer, this is probably not a contradiction.