Category: News

Today, on FelonyWatch, we visit lovely Bloombertopia, where Augusta Kugelmas, pigeon lover, threw birdseed at an overzealous and power-mad park volunteer who wanted to stop Augusta from feeding the birds. Augusta has been charged with third degree assault.

FindLaw.Com indicates that this is not yet a felony in New York:

S 120.00 Assault in the third degree.

A person is guilty of assault in the third degree when:

1. With intent to cause physical injury to another person, he causes such injury to such person or to a third person; or
2. He recklessly causes physical injury to another person; or
3. With criminal negligence, he causes physical injury to another
   person by means of a deadly weapon or a dangerous instrument.

Assault in the third degree is a class A misdemeanor.

Hopefully, an enlightened politico on his or her way up will soon recognize the danger thrown birdseed poses and will bump this up to a felony.

I’m Brian J. Noggle with FelonyWatch.

Charter Communications announced on its investor conference call that it’s going to raise the rates for its Charter Pipeline cable modem offering because it can.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch story says:

Charter Communications Inc. is considering raising the price for its high-speed Internet service and eliminating its slowest-speed service to “extract more revenue” from its markets, Chief Executive Carl E. Vogel told analysts Thursday.

“High-speed data has been a wonderful business for us,” Vogel said.

It’s the most profitable product as well as the one requiring the least capital expense for Charter to deploy.

That’s right, little lambs, Charter needs a new pair of woolen socks, so give it up. It’s not passing on increases in its costs. It’s just extracting revenue from you.

Meanwhile, the Noggle household happily continues to pass on any Charter offerings.

Today’s Washington Post has a story about the New Zealish guy who’s doing a complete ASCII art remake of Star Wars. Unfortunately, the author makes the astonishing claim:

Anyone who’s ever come near a computer knows how to create little text “emoticons,” such as a sideways smiley face :-) or a winking face ;-), but Jansen has taken this idea to extravagant, or possibly insane, extremes. He’s tapped out whole “Star Wars” tableaux — hyper-driven spaceships, storming Storm Troopers, the famous bar scene — with nothing but dots, dashes, parentheses, asterisks and what-have-you.

Simon Jansen, the artist, is not taking emoticons to a whole new level. ASCII art is not an extension of AOL-inspired colonic stupidity. By making that claim, the author is denying we old-time geeks of our culture and heritage and represents a great deal of insensitivity duly worth of italics and sometimes bold!

After all, ASCII art has been around for much longer than AOL. Am I the only one who remembers Color 64 BBSes, with their medium res ASCII animations, and St. Louis’s own Dave Hartmann?

Techdirt links to a story wherein Snopes.com gets props for debunking the ‘Bambi Hunt’ story. Bravo, Snopes!

I have been a fan of Snopes for almost five years (since I worked at my first “sit down in front of a computer” job). I use them as a resource to debunk e-mail forwards that I get and just to keep abreast of the latest foolishness on the Internet.

Bravo, David and Barbara Mikkelson! You’re better than the World Book, werd.

Look for the Snopes.com IPO coming soon to a new-and-improved Internet bubble near you!

I didn’t see this in the “Armed Citizen” column of America’s First Freedom, but apparently, according to MSN, the actress Gabrielle Union (of Bad Boys II) once exchanged gunfire with a robber/rapist.

Is she the NRA? If not, why not?

The first time I read Steve Chapman’s piece in today’s Chicago Tribune, entitled “Eliminating death penalties for drug use” (registration required), I misunderstood its contents.

The title, of course, does not refer to state-imposed death penalties. Instead, he’s talking about some of the unintended consequences friends of the White Lady suffer. Heroin addicts swap needles and give each other a bunch of neat blood-borne diseases. They overdose, too, in increasing numbers. These aren’t death penalties, they’re just the unexpected results that can occur when you use the human body in ways not explicitly covered in the documentation.

When I first read it, I thought Chapman was talking about whacky enabling behaviors, like hypodermic giveaways, but I should have known better. He’s simply talking about making it legal to buy as many hypodermic needles as you want and making the antidote to overdose, a non-addictive and non-enjoyable drug, into an over-the-counter medication. These subsidary things are only illegal because heroin is, and because in the national War on Drugs, some collateral damage is acceptable.

So Chapman’s comments are really applicable. Read them more carefully at your first glance than I did.

The Professor links to a piece by John Scalzi. Scalzi’s critical of workshops for writers, which are more often than not touchy-feely confabs for consumers in the ever-profitable writer-wannabe market. I understand the feeling.

On the way to my Writing Intensive English (appropriately enough, acronymed as WINE) degree, I enjoyed many workshop-centric classes and extra-curricular activities. As you can imagine, my style was much like that of Gene Wolfe, the protagonist of the Scalzi posting. Blunt and acerbic, I pointed out flaws in the other writers’ work.

Hey, if they cannot take it from a peer, I didn’t expect they could take it in the cold, cruel world of publishing. Besides, if I broke their hearts and drove them into a Business Administration degree, I was thinning the herd and eliminating potential competition early.

Funny, I haven’t had much more publishing success than they did anyway. But at least I had fun.

The illuminated state of Illinois has clarified, according to a story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, that:

“No” always means no, even when someone says it during the middle of consensual sex, according to a new state law.

The law clarifies the issue of consent by spelling out that people can change their mind even while having sex. If someone says “no,” the other person must stop or it becomes rape.

So during those coital communications, take care in choosing your words for communication with your partner. Such inappropriate questions as “Did you hear the doorbell?”, “Is that your husband’s car pulling into the driveway?”, or simply “Do you like that, baby?” might lead to you committing rape.

Remember to phrase the questions as true/false (“True or false: You like that, baby.”), short answer (“What did you hear just then that sounded like ‘ding-dong’?”), or multiple choice (“The crunch of wheels on gravel was caused by, a) your husband returning home, b) your husband’s assistant, Johnny ‘Cheeks’ Moreso, arriving to pick you up for your shopping trip, c) my frightened-but-strangely-excited imagination, or d) both a and b?”).

The Professor links to an article about the drive of Iraqis to learn English. It’s a neat piece, but here’s the most telling quote:

”We have not seen anything from the United States of what they promised,” he said. ”I want to help them help me.”

This particular Iraqi wants the United States to provide him with fresh water, electricity, phone service, and who knows what else. He wants the United States government to help him personally.

Sounds like these people are well on their way to the American form of government already. For whom can he vote to receive the best goodies?

In Illinois, anyway, where the Supreme Court has recently abjudicated its members and other statewide judges into a raise when the governor said the state couldn’t afford the cost of living adjustments this year.

Forget the constitutional crisis that occurs when the state comptroller doesn’t dish out the money. Let’s think about the wisdom of allowing a bunch of judges to sue non-judges. Where the hell do you find an impartial trial for that?

Oh, and lest we overlook it, these sagacious twits have decreed themselves a raise to $162,530 a year because they were barely scraping by at $158,103 a year.

News flash:

“The nation needs to break the chains of our addiction to prison….”

Maybe we just need to make going to prison into a felony to deter people from doing it.

(Link seen on Drudge.)

In the June 2003 issue of Esquire, Ilene Rosenzweig writes “10 Things You Don’t Know About Women” which offers the following sage advice:

10. Women judge men by the way they drive. If you aren’t at least ten miles per hour over the speed limit, we think you’re a wimp with no ambition. Heavy foot on the brake? Too neurotic and can’t dance. We also analyze your sexual potential at mealtime. Drive fast. Eat slow.

I’ve been looking for a new philosophy, so I decided this one was it: Drive fast. Eat slow. Especially when trying to impress a babe.

I conducted some surreptitious research on this new axiom while trying to impress a beautiful woman last weekend and can offer the following corollaries:

• Do not use the red four-cylinder “sports” car owned by the babe when proving you’re not a wimp and that you have ambition.
• When assertively and decisively changing lanes, remember to leave a distance approximately equivalent to the 6:15 Freight Express, that is, about four train cars and a locomotive, between you and the vehicle in front of you. Particularly if you’re driving the red “sports” car.
• Don’t utter, at about 85 dB, invectives to the other drivers.

You can call these the Brian J. Corollaries, if you wish, and you may use them at will in geometric proofs as necessary. Follow the corollaries as the axiom, and you will lead a more fulfilling life.

Oh, and one more hint, but this one doesn’t earn corollary status: order the couscous. You cannot eat couscous quickly without using a spoon.

My beautiful wife links to a story about an Oracle manager, an Indian, who used his undue managerial influence to receive monicas from a developer, also an Indian. So of course she sued Oracle.

My beautiful wife says:

And the kicker.

The lawsuit said that Oracle knew or should have known of the different cultural and legal context in which Anand was used to working in India, where managers can often exert unfettered power over their female subordinates.

Um, no. What could Oracle have done, anyway? If it, as an entity, was unaware of said manager’s particular behavior, what could it have done?

You poor, uncynical creature. This is a perfect case of DIYD/DIYD (an acronym pronounced “died-died”). Because the Oracle did not treat the non-Caucasian differently than it would treat an American, it’s getting sued. Of course, had it treated him differently, he would have sued them.

Lawsuits all around! It’s a paradise!

The St Louis Single Point-of-View is reporting that the whole Bambi-hunting thing, where people could pay $10,000 to hunt naked women in the Nevada desert and then, um, mount the trophies for a Nevada dessert, is admittedly a publicity stunt designed to promote videos depicting men hunting and, um, stuffing their ‘kills’ without a certified taxedermist present. Publicists would call that guerilla marketing, but those sorts of spoofs and hijinks are no laughing matter in LVNV.

But now he’s going to get the “Las Vegas is a Family Place” marketing brochure thrown at him. He’s being charged with a trumped-up misdemeanor charge because apparently misleading the news media is not yet a felony.

The story says:

The mayor said, “I’ll do everything I can to see this man is punished for trying to embarrass Las Vegas.”

So the mayor admits that he will wield all power that he has as a government official to punish this man for the bad behavior (not a crime, mind you, just bad behavior) of embarrassing (that is, causing a human emotional response of shame-lite) in a freaking social construct (the fiefdom of said government official).

What is everything in the mayor’s power? Fortunately, it’s not much:

“This man” is promoter is Michael Burdick. He could get six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for operating without a proper business license.

Fortunately, the avatar of Las Vegas has conjured a law with which to prosecute This Man so that he, the Embodiment of the Glorious City On Earth can find vengeance for the vast wrongs done upon The Almighty Yet Easily Embarrassed City of Sin. With this mighty cudgel, the petty tyrant shall once again affirm his power and his will.

Steve Chapman, of the Chicago Tribune, asserts (registration required) that intervention in Liberia would be a pointless waste of American time, money, and lives.

He’s right.

Sorry. I meant to say, “Indeed.”