Assorted Stupidity #80
by Kevin from Lowering the Bar on (#RXC0)
- This just in: a middle school in Dunbar, West Virginia, was put on lockdown after a man entered the school and threatened to sing Justin Bieber songs over the intercom. This story will be updated as more news becomes available.
- The New York Post spotted a federal lawsuit filed by ZVRS, a Florida company that provides hosted video phone services to the deaf. ZVRS says a Brooklyn man has been using its services inappropriately, and has been using them a lot. In fact, the company alleges he has placed 4,648 video calls to it since January 1 "for the sole purpose of masturbating in view of ZVRS's employees." That's 17.6 calls a day, or (assuming he devotes 16 hours a day to this) one call every 55 minutes for over nine months. Not only that, ZVRS alleges, "upon information and belief, [the defendant] is not deaf."
- "Man sprayed rival's door with fake snow before attacking him while armed with horse-riding stirrups" is today's Headline Making It Largely Unnecessary to Read the Article Itself, and also the first time I've seen an assault that involved stirrups but no horse.
- Okay, the foregoing item deserves at least one additional paragraph to mention the defense lawyer's argument that the metal stirrups were just sort of a side issue. "The stirrups may well have struck Mr. Probert [during the beating]," he told the court, "but [he] was not beaten with the stirrups." (Emphasis added.) The distinction appears to have been lost on the judge, however, who sentenced the assailant to a year in jail.
- Always on the lookout for security threats, TSA agents in Portland recently demanded a 90-year-old grandmother strip to the waist, her son told KOMO News. Their scanner had detected an "anomaly" that turned out to be a small pouch she had sewn into her bra to hold emergency cash while traveling. Why the agents thought a small-anomaly-wielding grandmother might realistically pose any risk at all was, of course, unexplained. They did take her into one of their little rooms before forcing her to disrobe, at least, so that's nice.
- "I'm just very unhappy being accused of something I have not done," said a man who walked into a police station in Cambridge (in the UK). He was complaining about a CCTV image a store posted on social media showing someone who employees believed was a shoplifter. It was embarrassing, he told police. Well, it's also you, they replied, and booked him for theft. A magistrate recently found that the picture he had come in to complain about was, in fact, "clear and compelling evidence" he was guilty.
- From the Washington Post (Oct. 23), reporting on a failed bank robbery: "In the Oct. 16 attempt at a Citibank branch, police noted that bank employees used a tactic to avoid being robbed. 'All employees walked away from the counter to the back room,' police said. Apparently recognizing that he had been thwarted, the would-be robber ran." I guess you could call that a "tactic," but it seems more like just leaving.
- This just in: the lockdown in Dunbar has been lifted. Police arrested the man for drug possession (marijuana) and took him to a hospital (presumably not because of the marijuana). But he later left the hospital and went to a daycare center, where he again threatened to sing Justin Bieber songs and was again arrested, this time for disorderly conduct and trespassing.
- To clarify, the man was not Justin Bieber.
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