Archives for April 2012

There’s just so much to get to today that I’m going to forgo my usual preamble and dive right in. Police in Florida remind crooks that, when fleeing the scene of a shooting, it’s best not to stop behind a tree and take a leak where everyone can see you. The unfortunately named Ryan Peck found that out the hard way. Also in Florida, Douglas Kutney, boy you don’t want to spell that sucker wrong, was arrested for molesting a cockatoo, dear God the jokes I can not tell, while not wearing any underwear. Moving just a little north, police in Georgia arrested a guy after they asked him, nicely, to get out of his van while he was naked and he, instead, tried to kill them all by running them over. That did not go well for him. And, bonus, he’s a Floridian who was wanted in Melbourne on an assault charge.

But not all of our nude nutjobs are in the southeast. The Southwest has some winners too.

New York may be the naked city, but San Diego is the home of the naked burglary suspect.

Early Wednesday morning, San Diego police apprehended a suspect who was allegedly attempting to rob musical instruments and electronic equipment from a church — wearing little more than a t-shirt and a purple tutu — with nothing underneath.

A resident reported seeing a tall, suspicious-looking person dressed in what appeared to be an oversize T-shirt and a sparkly purple tutu loading a guitar amplifier into a truck outside Palisades Presbyterian Church, according to Fox San Diego.

Officers arrived to find the suspect, Joshua Mahlon Baker, 39, carrying a trash can filled with property allegedly stolen from the house of worship, SDPD Detective Gary Hassen told CBS 8.

Authorities say when the 6-foot-3-inch, 190-pound Baker saw the police on the scene, he dropped the trash can and ran off to the north between two buildings and climbed a 6-foot chain link fence, losing his clothes in the process.

After the cops caught Baker, the person who placed the initial call positively identified him and Baker was arrested and charged with burglary and obstructing an officer, according to NBC San Diego.

Naked church robberies have been on the increase.

Why? I have no idea. We’re also seeing an uptick in naked truck robberies that end badly.

When Blake Bullock stopped his truck for a naked man in the street on Thursday, he thought he was the victim of a sick joke.

If only he were that lucky. Aaron Latham, 22, wasn’t sober and he definitely wasn’t joking.

“He just jumped in front of my truck, and he was naked and I thought it was a prank or something,” Bullock told the Star Press. “I was honking at him, and he started ramming his head into my front bumper over and over again.”

Bullock had found Latham at a bad time during his night, which started at about 9 p.m. when he allegedly climbed an electricity pole in Muncie, Del. Cops were called to the scene, but Latham escaped them by running down the street.

That’s when he found Bullock.

The driver got out of his truck to help the disturbed man, but took off when Latham started running toward him.

“I just ran away, not thinking he was going to hop in my truck,” Bullock told the paper.

Latham did, and allegedly took off in the stolen vehicle, driving straight through the front door of a home at 50 mph.

The crash ended his nude spree, and nobody was injured during the incident.

Australia seems to have become victim to the same trend.

A naked Australian man allegedly drank heavily and rolled his SUV as he sped to his goal: a pack of smokes.

Cops said that the 41-year-old unidentified drunk man was driving yesterday with his wife to get his nicotine fix at about 1:20 a.m. when he got lost, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

He careened through the back streets of Wallsend, and at one point allegedly backed up quickly while turning, causing his vehicle to flip onto its roof. A nearby off-duty cop heard the wreck and found the allegedly boozed-up couple uninjured. Police reported that he was naked for unknown reasons.

Sadly, there are plenty of weird drunk driving cases to go around.

Video surfaced this month of a Minnesota Zamboni driver who was arrested after a pee-wee hockey team caught him on tape swiveling and swerving on the ice. Joel Bruss’s blood-alcohol level was measured at 0.32 percent — four times over the state’s legal driving limit at the time of the January incident.

Earlier this month, four young Amish adults were arrested in New York for allegedly driving their horse-driven buggies while drinking. Several other buggies fled the scene.

And in Oregon, a man accused of driving sauced on March 11 crashed into a rehab facility.

Showing up drunk and naked at a rehab facility certainly saves everyone a lot of time.

Police in Maine have admitted that one guy did have a legitimate reason t get naked and break out of prison.

He wanted to get laid.

Sex like this has got to be illegal.

A correction officer said he spotted a Maine inmate crawling in the county jail’s corridors after apparently sneaking to the women’s block for a romantic meetup on March 10.

Arien L’Italien, 23, of Biddeford, slipped from his maximum-security Cumberland County Jail unit by finagling with the lock around 11:50 p.m., according to a statement from the county sheriff’s department. After freeing himself from the cell, he moseyed over to Karla Wilson’s place in the pen.

While in her quarters, the two had sex. The guard saw L’Italien as he tried to crawl back to his cell at 12:50 a.m.

Watchmen check prisoners’ cells every 15 minutes, but L’Italien arranged his bunk to make it look like someone was tucked in, My Fox Boston reported.

The lovers evidently arranged their rendezvous by communicating through the jail’s ventilation system, according to the sheriff’s office.

L’Italien is on trial for attempted murder of a federal officer and possession of a firearm. Wilson, 25, has been charged with four counts of sexual assault and two counts of aggravated assault.

The lapse in security has prompted penal authorities to vow a full-scale reappraisal of the facilities and procedures, the Kennebec Journal reported.

In the embarrassing aftermath of the breach, prison officials transferred L’Italien to the super maximum security unit and moved Wilson to the intake unit, according to My Fox Boston.

Nearby, in Massachusetts, cops found a naked guy, slathered in grease, trying to break into a restaurant.

On the night of April 4, when 26-year-old Robert Kuhn greased himself up and climbed into a exhaust pipe at his former employer, the now-closed Lido restaurant in Springfield, Mass., he probably meant to execute the perfect crime. It was to be a burglary that involved entering but no breaking. Instead, he became exhibit A in the case against Santa Claus delivering presents to restaurants.

That’s because Kuhn didn’t get far down the 2′ x 2′ air shaft before he got stuck. The Boston Herald reports that Lido’s owner, and Kuhn’s old boss, Don Cerasa called the local police to report a pair of legs dangling out of his chimney.

When officers arrived, at about 9:55 pm, Kuhn allegedly told them, “I’m stuck.” A fireman is said to have laughed uncontrollably before helping Kuhn escape.

After Kuhn was freed from the pipe, he was put into the more spacious, but no less absolute, confinement of the back of a cop car. He was charged with breaking and entering after all.

Everyone agrees that Kuhn wasn’t wearing any pants when the police found him or when entered the cop car. It’s not clear, however, when or how he got that way. The Herald implies that Kuhn had removed his pants before entering the shaft, assumedly in a futile effort to reduce friction. But CBS Local News insists that Kuhn had become stuck because he hadn’t removed his pants before entering the shaft. According to the CBS story, the pants became entangled in some manner, which halted Kuhn’s intrepid entry into Lido’s.

I’m not sure that how he ended up pant-less or when is exactly relevant information. But I bet it will be interesting.

But, my hero is this Iowa City man who claimed he ended up drunk and naked because “they” made him hold a nuclear bomb.

No, you read that right.

His excuse was a dud.

A drunk, naked Iowa City man claimed during his arrest on Monday that four unknown assailants forced him to carry a nuclear bomb.

Johnson County cops were responding to a report of a naked man at about 3:30 a.m. when they found 41-year-old William Bliss, who was “excited” and allegedly smashed at the time, the Press-Citizen reported.

Bliss was allegedly stumbling around near his apartment, but made a break for it after he made the wild nuke claim, cops said. A chase ensued, and one officer was injured as Bliss was taken down.

The nude nuker allegedly had a blood-alcohol level of .111 when he got to jail. He admitted that he’d had nine beers and had been drinking vodka throughout the day, according to Fox 47.

Bliss was slapped with charges of interfering with and injuring an officer and public intoxication.

Cops didn’t find a nuclear bomb.

I can’t believe they couldn’t find the bomb. I mean, that almost makes it seem as though the nice man may have not been entirely truthful.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

One of the reasons movies like Independence Day don’t make factual sense, no matter how much fun they are, is that there’s no reason for any group of sentient beings to go anywhere to get raw resources. Every solar system is already full of them. The same holds true here. In fact there’s so much stuff floating around that we could all be kazillionaires if, and this is the catch, we could just get into space and mine the asteroids. Governments can’t afford that kind of research, no matter the possible reward, you can’t afford it and, God knows, my bank isn’t about to toss me a line of credit so that I can go hopping into the wild blue yonder. I know this to be true becasue I asked. It took the nice branch manager an hour to stop laughing and then she needed oxygen.

Now, our old pal Ian O’Neill says that there are a few people who seem to have a couple of free dollars laying around and they are going to shoot some miners into space and see what they find. Think Outland without gun fights and the club full of strippers.

Well, maybe the strippers. They’re always good for morale.

Sorry, I’m getting off target here, I’ll let Ian fill you in.

Now that Google’s top brass, a rich Hollywood director, an astronaut and space entrepreneur are on board, it must mean that asteroid mining is just around the corner! Untold riches are about to flood the streets. Hell, we’ll soon be able to pave those streets in platinum!

Although Tuesday’s exciting announcement that the asteroid mining start-up Planetary Resources has attracted some very high-profile investors and advisers, it’s probably a good idea to take a step back and understand why we don’t already have refineries attached to near-Earth asteroids.

At face value, asteroid mining seems to make a whole world of sense. Ahead of today’s much-hyped announcement, Peter Diamandis, a long-time space entrepreneur, space tourist and founder of the X PRIZE, pointed out that a fairly small asteroid — 30 meters wide, say — could contain platinum worth $25 billion to $50 billion.

“Many of the scarce metals and minerals on Earth are in near-infinite quantities in space. As access to these materials increases, not only will the cost of everything from microelectronics to energy storage be reduced, but new applications for these abundant elements will result in important and novel applications,” he said in the Planetary Resources press release.

Forget the California Gold Rush of the 19th century, there’s an unlimited supply of gold in the solar system. What’s more, asteroids have very weak gravitational fields, so we could send spaceships to build a refineries on these interplanetary interlopers and send back chunks of refined minerals very cheaply — we wouldn’t have to worry about exorbitant launch costs as there’s no gravitational well to launch out of. As you may have guessed, this is why everyone wants to mine asteroids and not the moon or Mars.

Platinum and gold to one side, asteroids are thought to contain untold riches held in other precious metals and rare minerals — asteroids, after all, are built from the same “stuff” as Earth (albeit in varying quantities) as they were formed in the same proto-planetary disk of material when the sun was a baby. It’s reasonable to say that if we have the technology and if we can establish a mining outfit in space, the first company to do so could have access to resources that would make today’s oil companies drool.

But Planetary Resources isn’t just going to build the world’s first refinery tomorrow. Like the majority of commercial space companies, they are going to take an incremental approach to the endeavor, building an observation satellite first and then developing new technologies for robotic probes that could autonomously prospect nearby asteroid candidates. They hope to make some profit along the way to develop the next technology needed to reach their ultimate goal.

It is known that asteroids contain water, so the first operation carried out on asteroids probably wouldn’t be mining per se, it’ll be extracting water and refining it for spaceship fuel. One of the costliest things to launch into space is propellant for in-space maneuvers; if there’s a supply of fuel already floating in orbital “fuel stops,” cheap and sustainable spaceflight may be possible — the spin-off technology potential seems more exciting than asteroid mining itself.

“Water is perhaps the most valuable resource in space,” said Eric Anderson, co-founder of Planetary Resources. “Accessing a water-rich asteroid will greatly enable the large-scale exploration of the solar system. In addition to supporting life, water will also be separated into oxygen and hydrogen for breathable air and rocket propellant.”

As discussed in previous articles about finding ways to invigorate the development of a sustainable low-Earth orbit infrastructure, we need an ultimate goal. If the goal is making money from asteroid mining, it would be desirable to have a low-cost means of launching equipment into space. This would invigorate competition between private rocket companies, in turn spurring a new era of launch technology development. Ideally.

Science will also be done — in the pursuit of prospecting asteroids, incredible insights to these primordial chunks of space rock will be acquired. Docking with, and perhaps even controlling the trajectory of asteroids would be beneficial to any asteroid mining outfit — all of a sudden we are developing an asteroid impact mitigation infrastructure, all in the pursuit of the ultimate goal of making money.

In the pursuit of profit, very real technological advancements may be possible. For example, Elon Musk, billionaire entrepreneur and SpaceX founder, has built a rocket company from the ground up. Granted, he’s done it with a lot of help from NASA and government contracts, but he is seeing a future profit in launching satellites and carrying out space station resupply runs.

Recently, Musk also announced plans for a commercial route in getting humanity to Mars. Like mining asteroids, getting to Mars is a long-term, lofty goal; so long as there is money to be made from developing the technology to reach that goal, these private space enterprises have a fighting chance of getting there.

So Planetary Resources’ premise isn’t unreasonable, but there are many cons to these few pros.

We Don’t Have the Tech

The biggest hurdle facing any hopeful space mining company is that we don’t have the ability to refine precious metals and rare minerals in a microgravity environment. Every asteroid mining plan in the past has come with a huge caveat: we don’t have the technology. This may not seem like a huge hurdle — especially considering the amazing feats of human ingenuity in space technology over the past six decades — for investors who actually want to see a return on their investment, it’s probably a deal breaker.

Perhaps it’s not desirable to refine asteroids in situ — might it make sense to capture asteroids in Earth orbit and use them as a near-Earth smorgasbord of resources, cutting off chunks as needed? In this case, I’m highly skeptical that there would be any international agreement about steering potential city-killer asteroids near Earth. That’s one Planetary Health and Safety meeting I’d love to sit in on.

Also, Planetary Resources specifically single out near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) as their target. “Of the approximately 9,000 known NEAs, there are more than 1,500 that are energetically as easy to reach as the Moon,” says the press release. This may be true, but NEAs don’t hang around. They orbit the sun just like the Earth. So is the plan to jump on board, set up a mining platform and then watch billions of dollars of equipment zoom off into deep space until it comes back a year (or ten, or a hundred years) in the future? Or are we going to slow the small NEAs sufficiently so they can be parked in Earth orbit? Once again, messing with an asteroid’s trajectory is a huge technological unknown.

During the announcement, Diamandis kept referring to “risk tolerant investors” investing their “smart money” in the biggest opportunity ever. He also emphasized that Planetary Resources’ goals would enrich humanity as a whole and that their goals were in alignment with NASA’s aims to push humanity into space. Bold words for sure, but, again, there are problems with this vision.

Countering the “Gee Whiz” factor, as my cohort and business/space analyst Greg Fish would put it, there’s a thick forest of formidable red tape an asteroid mining company would have to wade through.

For starters, mining and refining materials on Earth is a costly and risky endeavor. Can you imagine trying to insure an extraterrestrial mining outfit? If the refinery is totally automated, at least you don’t have to worry about workers’ benefits, health and safety. But humanity would need to have mastered our solar system to an incredible degree to assure the safety of in-space assets. Losing a multi-billion dollar robotic mining operation wouldn’t look so good at the end of the next quarter’s budget report.

But the biggest selling point for asteroid mining is, of course, all the gazillions of dollars we stand to make from sucking precious metals like platinum from asteroids. As Diamandis kept emphasizing, by exploiting the solar system we would enrich the entire planet with huge wealth. How a profit-making industry became a world-wide charity, I’m not too sure. Last time I checked, BP wasn’t busy enriching the world with the profits from their oil drilling.

And, as Fish has pointed out countless times, flooding the world’s economy with much-fabled trillions of dollars-worth of “cheap” platinum and other rare minerals could kill global markets. On the basis of supply and demand, the price of platinum group metals could collapse as supply routes from asteroids become common.

However, to set up and maintain an asteroid mining industry, it would be unimaginatively expensive — perhaps the price of asteroid material would be naturally high due to the sheer risk and overheads required. In short, we have no idea about how an influx of asteroid resources could impact the world. But to say it would benefit mankind as a whole? That’s as speculative as predicting the world’s economy in 50 years time.

In short, the only thing that seems unique about today’s announcement is that a group of very well respected and smart entrepreneurs and billionaires have clubbed together and thought asteroid mining seemed cool.

Sadly, the plan is deliberately vague (who knows how many technological iterative steps are needed before a sustainable mining operation can begin anyway?), there is no realistic timescale and as far as I can tell, there’s been only limited analysis as to how much investment will be needed.

Regardless of how “risk tolerant” Google’s investment may be, the corporation certainly isn’t stupid with their investments. Seed money may be very forthcoming in the early stages (and that’s all that may be needed if Planetary Resources turns rapidly into a profit making space technology company), but in the long term, hinging this enterprise on making vast wads of imaginary cash from mining asteroids will leave any investor looking for a way out.

While I’m personally very excited to hear about any enterprise that can drive innovation in space and invigorate private investment into building a sustainable space infrastructure, I don’t believe that getting all hot and heavy over mining asteroids is the way to do it. Although I hope asteroid mining is an industry of the future, we’ll have to wait some time before it becomes a realistic proposition. Setting unachievable goals for an undefined future — regardless of the amazing technological advances this will inevitably generate — leaves the plan open to criticism and ultimately rapid loss of interest.

I think I’ll wait until one of the big oil companies starts to launch rockets before I go getting too excited about yet another plan to pillage asteroids.

Oh, c’mon, he got to use the word “pillage” in a serious article about science. How freaking cool is that? I almost want to go out and buy a Viking outfit or something.

Let’s be honest, the underlying technology to get a large group into space already exists. We have the rocket technology, we can build ships large enough to contain the crew and, unlike in the movie Alien, we don’t need to put anyone to sleep to get them from here to there. In fact the crew would have plenty of time, and reasons, to get to know the space strippers.

Plus, be honest, Seven Dwarf Miners and their Space Strippers would be a movie that you would pay to see.

Twice.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

Before I mount my usual wild eyed screed against whatever caught my minimal attention, I thought I’d mention something nice. A young lady named Corina Jane was diagnosed with cancer. “HEY MR. HAPPY THOUGHT …..” Relax. She’s fine. In fact she’s so fine that she’s been selected to represent the Chicago Rush at the Arena Bowl. That is some serious amount of fine.. And, ladies, you can knock it down a notch too. She’s hopelessly devoted to her boy toy. All she needs is for all of you to click on her name and help her get the fan votes she’ll need to go to Louisiana and represent the Windy City. You can handle that task. Since we are on the topic of hot women and Chicago sports I feel it is only fair to take a quick glance at what has been happening at the Cell.You see there is this wonderful statue of Louis Aprecio outside the park. He is smiling. He is bent forward. His right hand cupped to grasp the ball. Said hand is at the perfect height to also grasp a woman’s breast. So, every home game, hundreds of women, some en flagrante some not, pop their breasts into Louis’ outstretched hand and get their picture taken. in case that wasn’t clear enough for you the Sun Times ran a pic.

BOO YAH!

Enough of that, let’s talk about criminals. Swedish police arrested a man for stealing a beer truck. They were able to arrest him because he was so drunk when he stole the truck he forgot to close the back of it and they just followed the trail of broken bottles all the way to his house. He has since pleaded guilty to all charges.

Police in Gainsvile Florida may have heard the ultimate excuse for why a criminal fled the scene of a crime. He had to run because he had the runs.

Police in Florida said a man told them he fled the scene of an accident and went to a Walmart because he “had the runs.”

Gainesville police said Barnard Cato III was arrested Tuesday and charged with driving under the influence, hit and run and a felony count of leaving the scene of an accident involving injury after he struck another occupied vehicle and a few newspaper boxes around 7:15 a.m. Tuesday and left the scene, The Gainesville Sun reported Thursday.

Police found Cato a few minutes later at a Walmart, where he told officers he did not realize he had hit the other vehicle and he “pulled into the next stop. … I had the runs, I had to go,” he said.

Officers said Cato had a “strong odor of alcohol emanating from his breath and clothing” and his eyes were “bloodshot and watery.”

Cato declined to submit to a breathalyzer test.

Speaking of drunks, let’s move no to drunks with guns. They are always the most fun. Cops in Idaho arrested a man in Utah for forcing a victim to moonwalk at gunpoint.

A 30-year-old Idaho resident was charged with felony assault when he took his love of dance a step too far and allegedly forced another man to perform Michael Jackson’s always-tricky moonwalk routine at gunpoint.

According to a report in the Coeur d’Alene Press, sheriff’s deputies arrived at the home of John Ernest Cross on Monday after being informed he was using drugs and had ordered another man to make with the moves made famous by the late King of Pop — or else.

On Tuesday, Cross’ bail was set at $20,000, and he was ordered not to contact the other man.

NOW! ELECTRIC BOOGALOO!

Or not.

Also on the west coast, cops in Washington State arrested a burglar who called the victims and offered to trade some of the stuff he stole for the stuff he’d left behind. Like his ID. Even though he told them not to call the cops, they did so anyway said the police who made the arrest. Well, they did arrest him after they stopped laughing at him.

The one thing that stands out in the police report is that they mention, three times, how polite he was.

On the east coast crooks have a better sense of how things work. Cops in NY are looking for a hooker who, allegedly, drugged a diamond merchant and stole $500,000 worth of sparklers. So, if you know a hooker named Erika Cooper, 34, aka Bianca Williams in New York, she’s buying the next round.

Back on the west coast, a woman is suing McDonald’s for forcing her into prostitution, giving a whole new meaning to being Supersized. She claims they were complicit with her husband running a prostitution ring out of his Nevada franchise. But not his L.A. one. Oddly enough this is not the only McDonald’s related story involving a prostitute. Cops in Oklahoma are investigating the disappearance of an internet hooker who went missing at a local Mickey D’s after she showed up there to fulfill an online contract.

I may have to rethink my usual aversion to McDonald’s.

Or not.

Cops in Indianapolis are doing their level best to keep the world safe. They arrested a 6 year terrorist who threatened his principal.

Police in a small Indiana town hauled a six-year-old from his elementary school and charged him with battery and intimidation after he kicked and threatened a principal, police said on Wednesday.

The incident followed one earlier in April where police handcuffed a 6-year-old girl who was screaming and crying and had injured a principal and damaged property at an elementary school in Milledgeville, Georgia. She was not charged.

The Indiana student, who had been suspended from school recently for biting and hitting a staff member, was arrested April 18 at Hendricks Elementary School in Shelbyville, which is about 30 miles southeast of Indianapolis.

“This was not an isolated incident,” Shelbyville Police Lieutenant Michael Turner said.

School officials called police, reporting that the student, who was not identified, had kicked Principal Patrick Lumbley and told him and Assistant Principal Jessica Poe that he was going to kill them, a Shelbyville police report said.

The student was yelling and screaming and lying on the floor of Poe’s office when police arrived, the report said.

Poe led the student to a police car where an officer placed him in the back seat, buckled him in and drove him to the police department, the report said. He was not handcuffed.

Turner said he hoped the filing of juvenile charges would help get the child needed help.

“Putting him into the system can open up avenues perhaps the parents don’t have,” Turner said.

Really? The only way this college graduate and leader of children can come up with to get this kid the obvious help he needs is to have him arrested? Have things gotten that bad in Cornville?

If so that’s the kind of thing that would lead people to become activists. Especially anti-violence pro-education activists. And that strong, pacifist based stance would then lead them to slash tires and terrorize a city.

Wait? What?

Off to Philly we go.

A neighborhood activist who spoke out about the vandalizing of dozens of cars near his home now has been arrested in the case, police say.

At a press conference Wednesday evening, police said Toledo had been arrested and charged with two counts of felony mischief, 47 counts of criminal mischief, false reports and other related offenses.

Police say they questioned Toledo extensively on April 16, the same day the most recent vandalism was reported on Aldine and Teesdale Streets as a dozen or so more cars were targeted.

Toledo has spoken to NBC10 several times since coverage of tire slashings in the area of the 4000 block of Aldine Street and surrounding roads began to surface in February. The vandalism dates back even further than that, according to neighbors.

“I hope the cops get them before the neighbors find out who it is because something bad is going to happen,” Toledo said after some cars were vandalized in mid-March. “My wife said ‘somebody is watching us, watching the cops’ because when they’re here nothing happens.”

Now police say that it was Toledo who was causing sleepless nights for neighbors concerned that their cars would be vandalized while they slept. A town watch was formed and police even offered a big reward for an arrest in the case.

All along, Toledo, who lives on Aldine Street, was there speaking out against the vandalism.

“This will be the last time that you’re going to get my car because you will get caught,” Toledo told NBC10 after just his tires were slashed on March 20. “The $10,000 reward, I don’t want the money, all I want is their hands so I can smash them so they can never do it again.”

It’s unclear if Toledo is responsible for all the area vandalism but police do believe he at least committed some of the tire slashings on Teesdale, Aldine and Erdrick Streets, McGinnis said.

NBC10 also spoke exclusively with Toledo’s mother, who reacted strongly to her son’s arrest.

“I think he’s being set up,” she said. “He doesn’t go around slashing tires. He’s got better things to do in life — he’s got a life!”

The local town watch program Toledo claimed to be a part of held a meeting at 7 p.m. at Frankford and Aldine. In spite of Toledo’s claims, the town watch says he was never a member of their organization.

Philadelphia Police urged neighbors who feel betrayed by Toledo to not take matters into their own hands.

“Let the justice system take care of Mr. Toledo,” said Capt. Frank Bachmayer. “We don’t want any type of retaliation.”

Which is why they are making it real easy to get his home address and directions.

Oy.

Oh well, the world may not be any safer, even with the arrests listed above, but at least they keep me gainfully employed.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

Those of you who stop by here regularly know that I have a lot of fun at the expense of stupid people. Usually, hilarious though they may be, they are only a danger to themselves and their immediate surroundings. Like the lady from Michigan who was so excited by being able to send a text message that she fell off a pier and into Lake Michigan. She was kept afloat by a savvy teen and her hubby until the Coast Guard arrived and, once they stopped laughing, rescued her. Or maybe you’re thrilled by the residents of Simi Valley, California who have passed a law forcing porn stars to wear condoms when they shoot, as it were, their films. They did this becasue L.A. had already passsed a similar law and they were worried that porn stars would flee the City of Angels and flock to their bucolic home and spoil it with an AIDS epidemic. Obviously, as you all can imagine, adult entertainers want nothing more than to catch a fatal disease and die a wasting death. Why it’s more fun than Yahtzee.

However, if you DO want to die a wasting death but find that having sex with random strangers on videotape really isn’t your cup of tea, then you can thank your local deity for Snooki and her “Let’s all catch skin cancer together” U.S. tour. She has a wonderful variety of aids, as it were, to help you embrace a horrible, and very public, form of cancer. Make sure to get there early so you can get your picture taken with her too.

Still, each of those idiocies are limited in their scope and impact. Racism is not. And it’s been rearing its ugly head under many guises ranging from “social awareness” to “political astuteness.”

Those new monikers aren’t fooling anyone. Racism is racism. And what it is is proof that the person espousing it is afraid. Afraid of things that go bump in the night. Afraid of anyone who looks or acts different than them.

I have no idea what it would be like to live in soul crushing fear of the real world around me and, if you don’t mind, I have no intention of finding out. I have learned to like people from all walks of life. That comes from the fact that I always have taken the time to get to know each person. It’s hard to hate “__________ people” when one of them has made you a glorious breakfast or shared a family moment with you.

When you can no longer maintain the “evil group” as an entity and it becomes a tangible reality of a person, racism dies. That is why racists want to separate themselves from humanity. They don’t build their compounds or gated communities to purify their race or maintain their culture, they build them to hide from the world like the scared little creatures they are.

Which is their loss. But, lately, they have been sneaking back into and polluting the world around us. And that has led a man named David Pilgrim to open the most astonishing museum ever. The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia.

The objects displayed in Michigan’s newest museum range from the ordinary, such as simple ashtrays and fishing lures, to the grotesque — a full-size replica of a lynching tree. But all are united by a common theme: They are steeped in racism so intense that it makes visitors cringe.

That’s the idea behind the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, which says it has amassed the nation’s largest public collection of artifacts spanning the segregation era, from Reconstruction until the civil rights movement, and beyond.

The museum in a gleaming new exhibit hall at Ferris State University “is all about teaching, not a shrine to racism,” said David Pilgrim, the founder and curator who started building the collection as a teenager.

Pilgrim, who is black, makes no apologies for the provocative exhibits. The goal of the $1.3 million gallery, he explained, is “to get people to think deeply.”

The displays are startling. The n-word is prevalent throughout, and many items portray black men as lazy, violent or inarticulate. Black women are shown as kerchief-wearing mammies, sexually charged Jezebels or other stereotypes.

The shocking images exact an emotional cost.

“There’s parts in that room — the main room — where it’s quite gut-wrenching,” said Nancy Mettlach, a student conduct specialist at Ferris. “And the thought that was going through my mind was: `How can one human being do this to another human being?'”

Pilgrim, a former sociology professor at Ferris State, started the collection in the 1970s in Alabama. Along the way, he “spent more time in antique and flea markets than the people who work there.” His quest for more examples was boundless.

“At some point, the collecting becomes the thing,” he said. “It became the way I relaxed.” He spent most of his free time and money on acquisitions.

In 1996, Pilgrim donated his 2,000-piece collection to the school after concluding that it “needed a real home.”

The collection spent the next 15 years housed in a single room and could be seen only by appointment. Thanks to the financial support of the university and donors — notably from the charitable arm of Detroit utility DTE Energy — Pilgrim’s collection now has a permanent home, which will have a grand opening ceremony April 26. Admission is free.

Today, the school has 9,000 pieces that depict African-Americans in stereotypical ways and, in some cases, glorify violence against them.

Not all of the museum’s holdings are on display, but the 3,500-square-foot space in the lower level of the university library is packed with items that demonstrate how racist ideas and anti-black images dominated American culture for decades.

Visitors can forget about touring the exhibits and retiring untroubled to a cafe or gift shop. Some leave angry or offended. Most feel a kind of “reflective sadness,” Pilgrim said.

But that’s not enough. If the museum “stayed at that, then we failed,” he said. “The only real value of the museum has ever been to really engage people in a dialogue.”

So Pilgrim designed the tour to give visitors a last stop in a “room of dialogue,” where they’re encouraged to discuss what they’ve seen and how the objects might be used to promote tolerance and social justice.

Some of the objects in the museum are a century old. Others were made as recently as this year.

Ferris State sophomore Nehemiah Israel was particularly troubled by a series of items about President Barack Obama.

One T-shirt on display reads: “Any White Guy 2012.” Another shirt that says “Obama ’08” is accompanied by a cartoon monkey holding a banana. A mouse pad shows robe-wearing Ku Klux Klan members chasing an Obama caricature above the words, “Run Obama Run.”

“I was like, `Wow. People still think this. This is crazy,'” Israel said.

One of the first rooms in the museum features a full-size replica of a tree with a lynching noose hanging from it. Several feet away, a television screen shows a video of racist images through the years.

The location of the museum — in the shadow of university founder Woodbridge Ferris’ statue — also catches some by surprise. The mostly white college town of Big Rapids is 150 miles from Detroit, the state’s largest predominantly black city.

Ferris, who later served as Michigan governor and as a U.S. senator, founded the school more than a century ago. He once said Americans should work to provide an “education for all children, all men and all women.”

Pilgrim, who is also Ferris State’s vice president for diversity and inclusion, initially considered giving his collection to a historically black college, but he wanted to be “near it enough to make sure it was taken care of.”

Most of the objects “are anti-black caricatures, everyday objects or they are segregationist memorabilia,” he said. Because they represent a cruel, inflammatory past, they “should either be in a garbage can or a museum.”

___

Follow Mike Householder on Twitter at www.twitter.com/mikehouseholder

Online:

Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia: www.ferris.edu/jimcrow

I’m glad he put it where he did. If it was in an all black college it could be ignored easier by the media. Now it can’t be passed over as “black people talking about black stuff.” Ferris University is very diverse and easily accessible. Hopefully this can get a real conversation started.

And then, one day, we can all look back on it and wonder what the hell people were thinking.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

A long time ago in a land far, far away …. well, 1980 and a suburb to be named later to be specific, I was driving a borrowed motorcycle with a young lady on the back. She thought it would be great fun for all involved if we had a little naughty moment while I drove. And she was right. Well, she was right up until I hit a small pothole which caused her to bite down which caused me to scream and lose control of the bike which caused the bike to end up in a laundromat. I bring this up so that you will understand that I am qualified to talk about stupid things people do while driving. I am also qualified to talk about bad taste as anyone who saw my wardrobe in the 70’s can attest. I went in for orange suits and bell bottoms with prints. That being said, even I would have avoided the Helen Keller sunglasses with the company motto “You see the world, the world sees you.” Also, I feel, based on the above, qualified to talk about bad judgement. NY native, Brianna, has made a You Tube offer to have sex with the last person selected in the NFL draft. Since there is no rule that says the person drafted last has to be male, or human for that matter, I’m hoping whoever holds that pick has some fun.

A cow went to McDonald’s. Insert your own jokes here.

Anyway, mooooooving on, (oh, you knew that was coming), let’s talk about the smart lady who jumped out of racing van as her loving spouse drove it off a cliff.

A California woman was forced to jump from a speeding van, because her husband was driving towards a cliff in order to escape from police.

Malibu cops say that Michael Kheop, 44, started to flee in the stolen van at about 1:30 p.m. on Friday during a traffic stop. His wife Meru was in the passenger seat. and she told CBS2 that she wanted him to surrender and assured him that everything would be all right.

But Kheop wanted to get away and allegedly turned toward a 200-foot cliff.

“I said … ‘Get out of the car, we can handle this,'” Meru Kheop told the station. “He said, ‘Get out,’ and I opened the door, and then that’s when the car turned.”

“I jumped when it was about to go down,” she added.

She made it just in time. Her spouse cascaded down the grassy cliff, but miraculously survived. He eluded cops a second time by allegedly hiding in the brush.

The van was smashed, KTLA reported.

Cops searched for him for five hours. He had escaped — until Meru Kheop heard a knock at her window that evening. It was Michael, but Meru didn’t let him in. She called police who arrested him without incident.

Police charged him with attempted murder for endangering his wife and car theft. His bail was set at $100,000.

It must have been a really wonderful van to go through all that. And, even in California, I’m betting she now has valid grounds for divorce.

In unrelated news, a blind guy built a sports car in his garage. He had time on his hands and seems to be a lonely, bitter soul, so this kept him occupied.

No, he still isn’t allowed to drive it.

Quick funny, a gun instructor in Virginia shot himself and his wife with the same bullet. Even in Virginia, I’m betting she now has valid grounds for divorce.

In Romania, you’ll be pleased to learn, driving a motorcycle naked is legal. Driving it without a helmet is not.

A Romanian policeman pulled over a woman who was riding pillion naked on a motorcycle – and booked her for failing to wear a helmet.

The woman was not wearing a stitch but the traffic officer said it was the only offence that he had authorisation to book her for.

Motorists got out their smartphones to take photographs of the eye-catching biker who was pulled over in Constanta.

And, after accepting her punishment, she donned a helmet before continuing her journey – still naked.

“The officer was a traffic cop and the only traffic offence she’d committed was in not wearing a helmet,” one witness told Romanian media.

“So he gave her a warning and a ticket and told her and her companion to ride on,” they added.

Yes, there’s a pic of the young lady if you click the link. Let’s just say she wears naked well and move on.

New Yorkers are having a heck of a time with drivers having sex in their cars. It has actually become a problem severe enough to warrant police intervention.

New Yorkers are getting fed up with clubgoers who make hanky panky inside of parked cars. Residents between Seventh and Eighth Avenues around West 30th Street say randy partiers are having sex in cars, leaving condoms on the street, honking car horns at all hours … you get the idea. So the neighbors have convinced a community board to back a request for a no-parking area on weekend nights, the New York Post reports. The board can’t enforce the ban, but has petitioned city leaders to take action. One club on the strip is already in hot water after the State Liquor Authority denied its request to renew its liquor license. Facing possible closure, The Parlour owner Rocco Sergio has promised to resolve problems with the community, saying, “I had no idea that anything like that was going on.” Says one longtime resident: “Every night when they close, there is controlled riot.”

Guys I hate to break it to you but the only thing saving you from people just straight up fucking on the streets might be those cars. Those foggy windows are the only thing between you and live sex shows on the streets. Because generally speaking if you are stumbling out of a club and can’t wait to get back to someone’s apartment and you’re willing to fuck in the car, you’re not going to be stopped. Sex in alleys or secret hand jobs on the corner, whatever. At that stage in the game people aren’t being denied. So I guess if you change the parking laws, you’ll avoid the honking horns. But people ain’t gonna stop fucking any time soon.

Its like the old saying “You can take the cars out of the neighborhood where people want to fuck, but you can’t take the want to fuck in cars out of the people in your neighborhood.” Right? Makes sense? Good.

Back in the day the only place we young-uns could have sex was in a car. But we had the decency to find some place private first.

Of course, we didn’t have the advantage of having a police escort every time we wanted to drive our Ferrari’s really fast either, so we had to make do with our Impalas behind a factory.

Two state troopers have been suspended over allegations they provided an “unauthorized escort” to a group of sports cars — including one driven by football star Brandon Jacobs — driving at high speeds in New Jersey.

The convoy of cars, including Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches and others, traveled at speeds in excess of 100 mph down the Garden State Parkway to Atlantic City last month, according to The Star-Ledger newspaper. They also traveled on the New Jersey Turnpike and Atlantic City Expressway.

The paper said witnesses had made complaints to police about the caravan — which one witness dubbed “Death Race 2012″ — saying they saw patrol cars with emergency lights flashing at the front and rear of the sports cars.

The Star-Ledger also obtained amateur video footage of a caravan of luxury cars allegedly being escorted by state police at high speed on the Garden State Parkway in 2010. It is not known which officers were involved in this convoy.

A statement released late Monday by the attorney general’s office said Sgt. First Class Nadir Nassry, 47, a trooper for 25 years, and Trooper Joseph Ventrella, 28, who has six years’ service, had been suspended without pay in relation to the incident last month.

An unnamed station commander was also transferred “until any potential involvement on his part has been determined,” the statement said.

“We will not tolerate any conduct by a member of the State Police that puts the public in jeopardy, as this unauthorized caravan had the potential to do,” Attorney General Jeffrey S. Chiesa said, according to the statement. “We are thoroughly investigating this incident, and those responsible will face serious discipline.”

Lt. Stephen Jones, a spokesman for the state police, said investigators would be looking to see if there were any incidents in addition to the one last month and the one in 2010.

“You better believe they are looking hard to see if there are any more; they are certainly checking that,” he told msnbc.com.

Charles Sciarra, an attorney representing Nassry, said in an email that state police officials had canceled a scheduled interview with his client and “simply suspended him without pay.”

“This change of course was taken only after tabloid-like headlines appeared on the cover of Star Ledger over the last two days. The headlines scream ‘Death Race 2012’ when in fact these charitable organizations routinely ask and receive escorts from the State Police to and from the various charitable functions they attend with their exotic vehicles,” Sciarra said. “This practice has been in effect for years.”

Really? Why? I mean if you want to have a cop act as security for your function you better be ready to write a nice sized check. I know that since I have hired them many times during my life. So why do these rich tools get a free escort every time they want to drive around at 100 mph?

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

We all know there are things we probably shouldn’t do. I’m not just talking about some tawdry night in a bar that goes wrong and right at the same time. No, I’m talking about those decisions we make while allegedly sober. For example, some people, mostly teenagers, seem to think that putting an ice cube on a hand full of salt is big fun. And it is as long as you’re a fan of major burns. Other kids like to try the cinnamon challenge because nothing says “good times” like puking up enough red dust to look like you’re an extra in Dune. And before you go off railing against the idiocies of public education, I should note that Lela Davidson from MSNBC has had to deal with her kids falling prey to this stuff.

When I noticed the dark brown wound on the back of my 13-year-old son’s hand, he explained that he had burnt himself with salt and ice. “I just wanted to see if it would work,” he said. “It didn’t even hurt.” When my shock turned to anger, he implicated his 11-year-old sister as an accomplice. I had apparently raised not one, but two, “gifted” children.

Why would honor students with no history of drug use or brain disorders maim themselves in the name of curiosity? They saw it on YouTube, naturally.

Hollye Grayson, M.A., MFT, works extensively with Los Angeles teens and she points out that our hyper-social society allows teens to emulate kids they would not associate with in person. These virtual peers can provide real validation.

“It’s a cool factor,” she says. “‘Look how cool that is. Look how many hits, how many people are looking at that cool thing he did.’” Even high achieving kids may crave this kind of attention. It’s different from the approval they receive from parents and teachers. “Before YouTube we didn’t have to worry about something like this. This is clearly a big problem now, with these kids copying these crazy things.”

After the salt and ice incident, I talked with my daughter and a friend who had tried similar feats, like the cinnamon challenge, she saw on YouTube. The friend told me that kids copy the videos because they are funny, and because they want to prove for themselves that the results in the video really happen. This was the reason my own children had given for the idiotic stunt. I asked if she applied the same logic to trying drugs. “Oh, no way,” she assured me. “They teach us about drugs at school. They don’t teach about this stuff.”

As if teachers don’t have enough to do.

Ah yes, because as well all know, teachers are woefully overpaid and under-worked.

But, then again, a little pro-active education might have prevented this fiasco. Ravshan “Ronnie” Usmanov became one of the few people convicted of posting revenge porn.

When he posted his ex-girlfriend’s nude pictures on Facebook three months after their split, Ravshan ”Ronnie” Usmanov, 20, probably wasn’t thinking “Hey, this is my ticket to six months house arrest as the first social network-related conviction in Australian history!”

A similar thought probably wasn’t going through the unidentified ex either when, during a happier time in their relationship, she posed for the pics: “Hey, this is my ticket to Facebook humiliation!”

Yet for both, that’s exactly what happened. The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

The six pictures, according to court documents, showed his ex-girlfriend ”nude in certain positions and clearly showing her breasts and genitalia.

Shortly after posting the pictures on his Facebook page in October last year, Usmanov emailed his girlfriend with the message: ”Some of your photos are now on Facebook.” She had ended their relationship and moved out of their shared home less than three months earlier.

The woman, who the Sun-Herald has chosen not to identify, ran to Usmanov’s flat at Pyrmont, demanding he take down the pictures. When he refused, she called the police.

Usmanov’s lawyer said her client’s crime was not a “serious offense,” according to court documents — a claim on which sentencing Deputy-Chief Magistrate Jane Mottley quickly called shenanigans.

”What could be more serious than publishing nude photographs of a woman on the Internet, what could be more serious?” Mottley said in court records.
Describing a type of reputation decimation both unique and common to the Internet age, Mottley explained, ”It’s one thing to publish an article in print form with limited circulation. That may affect the objective seriousness of the offense but once it goes on the World Wide Web via Facebook, it effectively means it’s open to anyone who has some link in any way, however remotely.”

Mottley’s words are probably echoed by more than a few victims of recently shuttered U.S. “revenge porn” website Is Anyone Up, which the Village Voice recently described as “a virtual grudge slingshot of a website that gleefully publishes ‘revenge porn’ photos — cellphone nudes submitted by scorned exes, embittered friends, malicious hackers and other ne’er-do-well degenerates — posted alongside each unsuspecting subject’s full name, social-media profile and city of residence.”

My first thought is “Really? You’re that freaking petty? No wonder she dumped you.”

That is also my second thought.

My third would run along the lines that there should be jail time attached to actions such as these.

After all, Clown Red, could get five years for stealing a soda.

Well, it was in a Florida McDonald’s, a place where they REALLY REALLY prize their soda.

It was the ultimate heist: ask for a free cup for water, but fill it with soda.

That’s the alleged plot that 52-year-old Mark Abaire hatched on Thursday before he was caught by Florida McDonald’s employees and charged with felony theft, the Naples Daily News reported.

Abaire — whose aliases include Red, Clown Red and Clown — entered the Naples franchise at about 10 p.m. and asked for a cup of water. Then he allegedly snuck some pop into the cup, despite a conversation with an employee that he couldn’t do so, the Sun Sentinel reported.

The soda was valued at $1.

“Clown Red” allegedly refused to leave the burger joint, so a manager called cops.

Abaire was charged with felony petty theft because he had previous theft convictions, among other crimes. He was also charged with misdemeanor counts of trespassing and disorderly conduct. He faces five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.

Well, Red can thank his lucky stars he didn’t try that crap in Georgia. Police there report that Granny Lulu got into a shootout with some thugs and messed them up good.

Authorities in Georgia say a grandmother foiled a robbery attempt by two armed men by getting into a shootout with them, injuring one man.

Police told The Telegraph that Lulu Campbell just dropped off her grandson at her daughter’s house early Saturday morning when someone demanded money outside her car, threatening to shoot her.

Campbell says the man fired at her, missing. The 57-year-old fired back, striking him in the chest. Her truck sustained eight bullet holes in the hood, one in the grill. Both front side windows were destroyed. The second man fled after she shot at him.

Campbell, who owns convenience stores and gas stations, always is armed.

Police say 32-year-old Brenton Lance Spencer has been hospitalized and was charged with aggravated assault and attempted armed robbery.

Well, good for her.

I have no problems with guns, I just think that a little firearm education can go a long way and prevent tragedies like this one. Steven Egan, a Floridian in case you needed to be told that, shot his girlfriend.

Why? Good question.

Becasue he thought she was a wild hog.

A Florida hunter accidentally shot his girlfriend thinking that she was his target — a wild hog.

Cops said that Brandon man Steven Egan, 52, was hunting from a tent in Flagler County on Saturday when Egan heard a noise that he thought was similar to that of his prey. He took a shot at it, not realizing his significant other wasn’t in the tent with him, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

The shot sent a .30-caliber rifle bullet through both of 52-year-old Lisa Simmons’ legs. Simmons was airlifted to the hospital where she was recovering from surgery on Sunday, the News-Journal reported.

Egan maintained that he fired in the first place because he had seen a real hog just minutes before the accidental shooting, WFTV reported. No charges were filed.

“No honey, I didn’t say you looked like a pig, just that you rutted like one.”

You know what, I bet they get married and use that as one of those “How we fell in love” stories at church.

But, no matter what you do, allow me to be the first to tell you that you should never order Hand Shredded Ass Meat. And, yes, this is an issue that may come up in your life.

Overseas tourists often find the menus here befuddling, for good reason.

After all, what Westerner has experience with foods like these? “Cowboy leg,” “Hand-shredded ass meat,” “Red-burned lion head,” “Strange flavor noodles,” “Blow-up flatfish with no result,” or “Tofu made by woman with freckles.”

As proud as the Chinese people are of their thousands of years of gastronomic culture, even a Chinese native can feel disoriented when going to another province, given all the different styles of cooking. Many of the food names, often unique to different provinces, get lost in translation, especially in booming cities starting to embrace overseas tourists.

With few English speakers, restaurants usually translate their menus word by word directly from an English-Chinese dictionary. Or they just Google the Chinese characters. A photo that made the rounds online a few years ago got a chuckle from a lot of people: a restaurant with a large “page not found” sign above its door as its English name.

But the Beijing Municipal government hopes to end such unintended jokes with its new guidebook intended for the public and restaurants alike, “Enjoy Culinary Delights: The English Translation of Chinese Menus.”

The effort began in 2006 with a “Beijing speaks English” campaign. By the 2008 Summer Olympics, officials had created a draft guide with translations for major restaurants to meet the demand for arriving athletes and tourists.

“After 2008, we felt like the book was in a good demand, so we kept working on it and collected more menus. Finally we translated over 2,000 Chinese dish names,” said Xiang Ping, deputy chief of the “Beijing speaks English” committee, in an interview with NBC News.

Some of the dishes kept their original names, which people familiar with Chinese food may understand: jiaozi, baozi, mantou, tofu or wonton.

Some more complicated dishes come with both Chinese pronunciations and explanations: “fotiaoqiang” (steamed abalone with shark’s fin and fish maw in broth); “youtiao” (deep-fried dough sticks); “lvdagunr” (glutinous rice rolls stuffed with red bean paste), and “aiwowo” (steamed rice cakes with sweet stuffing).

Chen Lin, a 90-year-old retired English professor from Beijing Foreign Language University, was the chief consultant for the book.

He told NBC News that about 20 other experts – like English teachers and professors, translators, expats who have lived in China for a long time, culinary experts and people from the media – helped develop the final version.

So next time you’re in Beijing and you are confronted with a menu item like “hand shredded ass meat,” hopefully you can crack open the book to get some guidance. It means “hand shredded donkey meat.”

Oh, it’s donkey meat? Well, that’s okay then.

NOT!!!!!!!!

So, in review, avoid teenagers, revenge porn, Floridians and guns. Oh, and Hand Shredded Ass Meat. Can’t forget that.

And if you’re not sure, go shopping with the Hippoteers.

Aisle 2 from Alejandra Guerrero on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

There are some things that we take for granted. For example, back on November 18, 2010, I wrote that humanity was due to be absorbed by its impending robot overlords. Most people seemed to think that was a pretty good idea. Why? Well, just watch the news and you’ll figure it out. It’s no wonder that scientists have just tossed any thought for the future of mankind into the landfill and, instead, are concentrating on making singing mice. Let’s face it, when you turn on the news and see some middle aged loser, always male (making me sad to possess testosterone), espousing the joys of trans vaginal ultra sounds for fun and profit you have to, at least, consider the idea that just chucking all of civilization into the dumper and letting robots give it a whirl does seem appealing.

But it’s not quite that easy. As reported in Gizmodo, the first robot overlords will have brains like babies. So, we’ll need to wait for them to mature before we turn over the reins.

Scientists are modeling artificial intelligence after baby brains. Why would they want to make computers similar to beings whose favorite pastimes are drooling and pooping? It makes perfect sense when you think about how malleable a baby’s gray matter is.

Artificially intelligent machines have a tough time with nuances and uncertainty. But babies, toddlers and preschoolers are great at interpreting such things. So Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley and her colleague Tom Griffiths are putting babies to the test to find ways to incorporate their abilities in to computer programming. “Children are the greatest learning machines in the universe,” Gopnik says. “Imagine if computers could learn as much and as quickly as they do.”

They’ve already found that at very young ages, babies can test hypotheses, detect statistical patterns and draw conclusions about important matters such as lollipops and toys—all the while adapting to changes.

As smart as computers are, youngsters can solve problems that machines can’t, including learning languages and interpreting causal relationships. If computers could be more like children, it might lead to digital tutoring programs, phone operators, or even robots that can identify genes associated with disease susceptibilities. The researchers are creating a center at the Berkeley’s Institute of Human Development to meld baby and computer research.

And if an angry machine comes storming out of there one day in a baby robot rage, the good news is all you’ll need to do is find its binky.

Well, maybe not a binky, but I’m betting that a simple dodecahedron with a reverse temporally engineered spacial anomaly will serve the same purpose.

But, while our robot overlords are being trained, what about the rest of us? James Temple reports that we now have National Robotics Week to help mold our kids into malleable cyber-servants.

It’s National Robotics Week, that time of year when we kneel before our digital overlords and appease them with offerings of batteries and memory chips. Organizations around the nation have planned more than 150 propitiation ceremonies in a desperate effort to gain favor with our mechanical masters – or at least avoid their fiery eye-beams.

That, at least, was my assumption about the National Robotics Week events transpiring this week. Organizers themselves insist the events are intended to showcase the modern capabilities of robots and inspire our nation’s young to learn the skills necessary to build the next generation of machines.

In one of the first Bay Area events, design software giant Autodesk on Monday turned over its gallery space at One Market Street in San Francisco to robot builders of assorted ages.

Creative kids

There were spider-looking robots scampering across the floor upon legs made out of kitchen brushes. There was a small, Transformer-looking gizmo performing cartwheels and headstands. And there was a boxy little robot that could pick up racquet balls and lift them 5-feet into the air – surely a warm-up for human body flinging.

That last one was created by a team of junior girls from Terra Nova High School in Pacifica for the First Tech Challenge, a national robotics competition for grades nine through 12.

They designed it using Autodesk’s Inventor application and constructed it out of metal beams reminiscent of an Erector Set. The team has already breezed through two qualifying rounds and is on its way to the St. Louis championships later this month.

Emma Filar, who works on the software, explained why she spends most evenings and weekends during contest season working on the project: “It’s kind off geeky, but it just makes sense to me. The code is just a jumbled mess to look at, but then it works. I really like working with it and seeing the robot do what I made it do.”

Isn’t that positively adorkable?

National Robotics Week was started three years ago by iRobot and other companies and research groups in an effort to inspire U.S. students to focus on the fields critical to the future. There’s also the issue of making up educational ground against the many nations that have sped ahead of us.

Put simply: Robots are the rolling, beeping, problem-solving personification of the potential of math, science and engineering.

“Robots very quickly get kids excited about what they can do with these things and help them see the possibilities ahead,” said Nancy Dussault Smith, vice president of marketing at iRobot, the Massachusetts maker of the Roomba.

Robo events multiply

In 2010, the U.S. House passed a resolution officially designating the second week in April as National Robotics Week. There were just a handful of events that first year, but this week will see 152, including at least one in every state plus Washington, D.C.

Stanford University has participated each year. The law school’s Center for Internet and Society will host a Robot Block Party open to the public, as well as a job fair, starting at 1 p.m. on Wednesday. More than 1,000 people attended last year, about a third of them kids, estimates Ryan Calo, director of robotics at the center.

Local companies including Willow Garage, SRI International and Adept will be on hand to show off their robots.

“The main purpose of National Robotics Week is to raise awareness in the U.S. about the potential of this technology to be transformative,” Calo said. “It will make us more productive, help us keep a manufacturing edge, continue advances in health care and make businesses run more effectively.”

At least, right up until the robots plug our minds into the mainframe.

SRI, the famed Menlo Park research institute, plans to unveil its Taurus robot to the public for the first time. It’s basically a modular, portable update of its surgical robot technology designed to defuse bombs.

They call it a “high fidelity telemanipulation tool,” which is a fancy way of saying it has the dexterity to open irregular objects like paper bags and sever tiny wires.

Better lives for people

Willow Garage will be demonstrating the Pr2, an open source robot that university researchers have adapted to fold laundry, bake cookies, flip pancakes and deliver beer.

The Menlo Park lab is also testing the robots with disabled people, and sees great potential to restore some mobility and independence to those paralyzed or blind.

The block party is an opportunity to talk to children and adults about “what robots are and what robots can be in the future,” said Steve Cousins, chief executive of Willow Garage. “When you hear robot, it’s often followed by overlord, no thanks to Hollywood. So as we think about trying to create an industry where robots become a greater part of life, there needs to be an outreach to let people know, ‘Hey, there’s something exciting here.'”

OK, OK. Helping the disabled, disarming bombs, delivering frosty beverages. Maybe these robots aren’t so bad after all.

But I still hope these kids remember to include kill switches.

And everyone of those skills will supplant a human worker freeing them up to be helpful servants to their new masters.

See? It all’s working out for the best.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

Well all know what too much means. You order the cheeseburger and are greeted with a one pound behemoth slathered in stuff with a plate of cheese fries on the side, covered in salsa – naturally, and a soft drink the size of Utah. Or you meet a nice lady in a bar and the two of you hit it off and the next thing you know you’re locked in a motel room with the Poynter triplets and someone’s busting out the body paint. Well, that’s kind of like my morning thus far, minus the saturated fats and nude models. As regular readers know I occasionally poke a gentle stick into the festering corpse that passes for civilization in Florida. Well, today, I had programmed my search engine to find me crimes in Florida over the past week. I added some filters, the usual ones I use, and set it free. It usually comes back with 4 or 5 stories and I work from there. Today there are 16 to choose from. Take, please, the case of Carl I. Little, Jr. Recently released from prison and he decided that this freedom thing is too much for one man to bear so he robbed a bank. While the police haven’t caught him yet they do have a lovely 8X10 that they snagged from the surveillance footage that clearly shows his face and other distinguishing features. Not to be outdone, Gabriel Miller, Gabe to his friends, was arrested to stealing a car on his way home from prison where he had just served a stretch for grand theft auto. He’s really bad at this, don’t you think?

Also “bad at this” is one Marcus Wayne Hunt. I’ll let Sheriff David Gee, from Hillsborough Florida, tell the tale.

On April 14, 2012 at approximately 4:22 p.m., Marcus Wayne Hunt was released from Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office jail after posting bond. Tampa Police Department had arrested Hunt earlier the same day on charges of Fleeing and Attempting to Elude Police and No Valid Driver’s License.

Approximately sixteen minutes after his release from jail, Hunt approached a victim in the area of 78th Street and Gray Moss Lane. Hunt struck the victim in the face and took the victim’s bicycle, valued at $190.00.

Detectives were able to identify and issue a warrant for Hunt in connection with the April 14 incident. He was taken into custody on April 17 at approximately 11:29 a.m. at 8708 Fish Lake Road.

Of course we can’t forget those classy Florida dames like Jennifer Marie Guthrie who robbed two men just after being released from prison for robbery.

I’m starting to see a pattern here.

And let us not forget the lovely and talented Ms. Theresa Jones who got out of jail after serving time for drugs and hooking an met up with a nice man (pen pal) on her way out and then stole his car to go on a beer and crack cocaine run.

I understand the beer part but …..

Anyway, she got arrested again.

Now, folks, if your pen pal is in the slammer the odds are, and I’m just pointing out the painfully obvious, that they may not be the stellar humans you want to introduce to your parent while in church. Also, if your only hope of getting a date involves recently released inmates, just buy an inflatable doll and get yourself neutered.

Of course, even Floridians can be taught proper manners, right? After the bikini riot at Burger King and the man who shot up a Denny’s to get better service (it didn’t work in case you’re thinking about it), those kind of incidents have declined.

Right?

Oh, hell, no.

Jennifer Lynn Betterfly, driving on a suspended license and possessing godawful taste in food, rammed a car at a Taco Bell because she wanted to place her order and the other car was in her way.

Yeah, boys, she’s still single if you can believe it. And you know that for a couple of Gordita’s she’ll think WAY outside the bun.

Also at Taco Bell, Joshua Ryan Fisher, terrorized customers by throwing utensils, his head set and a taco pizza into a customer’s face. Police say he was cold sober at the time and have offered no explanation for his behavior.

How about “he works at Taco Bell”?

And we can’t forget Michael Linn Ogborn, who beat up a manager at Sonic’s for putting tomatoes on his BLT a/k/a bacon – lettuce – tomato sandwich.

You just can’t make stuff like that up.

But there was one item out of Florida that stood head and shoulders above the rest. This is the kind of thing that can, and does, only happen in Florida.

Terrorist squirrels are attacking trailer parks.

And they’re armed with Molotov cocktails or something similar.

Unbelievable but true. Conditions are so dry right now that even squirrels are accidently sparking devastating fires. And the worst part seems to be there’s nothing you can do to stop them.

Four brush fires in four days and a Lehigh Acres firefighter says all of them were started by squirrels.

A squirrel was also blamed for the Buckingham fire Tuesday that ultimately destroyed the home of a local pastor.

Clark Ryals with Florida Forest Service says this is a first for him.

“This has happened before but I’ve never heard of it causing fires,” he said.

Scurrying along high voltage lines, the squirrels play a dangerous game when they touch one line while still on another.

“They create a connection between the two which is called arching and the electricity flows through them and can sometimes set them ablaze,” Ryals said.

He says incidents of squirrels getting fried are not as uncommon as people think.

“Usually they are safe if the stay on one wire at a time. But when they try to reach over to the other wire they make that arc,” Ryals said.

But with rain hard to come by throughout many portions of Southwest Florida, we could begin seeing a rise in serious brushfires started by the animals.

“I think you are going to see more and more chances of causing fires in the near future until we start getting steady rainfall,” said Ryals.

But stopping the squirrels from hopping along the wires isn’t something that’s expected to happen anytime soon.

“It’s an inherent risk you have with electricity flowing over the wires that these accidents can possibly happen,” said Ryals.

For residents, keeping a watchful eye out is the best solution.

“If you do have a transformer that blows, call the power company and the fire department as soon as possible. That way tragedies that happened today won’t happen in the future,” Ryals said.

So while there’s not much you can do to stop this from potentially happening to you, officials say you can keep your lawn watered so the grass isn’t as dry as it could be.

“Accidentally?”

I don’t think so. They’re just tired of the words “squirrely” and “nuts” being associated with Floridians. You would be too if you were a squirrel.

Here’s a sexy Floridian named Tori. Well, she’s sexy to other Floridians, which should frighten the hell out of the gene pool.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

Yeah, I just used the generated tags to come up with a title today. First off, Big Ups to all my homies in The Ex Senators for the triumphant release of their cooler than hell video, Start a Fight. The fact that I co-produced it only shows that they have good taste as well as talent. The video even got a great review on the U.K.’s hippest e-Zine, Louder than War. That’s not to say everyone in the U.K. is all things wonderful. The people at the Daily Mail called an orphaned parrot the ugliest bird in the world. That’s just tacky. “Hey look, you were abandoned at birth AND you’re butt ugly!” is not a path to good self esteem. On the other hand, since the exact same thing happened to me, I can relate and am sure the little fellow will grow up and become all sorts of wonderful. Just like me.

Earlier this week I took an intellectually driven look at hookers, bacon and robots. It seems that I was having similar thoughts to Serena Dai at Huffington Post who spent the weekend coming up with the line “Bacon Gives Me a Lardon!”

No, I am not making that up.

We did not eat bacon in my house.

I know: It’s dreadful to think about. It wasn’t until the fifth grade at a friend’s sleepover when the magic happened. Her mom fried up turkey bacon, which I liken to a gateway drug of sorts. There was no turning back.

So to say I jumped at the opportunity to go to the third annual Chicago Baconfest would be a huge understatement. (Leapt? Cried for? Gave up my first-born?) My foodie partner-in-crime Ben and I hauled a camera, a notebook, and empty stomachs to UIC forum on Saturday evening. From candied bacon and bacon vodka to t-shirts with funny sayings like “Bacon Gives Me a Lardon,” Baconfest 2012 did not disappoint Chicago pork lovers.

If you click on her name it will take you to a bacon themed slide show that will keep you entertained for hours.

Now, normally, this next sentence would cause people to get very worried; “After healthy helpings of bacon and porn many people are opting for crabs as well.”

But, as it turns out, we are talking about the many fun things you can get in vending machines these days.

The National University of Singapore is home to one of the world’s most inviting Coke machines. The words “Hug Me,” written in signature Coca-Cola script, grace the giant red box, and when curious students wrap their arms around the cumbersome machine, it dispenses a free Coke — all in the name of making people smile.

They, too, have a fun slide show. The machine that vends live crabs even comes with a 3-1 replacement guarantee if you ever get a dead one.

That seems pretty sporting of them.

Also a sporting type is Melissa Borrett. The 26 year old former waitress decided to blend in nicely with her all hard core right wing neighbors by opening an all nude maid service. Business has been booming.

Police in this staunchly conservative West Texas city are keeping close tabs on a young entrepreneur’s recently opened cleaning service that offers nude maids.

Lubbock police Sgt. Jonathan Stewart said the owner of Fantasy Maid Service of Lubbock doesn’t have a permit to operate a sexually oriented business and officers are watching for any violation, which would bring a $2,000 fine.

But owner Melissa Borrett insists she’s not operating such a business. Customers pay $100 an hour for one maid or $150 an hour for two maids, and no touching is allowed, she said.

“I run a maid service,” the 26-year-old entrepreneur said. “We really just clean houses. These girls are not performers. They’re maids.”

The West Texas native and mother said she started the business about a month ago because she was struggling as a waitress to make ends meet. She had even been living at the Occupy Lubbock encampment near Texas Tech University’s campus in Lubbock.

“I just decided to go a little bigger, work a little smarter,” she said.

Her business model isn’t unique, but the city’s ordinance requires all sexually oriented businesses to apply for a permit, which costs $650 a year, and to post a $5,000 surety bond or letter of credit.

Such businesses are defined as any commercial venture whose operations include “providing, featuring or offering of employees or entertainment personnel who appear in a state of nudity, seminude or simulated nudity and provide live performances or entertainment” intended to sexually stimulate or gratify customers “and which is offered as a feature of a primary business activity of the venture.”

Stewart wouldn’t say how police planned to keep tabs on the maid service, and Borrett said she would hire an attorney to fight any attempt by the city to shut her down.

So far, Borrett said, business has been good and she is now busy interviewing to hire more maids. She currently has three on staff. She offers a regular discount to government employees and law enforcement, and an ad posted Friday on the online bartering site Craigslist offered 20 percent discounts for Easter weekend.

If requested, the maids would clean fully clothed, but the cost is the same.

“It is kind of pricey, but we’re fantasy maids,” Borrett said.

Texas is also the state with a “pole tax” on strippers which they use to provide medical assistance to women, as long as none of that assistance is related to procreation.

Texas is weird.

Anyway, I don’t want our female readers to think I’ve forgotten them. Since we’ve got them all lubed up with bacon and thinking about porn, what better subject to bring up, as it were, than a great vacation spot for the ladies; the Antique Vibrator Museum.

On assignment for COED, this week I took a historical romp into the wild and wonderful world of vibrators. Good Vibrations in San Francisco kicked open its doors on Thursday for the grand opening of the Antique Vibrator Museum. The exhibit covers the “weird and wonderful” world of vibrators from the 1800s to modern-day. Very informative indeed: the electric vibrator had its inception in 1869 with the invention of a steam-powered massager patented by an American doctor. The invention preceded the electric vacuum, iron and frying pan by nearly a decade. (Not to mention preceding the home alarm system by a century.)

Far from sexy, vibrators pretty much resembled power tools when they were first introduced. Doesn’t this device look like it could strip the paint off a car?

Hysterical: With a nod-and-a-wink, vibrators were originally marketed as “health and beauty” devices or “head massagers.” Those in-the-know interpreted their true purpose. At the 1900 Paris Expo, a dozen vibrators were first on display as sexual devices. Oh, those crazy French!

The nice ladies at COED have over 100 images of early vibrators for you to peruse.

It makes me wonder who needs a man any more?

Maybe these two young ladies. Well, they may be too young (except in Arkansas) to need a man, but clearly something is missing from their lives. Since we started this blog with one of the best videos out right now, it seems only fitting that we end it with one of the worst.

Seriously, these two talentless hacks would get booed in a porno, even one featuring bacon, if they were old enough to star in one.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

A buddy of mine is going to die. To be blunt, by the time you read this he may already be dead. Anyway, I went to go see him yesterday. Before I got there I asked if there was anything he wanted and there was. So I stopped on the way and got a six pack of beer, a pizza (supreme, extra crispy) and some ice. They have plenty of buckets in the hospital. A nurse saw me and started to say something until I mentioned who I was visiting. She knew as well as any of us that this stuff stood no chance of doing my buddy any harm. And it might do him some psychological good. She shrugged and found us some plates. The three of us sat watching the Sox game for a bit and then she had work to do. He and I talked between innings, etiquette before eternity, and had some good laughs. We joked about how I’d once lost control of a motorcycle I was having sex on and ended up in a laundromat. That required both bail and stitches. We laughed about the time he entered a talent contest and got booed by the MC.

We missed talking about how his wife left him, and took the kids, when he was diagnosed with prostrate cancer. We also forgot to mention how his mother blames him for getting sick in the first place and hasn’t talked to him in over a year. It’s funny how some things can skip your mind when you’re watching baseball. Neither he nor I blame his family for their reactions. There is no “how to” book for times like this. At least not one that isn’t full of treacle. He doesn’t need poems or cuddly kitties, he just needs a friend. And while my skill set may not be wide, I can handle this.

He fell asleep in the fifth inning, after his second beer, and so was spared the Sox melting down in the 6th. The nurse helped me wrap the remaining pizza and put it in a mini-fridge along side the two beers. I sat with him a while more making sure he was just sleeping and then headed off into the night.

Aside from the reaction of his family my buddy has been treated extremely well by the hospital staff. Above and beyond the physical care they make sure to talk to him every day. Even if it’s only for a minute or two it helps him feel like a human being.

I contrasted that with a time, about 25 years ago when another buddy of mine was dying. He had AIDS. His family shunned him, his lover abandoned him and the doctors avoided him except to provide the mandatory, minimum, care. This was years before the Magic Johnson “HIV Positive = buy a baseball team” therapy was introduced. That friend too wanted pizza and beer but there was no way I could get that into the hospital. Hell, I was lucky they let me see him at all.

But, with the clever use of a lab coat and some rubber gloves, we were able to sneak him out to a prearranged bar. There was pizza and beer waiting for us in the back corner. This was out of respect for him, he was covered in last stage lesions, and out of respect for the customers. I believe I mentioned that he was covered in last stage lesions. We laughed, we joked, we played the jukebox. And then we took him back to the hospital. He died about an hour later.

Smiling.

I was there holding his hand.

After that his mother decided his death was all my fault. Because, after all, the one straight friend he had was the obvious choice.

But I was there when he died and she wasn’t. That was by choice for both of us.

Nevertheless, death is an odd subject. Everyone of us will face it. There is absolutely no way around it. And, yet, people do everything in their power to avoid dealing with it. I don’t get that mentality. I’d rather admit the obvious and then enjoy the time I have with those I love. You’d be surprised how funny the terminally ill can be if you give them a chance.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.