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You are here: Home / 2012 / Archives for September 2012

Archives for September 2012

Zom-Bees?

September 28, 2012 by

bzz bzz bzzz
You, being a sane and rational person, rarely take talk of impending apocalypses very seriously. You are of a mind that rational people will work things out. And, in the main, history has proven you right. Granted, sometimes, it has taken rational people and a well trained army, but still, in the end everything worked out. So when I write about our eventual enslavement by our robot overlords and the like, you smile and then go have another latte. Sometimes you even send me a funny email. That’s very nice of you by the way. And when I mention that scientists, far too long at play in the fields of the Lord, have decided to build the world a singing mouse, you don’t panic, but you do make sure you have some of those lethal mouse traps. Simply put, you are a person of infinite jest, Horatio, and it takes a bit to get you riled up.

Fact: If all the bees disappeared humanity would die within four years. That’s how long it would take for all the food to disappear from lack of pollenization and for us to starve.

Fact: Bees are disappearing at an alarming rate due to pollution infesting their pollen.

Fact: Zombie bees have been discovered in Washington state.

Feel free to run screaming from the room and then start stocking up on perishables. It may buy you an extra month or so after the world dies.

Washington state’s first “zombie bees” have been reported in Kent.

Novice beekeeper Mark Hohn returned home from vacation a few weeks ago to find many of his bees either dead or flying in jerky patterns and then flopping on the floor. He later learned they had a parasite that causes bees to fly at night and lurch around erratically until they die.
The infection is called “zombie bees.”

“I joke with my kids that the zombie apocalypse is starting at my house,” Hohn told The Seattle Times.

San Francisco State University biologist John Hafernik discovered the infection in California in 2008.

Hafernik now uses a website to recruit citizen scientists like Hohn to track the infection across the country. Observers have found zombie bees in California, Oregon, South Dakota and, now, Washington.

Zombie bees also are being studied by Steve Sheppard, chairman of the entomology department at Washington State University.

The infection is another threat to bees that are needed to pollinate crops. Hives have been failing in recent years due to a mysterious ailment called colony collapse disorder, in which all the adult honey bees in a colony suddenly die.

Hohn had remembered hearing about zombie bees, so when he discovered the dead bees at his 1.25-acre spread, he collected several of the corpses and popped them into a plastic bag. About a week later, Hohn had evidence his bees were infected — the pupae of parasitic flies.

The life cycle of the fly that infects zombie bees is reminiscent of the movie “Alien,” the Times reported. A small adult female lands on the back of a honeybee and injects eggs into the bee’s abdomen. The eggs hatch into maggots.

“They basically eat the insides out of the bee,” Hafernik said.

After consuming their host, the maggots pupate, forming a hard outer shell that looks like a fat, brown grain of rice. That’s what Hohn found in the plastic bag with the dead bees. Adult flies emerge in three to four weeks.

There’s no evidence yet that the parasitic fly is a major player in the bees’ decline, but it does seem the pest is targeting new hosts, Sheppard said. “It may occur a lot more widely than we think.”

That’s what Hafernik hopes to find out with his website, zombeewatch.org. The site offers simple instructions for collecting suspect bees, watching for signs of parasites and reporting the results.

Once more people start looking here, the number of sightings will probably climb, Hohn said.
“I’m pretty confident I’m not the only one in Washington state who has them,” he said.

When you go to Zom Bee Watch you will see a map. It is a very nice map, very well laid out. It has nice colors and easy to understand symbols and clear definitions of what the symbols mean. Just in case you have vision problems they were kind enough to include a link to a full screen version of it as well.

You will quickly learn that Washington, Oregon, California, Colorado, South Dakota, Indiana, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania and New York either are infested or have shown enough wanring signs to warrant sampling.

That’s a little over a fifth of our country by area.

And it’s just the beginning.

Insecticides, water pollution, air pollution and genetically altered crops that poison the insects or, at the least, prevent them from pollinating the next plant, are all partially to blame for the decline of bees.

The Zombees are just a bonus to hurry us along so that we can shake off this mortal coil once and for all.

Vanishing of the Bees – Trailer from Bee The Change on Vimeo.

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

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Fook Da Poleees

September 27, 2012 by

Spread ’em!
Today we will go geographically through our stories. Why? Well, because every now and then I need a challenge. It’s easy to just write about Florida and boobs. I can do that in my sleep. So, today, you do not get any references to Florida. Not to worry though, I have found several examples of places where the gene pool has completely dried up. While we all have moments where we don’t think our actions completely through – see my story about making love on top of a police car as example “A” – the people I am going to write about today didn’t have a minor lapse in judgement, they are completely brain dead. I am talking seriously stupid. I am talking about people who aren’t qualified to be extras in a porno. The kind of people who start every day stating, erroneously as you will see, “I don’t need to know none of that s**t.”

Let us start in Colorado with the lovely tale of a certain Ms. Shelly Figueroa. Starting her day by getting arrested for trying to run over a cop didn’t satisfy her personal needs (and Dr. Phil says we should try and satisfy our personal needs, proof that Dr. Phil is a thoughtless moron) so she stole his police car and went on a thrill ride.

The Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Office might want to invest in some stronger handcuffs.

Shelby Figueroa, 18, is facing multiple charges after allegedly breaking free from a pair of handcuffs, stealing a deputy’s vehicle, and leading officials on a high-speed chase through the mountains of Colorado, KUSA-TV reports.

Authorities say they first encountered Figueroa on Sunday morning, near Georgetown, Colo., when she rammed her own car into an SUV belonging to the Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Office . The deputy on patrol handcuffed the teen and placed her in the back of the SUV.

“She’s combative, but she’s in the back of [the deputy’s] car now,” dispatchers were told.

Yep, that’s her.

Not for long.

Two minutes later, the 18-year-old managed to break out of her restraints, escape from the cage, get into the driver’s seat and speed away, deputies say, igniting a chase that lasted a half hour and reached speeds up to 100 mph.

Deputies attempted to ram Figueroa off the road several times before succeeding at around 10:30 a.m., according to KUSA-TV. However, KDVR reports that the teen went off the road when she hit a spike strip.

Either way, the SUV flipped over and crashed into a rock wall.

Figueroa was treated for her injuries at a local hospital, and is now being charged with attempted vehicular assault on a peace officer, vehicular eluding, aggravated motor vehicle theft, resisting arrest, driving under the influence of alcohol/drugs, theft and reckless driving.

And, kids, those are just the charges today. She’s eligible for many more. And, thanks to the fact she’s 18 she gets to look at hard time. But, my only question is “Why did she try and run over the first cop in the first place?”

Heading down south and a little west we end up in the thrill packed city of Vaughn, New Mexico. This fun loving little metropolis was stunned, STUNNED I TELL YOU, to discover that you can’t give guns to convicted felons and make them sheriff.

A drug-sniffing dog now is the only certified member of the police force in the small eastern New Mexico town of Vaughn.

Police Chief Ernest “Chris” Armijo decided to step down Wednesday after news stories reported that he wasn’t allowed to carry a gun because of his criminal background.

“He decided the attention was distracting,” said Dave Romero, an attorney for the town.

State officials said Armijo couldn’t carry a gun since acknowledging that he owed tens of thousands of dollars in delinquent child support payments in Texas. Armijo also faces new felony charges after being accused of selling a town-owned rifle and pocketing the cash.

Romero said Armijo is working to clear up the latest case. He said Armijo has not ruled out seeking the police chief’s position again if his case is resolved and the position is open.

According to NBC affiliate KOB.com in New Mexico, Armijo’s annual salary is less than $30,000. Because he can’t own a gun or any ammunition, he sold an assault rifle he owned to Guadalupe Sheriff’s Deputy Juan Sanchez in January for $250, KOB.com reported.

A second police officer in Vaughn, Brian Bernal, was hired in the spring, but he had his own legal problems: In January of 2011, Bernal pleaded guilty to assault and battery against a household member, which prohibits him from owning a firearm by federal law, KOB.com said.

Now, according to records, the only qualified member of the Vaughn Police Department is Nikka, a drug-sniffing dog. Non-certified officers can’t make arrests and can’t carry firearms.

The K-9 police truck of the Vaughn, N.M. Police Department sits in the driveway of former Vaughn Police Chief Ernest “Chris” Armijo on Wednesday, Sept. 26.

But Romero said not having an officer qualified to carry a gun didn’t put Vaughn at risk. “England doesn’t allow police officers to carry guns,” he said. “Sometime the strongest weapon in law enforcement is communication.”

Vaughn, a town of about 450 located 104 miles east of Albuquerque, is a quiet place that is an overnight stop for railroad workers.

While residents maintain there is no crime problem, the town is set deep in what U.S. officials say is an area popular with drug traffickers. The desolate roads in Guadalupe County make it hard for authorities to catch smugglers moving drugs from Mexico.

Guadalupe County Sheriff Michael Lucero said since news about the police chief’s record became public his department has helped patrol Vaughn. But he said those efforts have put a slight strain on his already short-staffed department.

“I visit the town at least once a month,” said Lucero. “The important thing is to keep a presence so residents know we’re there to help if we’re needed.”

Romero said town officials are considering whether to hire another police chief or keep the department staffed with just one officer. He said it’s unclear whether the town will keep the police dog, which had been in Armijo’s care.

When approached by a reporter from The Associated Press at his Vaughn home, Armijo said he had no comment, and he declined to grant access to the canine for photographs or video.

The dog’s kennel could be seen in Armijo’s backyard, and a police truck marked “K-9” was parked in his driveway.

At Penny’s Diner, residents said they were embarrassed by the attention the episode has put on the small town.

“There’s just a whole lot of nothing going on here,” said cook Joyce Tabor. “We have very little crime. It’s quiet. So this really doesn’t matter.”
Armijo told KOB.com in June that he didn’t feel he needed a gun to do his job.

“We have tasers, batons, mace … stuff like that,” Armijo said. “This isn’t a TV show. This is life. We don’t run in every day with a gun drawn. Life isn’t in a pistol grip. It’s how you talk to people. I wasn’t the type of person to go, ‘I’m a cop, now give me my badge and my chip on my shoulder.’ That’s not me.”

Let me see if I got this right. A town so small that everyone could, legitimately, be related to everyone else and they elected the two town felons? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of rehabilitating felons. But handing weapons to a couple of guys who are involved in gun running and violence strikes me as mildly obtuse.

On the other hand, Vaughn is now the only city in the world with a pistol packing pooch calling the shots.

That’s kind of fun.

Moving west we head over to the fun loving city of Phoenix, Arizona. Did you know there’s no daylight saving time in Arizona? They’re not convinced that time zones are real. That whole “world is round” thing just eludes them. And it’s easy to believe that when you read this next story. See, this guy dressed his kid up like a Taliban member and then set him loose on the streets with a rocket launcher and ….. no one said anything for quite some time.

Police have arrested an Arizona man who allegedly filmed his 16-year-old nephew walking city streets dressed in a sheet and carrying a fake grenade launcher, authorities said on Wednesday.

Michael David Turley, 39, was arrested Monday over the making of the video, in which an unidentified narrator says he aims to discover how quickly police in Phoenix would respond following the fatal shooting of 12 people at the screening of the “Dark Knight Rises” Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado, in July.

What could possibly go wrong?

The bizarre, amateurish video depicts a person with a fairly realistic but fake grenade launcher walking around a Phoenix intersection in what appears to be a blue sheet with dark material covering his head and face.

Made eight days after the shooting at a screening of a Batman movie, the film was posted on YouTube and titled, “Dark Knight Shooting Response, Rocket Launcher Police Test.”

“Given this event, I wanted to run a little test here in Phoenix, Arizona,” the narrator says in the film. “I want to find out how safe I really am, and I want to know the response time of the Phoenix police department.”

The filmmaker claims it took 15 minutes for police to respond.

The first officer finds the filmmaker and the teen standing in a driveway. The officer calmly tells the boy to put down the weapon and the man to put down the camera. He didn’t draw his gun.

Officer James Holmes, a police spokesman, said Turley told the officer they were just filming a movie, and the officer took down their names and left.

After interviewing people who called 911 and later seeing the video posted on YouTube, police arrested Turley.

“It surprised us that he actually put that video on YouTube,” Holmes said.

Not ‘fun and games’
Holmes said the police response took just over three minutes from the first call, and a helicopter and SWAT team was dispatched as backup.

The Anonymous Filmmaker explores how the Phoenix Police Department reacts days after the event at the Century 16 Movie Theater in Aurora, Colorado where a gunman, James Holmes, killed 12 people and injured 58 more at the premiere of Batman The Dark Knight Rises. In our Hollywood style video, a man resembling a terrorist paces around a busy street in Phoenix Arizona carrying a rocket launcher until the police apprehend him. This film explores the response time and reaction of law enforcement within the Phoenix rural community. You will be shocked to see what happens.

Turley was charged with knowingly giving a false impression of a terrorist act, endangerment, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and misconduct involving a simulated explosive.

He is being held in county jail on a $5,000 bond. If convicted, he faces up to 45 months in prison, said Maricopa County Attorney’s Office spokesman Jerry Cobb.

“We take something like this seriously,” Phoenix police spokesman Officer James Holmes said. “It wasn’t fun and games to all the people who were affected by this. We don’t behave like this in this country to prove a point.”

The 16-year-old has not been arrested, Holmes said.

“The video told us what Turley was intentionally trying to do — creating a terrorist hoax for his own personal ideals,” he said.

Turley doesn’t have a listed phone number. He didn’t immediately respond to messages sent Wednesday through the YouTube account.

An attorney for Turley could not be immediately reached for comment.

And I can think of 100 ways this could have gone terribly wrong and all of them end up with his kid dead on the streets of Phoenix.

Sadly it’s not against the law anywhere to be a dumbass. I guess we’ll just have to settle for the charges as delivered. And, I guess it’s good to know that rocket launcher carrying terrorists are welcome in Arizona as long as they don’t have a Mexican accent.

SuicideGirl Belle and Sebastian Music Video – NSFW from SuicideGirls on Vimeo.

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

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Mrs. Jesus?

September 26, 2012 by

Can you imagine the family reunions?
A while back I wrote about Mrs. God and how there was enough historical evidence now to show that early theists believed there was a God and a Mrs. God. If we are truly made in God’s image then that point of view makes complete sense. So now this guy has found a piece of papyrus from a couple thousand years ago and some folks went completely insane over it. Thanks to Dan Brown’s godawful, if I may use that word, piece of literary tripe, people think that his story was based on historical fact. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let’s take some of the simple stuff before we get into any depth. Had Jesus married Mary Magdeline the Gospels would have noted it. Whatever they thought of her they would have respected the wife of their messiah and not called her a whore. That doesn’t mean that Jesus was never married, just not to her. Now what kind of idiot would think that Jesus was married in the first place? One who’s met a Jew before. You see, and people are still surprised by this, Jesus was a Jew. In Judaism the word “rabbi” has a very defined meaning. Especially 2,000 years ago. A rabbi was a person who had studied under approved scholars and who had been awarded the rank of rabbi. All rabbis were married. Since the New Testament specifically refers to Jesus as a rabbi on 12 occasions (Mark 9:5, 10:51, 11:21 & 14:45, John 1:38, 1:49, 3:2, 4:31, 6:25, 9:2, 11:8 & 20:16, Matthew 26:25 & 49:00 in case you want to look it up) many people assumed that Jesus was a married teacher.

Here’s the rub; the texts of the Bible were translated from spoken Aramaic to written Greek to written Latin to written English. The actual Aramaic / Hebrew word rabi literally means “My Master.” It would have been a great word for translators to use to describe the relationship of Jesus to his disciples. It is easy to see how subtleties in the social nuances (such as the whole marriage thing) could have gotten lost in such a convoluted translation. There was no pagan or Roman equivalent requirements for teachers.

Michael Peppard wrote a great piece for the Washington Post that puts this latest discovery into some perspective.

Rational perspective, that is.

Trying to do ancient history is like assembling an enormous jigsaw puzzle—but we only have a small percentage of the pieces, these are mostly middle pieces, and there is no box lid to provide a model of the completed puzzle. Every once in a while, a new piece comes along with such a clear, vivid picture that we are able to reorient the puzzle and gain a new perspective on the whole.

This is not one of those moments.

The newly published Coptic papyrus does not fundamentally change what we historians of early Christianity are doing. So let’s not overestimate it.

But let’s not underestimate it either. When trying to complete the puzzle of early Christian history, every new piece is a godsend. The international guild of papyrologists, of which I am a part, hones its linguistic skills and sifts through bins and bins of cartonnage (small scraps of reused papyrus) in order to prepare for moments such as these. The Coptic papyrus is especially welcome because it’s a connector piece in our puzzle: its content shares enough similarities with existing pieces that we know roughly where on the table to put it. But it also offers a new detail: “Jesus said to them, ‘my wife…’”

In this Sept. 5, 2012 photo released by Harvard University, divinity professor Karen L. King holds a fourth century fragment of papyrus that she says is the only existing ancient text that quotes Jesus explicitly referring to having a wife. (AP) Professor Karen King, who will be publishing the papyrus, has been abundantly clear that this text does not mean Jesus was married; rather, it tells us a bit about some Christians in the second or third century who either thought Jesus was married or used the symbol of Jesus’ wife for some other meaning. Her forthcoming article speaks well and clearly to its intended audience of historians.

I would like to offer a complementary viewpoint: Christians have nothing to fear from this text, but always something to learn.

Some contemporary Christians have been outright dismissive of non-canonical texts from early Christianity, as if their very existence is dangerous or even diabolical. Many early Christian leaders from the beginning, though, did not maintain such a strong canonical boundary. Even Athanasius of Alexandria, the fourth-century bishop and champion of orthodoxy, encouraged Christians to engage with a wide range of scriptures, including those from outside the emerging New Testament.

In the present day, Pope Benedict XVI—no wild-eyed liberal—quotes favorably from the non-canonical Didache and the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings preserved most thoroughly in Coptic, in his books about Jesus. At last year’s Easter Vigil service in St. Peter’s Basilica, the pope even included in his homily a non-canonical saying of Jesus, which is preserved in the Gospel of Thomas.

Some of the most dismissive opinions toward non-canonical literature come from traditional, conservative Catholics. This is deeply ironic: an exalted view of the Virgin Mary and a profound veneration for her perpetual virginity are features found in the early non-canonical traditions. Most key Marian stories and dogmas are not found in the Bible, but in other early traditions. For example, the Infancy Gospel of James, likely a second-century text, is the primary textual repository of Mary’s biography and the doctrine about her perpetual virginity.

In short, Christians should approach new discoveries not in fear, but with a spirit of inquiry. When we do, we find that this new Coptic papyrus provides corroborating evidence, however miniscule, about what were some “live debates” in the second-fourth centuries. For instance, the new text is concerned with the worthiness of a woman to be a disciple. This is something historians have already seen in the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Thomas. The popularity of Mary Magdalene as the apostola apostolorum (“apostle to the apostles”) is well known from late antiquity. In addition, with the rise of asceticism in the third and fourth centuries of Christianity, especially in Egypt where monasticism began, many women sought a spiritual discipleship of sexual renunciation as a means of liberating themselves from submissive roles.

As for the headline-grabbing statement about Jesus’ “wife,” historians also can situate this alongside preexisting evidence. The Gospel of Philip, another non-canonical text probably from the second or third century, famously presents Mary Magdalene as the “partner” or “companion” of Jesus. Yet some scholars would argue that the Gospel of Philip overall disavows carnal marriage and instead endorses a kind of celibate, spiritual marriage between believers (as brides) and Christ (as groom). Such nuptial imagery is rooted in the canonical New Testament texts, in which salvation is imagined as a wedding feast. The Gospel of Philip expands on this imagery and describes Christian conversion and initiation as a sacramental marriage in a “bridal chamber.” Many other mainstream texts offered variations on that theme.

It is likely that, whatever words completed the sentence about Jesus’ “wife,” the new fragment came from a text that engaged some of the central questions of its day for Christians: Were sex and procreation blessings God wished for everyone? Or was some spiritual value to be sought in renunciation and celibacy? If Jesus spoke in figurative language of weddings, brides, and grooms, what and whom specifically was he talking about? The transmitter of this ancient text was likely trying to understand these legitimate questions, along with how Jesus’ singleness (or not) was to be understood as a model of Christian holiness.

Christians need not fear such timeless questions. We keep learning and striving to understand the issues that generated our past—even when its pieces are puzzling.

In case anyone asks you, Michael Peppard is assistant professor of theology at Fordham University, where he teaches Bible, early Christianity, and ancient languages (including Coptic). He does not wear a tinfoil hat and he has never seen Noah’s Ark.

That being said, as he noted, this is a neat look at the beliefs of fourth century Christians and, as such, should be relished. If you make any more out of it you are wasting your, and everybody elses, time.


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

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Even Dumber When They’re Drunk

September 25, 2012 by

Nah, he’s still got the cool table. He’ll be fine.
Those of you who know me know that I am a fan of the occasional frosty cold adult libation. And I’m not that picky about which occasion it is. I have celebrated toupees. every September 2 I, just like you – I’m sure, celebrate National Beheading Day. Is too a real holiday. Click the link if you don’t believe me. Anyway, I celebrate it. Simply put, I like beer. And I like to celebrate stuff. And, to be honest, it isn’t as though I’ve never made the odd minor judgmental error while imbibing. I have, you have, we all have. One minute you’re in Kansas waiting for a bus and the next you’re in Denver driving that bus. How you got from point A to point Z is a bit of a mystery but you are later informed that you were the “most together” so they gave you the keys. Sadly, that may have been a true statement given the people I was with at the time.

So, I’m sympathetic. To a point.

The story of Robert Hagerman does not invoke sympathy. Laughter? Yes. Pity? For his family, certainly. But sympathy? Not one jot. He tried to have his daughter arrested because she wouldn’t get him any more beer.

The man told authorities he needed a help with a domestic situation.

But deep down, all he apparently wanted was a beer.

Pinellas deputies said that late Thursday night they got a 911 call from Seminole resident Robert Hagerman, 56.

Hagerman said he needed help because his daughter was hitting him, throwing things and using drugs.

Deputies arrived shortly after 11 p.m. Father and daughter were both home. Hagerman, however, was “very intoxicated and uncooperative,” a report said.

Authorities quickly determined his story was a lie.

Hagerman’s daughter told deputies her dad called police because she wouldn’t buy him a beer. She used her cell phone to record his threats to make fake statements to the police and played the audio for authorities.

Hagerman was arrested on a charge of making a false report of a crime.

He was in the Pinellas County Jail on Friday afternoon in lieu of $150 bail.

$150 bail? That means he had to post $15 to walk and if he had $15 he could have gotten his own damn beer.

But, for sheer ingenuity, I have to give a tip of the WNC cap to Morgan Frances Carle. She treated being busted for a DUI as a business opportunity (Mitt Romney would be so proud) and tried to smuggle 30 Xanax into jail.

Deputies busted Morgan Frances Carle, a South Gulf Cove woman, for DUI on Tuesday after they noticed her driving erratically in a Dodge truck, according to a news release from the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office.

The deputy who had stopped Carle, 29, reportedly recognized her from previous encounters.

After all, she had previously been booked into the Charlotte County jail 18 times, records show.

Carle’s driver’s license had been suspended and she refused to do field sobriety exercises. So Carle was arrested and handcuffed — but refused to be searched at that time, according to the release.

At the jail, when Carle was asked if she had anything illegal on her, she said “no.” But since corrections deputies had found four pills in her front pocket, a strip search was conducted, the release stated.

Deputies then reportedly found 23 pills in her shorts, and while shaking out her shorts, two more pills fell out, for a total of 29 pills, which were identified as Xanax.

She also blew a .159 and .155 on her breath test for alcohol, about twice the legal limit, deputies said.

Carle was charged with DUI, Introduction of Contraband into a County Jail, Possession of Xanax, Resisting an Officer, and Driving While License Suspended. She remains in jail on no bond as she was also in Violation of Probation for previous arrests.

Look how happy she is. Have you ever seen a perkier mug shot? She is truly a fine example of better living through chemistry. Or something. I wonder if she even knows she’s been arrested?

“Wow, what a cool apartment. I love the stainless steel toilet.”

But my all time hero today was introduced to me by a guy who calls himself DUI Attorney on the ever popular sports blogs. I will reserve comments until you’ve finished reading.

When officers pulled over 23-year-old Warren Thomas Michael Saturday night, they said he was glassy-eyed, slurring his words and holding a squirrel.

A witness driving on Highway 17 in Fleming Island, Florida, spotted Michael swerving in and out of lanes and called police, according to an arrest report.

When officers caught up to Michael, they noticed him drifting over the center line, crashing into a stopped vehicle head on and continuing on his way.

Officers pulled him over moments later. But when Michael opened his window to greet officers, he wasn’t holding his driver’s license and registration — he was holding a squirrel.

“Upon contact with the defendant, he immediately told me he had a squirrel eating him,” the arresting officer said in a report.

When Michael pointed out the small squirrel wrapped under his shirt, officers said they smelled the strong odor of alcohol. According to the arrest report, he couldn’t divide his attention between looking for the items requested by officers and answering questions about his name and birth date.

“I had the defendant secure the squirrel and then exit the vehicle,” the report states.

After putting Michael through several field sobriety tests, officers charged him with driving a vehicle under the influence of alcoholic beverages and/or a controlled substance.

Michael was transported to the Clay County Jail. His vehicle and squirrel were released to his girlfriend, who arrived on scene to berate him for his actions shortly after the stop, according to the arrest report.

It was not clear if the squirrel was alive or deceased.

Let’s pull this one apart a little, shall we?

  • Why would the police need to secure a dead squirrel?
  • Why would they give a dead squirrel to his girlfriend? Even in Florida that seems odd.
  • More importantly, why would she want a dead squirrel?
  • Since squirrels are known carriers of rabies, why wasn’t this one tested? Assuming it was alive, of course.
  • “I had the defendant secure the squirrel and then exit the vehicle.” How do you even begin to say that with a straight face?
  • How did the girlfriend get there? He was ed on a highway, not down the block fro a home. Does she have magic teleportation powers or can she drive two cars at once?

LCD Soundsystem – Drunk Girls from DFA Records on Vimeo.

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

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Happy Birthday Smiley

September 21, 2012 by

Happy Birthday Emoticons!
Everything comes from somewhere. And it’s not always where you might think. For example, computers came about because of looms. Looms were, and still are, machines that could weave loose threads into fabric and the resulting fabric could be used to make clothes which are handy things to have. Especially when it’s cold. What does any of that have to do with computers? Well, weavers wanted a way to keep the designs consistent. So they developed these cards that, when fitted over the spindles of the loom, would allow only certain threads to be worked at certain times. This automated process worked perfectly. It allowed weavers in one part of the country to outsource their work to another part of the country simply by sending them a pack of the cards. The work would be identical as long as the same threads were used. It didn’t take long for smart people to figure out that what was really happening is that data was being stored (the design of the end fabric) and shared. And if you can store one kind of data you certainly should be able to store others. The first uses of these newfangled cards not related to keeping us clothed was a calculating machine. Probably made to count the profits of the weavers. By the late 1800’s machines were used to store census data so that the government could have a real idea of who was where and what they needed. All of these still used the same card types as the looms. In fact it wasn’t until the microprocessor was invented in the 60’s that those cards fell out of use. In other words, a loom worker, called a spinner back in the day, from 1750 could easily have understood the programming of an IBM business computer in 1960. The cards, and their basic purpose, were essentially identical.

A quick aside here; this is the kind of stuff that my old pal Zay Smith used to love when he wrote for the Sun Times. He’s back now, writing for WBEZ’s blog, and he hasn’t lost a step. He’s currently riffing on the impending presidential election and I’ll leave him that as I need to get back to computers.

By the 1970’s computers were starting to evolve into the thinking machines that we know today. But scientists needed to develop a way for humans to interact with them without the cards. They came up with the ASCII system that translated typed messages into numbers the computers could understand and, more importantly, allowed the computer to process those numbers and relate the results in a manner humans could understand.

And with all of that in place, on September 19, 1982, I celebrated my 21st birthday with a young woman named Darlene. Oh, and Professor Scott Fahlman invented the emoticon.

Thirty years ago Wednesday, noted Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Professor Scott Fahlman typed out the first sideways smiley face composed entirely of keyboard characters and posted it to the university bulletin board where — much like the Internet today —the flat text of faceless posts is often misunderstood.

“I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: : – ) (spaces added to prevent it from appearing as a smiley in some monitors) Read it sideways.” he wrote in a post Fahlman recently described to the Independent UK as “a little bit of silliness that I tossed into a discussion about physics.” It quickly spread from universities to the rest of the world, eventually co-opted and evolving into graphic yellow blobs effusing tears or laughter, and tarted up with fashion accessories such as sunglasses and Santa hats.

Fahlman doesn’t care for the evolution. “I think they are ugly, and they ruin the challenge of trying to come up with a clever way to express emotions using standard keyboard characters,” he told the Independent. “But perhaps that’s just because I invented the other kind.”

Or perhaps not. Ubiquitous, much maligned and yet still needed, the emoticon is often much abused — and not just in a graphics sense. Beyond the yellow blobby bastardization, there’s the unfortunate passive-aggressive misuse, in which a smiley face added to the end of a snarky email dares the recipient to take issue with the obvious tone. “Obviously you can’t be mad at anything I’ve typed, because here’s a smiley face!”

Yet, as long as we continue to bring all our issues and baggage to every bit of flat text sent from friend, lover or boss, the unaffected use of the emoticon is still very much needed. There are countless creative variations since that sideways smiley face — and still no need to resort to prefab yellow blobs. On this landmark birthday, lets return to the simple keyboard character composition and give emoticons the respect they deserve.

Now, I know that there are three people who read this who are going to point out that variations of hieroglyphics have been used to confer the emotional states of authors since before Jesus walked the earth.

That is 100% true and 100% meaningless. None of them survived to make it into use in modern times and none relate to computers. There is not a hue and cry for ankh based emoticons.

So, while Professor Fahlman may not approve of the graphic representations attached to his pristine code, where would society be without them?

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

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