CL flickr

Visit our You Shoot page.

The Blotter

Saturday, November 7th, 2009

bad_blotter1-1_27_2_SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY: A passenger reported a Florida man talking strangely on a shuttle bus at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. The man reportedly said this was the third time Delta had made him miss his flight and made him stay overnight in Atlanta and that someone needs to blow up the airport.
A Delta Airlines employee called police, and an officer spoke with the 61-year-old man from Palm City, Fla. “I asked him if there was anything said on the shuttle bus on the way to the airport,” the officer wrote. “[The man] advised that he was mad because this was the third time Delta made him miss his flight. They made him stay in Atlanta costing him to pay for a hotel. He did say he wanted someone to blow up the airport, but he was mad and was not serious, he is just tired of Delta making him miss his flight and costing him more money. He said he was sorry and didn’t mean any harm. He will just never fly Delta and not fly through Atlanta anymore.” No charges filed.

SUNSHINE STATE STRIKES AGAIN: A 36-year-old man said he called a personal chat line while he was waiting for his cousin to pick him up from the Greyhound bus station. He said he talked with a woman he knows as “Little Florida” on the chat line — and Little Florida offered to give him a ride from the bus station if he gave her gas money. The man agreed. When Little Florida arrived, the man put all his personal belongings in her silver pickup truck and they drove away. The man said they stopped at a gas station on Northside Drive, and he went inside to pay for gas. He said while he was inside, Little Florida drove away with all his stuff. He says his stuff is worth $5,000 and Little Florida won’t return his calls.

Continue Reading “The Blotter

(Illustration by Tray Butler)

The Blotter

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

bad_blotter1-1_26(2)SPOOKY VISITOR: A 33-year-old man said he heard the doorbell ring at his home on Euclid Avenue. He saw a woman around age 30 standing outside his door, peering in his windows. He said she had blond dreadlocks and she wore black pants and a high-visibility green traffic vest. According to the man, the woman walked around to the back of his house, then she returned to the front and broke open the front door. The man said he confronted the woman and she tried to give him a piece of paper saying her name was Denise and she was looking for her stolen television. The man said he was going to call police and the woman walked away, threatening that the man’s stuff would get stolen later. The man wrote down the woman’s tag number before she drove away. Police ran a computer check on the tag — it came back on a 2009 Jeep Wrangler stolen in Atlanta. The woman reportedly caused about $500 worth of damage to the man’s front door.

JACK-O-LANTERN DENIED: Around 3 a.m., a man in a brown coat tried to buy a pumpkin and some flowers at a grocery store on Piedmont Avenue. The cashier said he couldn’t buy them because the grocery store was closed. The man reportedly got very agitated, walked outside and flung the pumpkin at the store, damaging the pumpkin. Then the man reportedly kicked the flowers. The man left on a red bicycle. Police arrived and searched the area but couldn’t find him.

Continue reading The Blotter

(Illustration by Tray Butler)

The Blotter

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

HANGING OUT: An officer saw a man — wearing a button-down shirt and “no pants, no underwear,” according to the police rport — walking down Ponce de Leon Avenue. When the man spotted the officer’s patrol car, he reportedly hid behind a bush near a clothing store. “The male hid behind the bush, peeking around and over the bush every couple of seconds,” the officer wrote. “I approached the male and he placed a black shoulder bag over his exposed genitals. I asked the male if there were any problems. He stated he was, ‘hanging out.’ I asked him why he was not wearing any pants. He stated that he ‘wasn’t prostituting.’”

The officer asked the man why he wasn’t wearing any pants or underwear. The man said his pants were ripped while he was at a club on 10th Street. The man said he just left the club, but the officer noted that the club closes at 2:30 a.m. — and it was now 5:47 a.m.

The officer wrote, “I asked him to place the ripped pants back on his body — he took two pair of pants out of his bag. Neither pair was ripped in any way as to cause the gentleman’s genitalia to be exposed.” The officer asked the man again: What’s wrong with your pants? “He stated that they were ripped ‘at the bottom of the pant legs at the cuff,’” the officer wrote. “At this point, the male stated, ‘Take me to jail.’”

The 38-year-old man was charged with indecency and carrying a concealed weapon because he allegedly had a straight razor. He went to jail.

Continue Reading The Blotter

News of the Weird

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

LEAD STORY: Unconventional Medicine: British construction worker Martin Jones, 42, who lost one eye and was blinded in the other in a 1997 explosion, regained his sight this year as a result of surgery in which part of his tooth was implanted in the eye. Dr. Christopher Liu of the Sussex Eye Clinic used a piece of tooth because a “living anchor” was necessary to hold a patch of Jones’ skin underneath his eyelid, to generate blood supply while a new lens formed. When the lens was healthy enough, Liu made a hole in the cornea for light to pass, and Jones feasted his eye on his wife, whom he had married four years ago, sight unseen.

Continue reading News of the Weird

Straight Dope

Saturday, August 1st, 2009

I’ve seen pictures of Pangaea, the giant land mass that eventually separated into the continents we know today. But why were the continents smushed together like that in the first place? What made the land higher on that one side of the earth? Were there other continents we can no longer account for? Is it related to the asteroid that may or may not have smashed into Earth and helped form the moon?
— Chris D., Cranston, R.I.

Careful, bud. Thinking outside the box is great, but we don’t want to cross the border into the completely insane. That’s a chronic risk with continental drift, talk of which was a sure way to clear out your end of the bar at scientific conferences until the 1950s and which still inspires wacky theories. Asteroids don’t figure in any of those I’ve heard about — but wait till you get a load of the expanding earth.

Continue reading the Straight Dope

(Illustration by Slug Signorino)

The Blotter

Friday, July 31st, 2009

CATNAP? On Pharr Road, a woman called police to report her cat missing. An officer arrived. The woman said she “has not seen her cat in several days and believes that one of her neighbors inside her apartment complex has kidnapped the cat,” the officer wrote. Also, the woman said the same neighbor confronted her and said she knew the woman has “herperies,” the officer wrote. The woman said she didn’t know how her neighbor could know that information about her. The woman “stated that she previous left her personal phone books outside her apartment on her patio, which is an open area next to a bus stop near [her] apartment,” the officer wrote. “[She] stated she found a small knife laying on her patio table when she returned to pickup her telephone book. When I inquired about the knife, [the woman] got the knife from her kitchen drawer and showed the knife to me.” The woman said she thinks her neighbor has it out for her. The officer couldn’t locate the suspected neighbor. The woman insisted on filing a police report.

Continue reading the Blotter

(Illustration by Tray Butler)

Straight Dope

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

What’s the final word about Y2K? We were told this was a serious problem, and that huge dollars and man-hours were needed to head off trouble. Why didn’t the sky fall, as predicted? Were the dollars spent before January 1, 2000, well spent or not? The date change seemed seamless to a layman. Was this because we headed off most of the trouble before it happened, or because it wasn’t as serious as predicted?
— Paul Wheeler

One may inquire: Why am I answering this now? Because the question keeps coming in, and at some point you have to ask, if I don’t take it on, who will? So here’s the best answer you’re likely to get: 1) While the true extent of Y2K issues will never be known, what we do know suggests the problem was wildly exaggerated. In retrospect, it would have been smarter to focus resources on a few truly high-risk areas, wait till 1/1/2000 for everything else, and fix what broke. Looked at in that light, the money spent on remediation, estimated at between $100 billion and $600 billion, was mostly wasted. 2) That’s hindsight talking. To put things in perspective (I realize the argument cuts both ways) many now say the world as we know it is going to end due to global warming. You think the smart choice is to say “relax”?

Continue reading Straight Dope

(Illustration by Slug Signorino)

News of the Weird

Monday, July 13th, 2009

LEAD STORY: A 48-year-old immigrant from Malta regularly hangs out in various New York City bars, but always on the floor, so that he can enjoy his particular passion of being stepped on. “Georgio T.” told the New York Times in June that he has delighted in being stepped on since he was a kid. While one playmate “wanted to be the doctor, [another] wanted to be the carpenter … I would want to be the carpet.” Nowadays, he carries a custom-made rug he can affix to his back (and a sign, “Step on Carpet”) and may lie face-down for several hours if the bar is busy. He is also a regular at “high foot traffic” fetish parties, where dozens of stompers (especially women in stilettos) can satisfy their own urges while gratifying Georgio.

Continue reading News of the Weird

News of the Weird

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

LEAD STORY: Using GPS and state-of-the-art sonar, Columbia University researchers recently made the first comprehensive map of the wonders submerged in New York City’s harbors. Supplementing those findings with historical data, New York magazine reported the inventory’s highlights in May: a 350-foot steamship (downed in 1920), a freight train (derailed in 1865), 1,600 bars of silver (unrecovered since 1903), a fleet of Good Humor ice cream trucks (which form a reef for aquatic life), and so many junked cars near the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges that divers use them as underwater navigation points. Of most concern lately, though, are the wildlife: 4-foot-long worms that eat wooden docks and tiny “gribbles” that eat concrete pilings.

Continue reading News of the Weird

Straight Dope

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

I recently read a speech by Noam Chomsky in which he says that during the Vietnam War, “soldiers were fragging officers.” I, a man too young to have served in that conflict, have heard this before but thought it was just a rumor. Can you shed some light on this dark matter?
— Tom, Chicago

I can, but frankly not much — and in my opinion, that’s a story all by itself.

Fragging — assaulting a superior officer using a fragmentation grenade or other explosive — was surprisingly common during the Vietnam War. The most reliable figure is 730 suspected incidents from 1969 through 1971, much higher than in U.S. wars before or since. Oddly, there’s no official count of fragging deaths; one unofficial source says 86, another 45.

Continue reading Straight Dope

(Illustration by Slug Signorino)

The Blotter

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

WISHFUL THINKING: An officer saw a man on the Freedom Parkway ramp to I-75/85. The man reportedly was walking back and forth, asking for money from drivers. Apparently, as the officer circled around, the man moved to the Ellis Street ramp. “[He] had previously fled from me into the Auburn Avenue area, so I snuck up behind him and took him into custody without incident,” the officer wrote. “[The man] said I must be following him and that his uncle in the FBI was watching traffic cameras in the area, so once Mayor Shirley Franklin was fired for ‘taking that money’ all the police would be fired and they would close the jail.” The officer arrested the 49-year-old man and he “was transported to jail, which remains open.”

Continue reading the Blotter

(Illustration by Tray Butler)

News of the Weird

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

LEAD STORY: Competitive Facial Hair: At the biennial World Beard and Moustache Championships in May in Anchorage, Alaska, four local heroes “defeated” the usually dominant German contingent in the 18-category pageant, including overall champ David Traver of Girdwood, Alaska, whose woven chin hair suggests a long potholder. Said Traver, of the Germans, “They were humble, and you have to respect that.” One defending champ, Jack Passion of Los Angeles, fell short with his navel-length red hair, despite having authored The Facial Hair Handbook after his 2007 victory. Traver acknowledged that no money was at stake (only trophies and “bragging rights”), but added that there are “a lot of ladies” who fawn over men’s facial hair. “Seriously, they exist.”

Continue reading News of the Weird

Straight Dope

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond claims, “When NASA wanted to find some place on Earth resembling the surface of the Moon, so that our astronauts preparing for the first moon landing could practice in an environment similar to what they would encounter, NASA picked a formerly green area of Iceland that is now utterly barren.” This struck me as wrong. Growing up, I heard the slag fields around Sudbury, Ontario, helped get the lunar astronauts accustomed to the moon’s desolation. I’ve heard similar things about islands in the Canadian arctic and deserts in the American southwest. I can’t see NASA hauling astronauts around the world just to look at places without trees. I wonder if the real explanation is that the astronauts had to take geology lessons. True?
— CAMERON BARR, EDMONTON

You nailed it, friend. Most astronaut field trips were about geology, not getting used to a bleak hell unfit for life. For that they could have stayed in Houston.

The astronauts trained at lots of sites in the U.S. and around the world, at least a couple of which humans had turned into wildernesses. According to Diamond, “Since human settlement began, most of [Iceland's] original trees and vegetation have been destroyed, and about half of the original soils have eroded into the ocean. As a result … large areas … that were green at the time that Vikings landed are now lifeless brown desert.” Similarly, much of the area around Sudbury, Ontario, was a moonscape in the 1960s due to nickel smelting.

Continue reading Straight Dope

(Illustration by Slug Signorino)

News of the Weird

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

LEAD STORY: Convicted Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols, now serving a life sentence in the Florence, Colo., “Supermax” prison, filed a 39-page federal lawsuit in March alleging unconstitutional “cruel and unusual punishment” because the refined-food, low-fiber meals give him “chronic constipation [and] bleeding hemorrhoids.” He demanded fresh, raw vegetables and other high-fiber foods, necessary to “keep one’s body (i.e., God’s holy temple) in good health.” Nichols was joined in the lawsuit by fellow Supermax resident Eric Rudolph (the convicted abortion-clinic and Atlanta Olympics bomber), who claimed “gas and stomach cramps” and observed that “our bodies” are “sacred and should be treated as such.”

Continue reading News of the Weird.

The Straight Dope

Saturday, May 23rd, 2009

Do bras keep breasts from sagging as you get older? I’ve heard reports that they do nothing at all.
— CURIOUS

Oh, bras probably do something. It’s just that nobody can agree on what it is. I won’t pretend to have the definitive answer, but here’s what we’ve established so far:

1) The medical term for breast sagging is breast ptosis. One often hears that “the French have a word for it,” “it” being any inscrutable aspect of daily life. If the French ever get stumped, however, ask a doctor.

Continue reading The Straight Dope.

(Illustration by Slug Signorino)

The Blotter

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

AFTER-SCHOOL SPECIAL: A mother’s kids didn’t return home from school one day. (They attend a local elementary school.) The mother said her kids weren’t at their school bus stop on Oak Street, so she started searching for them. She said she found her kids at another bus stop three blocks away. While she was there, she found a 6-year-old boy – and he said this isn’t his regular bus stop and he didn’t know where he was. The woman took the boy home and called 911, the elementary school and police. A school employee arrived and called the lost boy’s mother – and she quickly came to collect her son. According to the police officer’s report, the mothers told police “that this was not the first time this happened and that their kids have been dropped off several times at the wrong locations.”

Continue reading The Blotter.

(Illustration by Tray Butler)

The Straight Dope

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

How lethal are Tasers? I know there’s talk about police being Taser-happy and torturing people with these devices, but has anyone been Tasered to death?
— DUGIE C., CALGARY

News a little slow getting up to Calgary, Dugie? Lots of people have died after being Tasered — which is not to say they were necessarily Tasered to death. According to a widely publicized Amnesty International study last year, 334 people in the U.S. plus 25 more in Canada died between 2001 and 2008 after being zapped with a Taser by cops. The Taser’s defenders say it beats shooting people and reduces the risk of stray bullets injuring bystanders. Wrong argument, says AI. The Taser isn’t a replacement for guns but rather for billy clubs and such — for a lot of cops, it’s become the default method of subduing the unruly. OK, getting whupped upside the head in the old days wasn’t a pleasant experience, but at least it didn’t involve 50,000 volts.

Continue reading Straight Dope.

(Illustration by Slug Signorino)

News of the Weird

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

LEAD STORY: In April at a New York City gallery, the Australian performance artist Stelarc starred in a video of his surgery in which an ear is implanted into his left forearm (right now, just a prosthesis, but to which stem cells will be added), which will house an Internet-accessed, Bluetooth-capable microphone. “Post-evolutionary strategies” are required, Stelarc told the New York Times, because the current state of the body is obsolete. Other exhibits at the Corpus Extremus (LIFE+) exhibit included a genetically modified goat that produces super-strong spider’s silk. In an earlier project, Stelarc wired half his muscles to computers in Paris, Helsinki and Amsterdam, to understand a semi-controllable “split-body experience.” Stelarc’s self-appraisal: “[I'm] never in [my] comfort zone.”

Continue reading News of the Weird.

The Blotter

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

GRABBING GRANNY: A 73-year-old woman said a man grabbed her right buttock while she was walking on University Avenue. Then, the man reportedly stuck out his tongue at her, grabbed his crotch and shook it. The suspect — a 38-year-old man — had a mohawk haircut and glasses, and he was wearing a tan camouflage jacket, denim shorts, a fanny pack and a visor. The elderly woman told two witnesses what happened — and they stopped the suspect and took him to a nearby church. That’s when police arrived. “The suspect made an outburst that he was sorry for grabbing the victim,” the officer wrote. He went to jail on a simple battery charge.

Continue reading Blotter.

(Illustration by Tray Butler)

The Blotter

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

THROWING MONEY AROUND: A 19-year-old woman from Rex said she went through a toll booth on Ga. 400 one evening. She said her passenger (a 19-year-old man) got out of the car, put 50 cents in the toll basket and they drove on. A little farther down the road, the male passenger “noticed that the $7,649 was missing, so they got off at Exit 4/Glenridge Connector and turned around and went back to the toll booth,” an officer wrote. According to a toll-booth employee, a woman in a white car said there was money on the ground — and she showed him the money and drove away. He said, “some of the money was in one pile and that some more of the money was blowing around and that he picked up some of the money, but the female never gave him any money. [He] then turned the money in to his boss.”
The woman got $4,520 back — but she’s still missing $3,129. An officer wrote, “When I asked if they could review the security camera [a manager] stated that he was unable to review then and they would have to wait til the day shift manager came in.”

Continue reading The Blotter.

(Illustration by Tray Butler)

The Straight Dope

Monday, April 27th, 2009

I recently heard a rumor that sugar processed from beets contains traces of a poison used as a combat weapon in World War II. Is this true? What’s the difference between beet sugar and cane sugar, anyway?
— TOMLOBUR

A good rumor, which this is, is like an Indiana Jones movie. There’s a grain of truth to it, life and death are at stake, and you know Nazis are somehow involved.

Continue reading Straight Dope.

(Illustration by Slug Signorino)

News of the Weird

Saturday, April 25th, 2009

LEAD STORY: The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration recently postponed its crucial program to rejuvenate quarter-century-old Trident missile warheads because no one can remember how to make a key component of the weapons (codenamed “Fogbank”), according to a March 2 report of the Government Accountability Office. The GAO found that, despite concern over the bombs’ safety and reliability, NNSA could not replicate the manufacturing process because all knowledgeable personnel have left the agency and no written records were kept. Said one commentator, “This is like James Bond destroying his instructions as soon as he’s read them.” (The GAO report came two months after the German Interior Ministry reported to Parliament that over a 10-year period, it had lost 332 secret files that were in fact so secret that no one in the Ministry could recall what was in them.)

Continue reading News of the Weird.

The Blotter

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW: A woman said she and her boyfriend went out drinking on a Sunday night. “The two of them had a conversation about trust, when [the boyfriend] convinced [her] to let him use her Wachovia bank card to get $40,” an officer wrote. When he returned from the ATM, she asked for her card back, but he allegedly refused to return it. Then, she said, the boyfriend pulled off her wig — and returned to an ATM and took all her money — $320.  Continue reading Blotter.

(Illustration by Tray Butler)

News of the Weird

Friday, April 17th, 2009

LEAD STORY: Through the years, News of the Weird has reported on restaurants around the world with singularly quirky themes and signature dishes, such as the one in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, that seats all diners on toilets and the Beijing restaurant whose cuisine features animal penises. Last year, a group of doctors in Riga, Latvia, opened Hospitalis, a medical-themed restaurant whose dining room resembles an OR, with “nurse” waitresses bringing food on gurneys, accessorized with syringes and forceps in addition to knives and forks and with drinks served in beakers and test tubes. Hospitalis’ signature dish is a cake with edible toppings that resemble fingers, noses and tongues.

Continue reading the latest News of the Weird.

The Straight Dope

Friday, April 17th, 2009

My girlfriend and I were fighting over which led to a greater chance of getting cancer, smoking or tanning. I probably average a cigarette a day, and my girlfriend usually goes tanning two or three times a week. Who gets cancer first?
DAVE, COLUMBUS, OHIO

A slo-mo suicide pact — quel romantique! The competitive aspect bugs me, though. Why not jump out the window hand in hand and have this end in a tie?

Research on light smokers is fairly sparse (heavy smokers get most of the ink), but what there is won’t be much comfort. One Norwegian study, which tracked more than 40,000 people for up to 30 years, found the risk from smoking just one to four cigarettes per day was surprisingly high. For men, the risk of dying from lung cancer was 2.8 times higher than for nonsmokers; for women, it was more than five times higher. The cardio news was bad, too: The risk of death from ischemic heart disease was 2.7 to 2.9 times higher than for nonsmokers. Overall, light smokers’ risk of dying from any cause was about 50 percent greater than nonsmokers’. (This means within a given period of time, you understand. The long-run risk of death for anyone short of the Virgin Mary is a solid 100 percent.)

Continue reading The Straight Dope.

(Illustration by Slug Signorino)