Off the wall news.

[Old-Navy]

Leon Howard Matter was arrested in Sandusky, Ohio, in August for sending a letter containing "anthrax" (though it turned out to be harmless powder) to the local FBI office.

He told agents the reason he did it was because he was facing earlier child pornography charges and didn't want to go to prison for that because he'd get beaten up.

Threatening the FBI, he reasoned, has a better cachet. [WKYC-TV (Cleveland)-AP, 8-9-06]

[cobychuck]

Hundreds of people descended on Liverpool Street station for the biggest ever turnout for the latest internet craze - mobile clubbing.

Armed with MP3 players loaded with favourite tracks the "clubbers" arrived on the concourse just after 7pm last night. Students, business people and office workers danced in silence as they listened to their iPods among commuters listening to announcements about late trains.

Details of the time and venue were sent by email. The event is similar to the flash mobbing movement pioneered in New York which involved large numbers of people gathering to conduct bizarre activities.

One commuter said: "It was entertaining if strange to see all these people gyrating to their own beat. It was the Soul Train arriving at platform one."

[Old-Navy]

WEWS-TV in Cleveland reported in August that the pregnancy rate among girls at Timken High School in Canton, Ohio, was 13 percent, despite the fact that the school's athletic teams are known as the Trojans.

[Old-Navy]

OTTAWA, Canada (Reuters) -- Canadian troops fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan have stumbled across an unexpected and potent enemy -- almost impenetrable forests of marijuana plants 10 feet tall.

General Rick Hillier, chief of the Canadian defense staff, said Thursday that Taliban fighters were using the forests as cover. In response, the crew of at least one armored car had camouflaged their vehicle with marijuana.

"The challenge is that marijuana plants absorb energy, heat very readily. It's very difficult to penetrate with thermal devices. ... And as a result you really have to be careful that the Taliban don't dodge in and out of those marijuana forests," he said in a speech in Ottawa, Canada.

"We tried burning them with white phosphorous -- it didn't work. We tried burning them with diesel -- it didn't work. The plants are so full of water right now ... that we simply couldn't burn them," he said.

Even successful incineration had its drawbacks.

"A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those [forests] did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action," Hiller said dryly.

One soldier told him later: "Sir, three years ago before I joined the army, I never thought I'd say 'That damn marijuana'."

[Old-Navy]

Sometime next year, if all goes well, Brett Holm of Chaska, Minn., will begin selling his Season Shot, an improvement over current shotgun shells because its pellets dissolve on contact in the game meat and, more important, automatically flavor it for cooking.

Holm told the Chanhassen (Minn.) Villager newspaper in August that he will initially offer lemon pepper, mesquite, Mexican, and Creole flavors, but, he said, chemists are at work right now to expand the selection. [Chanhassen Villager, 8-3-06]

[K-Rock]

SEATTLE - He uses binoculars to peer into people's windows, and the things he does after that make his neighbors absolutely disgusted.

One woman caught this peeping tom on tape - and she wants police to take action.

It's happening at a high-rise apartment building in downtown Seattle. But the peeper is terrorizing his neighbors without leaving his apartment, making it hard to determine whether he's committing a crime.

Diane Earl's apartment window has a beautiful, sweeping view of Elliot Bay, but she doesn't get to enjoy it very often.

"I just sit in the corner," she said. "With all my lights off and my drapes drawn."

She feels like a prisoner in her own apartment -- all because of a man living across from her.

"When I get up in the morning he's over there watching me all day long," she said. "He takes his clothes off and will walk around his living room nude -- masturbate in full view with all his house lights on."

But what the man across the way didn't know is that he too was being watched. After getting fed up with the man watching her Diane set up a camera and got it all on tape.

Her video shows the man sitting in his window peering at her through binoculars while masturbating in plane sight.

Seattle police say they plane to follow up on Diane's initial complaint because the man's actions may be considered voyeurism - a Class C felony.

So far, though, the man has not been arrested or charged.

Diane said she filed a formal complaint with the managers of the apartment where the man lives, but she says they haven't done enough, to make him stop.

And at this point, that's the only thing Diane wants.

"I just want this to stop," she said."I want him to go away."

Seattle police plan to visit Diane's home on Tuesday to take the tape and say they will continue to investigate.

[Old-Navy]

In September, police in Madison, Wis., said Milo G. Chamberlain's blood-alcohol content was .425.

Experts said that is normally attainable only by those either dead or in a coma, but he was picked up, quite conscious, allegedly causing a disturbance at a Marathon gas station.

Hereportedly got into a fight with a gas pump before being restrained by passersby.

Police said Chamberlain responded to each of their questions only by rattling off strings of numbers of no particular pattern. [Capital Times (Madison), 9-23-06]

[Old-Navy]

What's next?  PENCILS??


ATTLEBORO, Mass. - Tag, you're out! Officials at an elementary school south of Boston have banned kids from playing tag, touch football and any other unsupervised chase game during recess for fear they'll get hurt and hold the school liable.

Recess is "a time when accidents can happen," said Willett Elementary School Principal Gaylene Heppe, who approved the ban.

While there is no districtwide ban on contact sports during recess, local rules have been cropping up. Several school administrators around Attleboro, a city of about 45,000 residents, took aim at dodgeball a few years ago, saying it was exclusionary and dangerous.

Elementary schools in Cheyenne, Wyo., and Spokane, Wash., also recently banned tag during recess. A suburban Charleston, S.C., school outlawed all unsupervised contact sports.

"I think that it's unfortunate that kids' lives are micromanaged and there are social skills they'll never develop on their own," said Debbie Laferriere, who has two children at Willett, about 40 miles south of Boston. "Playing tag is just part of being a kid."

Another Willett parent, Celeste D'Elia, said her son feels safer because of the rule. "I've witnessed enough near collisions," she said.

[cobychuck]

Another Willett parent, Celeste D'Elia, said her son feels safer because of the rule. "I've witnessed enough near collisions," she said.

Okay, I have to comment on this because that last comment just pisses me off.  What kid hasn't been hurt growing up?  Are we now restricting their playtime because the might get a scratch or God forbid, feel pain!?  Now I know why the school banned it, because the suit-happy parents would say it was the schools fault for allowing them to play because the parents "don't want their kids to get hurt".  B******t.  They just want the money that would fall from this frivolous lawsuit.  So now our kids are stuck doing what exactly at recess?  Standing around, since pretty much everything has been removed from the playground.  Well hell, we can't even really call it a playground anymore.  "Hey kids, go to recess and stand around for a while.  No, don't move you might get hurt.  Just stand there."  WTF!?  They are so eager to keep their children from getting hurt physically or emotionally that they do stupid s*** like this.  Okay, I feel better now.

[Old-Navy]

Yeah, it's a wonder that I survived 6 years of catholic school.  Still haven't figured out which was worse, tumbling around, falling, jumping, getting sore, scratched, head knocked on the playground, or getting the "attitude adjustments" from the nuns   

[Hoopty]

I thank my lucky stars that I survived my childhood...

I rode my bike for miles every single day, jumping whatever I could find and never once put on a helmet.  On top of that, I never even had a car seat as a child let alone ever wear a seatbelt.   Me and my brother roamed the car freely.  Not until the AF told me that I had to or else they wouldn't pay my hospital bills or life insurance did I pay any attention to wearing one...  Oh yeah, and we had corporal punishment in school where I used to get my a$$ whooped on a pretty regular basis by some teacher, coach, or principal starting in the 1st grade.  Hell, my T-ball coaches thought it was a good time to have 2nd graders go a few rounds bare-knuckle every once in a while for absolutely no reason (got a nice chipped tooth out of that one).  My shop teacher used to settle arguments with the line "get the gloves", there were 2 pairs of boxing gloves hanging on the wall, and out we would go to take care of it.  Good times.  I can only imagine the lawsuits that could have been brought during my childhood.

Now, you can't spank kids in school, I can get in trouble if I ride a bike without a helmet, a ticket if I'm not wearing my seatbelt, and probably thrown in jail if my kids hadn't been in carseats.  I can even get in trouble if I don't wear a reflective belt (which I refuse to do) during hours of darkness!  My God, if I can't safely cross the street at my age, I'm in real trouble.

And now they're taking away the game of tag...  What the hell?

[Old-Navy]

In a September raid, sheriff's deputies in Vista, Calif., seized jars of urine from the home of a suspected methamphetamine user.

Deputies said the user appeared to be saving his own urine in order to extract, and reuse, the meth he had already used.

A Drug Enforcement Administration agent said he was unsure whether the practice was widespread.

[Old-Navy]

hi i am judge floro --- here, philippines, asia, it is now 1 pm friday

Gawwwwwd... I LOVE TROLLS!!

A 'judge' that shows up on a PMEL site?
I bet he gets a lot of "BENCH TIME"!   

[Hoopty]

His IP does trace to the Phillipines...  I think it may really be the judge from the story.

[docbyers]

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian region has ordered an inquiry into a report that hunt organizers, keen to make the King of Spain's chances of killing a bear easier, provided a tame one drunk on vodka, a regional spokesman said Thursday.

"The governor has ordered a working group set up...to check the facts published in local press about the killing of the bear," said a spokesman for Vyacheslav Pozgalev, governor of the northwestern Vologda region.

National paper Kommersant carried a letter from Vologda's deputy chief of regional hunting resources management, Sergei Starostin, which accuses hunt organizers of plying a captive bear named "Mitrofan" with vodka-drenched honey and then forcing him from a cage to be shot by Spain's King Juan Carlos I.

"His majesty Juan Carlos killed Mitrofan with a single shot," Starostin wrote in his letter.

Russian hunt organizers are not complete strangers to such tactics. Keen hunter and former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had trouble with his aim in his later years. Some of the animals he liked to stalk were either tied to trees or plied with booze.