We hear emergency vehicle sirens throughout the day since we live near a busy intersection, but when they stop near us it's usually on the block to our west. (It has less-expensive apartments on the near side and a Taco Bell on the far side. You may remember the 'Bell from a road-rage stabbing I posted about last year.) Yesterday I heard a bunch stop in the much quieter block to our east and wondered what happened.

The DMN's Crime Blog filled in the blanks for me this afternoon: 15-year-old Dallas boy shoots himself in the foot while watching Iron Eagle.

Somebody failed at home gun storage.

This happened around the far corner of our block. The apartments shown behind one of the victims are the cheapest in the neighborhood and frequently mistaken for public housing. (The actual city-owned housing is a few blocks away and blends in with the rest of the nicer complexes.)

Two signs this won't be in the news long:
- What the teens were doing out that late on a school night is probably not going to elicit sympathy; and
- The victims were taken to Parkland Hospital (for Denver people, this is like being taken to Denver Health).

I want to make snarky comments about plagiarism, but this is so bizarre it stands on its own: romance "author" Cassie Edwards uses passages of an environmental magazine article as dialog in novel and is outed by the ladies of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.

Links:
- Cassie Edwards Investigatory Extravaganza at SBTB
- "Move Over, 'Meerkat Manor'" article at Newsweek
- "Ferret Article Allegedly Plagiarized in Romance Lit from Monday's Talk of the Nation; it's 17 minutes but worth listening to just to hear Tolme (the ferret article author) say "Is that a ferret in your loincloth or are you just happy to see me?".

Two observations:

0. Apparently children's clothing manufacturers have "adjusted" sizes again. I'm reasonably sure I'm not shrinking, yet a girls' 16 seems to be at least a full size larger than it was a year ago. So far this has tripped me up buying underwear and yoga pants. I'd like to make an offering to the fashion gods to help me find yoga pants that fit me like the pair I bought last year.

1. gamahucheur posted a link to an article last week discussing a link between the ApoE-4 gene and herpes simplex 1, which are respectively a key risk factor for Alzheimer's and the virus that causes cold sores around the mouth. vogonpoet took a keen interest in it and has been bringing it up as more bits pop up in his memory about both subjects.

...

I've got a busy week with school and Scouts this week, so I may be slow on replies but I will get to you.

Trish, I'll e-mail you menus to choose from in the next day or two. I finally got them typed up over the weekend!

Girl, 9, Killed By Circus Lion

MENA. Ark. Authorities attempted Wednesday to determine how a circus lion got loose and clawed to death a nine-year old girl in Mena. No one apparently saw the enraged animal grab little Maria de la Luz Tuesday night in the darkness outside the tent. Spectators watching a performance rushed outside upon hearing the screams of the victim, a granddaughter of performers in the Campa Brothers travelling circus. The lion, which is not full-grown, was found holding the girl in his clutches underneath a circus truck. The crowd stood helplessly until the animal trainer pried open the lion's jaws with a stick and led him back to his cage. The girl was dead before medical aid could reach her. There were conflicting reports as to whether the lion had been caged or staked outside on the abandoned airport grounds where the circus was held.

Source: The Newark Advocate, Wednesday, October 31, 1951

For those of your playing along at home, Maria Campa de la Luz was a first cousin to my grandmother, Blanca Campa [later Hall]. The lion was staked outside the cage because he had been hand-raised and considered tame; the animal trainer was the girl's father.

Battle of the Species

Man has reaped many rewards from his dominance of the animal kingdom. But animals are not his loyal followers; and he is still only slightly ahead. Last week the battle of the species was waged from Maine to Alaska.

¶ In Mena, Ark., while the Campa Bros, circus trumpeted through its one-night stand, nine-year-old Maria Campa, granddaughter of one of the circus owners, was clawed and chewed to death by a young lion considered so tame he was tied to a stake outside his cage. Next day, as the Campa circus trundled along the rain-slicked road toward Mount Ida, two trucks overturned. Nine beasts scampered into Ouachita National Forest. A pursuing posse brought down one of two escaped leopards and recaptured a tame black bear and a rhesus monkey. The other leopard prowled all night before being tracked down by a small but heroic cur named Tony, whose owner, Roiston Fair, shot the leopard, but not before it had killed Tony. Still in the forest: a polar bear, a black bear, three monkeys.

...

Source: Time, Monday, November 12, 1951

But Seriously, Folks
Heard the One About Kinky Friedman Running for Texas Governor?

By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 18, 2006; C01

FORT WORTH

Smoking an illegal substance, Kinky Friedman heads for the Flying Saucer.

Kinky -- nobody calls him Friedman -- is a comic country singer, mystery novelist and Texas humorist. The illegal substance is a fat, stinky Cuban cigar. The Flying Saucer is the Fort Worth bar where Kinky is about to deliver a speech in his campaign for governor.

But first he removes the cigar from his mouth and reveals the wisdom that his old friend, country icon Willie Nelson, imparted when Kinky began his campaign: "No pedophile jokes till after the election."

So far, Kinky has followed that advice, and it has served him well. The pols and the pundits said he was a clown who could never collect the 45,540 signatures necessary to get on the November ballot as an independent candidate. But Kinky showed them: He got 137,154 certified signatures.

He ambles down the sunny street, wearing his trademark outfit: black cowboy hat, black shirt, black leather vest, bluejeans and black cowboy boots. Those duds, along with the Frank Zappa facial hair and the Groucho Marx cigar, make Kinky look like the bad guy in a bad western. They also make him instantly recognizable all over Texas.

( Read more... )

Is it wrong of me to laugh that the weather segment on the local 10 PM news was interrupted by an Emergency Alert System message for a tornado warning for a single county (and not the one I'm located in)?

Now I'm going to have wait another fifteen minutes for that channel's five-day outlook or flip to another station. d:

There's something slightly hysterical about hearing a story on PRI's The World about an invasion of giant beavers while sitting in the car outside an elementary school.

After that line, Vogon kept intermittently bursting into chuckles until the story wrapped up with "and no one knows how far the giant beavers will spread".

...

From The World: January 30, 2006:

Beavers in Chile threaten environment (5:45) (Listen in WMA format)
Beavers in southern Chile are gnawing their way north and causing concern. Biologists fear economic and ecological mayhem if something isn't done to stop them. Reporter Jen Ross has the story.

A little something to think about today from bookslut:

Everyone in America owes Kathy Glick-Weil a big thank you.

A matter of principle -- and law -- made Newton Free Library's director, Kathy Glick-Weil, insist that FBI agents cool their heels in their pursuit of an alleged terrorist threat.

Glick-Weil said yesterday she had no choice but to prevent the FBI from seizing library computers last week, because they came without a search warrant.

You can send that thank you at Newton Free Library - Email the Director.

One thing I'd actually buy on CD instead of in iTunes: The Complete Verve Remixed Deluxe Box, released last month. The fourth disc is a bunch of unreleased mixes and videos, including an both an extended mix and a video of "Sinnerman". *drools*

...

While listening to the breaking news yesterday afternoon about federal air marshals shooting a passenger on a jetway in Miami, I told Vogon it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out like an episode of CSI ("Unfriendly Skies", season 1) where an air passenger that started behaving erratically and was taken down by other passengers turned out to have encephalitis. Score one for pragmatism, I guess.

...

Vogon has been prodding me lately to look into studying human factors -- according to him, it's all I talk about.

I'll bite: I usually bring up the latest Alertbox or Don Norman articles at lunch because I'm interested in his opinions on them coming from his experience in software development. He gave me two Don Norman books that were on my Amazon wishlist for Mother's Day, which made me joke that I should put some Edward Tufte books on that wishlist for the next time I think he might look at it.

Seriously, what keeps kicking me is that what I think I really want to do is study library and information science, but I need to finish my undergraduate work in order to get there and I don't know what I want to study. I suppose it doesn't really matter -- I know dozens of people, if not more, who work in fields totally different from their undergraduate field of study -- but I want to chart a course that will get me to an LIS program with the least time spent wanking about to get there.

Thinking about obituaries lately and looking at the NPR site today for a link to a story I heard this morning led me to the Remembrances section, which recently added an article on Stan Berenstain.

/me is silent for a moment

If you'd like to subscribe to the LJ syndicated account of the page's RSS feed, it's rssnprobits.

The Dallas-Fort Worth CBS affiliate did a story on geocaching that aired tonight. The closing bit about "the geocaching way" was a bit cheesy, but it was positive overall -- it showed Dreamcacher V placing a cache up in a tree and Cammie455 wearing a TerraCaching shirt. (:

It also reminded me that I should get out and find some of the caches near me -- there's over a dozen within two miles and most of them are in kid-friendly locations. Well, except for that crazy White Rock Creek one, but I'm not into wading through brush here.

I think a theme for this year's pumpkins would be fun. I came up with a bunch of ideas, scrapped most of them, and now I'm down to Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends (Bloo and Mac together, Eduardo, Coco), Kim Possible (Kim, Ron, Rufus), or Mucha Lucha (Rikochet, Buena Girl, The Flea).

...

Vogon came in at lunchtime craving wood-fired pizza. After racking our collective brains and coming up with Colorado places (the obvious -- Beau Jo's and Woody's), we did a quick Google search and came up with Two Rows, which has a location in Addison. We split a blackened chicken alfredo pizza with a scallion and garlic focaccia crust, no tomatoes.

While looking for an official website for Woody's, I skimmed the headlines on the Denver CBS affiliate's website since one in the local news box on denver.citysearch.com caught my eye: "Home Invasion Suspect Stabbed To Death By Homeowner". One of the related stories from that story's page was "Man With Sword Confronts Burglars, Gets Shot" (talk about bringing a knife to a gun fight, though it was a homeowner awoken by the burglary and shot at by the suspects as they were leaving his home) and at the end of the local/regional headline list was "Man Caught Smuggling Yeast In Jail", which I just giggled at even though I correctly guessed it was brewer's yeast and not a bacterial infection. The line "Initial tests on the substance were negative for marijuana, cocaine and hash. . . . Later, authorities determined the true nature of the substance" just slays me.

...

I need to do a sweep for any loose writing utensils again -- Laurel took a crayon and a pen to one of my vintage children's books that we had gone over many times that it was a reading book, not a coloring book, and belonged to Mommy. I'm considering withholding her latest book order's books until she agrees to not color in reading books. (She has a pile of coloring books and paper in the living room, so I think this is more exploring boundaries than a lack of material for creative pursuits.)

Last night I had Texas Cable News on to listen to KHOU covering the weather conditions in Galveston. I was hoping to hear about the Flag Man after hearing on The Pugs & Kelly Show that he was supposedly still there. Instead, I got an unexpected chuckle at the fashion choice of a citizen journalist.

While a reporter covering the fire in the Strand was on the phone to the station as a crew tried to set up an uplink, he talked to a local resident that had taken a video clip of the fire with his camera phone and asked him why he hadn't evacuated. He replied that his van wouldn't have done well in the traffic getting out of the area, chuckled and said yesterday had the sweetest surf of his life, then continued that he had come over to check on some friends' businesses. I giggled at his Oscar the Grouch t-shirt when they briefly got the video uplink working.

Today it looks like Galveston was spared major damage, so hopefully our annual October mini-vacation there is still on.

(For those curious about the damage, what I've gleaned from the news is that a fire last night in the Strand damaged a bail bonds company, a Victorian-era home, and an art gallery housed in the former Eagle Lodge, the Galveston Daily News building had a partial roof collapse, and a wall of Yaga's Cafe collapsed. The Daily News article "Storm damage not as bad as feared" goes into more detail.)

It's surreal to get the news on delay.

We watch children's television in the morning (they don't break in with news) and get not-so-great radio reception indoors, so I didn't catch up on the morning news until I sat down at the computer, skimmed the NPR headlines (I set them as a Live Bookmark in Firefox) and refreshed my Friends page, where over half the posts are talking about the London attacks and particular people they're hoping to hear from.

I mentioned in a comment to a friend that I was thinking about how to talk to Laurel about the attacks, so I dug up a few resources other readers might find useful:
- Talking With Kids About War and Violence from PBS Parents
- Dealing With Disaster: Talk It Out, Take Care Of Yourself, Answer Kids' Questions from WebMD
- Talking With Kids About Tough Issues (aimed at communicating with 8-12 year olds)

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It has been just-after-dawn dark here all day, thick cloud cover and it barely broke 80 degrees by 1100. Accuweather (via Forecastfox) gives our local weather forecast for today as "A stray afternoon t-storm, 98", but it's been rumbling for awhile now and Laurel keeps asking if it's going to thunder or not. I hope it brings some much-needed rain.

For ass_, who texted me this morning asking about it:

The shooting happened in a neighborhood a few miles south of us. (Tresine Drive is in Wonderview, just south of the s-curves on Highway 73. We live a few minutes' walk from Evergreen Lake.) From what I've heard, the victims were working in/on the house the shooting occurred in and probably knew the suspect. The sheriff's office says it wasn't a random shooting; I'll believe that since most crimes that happen up here -- aside from mailbox-bashing and similar vandalism -- aren't random.

I'll probably know more tomorrow and will update then.

Edit 1658: local news just reported Jeffco Sheriff cadets are searching a field alongside I-76 for weapons that may have been used in the shooting.

When Himself saw the typo, he asked if they were for cancerous GIs.

( It's *chem* gear, not chemo gear. Heh. )

I know it's not the point of press pool remarks to answer questions, but unintentional humor is good for me tonight. From IM:

auntiesiannan: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040122-5.html
oddharmonic: *snerks* Ahm a' gonna hef to stop yuh, I need me some ribs!
auntiesiannan: BABYBACKBABYBACKBABYBACKBABYBACK
oddharmonic: Barbeque sauce.