Where are your pants?

The Baltimore Police Department has run out of pants.

Officials have placed an emergency order for the department's most popular sizes, 36 and 38, and are waiting on the shipment. New officers receive four pairs of the standard-issue navy pants each upon being hired and other officers may trade in their old pants for new ones at any time.

"We are officially out,'' Officer Troy Harris, a police spokesman, told the Associated Press. "We're putting in an emergency order for those two sizes.''

Until the emergency order goes through, each new officer who is a size 36 or 38 will have no pants. Having recently hired 240 new police officers, well, that's a lot of pantsless police.

Why I'm in love with Linda Greenhouse...

In her Supreme Court Memo in yesterday's Times, she was talking about how often the Roberts court might overturn precedents, and she referred back to Arlen Specter's line of questioning in Roberts' confirmation hearings. Specter had asked Roberts if he agreed that Roe v. Wade was more than just a precedent, but a "super-duper precedent," because it had been revisited and reaffirmed in 1992. Then:

The nominee obviously knew exactly what Mr. Specter was driving at, but he gave
away nothing. He acknowledged the historical accuracy of the senator’s
chronology, but would not follow him to the land of “super-duper” precedents.

And this is why I'm in love with Linda Greenhouse.

(Incidentally, the lede was pretty awesome too: No Supreme Court nominee could be confirmed these days without paying homage to the judicial doctrine of “stare decisis,” Latin for “to stand by things decided.” Yet experienced listeners have learned to take these professions of devotion to precedent “cum grano salis,” Latin for “with a grain of salt.”)

Full story here.

I'm sorry, you're just not good enough for our poop.

I just essentially got rejected for a volunteer gig called "Kitten cage cleaner" with a cat rescue group.

Step aside, Tony Snow

I was just on the phone with the spokesman for, let's say XYZ Co. I was trying to find out some information about a project that began about a year ago but is making its way into a town in our coverage area next week. My conversation went something like this:

I asked a general question about the project. He said XYZ Co. had a press conference a year and a half ago and if I wanted this information I should have come to the press conference. I said that I wasn't here a year and a half ago, and it would have thus been very unlikely for me to attend his press conference.

He said someone at our newspaper should have attended it. I said I understood his concerns but this story has been assigned to me and I can't find any information in our archives about this project. Could he please just give me some information?

He said he had a plane to catch soon.

I asked if there was someone else who might be able to provide some information, or if I could find it online. He said he was the only one who was allowed to provide information.

Then he proceeded to lecture me about how there's no point in holding press conferences if we're just going to call him and ask him questions. I eventually stopped him and said maybe instead of spending his obviously valuable time arguing with me he could answer one or two of my questions. This didn't sound like fun to him. He answered everything with, "I don't have that information at my fingertips."

Eventually, something I said must have registered. As I was writing this post he called back with the information.

But seriously... I've never had this much trouble getting standard information about something not police-related.

I really think Tony Snow has met his match.

Maybe if I were lumpier...

While I was picking up prescriptions at Rite Aid yesterday I saw a woman carefully looking through all the options in the condom aisle. Picking up each box, comparing written descriptions, turning the boxes over in her hand to inspect every side. Considering colors, flavors, textures -- everything.

She was in her mid-forties or early fifties, was very lumpy and had short, frizzy, awkwardly-dyed-reddish-brown hair. She was wearing black tapered sweatpants that were somehow tight from ass all the way down to ankle (maybe *she* was also tapered) and the lumps of cellulite seemed to be trying mightily to come out for air. She was also wearing a bright red T-shirt.

Last month, I think, I would have been happy for her.

But all I could think was -- seriously? *She's* getting sex and I'm not?

Yeah...

Zippity doo da

There's nothing like writing a story about euthanizing kittens to make a shitty day That Much Worse.

I see London, I see France...

Anyone caught "sagging" their pants in Delcambre, Lousiana, is likely to face a $500 fine and/or six months in jail.

The town council there passed an ordinance that will go into effect once the mayor signs it (and she has confirmed that she plans to sign it). The ordinance reads:

“It shall be unlawful for any person in any public place or in view of the
public to be found in a state of nudity, or partial nudity, or in dress not
becoming to his or her sex, or in any indecent exposure of his or her person or
undergarments, or be guilty of any indecent or lewd behavior.”

Essentially, the ordinance is saying that showing body parts in public shall be illegal, and the underpants count as a body part.

In addition to the possibility of being arrested by an officer who gets a peek at your peeper, you can also be arrested if a resident files a complaint against you and signs a sworn affadavit confirming that he/she witnessed the offense.

So. Much. Fun.

And if you're interested in the full story, here it is at the Daily Iberian, apparently the town's "official journal."
http://iberianet.com/articles/2007/06/13/news/news/news56.txt

"The Gamete Games"

In trying to find a new angle on Father's Day, the New York Times decided to do a story on sperm. How they're produced, what they look like, how they work. Just a straight-up, detailed account of the inner workings of the male reproductive system.

It starts like this:

We are fast approaching Father’s Day, the festive occasion on which we plague
Dad with yet another necktie or collect phone call and just generally strive to
remind the big guy of the central verity of paternity — that it’s a lot more fun
to become a father than to be one. “I won’t lie to you,” said the great Homer
Simpson. “Fatherhood isn’t easy like motherhood.” Yet in our insistence that men
are more than elaborately engineered gamete vectors, we neglect the marvels of
their elaborately engineered gametes. As the scientists who study male germ
cells will readily attest, sperm are some of the most extraordinary cells of the
body, a triumph of efficient packaging, sleek design and superspecialization.
Human sperm are extremely compact, and they’ve been stripped of a normal cell’s
protein-making machinery; but when cast into the forbidding environment of the
female reproductive tract, they will learn on the job and change their search
strategies and swim strokes as needed.

Sperm are also fast and as cute as tadpoles. They have chubby teardrop heads and stylish, tapering tails, and they glide, slither, bumble and do figure-eights. So while a father may not be entitled to take the same pride in his sperm as he does in his kids, it’s fair to celebrate the single-minded cellular commas that helped give those children their start.

And then proceeds to turn into a science textbook. Not judging the writer here... I would have no idea how to write an article about sperm with no news hook beyond Father's Day. But... well... sperm.

The missing toilet paper was being hidden by Butts the whole time!

A woman whose last name is Butts faces up to three years in prison for stealing toilet paper from an Iowa courthouse.

Suzanne Marie Butts, 38, was caught taking three rolls of two-ply toilet paper from the storage closet at the courthouse. The discovery came after workers had noticed the toilet paper was disappearing more quickly than usual.

Butts, who is not a courthouse employee, acknowledged taking the three rolls but insisted it was her first time.

The fifth-degree theft charge, a misdemeanor, normally carries a sentence of less than a year in jail. But Butts could face more time if convicted under the state's habitual offender law because she has prior theft convictions, according to the Associated Press.

Because transforming the Democratic Party is like a baseball game

So I was Googling myself and saw that someone blogged about a story I wrote about the Edison primary, which has been running the last two months of my life. The only part of the blog entry that showed up in the Google summary was "In the middle of Erica Harbatkin's coverage of the Edison election results..." and I was intrigued to find out what that was. Turns out:

The entry, from a blog called "Laughing at the Pieces :

Choi at the Bat

I’m sure they’ll fix this on the main site, so I’m pasting a bit of it here for posterity. In the middle of Erica Harbatkin's coverage of the Edison election results in the Home News Tribune (mayor Jun Choi’s handpicked slate of newcomers won), something strange happens. Take a look:

EDISON — Mayor Jun Choi's slate of candidates won the Democratic council primary on Tuesday, giving the mayor control of the township's divided Democratic party.

Choi's Edison Democratic Party slate, which was full of political newcomers handpicked by the mayor, beat out the incumbents on the council and a third ticket headed by former Councilman Bill Stephens for the Democratic Party line in the November General Election.

The winning slate is composed of Washington Elementary School Principal AnnMarie Griffin-Ussak; former Edison boys baseball coach Wayne Mascola; Edison Township Education Foundation founder and President Melissa Perilstein; and Sudhanshu Prasad, an internal-medicine specialist and former chairman of JFK Medical Center's Department of Medicine.

Official numbers were not available Tuesday night because District 26 had a zero tally sheet, but results without those numbers had Griffin-Ussak with 3,607 votes, Perilstein with 3,486, Prasad with 3,500 and Mascola with 3,389.

"We started this movement two years ago and onto the diamond for the top of the sixth. But Randolph, which was down to its final strike in the sectional semifinal on May 29 and came-from-behind to win the sectional final, turned four hits, including a triple and two doubles, two walks and an Edison error into six runs.

HUH?

I follow American politics, so I’m no stranger to the labored sports metaphor. But it’s usually not this long. Sure, there’s a baseball coach among the winners, but Jack Kemp didn’t talk about football this much.

Let’s continue, shall we?

Senior catcher Rob Kral, who homered four times in Friday's sectional final, hit a grand slam in the top of the seventh for Randolph (23-7) to conclude the scoring. Winning pitcher Steve Zavala (13-1) homered in the first at bat of the game and went 3-for-4 with four runs and three RBIs to help fuel the Morris County school's 14-hit attack…

And it goes on for three more paragraphs, before resuming the election coverage.

Um… go Eagles? And congratulations, councilmen-elect?

I’d prefer a few more checks and balances in my soup, but I have hope that Mayor Choi and his handpicked team of councilmen govern responsibly, and don’t run on a pop fly unless there are already two outs.

Rob

Yup. That's my paper.

The Prez

(the man, not the cat)

I covered an event with President Bush in Edison yesterday, and was officially a member of the White House press pool... for a grand total of about three hours.

For two of those hours, I was roped inside the little press area, where we weren't allowed to move from while we awaited the president's arrival. I read a book. I spent about half an hour making my way around after the speech talking to people who paid $300 to $5,000 to see the president speak. And exactly 27 minutes of that time was spent watching the president speak, trying to see over the Very Tall People who paid $300 to $5,000 to be there.

When I arrived at the Expo Center, I received the following credential, on which the man wrote down the wrong name, crossed it out and then made an attempt at writing my actual name. So it looked kinda like I found a press pass and colored it in myself.



Yup. I'm that important.

Oh, and I wrote this crappy story while I was there.

And they say camels rarely get dehydrated...

I visited Nicole in Rhode Island last weekend, and we went to the Roger Williams Zoo. This is what we saw:

We were looking at a couple of camels, who were standing there being camels, when I determined that the camel on the right looked a little like one of my ex-boyfriends. Just as I vocalized that observation, the camel on the left started to pee. Well the stream came for a long time, and eventually Ex-boyfriend Camel saunteredto the back end of his friend and started licking the pee out of the air.

Nicole and I stared in awe for some time before we started laughing. Then it was over. Ex-boyfriend Camel walked back to the other side of his friend and stood where he'd been before. But Friend Camel's pee continued to flow, and Ex-boyfriend Camel decided to go back for more. So he returned to the back end of Friend Camel and licked some more pee from the falling stream.

Then Ex-boyfriend Camel took a few steps backwards and tilted his head all the way up, so his face was in the air and he appeared to be gargling the urine.

Now Nicole and I were more entertained than ever, and as we laughed I heard the words, "Ya like that?" from someone standing to my left. I looked over, and there stood a little man with eyeliner who apparently wanted me to lick his pee. I grabbed Nicole and said it was time to go.

And that was our day at the zoo.

Oh, and llamas poop in a neat trajectory, allowing them to stand upright and excrete without getting any poo on themselves.

Because being questioned by Congress is like a flower on a warm, wonderful summer day

Monica Goodling's Web site from college (click around... it's good stuff)
http://web.archive.org/web/19991008153443/home.regent.edu/monigoo/

Some of my favorite snippets:
Send me an e-mail if you want... I love to get mail.
And smile, the world can be a good place or a bad place, depending on which way you look at it. But it's a lot better when you're smiling.

Cassiopeia, my darling puppy, is only happy when she is chewing on someone's shoes. She's not picky, one doesn't even have to take off his or her shoe!

Friends are those things which make a day pass from mere existence to life itself. Their laughter, smiles, and love make all the difference.

Thanks for visiting, and have a wonderful, wonderful day.

Frisky young Jews...

I was running around my neighborhood this evening, a neighborhood filled with Orthodox Jews and some Orthodox Jews. It's the first place I've lived where I've actually felt comfortable running in after dark (although today it was still light out). Anyway I usually wear baggy running shorts, but tonight I was wearing a cotton tank top and spandex shorts. Three different little boys tried to talk to me.

It wasn't like the icky cat calls I've gotten in the past, but very polite greetings. In all cases, their ages couldn't have been into the double-digits.

The first was a little boy on a bike saying hi. The second a boy playing with his friends, who stopped what he was doing and very nicely said, "Nice shorts." The third, a boy running around with his friends who ran toward me for a few seconds and kept saying, "hey."

It was all very strange.

In other news, I've decided to go to Thailand this summer. Hooray tigers!

Lord of the Flies, anyone?

CBS unveiled its fall lineup today, featuring a new reality show called "Kid Nation," in which 40 kids (ages 8 to 15) live for 40 days in a New Mexico ghost town. They'll try to set up their own 19th-century society (complete with outhouses, a saloon, etc.), creating businesses and government without adult supervision.

My question is what parents will sign their kids up for this? You'll have the Hollywood-wannabes who hope this catapults their kids to stardom... who else?

No one can be voted off, but CBS never said murder and heads on stakes weren't involved.

Alien balls

From a wizarduniverse.com interview with Futurama co-creator David X. Cohen on the upcoming new episodes:

Q: Are there any new characters being introduced in the new season that you’re excited about?
COHEN: Yes, particularly Nudar, the evil alien nudist. We’re not sure what the censorship issues are as far as showing unrecognizable alien reproductive organs. I guess we’ll just put it on the air and see what happens.

Fiver!

If you could just tell me the make and model of your maternal grandfather's first car...

So I understand the need for security questions, etc., but...

I called to activate a new credit card I received in the mail after the old one expired, and they apparently had my old phone number, so the automated system transferred me to a live person since I wasn't calling from my "home number." Fine.

So I talk to the first "live person," who punches a bunch of things in the computer and then says he can't help me and I need to talk to a new live person.

So he puts me on hold for a few minutes and then tells me I'm on the phone with "Inez," my new live person. Who proceeds to politely interrogate the hell out of me.

What's your name?
What's your mother's maiden name?
...... I'm OK with these, but she continues...

In what state was your social security number issued?
.... Fine....

You may have gone to a college a few years back. Do you know what college it was?

Ummm.... UNCW? I mean, UNC-Wilmington? Or do you have Emerson College down there? In fact, I may have registered at Santa Monica College one summer thinking I was going to take classes but then didn't. Is that the one you have?

Through this whole thing, Inez has apologizing for the inconvenience and saying, "One moment," very politely, over and over again. In response to this answer, she sighs, says "Nevermind" and proceeds with "One moment."

You say you used this 1959 Cloverfield as a "permanent address?" Can you tell me the name of one of your neighbors?

You want me to name one of my neighbors?

Well you did say you lived there a while.

Yeah, that doesn't mean I can name neighbors. I can name people in Santa Monica. Do you want me to start naming people in Santa Monica?

Why would I want you to name people in Santa Monica? I need you to name neighbors. You said you lived there a while. You should be able to name neighbors.

I don't talk to people. Certainly not neighbor people. I'm antisocial. My brother, Daniel, lives at that address. Can he count as a neighbor?

*Sighs* One moment. *clicketly clack of the keyboard* Do you know this "Daniel's" year of birth?

1980.

Somehow, that did it.

But seriously? I understand the need for security, but a social security number, mother's maiden name and question about the name of my first pet really should do the trick. And what else do they know about me and all of my "neighbors" in Santa Monica?

What were you doing when you were 14?

In Dallas, kids are getting hooked on a mixture of Tylenol P.M. and heroin called "cheese," according to an AP story. The AP reported that it's been linked to 19 teenager deaths in Dallas, and the average age of those arrested for possession is 14.

Seriously? At 14, I was watching Animaniacs and going to parties at my friends' swimming pools.

In other news, I'd like to congratulate Eric and Brian on their new kitten, Stache. Go to Eric's comment on my MySpace page for a picture. And know that he has promised more pictures as well.

So that's all I've got. My life is boring...

Cat piddle and dead mice

So I decided to try this remove-frizz-for-a-whole-month hair product which promised on the box to, that's right, remove frizz for a whole month. It didn't work. What it did do, however, was make my hair smell like a dirty litter box. Hooray!

In other news, this amused me (in a sorry-this-lady-died sort of way)
JANESVILLE, Wis. (AP) — A couple checking out a house for sale were shocked to discover the 55-year-old homeowner dead in her bed. Authorities said foul play was not suspected.

Real estate agent Linda Chabucos-Galow stood in the dining room while Justin and Colleen McKeen walked through a house Monday night. Before long, she heard Colleen McKeen scream.

"I thought, 'What's wrong?' Maybe it was a dead mouse or something,'' Chabucos-Galow said.

But then she peered into the bedroom and saw the body of Linda L. O'Leary.

...