Category:
Crime
As anyone who has endured five minutes of conversation with me knows, I'll often relate real-life events to
The Simpsons. That show, like the Bible and the works of Shakespeare, has now reached a canonical mass such that you may find a textual reference applicable to any real-world situation.
Today's printed version of
THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL offers me another such occasion. There's an article headlined "Police Raid After-Hours 'Sip Joint' in Silver Lake." Inexplicably, though, this piece is not online, so far as I can google. But the barebones of the tale is told in a subheading. "A 17-year-old male who was allegedly caught dispensing beer has been referred to the Youth Services Bureau for prosecution in Family Court."
An
older article which is still available gives us this definition of a "sip joint."
"A sip joint, according to the police, is a place where a bar is set up — usually a house — for the illegal sale of alcoholic beverages at times when bars are closed."
Now, I've often been strapped for cash, but I've never once thought of setting up a tavern in my residence. Yet to geniuses like Homer Simpson, such a plan is their first instinct, as we saw at the end of
this episode.
The term "sip joint" itself seems exceedingly rare, and perhaps limited to Rhode Island.
Can readers supply instances of this practice, and what it's called, from their own regions?
I believe that in Bank Robbery 101, the student is generally taught that when a heist goes sour, one should snatch a hostage and threaten to kill he, she or it. But our boy in
this case was obviously not in class the day that lesson was taught. When cornered by police, he instead chose to take what our Illustrious Weirdo Chuck Shepherd has termed "the only way out."
Feast your eyes upon a true local hero! He achieved a personal best, nigh-terminal DUI rating of .489, as you can read
here.
As the authorities reveal: “'He is in a very small class of people because most people — even heavy drinkers — would be unconscious or approaching death to get up to .5. The danger with this guy is that with that kind of tolerance, you may appear to be fine one moment and unconscious the next.'
"Dasgupta said that for a man to reach a level of .491, he would have had to be drinking whiskey, rum or tequila — 6 to 10 shots — within two or three hours."
But Mr. Stanley Kobierowski also attained the honor of notching up the highest such rating ever recorded in my humble state of Little Rhody.
Way to go, dude!
Who knew that Serbia boasted so many high-placed fans of
Rankin-Bass animation?
We see by this scan of your brain that you're guilty of murder
Just recently, three people on trial for murder in Maharashtra state in India were convicted with the help of what has been called "brain fingerprinting" or "brain wave science," where electrical activity is measurable in a certain part of your brain only if you have actually experienced what you're being stimulated for (e.g., just reading about it or hearing it doesn't light your scan up). "Brain Electrical Oscillation Signature" requires wearing a cap with 32 electrodes, and obviously, other evidence of the crime is needed in order to fashion precise questions that differentiate what one might experience at the scene from what one merely learned about later. Defendants here, for example, demonstrated experience in buying arsenic, in actually sparring with the potential victim, and in traveling the route that the killer traveled. (News of the Weird reported previously on America's leading exponent of this technology, Lawrence Farwell [NOTW 669, 12-1-2000;
NOTW 802, 6-22-2003], which has been put to some uses, but solidifying a murder conviction.seems pretty radical.
Times of India // Wikipedia (disputed)
// Farwell's website
The
Edmonton Sun offers this description of a bizarre murder that occurred in 1887 near Canada's Slave Lake:
Marie Courtereille, 40, died after being struck four times with an axe -- twice by her husband Michel Courtereille and twice by her son Cecil. Testimony at their trial indicated that Marie had begged to be killed because she believed she was possessed by a Windigo, telling them, "I am bound to eat you." Over a period of several weeks, she became increasingly aggressive, "roaring like an animal" and attacking her husband.
Eventually, she was tied down and guarded around the clock until it was decided that there was no choice but to kill her. The community supported the killing.
A Windigo (also spelled Wendigo) is a creature from Algonquin mythology. The Algonquins believed that Windigos were malevolent spirits who could possess people, transforming them into "wild-eyed, violent, flesh-eating maniacs with superhuman strength." Horror fans will be familiar with Windigos, since they've featured in a number of horror books and movies.
The term "Windigo psychosis" describes a psychological condition in which people who believed they were possessed by a Windigo would go on cannibalistic rampages.
Many researchers regard Windigo psychosis as something of an Algonquin urban legend, but ethno-historian Nathan Carlson argues that it was a real phenomenon "which haunted communities right across northern Alberta in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries and cost dozens of lives." Carlson is working on a book that will documents dozens of cases of Windigo psychosis. Sounds like fun reading.
More about Windigos in
Wikipedia. (Thanks to
DJ_Canada for the link)
DNA evidence may not be all it's cracked up to be
There's now a war for hearts and minds over what level of improbability it is that two DNA samples can "match." The FBI lab allows numbers like "1 in 113 billion" and "1 in 108 trillion" to be used, but an Arizona researcher, looking at the question in a slightly different way, says that matches are certainly much, much more likely than that (and thus, "matches" in criminal cases should not automatically convict, as they seem to do now). Other researchers are intrigued and want to further study the FBI database. The FBI responds in the way it usually does when anyone questions it: Move along; nothing to see here; shut up.
Los Angeles Times
Update: One of the two arrogant little twits who stole the Girl Scout's cookie money actually has a substance-abuse problem
Stefanie Woods, 18, made
News of the Weird recently [
NOTW M062, 6-15-2008] when she snatched $168 off the girl's table and then gave a TV station some arrogant sass on camera. It turns out the judge bought into her drug/alcohol problem and sentenced her to three yrs in lockdown rehab. Whoa. But they couldn't find a spot for her so she's now on house arrest while inching up the waiting list.
Palm Beach Post // Video of original news story
Cruel, sadistic prison guards subjecting inmates to horrible excruciations. It's a sad practice as old as history. But seldom before today has the vile ritual reached such depths as reported in this
story.
What exactly is the new nadir of torture? Here's the quote:
"Houghton also said that Botas and Viveiros forced him to watch a Burger King cartoon on his office computer and sing along to a jingle that accompanied the commercial. He said that all three officers laughed and 'were getting a kick out of it … that they could take advantage of me.'”
Oh, the humanity!
Recovering my senses, and getting over the evident confusion on the prisoner's part between "cartoon" and "commercial" (his mind is obviously shattered, after all), I had to ask, "Which Burger King commercial?" Not watching much TV, I'm unsure what's currently on the airwaves that might have registered on the radar of the abusive guards. But they were after all using a computer, presumably to visit YouTube. So I found five possible torture jingles.
Which one do you find most excruciating? Or do you have another candidate?
See them after the jump.
More >>
Update: The murder suspect in the lion's head slippers
William Torres was arrested in Pennsylvania in January and charged with a couple of unremarkable murders, but when police finally apprehended him, he happened to be wearing lion's heads on his feet. He had his preliminary hearing this week, and you can once again check out the slippers.
Morning Call (Allentown)
All original content in posts is Copyright © 2008 by the author of the post, either Alex Boese ("Alex"), Paul Di Filippo ("Paul"), or Chuck Shepherd ("Chuck"). All rights reserved. The banner illustration at the top of this page is Copyright © 2008 by Rick Altergott.
Category: Business, Crime, Stupid Criminals, Domestic, Inebriation and Intoxicants, Regionalism