Patrick Eakes has the video of a gun-safety speechifier who shoots himself in the foot during a presentation. The speechifier is suing the government because the video got out and he thinks it ruined his credibility.
BTW, I like Patrick’s headline much better than mine: "Barney Fife Lives"
Here’s the story: a 15 year old high school kid in Canada makes a video of himself reenacting a Star Wars light saber fight. He leaves the tape on a shelf at the schools video lab and another student finds it and shares it with another student. The second student digitizes it and emails it to some more kids. A third kid decides to host the video on his website and then the video goes viral. Life becomes miserable at school for light saber boy when all the teasing starts.
Okay, I feel bad for the kid but according to this article he and his parents sued the families of the three kids responsible for the video getting out and the parents of the three boys ended up settling the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount. Huh?
If I understand this correctly the kid made a video using the school’s equipment, left the tape on a shelf at the school (expectation of privacy?) and then when some boys found the tape and put it on the internet his family sued the parents of the kids who found the tape and put it on the internet. According to the article the three boys are accused of bullying, but aren’t all the kids that teased saber-boy the real bullies? Why not sue them all?
The article also talks about whether any of the parents had liability insurance and how much money they had available for settlement. Who the heck carries liability insurance for instances like this? Am I missing a potential business opportunity here? Insurance against over-litigious parents might be a huge growth industry:)
When I was a kid and cable TV had yet to come to our house I used to scroll the six stations on our TV looking for something interesting to watch at odd hours. Sometimes I came across a faith healing tele-preacher named Ernest Angley who was easily the most entertaining crackpot I’d ever seen. I’d sit mesmerized, watching as people in 50s-era eyeglasses and polyester jumpsuits would come forward, one after another, to be healed. The best were the ones who would get smacked on the forehead and then with knees locked fall backwards into the arms of Angley’s waiting assistants. Even at 12 years old I couldn’t believe any sane person would fall for the act, but he was on week after week so obviously someone bought it. (Further evidence can be found in this article from 1980…in Penthouse? Don’t worry the link goes to someone else’s archive.)
I figured Angley was either long dead or in jail but it ends up he’s in Ohio (surprised?) and is now exporting his faith healing to impoverished countries. Oh, what a wonderful world we live in.
Celeste, my lovely wife, is going to choke when she reads this one. There’s a woman in Wisconsin who has been paying a monthly fee to rent a rotary phone she hasn’t used in at least 10 years. It’s been boxed up in her basement all that time. (Read about it here).
The monthly fee is currently $4.45 per month plus tax. That means for at least the recent past she’s been paying over $50 a year for the thing, and she only discovered it when she changed from AT&T to SBC for long distance. She’d never switched from AT&T for long distance after the company split into the baby-bells in 1984, and she never noticed the line item for the phone on her bill.
That’s exactly the kind of thing that Celeste guards against. If the bills were left to me I’m sure we’d have a similar story to this, but Celeste catches those things like a hawk. Needless to say I don’t get away with ANYTHING around here.
There’s a best-selling book out there called "A Million Little Pieces" and it’s a best-seller primarily because Oprah featured it in her book club. I haven’t read the thing, and in a second I’ll explain why I’m glad I didn’t.
The Smoking Gun (TSG) wanted to put up a mug shot of the book’s author, James Frey, because the book is all about how the author survived addiction, alcoholism and a life of crime. When they had difficulty finding any evidence of the life of crime that this guy supposedly survived they started to dig and the result is a long expose that pretty much shows that Frey has invented a new genre that I’ll call BioFiction.
This guy Frey is a mid-30s white guy who grew up in an upper middle class home and had what I’d call a relatively common alcohol and drug experience in his high school and college days. In fact he seems remarkably like most of the guys I knew in college. Now he’s taken those experiences and grossly embelished them to create a story he could sell; in fact he first submitted the book as fiction but had to "revise" it to a biographical account to get it published. And now he’s a millionaire.
I won’t go into all the details since you can read the TSG piece for that, but I will say that based on the book excerpts in the expose I’m very glad I didn’t bother to read it. Actually, a book being featured in the Oprah club is a good way to guarantee that I won’t read it. Oprah’s scheduled a follow up appearance for this guy, and he’s already published a follow up and apparently is working on the film version with some leading lights in Hollywood. I wonder if Oprah is going to cancel the follow up after reading the expose and it will be interesting to see if his pending book/movie deals go down the toilet.
Remember Michael Brown? You know, the guy who screwed up FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina so royally that even the Bush Administration had to fire him, uh, I mean let him resign. For any of you who are worried about where Mr. Brown might have gone to make a living after such a public professional fiasco, you need worry no more. According to this article he’s launching a consultancy focusing on, you guessed it, disaster preparedness.
You know we consultants are starting to give lawyers a run for their money in terms of PR. Me thinks I might need to change my descriptor to something like "professional advisor."
There’s a guy who was making a pile of money selling Legos online. Pretty smart. He got his merchandise by visiting Target stores, switching barcodes from cheap Lego sets to more expensive Lego sets and then buying the more expensive set at the cheaper price. The tag switching thing is pretty smart, but doing it only at Target stores was pretty dumb because the folks at Target noticed a pattern and one of their own store security people caught the guy while he was trying to buy 10 sets of the Star Wars Millenium Falcon set. They found a bunch more in his car along with a laptop that had Target stores plotted out on a mapping software. That’s dumb.
You can read all about it at Loose Wire.
Okay, I wasn’t thinking when I booked this trip. I’m flying out of Dulles this evening to return home, and although it is still 5 hours until my flight departure I’m a little worried about getting through traffic and then getting through security in time to get to my flight.
Yep, not one of my brighter moves.
This piece comes from the Online Sun (which, by the way, will continue to be the liberal thought leader even after the New York Times starts charging for access to their editorialists):
TWO Star Wars fans suffered horrific burns in a mock battle with home-made lightsabers filled with PETROL.
Shelley Mandiville, 17, and Mark Webb, 20, made the weapons with fluorescent light tubes.
They filled them with fuel and washing-up liquid to act out a Jedi Knight fight scene from new movie Revenge Of The Sith.
They lit the liquid to illuminate the makeshift toys.
But it exploded — covering them both in the burning mixture.
Firefighters discovered Shelly and Mark with serious burns after being
called to woodland near Hemel Hempstead, Herts, on SundayPolice were studying a video camera found at the scene. It was
thought that a third person was taping the “duel” — who fled in terror
when the disaster happened.
Update: I also found this story on the BBC site which I’m glad I didn’t cite first, since I find the BBC to be a sensationalist news organization that uses images of scantily clad women to attract eyeballs.
Befuddled 