News: Stupid and Punishment

• Yup, we're talking Florida here:
  
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• I bet this cat is also from Florida:
  
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• Amazingly, not Florida, but close; Georgia:
  
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• ...And some more classic Southern stupidity:
  
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• But this is from Canada!
  
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• An infographic on the punishment of various crimes in societies throughout history
• People who get computer malware are also more likely to get mugged in "meatspace."

Metro Journal: Aug 19 That's So Pants!

On the way home, I picked up some beer from the Target at the Glendale Galleria and then caught the 180. The YMD^* sitting next to my beer had his pants belted around the tops of his thighs. He was busy taking pictures of all his pals with his camera phone, so hey, I took a picture of his attire.

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^*Young Male Dumbass. I should probably just go ahead and make a tag for that.

News: There Will Be Cake!

Transportation stuff:

• A dumbass who (allegedly) killed a man because she just had to update her Facebook page while she was driving (I'd love to see that update) is being sued by the victim's family. The defendant is arguing that she posted the update a few minutes earlier but server lag kept it from getting posted immediately. Seriously, though, the source of truth would be her phone carrier, which knows when the phone is in use. Techno-ignorant lawyers and journalists not asking the right questions once again make me want to smack them.
• Yes, this totally qualifies as transportation. A baby elephant becomes a pedestrian! It's amazing how all the adults are swarming around, helping support the baby.
  
• This one leaves me speechless:
  
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• I guess there was nothing in the original Oregon Trail game about getting hit by someone (allegedly) updating their Facebook page while driving, so dysentery will have to do!
  
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• A 2-year-old bus-loving Seattle-area boy got this awesome cake for his birthday:
  

Lolcat break:

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Stupid criminals:

• This dumbass (from Florida, of course), kept calling 911 to check up on local deputies. The 16th of these phone calls, when he got drunk and dialed 911 to tell the police to arrest "the media," got him arrested for making false 911 calls. The very same day, a woman in the same county was also arrested for making false 911 calls after she got into a scuffle with her nail technician and kept calling even after a deputy had arrived.
• This moron in Maryland was stealing jewelry from a home when the owner arrived. The burglar fled, but forgot his phone, which he had left plugged into the wall because his own house had lost power in the severe snow storms a month ago.
• YMD (Young Male Dumbass) burglars in the Chicago area killed 3 goldfish because they "didn't want to leave any witnesses."

Those morons could all take a lesson from this cat:

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Metro Journal: June 29

Walking to the bus stop tonight, I interrupted a late meeting of the Business Park Kitteh Committeh. They looked annoyed.

I've been working in Burbank for almost three months now, and my bus-riding experience has been a mixed bag. Let's compare to my commute to my last job, in Hollywood.

Pros:

• Fewer drunks on the bus
• Fewer tourists to trip over at the bus stops
• No premieres of stupid movies along the bus route to make it really late

Cons:

• The two viable lines (94/794) don't run nearly as often as the 180/181/780, especially after about 6PM.
• The route the bus takes isn't as direct as the Hollywood lines were, so the trip takes a fair bit longer relative to driving, and that's if I don't miss a connection
• The route just isn't quite as, well, interesting

Out of sheer pig-headedness, and a reminder of how much I hate other drivers when I do drive, I muddle through.

Anyway, tonight I hoofed it to my stop. I had to take the 794, but it was so late in the evening, I would have had to wait another 30 minutes for the next bus, a 94. The two lines take the same route, but the 794, being a Rapid, doesn't stop as often. But unlike the 180/181 vs. the 780, the 794 doesn't actually get me there that much faster, because it has to sit and wait at the same set of stop lights through downtown Burbank, and get stuck in the same traffic on the perpetually-under-construction San Fernando Road as the Local. Plus the 94 stops several blocks closer to work, and while I could use the exercise, I'm always worried about somehow mistiming and missing the bus in the evenings, when the next bus may come in 5 minutes or not for half an hour. Of course, walking to the 794 stop means I can also take a 94, whereas waiting at the closer 94 stop means I'm locked in.

Anyway, I got there well ahead of time. I was standing around, playing with my new phone. A woman walked up to the stop and asked if I'd seen the 165 go by. I said I'd been there about 5 minutes and hadn't. Then I decided to use my fancy superpowers. Using the Google Maps app, which now has a feature where it will tell you when the next buses are due when you select a transit stop, I told her the next 165 should be there in 10 minutes. She marveled. I basked.

My bus came right then and I got in. I sat at the back, on the aisle-facing seats. This YMD¹ sat down across from me and opens the window above him. Even though the bus is freezing because the AC actively blowing cold air back there. If he was too warm, he should have taken off his jacket. If he was too cold, it wasn't actually any warmer outside. Yeah, anyway. He was the type of moron who has the volume on his mp3 player jacked up so high, everyone in a 5-seat radius can hear it coming out his earbuds. It sounded like really crappy dance music, too. Then he paused the player, called up a friend, said he was at his mom's for two days, listened a second, then told his friend to call him back when his phone is recharged. (That's the story I would usually tell my mother when I wanted to get her off the phone. "Oops, Mom, the phone's beeping at me. The battery's out of juice. Talk to you lat..." Click.)

I just made the connecting 780. After a few minutes, I glanced out the window. The SUV in the lane next to us had a vanity license plate that read "COEDDIE." So, of course, I had to try to parse it. Here are the possibilities I came up with:

• Co-Eddie. Like the driver is associated with some person named Eddie.
• Co-ed-die, as in "like a female student at a unisex institution of higher learning."²
• Co-ed Die! As in, "that female student at a unisex institution of higher learning stole my boyfriend and I curse her soul!"

The SUV stopped even with me at a light. The passenger, tapping on her txting device, was definitely a female of about college age, but while I could see the driver was female, I couldn't really get a sense of her age, relationship to the passenger, likelihood to ax-murder a bunch of sorority sisters, etc.

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¹Young Male Dumbass
²My father liked to relate how, when he was at Georgia Tech around 1960, they referred to them as "co-odds."

Other: I Love It When They're Stupid

This is too funny. Some YMD broke into an acquaintance's home to steal some jewelry. Police didn't have much trouble figuring out who did it, because the moron couldn't even stay away from his Facebook page long enough to commit a quick burglary. Not only did he log into his account from the victim's home computer, he forgot to log out afterward.

You just know it's a matter of time before some dumbass has to tweet his way through some crime just so his friends know what he's up to at every single minute of the day. To quote the immortal Lennie Briscoe from Law & Order: I love it when they're stupid.

(via /.)

Metro Journal: Aug 31 District Whine

To beat the late afternoon heat in my apartment, I decided to go see District 9. As it is friggin' hot here, I slathered on the sunblock and then went out to wait for the closest bus. It was several minutes late. Some YMDs¹ in mom's minivan yelled something out their window while they drove past me. Look, morons, if you're going to be That Kind of Asshole Who Yells at Strange Women on the Street, at least make what you're saying intelligible. All I heard were random phonemes. Also, there was no shade at the stop. Fortunately, there was a brisk breeze blowing, which, while not cool per se, was still cooler than the sun.

Anyway, I bought my day pass and then went to the intersection with the 780, which I had to race across the intersection to catch, but I made it. I went into Pasadena. I got there with a few minutes to spare, got out my knitting, and settled in. About halfway through the film, my ball of yarn fell on the floor and I couldn't seem to reach it in the dark. As it did keep feeding me yarn without snagging, though, I kept knitting. (I recommend the film, both for some great action effects and for a thought-provoking, if somewhat generic "why racism and mega-corporations are evil!" plot.)

After the lights came on, I extricated my yarn ball, which had fortunately not rolled anywhere and didn't seem the worse for wear. (Fortunately, no one seems to have spilled sode or dropped nacho "cheese" in that spot recently or even not-so-recently.) The movie had been longer than I thought, as I got out around 8. I went into the restroom before leaving the megaplex and noticed some bright pink patches on my left arm. They felt rather warm to the touch. I apparently missed some areas with the sunblock, and even though I couldn't have spent more than 15 minutes in direct sunlight, well, the sun was that bright and hot, even late in the afternoon.

When I got out, the sun was down, but it was still really warm, although not unbearably so. I got some chai at Starbucks and read my compu-nerd book a bit, then when out to the bus stop. I proceeded to wait a really long time. I knew the 780s had almost certainly stopped running, but I was there at least 15 minutes before a 181 showed up. It turned out to be standing room only, too, although at least the aisle wasn't packed like a sardine can. And of course, there were the standard dumbasses who stand in the front of the bus instead of moving back, thereby forcing people to push and squeeze past them so everyone can get behind the damned yellow line so the driver can move again. Bah.

One of the dumbasses standing at the front was a guy in his early 20s wearing an enormous backpack, the kind you use for camping with a bedroll and all that. He was wearing a chambray oxford shirt and one of those dorky driving caps. He was talking to someone sitting next to him. When he started telling them about how one time he was up near Pak Mann arcade², which, while it did close a couple years ago, he made it sound like this Stone Age-era archaeological site. Anyway, he was saying that he was up near there with some of his "homeboys" and they were getting shot at by guys in a Honda Civic. WTF. We're talking Mr Wonder Bread white boy here. He didn't dress or use typical gangsta inflections, either. My mind was boggling. I missed some bits, but then he was telling the person about how he had seen some guy wearing a t-shirt that said, "So Cool, So Rad," and he "wanted to slap the shit out of him" for the "besmirchment" of... I couldn't figure out what, because my brain was boggling at how such a t-shirt, while not particularly cool or rad, could be so offensive, but mostly I was just in shock that such a fucking poseur was so up-in-arms about some other poseur, without having any idea of the hypocritical irony of his own poseur-ness. At least when I'm being a poseur, I'm well aware of it, although, let's face it, I'm so superkewl, I can get away with just about anything. Anyway, I'm sorry to deprive everyone of the rest of this spectacle, but this guy was just such a ridiculous, self-important, dumbass dickhead that I couldn't take the pain anymore. It is probably more entertaining to read about than it was to experience in real life. I got out my headphones to block out the stupid and the pain.

Oh, and then I came home to a jury summons! Um, woot? No, probably not. I go on call the week of September 14th.

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¹Young Male Dumbass
²An enormous video game arcade maybe a mile or two from Tech. They had everything. I vaguely seem to recall feeding enough quarters into the old Simpsons game to finish it one evening about six zillion years ago.

Metro Journal: Aug 12 Beverly Shrooms 90210

I had a job interview in that most famous of zip codes yesterday morning. First I took the 780 to Beverly Blvd, then I could take the 14 to within a block of the interview or the 714, which stopped several blocks away. As I was wearing my angry shoes, I wanted to minimize walking. I got on the 14, which magically turned into a short line, dumping rather surprised passengers at the Beverly Center. I had a lot of buffer time, but we had to wait awhile until a 714 showed up. Fortunately, the weather was mild as long as you were in the shade, and, well, it wouldn't be like Beverly Hills to have crappy side walks. I managed to make it there with a couple minutes to spare.

Walking back to the closest stop in the mostly-residential neighborhood, I noticed a really large cluster of wild mushrooms growing next to someone's flower bed.

The 14 intersects the 780 at Fairfax, less than two blocks south of Canter's. I hadn't been to Canter's, a world-famous, 24-hour deli with a menu that rivals War and Peace in length, in many years. Plus I was really hungry. So, while I was trying to walk as little as possible as my angry shoes were making my feet, well, angry, I walked up there. Mmmm, avocado melt.

All in all, it was a pretty uneventful ride back. While waiting for my "my feet hurt too much to walk half a mile and it's kind of warm out anyway" bus in front of the post office, I was treated to a lovely floor show. Well, not lovely, exactly. Three people were already sitting on the shaded bench, watching a bunch of YMDs¹ standing next to a car with a very smashed front end, talking to a police officer. They were there awhile, then, too cheap I guess to get a tow truck, about half a dozen of them pushed the car down the block. They then blocked a side street for a couple minutes while trying to figure out how to maneuver the thing into a gas station.

That entertainment finished, I turned around in time to seeing some other YMD backing his BMW into a parking space. Um, WTF? It's a one-way parking lot. You go in one end, go out the other. And the slantedness of the spaces should also have been a clue, but, well, the driver was a YMTD.² I was really eager to see if he would try to go out the entrance when he left, especially hoping there would be cars driving in at the time, so I could see if he was just a TFD,³ but the bus came before he came out. Oh, well.

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¹Young Male Dumbass
²Young Male Total Dumbass
³Total Fucking Dumbass