Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

So the wife and I were up in NashVegas this weekend to help welcome a new niece into the world. On the local next yesterday morning there was this rather strange bit about the shooting of a Springfield police officer:

Springfield Police Officer Shot
March 5, 2007 12:53 AM

A Springfield police officer was recovering Sunday night after being shot inside a local emergency room.

It happened at the NorthCrest Medical Center. Sources tell NewsChannel 5 Officer Curtis Scott was on patrol, and stopped at the ER. They say a man there started fighting with Scott.

During the struggle, a gun went off. The bullet ricocheted off the floor, and hit Scott in the stomach. Scott was then lifeflighted to Vanderbilt where he was treated for his injuries.

Officer Scott is now back at home and we”re told he”s doing okay.

Police have arrested 31 year old Malchico Gardener.

Read that carefully. The officer was shot in the emergency room of a local hospital and flown to Vanderbilt for emergency treatment. And for wounds that were not severe enough to keep the guy in the hospital for 24 hours.

Quite the PR coup for NorthCrest Medical Center.

I”m pretty fascinated by the fact that a huge stash of Paris Hilton”s private photos, videos, diaries, etc. have been turned into a gawker/porn site after being auctioned off to settle a mini-storage bill. Talk about the perfect marriage of celebrity obsession and technology.

And surely lots will be written about all this. But what interested me - ok, it”s not the only thing that interested me - was reading through the site”s terms of service. I suppose it”s somewhat standard at adult sites to have to agree to things like:

“I VOLUNTARILY CHOOSE TO ENTER THIS WEBSITE BECAUSE I WANT TO VIEW, READ AND/OR HEAR THE VARIOUS MATERIALS WHICH ARE AVAILABLE, FOR MY OWN PERSONAL ENJOYMENT, INFORMATION AND/OR EDUCATION. MY CHOICE IS A MANIFESTATION OF MY INTEREST IN SEXUAL MATTERS WHICH, I BELIEVE, IS BOTH HEALTHY AND NORMAL AND WHICH, IN MY EXPERIENCE, IS GENERALLY SHARED BY AVERAGE ADULTS IN MY COMMUNITY. I AM FAMILIAR WITH THE STANDARDS IN MY COMMUNITY REGARDING THE ACCEPTANCE OF SUCH SEXUALLY ORIENTED MATERIALS, AND THE MATERIALS I EXPECT TO ENCOUNTER ARE WITHIN THOSE STANDARDS. IN MY JUDGMENT, THE AVERAGE ADULT IN MY COMMUNITY ACCEPTS THE CONSUMPTION OF SUCH MATERIALS BY WILLING ADULTS IN CIRCUMSTANCES SUCH AS THIS WHICH TAKE REASONABLE AND PRUDENT MEASURES TO INSULATE THE MATERIALS FROM MINORS AND UNWILLING ADULTS, AND WILL NOT FIND SUCH MATERIALS TO APPEAL TO A PRURIENT INTEREST OR TO BE PATENTLY OFFENSIVE.”

Sure.

But what I figure is fairly unique to this particular site is this piece of the TOS:

PROHIBITED ACCESS AREAS
All of the following areas constitute PROHIBITED AREAS from which no part of the website may be accessed, viewed, downloaded or otherwise received:

A. All parts of the United States of America;

B. All parts of the following countries: Afghanistan, Kuwait, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Libya, Pakistan, The Republic of China, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Syria, The United Arab Emirates; and

C. All parts of every other geophysical place corresponding to a political entity or part thereof in which the access, viewing, downloading or other use of materials at the website would, or could reasonably, constitute a violation of any law, regulation, rule or custom. YOU shall at no time access, view, download, receive or otherwise use, or cause or enable any other person or entity to access, view, download, receive or make use of any portion of said Content, directly or indirectly in places where COMPANY does not authorize such access, viewing, downloading, receipt or other use, including but not limited to “Restricted Areas.” As used herein, “Restricted Areas” means the following geographical areas: any nation, state or province or portion thereof where the access, viewing, downloading or any other use of the Content would, or could reasonably, be a violation of any civil or criminal law, governmental regulation or court decision.

That”s right. You agree not to access the site from the United States - or what sounds like the rest of the civilized world.

I have to assume this is an attempt to deflect liability from the people who bought Paris” tittie pictures by “prohibiting” anybody from accessing the site from any jurisdiction that might lend some rights to Paris to not have her tittie pictures sold by somebody else.

But I wonder how well this kind of shielding attempt will work - especially considering the default country shown in the signup form is, in fact, the United States. I”ll be interested to see how this thing plays out.

I was pretty amused by this PIN pad I saw at a retailer today:

So I guess that means 4, 5 and 9 are used less often in PIN numbers? Mine has one of those digits, so who knows?

There”s a nice opinion piece at Wired News today about how the hysteria over recent “security threats” shows the terrorists are winning. Of course, I wrote about this two years ago, but the Wired guy does a good job of framing his point in the context of recent non-threat “threats”.

Not to be a spoiler, but the last paragraph of the Wired piece sums things up very nicely:

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn”t make us any safer.

Of course, that”ll never happen in modern America.

As Baton Rouge leaders work on a set of rules for local parades aimed at fostering public safety and welfare, I”d like to relate my experience as a participant in the Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade.

The year was 1985. I was working at a little crawfish boiling, poboy making, snoball shaving, pig lip selling, gas pumping convenience store called Country Corner, and we were a fun-loving bunch. Most of the guys who worked there were LSU students from New Orleans who had a connection to the Yat that owned the place. I”d managed to get on there through a neighborhood connection, and by “85 (high school senior year) a very good friend of mine - who shall remain nameless in this piece for the sake of his now-important reputation - had joined me in the crawfish / poboy / snoball / lip / gas industry.

Our store”s manager - also a friend of the head Yat - thought it would be fun and smart to enter a Country Corner “float” in the Spanish Town parade. The theme that year was the Olympics (hey, just a year late) and our master creation was called “Crawfish Goes To The Olympics”. The “float” consisted of the store”s Ford F-150 pickup with a couple of plywood crawfish claws tacked on over the cab. Our gimmick? Instead of beads and doubloons, we”d be giving out fresh boiled crawfish. Seriously.

The back of the pickup had enough room for a garbage can full of crawfish, a keg and about five people. We put about 10 guys back there. Somehow driving duties fell to me.

We set up at the staging area in front of the state capitol about an hour before the parade started, which if I recall was about 10 in the morning. We tapped the keg, busted out the ever-present Country Corner bag-o-pot and waited around for things to get rolling.

As the driver, I didn”t have ready access to the keg … so I brought a 32-ounce cup. I loaded up heavily before the parade and would bang the cup on the top of the cab for more when I”d run dry on the route.

Driving at 3 mph ain”t hard no matter how much you drink; it”s stopping 1,000 times along the route that gets tough. Several times I stopped short and sent the whole crew in the back up into the cab window.

And back behind me, things got out of hand pretty quickly. The original idea for the crawfish was to put three of them into a baggie and hand the baggies out to people next to the truck. But not long into the parade, that strategy was abandoned in favor of tossing individual crawfish into the crowd. Cups of beer were handed out, cute girls were encouraged to drink directly from the tap and more than one parade goer enjoyed some of the gang”s special herbal refreshment.

The crowds around (and on) the truck were thick during the whole parade, and I”m still not sure how nobody ended up underneath it.

We didn”t win any prizes, but Crawfish Goes To The Olympics was a crowd favorite, to say the least.

After the parade was over, we stopped off somewhere (I seem to remember a grassy knoll) to rest up and get drunker/higher before driving the 2-3 miles back to Country Corner - because some of us had to go to work.

But nobody got hurt … unlike another incident that spring involving alcohol, pot (allegedly), a young man”s torso and the white-hot side of a gigantic crawfish pot.

I”d like to say Baton Rouge is over-reacting and parades don”t need no rules. But I know better.

This morning I was putting away some goods I bought this past weekend during a suburban shopping trip with the wife. As I was de-tagging and de-stickering a pair of Gap jeans, I noticed that sewn inside was another tag marked “DON”T SHOP AT GAP ANYMORE”.

Actually, the tag was labeled “REMOVE BEFORE WASHING OR WEARING”. It”s a security tag sewn into the garment that has to be removed by the purchaser before wearing. Apparently The Gap has joined J Crew and others in requiring that its customers shoulder the burden of protecting their goods from shoplifters.

Cap”n don”t play that.

It”s not my responsibility to protect Gap”s merchandise from shoplifters. If the store wants to put a security tag on something and then remove it when I check out, that”s fine. But don”t demand that I carry the burden of removing your security tag.

Because I won”t. Just like how I won”t buy anything at Kroger that they”ve slapped a non-sale “EVERYDAY LOW PRICE!” tag on the shelf to make it look like it”s on sale, there”s a principle involved here. So I guess I”ll have to start checking out those items at The Gap for hidden sewn-in tags. Maybe the first time I find one I”ll tell the check-out girl to remove it and see what kind of reaction I get.

But I won”t knowingly leave the store with one of those attached again. And that probably means I just won”t buy it.