American Madness

American Madness readers: meet William Johnson.

William, it is my pleasure to introduce you to American Madness.

I apologize up front for the awkward introduction, but this is the only way we could arrange for this meeting. William is currently incarcerated in Brazoria County, Texas on a burglary charge.

Turns out, he asked one of the local trailer park residents to help him move a big screen TV out of another trailer home that wasn’t William’s. Outside of stealing someone’s snuff, thievin’ a TV from a trailer park is about the highest crime you can commit in that part of Texas.

And he might have gotten away with the theft if he hadn’t been pulled over during a couple suspicious U-Turns in the middle of the Interstate. And even that might not have got him nabbed if the officers didn’t think it entirely too weird that his co-pilots were a six-foot long alligator and a water moccasin (a type of poisonous snake).

Ok, I’ll pause and let you read that last little bit over again.

Yep, William here is a man with a fondness for reptiles. The Houston Chronicle reports Johnson told the pokey that he found the snake and the alligator on the sides of roads and picked them up because he has an interest in cold-blooded, scaled creatures. (more…)

We all knew Bob Denver (Gilligan) was a stoner. Denver was arrested in 1998 for receiving some marijuana sent to him in a package through the mail. Originally he claimed that Dawn Wells (a.k.a. Mary-Ann) had sent it to him. He later recanted this statement and said that a crazy fan must have been the culprit. It looked like the real story would never come to light when Denver died in 2005.

That is until some news yesterday brought this story back to mind. Dawn Wells was arrested back in October (I am not sure why Associated Press picked this up yesterday*) for driving under the influence AND possession of marijuana.

Looks like the story of Mary Ann mailing Gilligan some pot might not be too far off. Wells “was sentenced Feb. 29 to five days in jail, fined $410.50 and placed on probation after pleading guilty to one count of reckless driving.” Apparently a friend testified that he had borrowed the car and left the drugs in there himself. Yeah, likely story.

*Possibly because Sherwood Schwartz just got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame last week

Last week I was pretty miserable, I had a bad head cold, my sinuses were killing me, my throat felt as if I had been swallowing sandpaper (which I had not) and my nose wouldn’t stop running. After digging through my medicine lunch box (yes, we keep all of our first aid and cold cures in a lunch box, a Curious George one at that) I discovered that pretty much all we had were cough drops and Airborne. I went through the cough drops pretty quickly kept drinking Airborne through out the day. That is until I read that it contains about 1500& of the daily recommendation of vitamin C, then I decided moderation was best and eased off the 4 glasses of airborne a day.

Needless to say, by Sunday I was feeling 95% better (I still have a bit of congestion, but nothing too bad). Apparently this has little to do with Airborne… Or maybe it has everything to do with Airborne (that was pretty much where all of my Vitamin C intake was coming from). According to a NY Times article Airborne has decided to settle a class action lawsuit out of court, admitting to no wrong doing, but I am sure changing its unproven claims that it helps prevent and cure the common cold.

For more info you can check out the settlement website here. Pretty much you will get a refund for the Airbrne you purchased (part of the millions of dollars of sales from last year). Personally I am going to skip it, I took Airborne pretty much as a dietary supplement (which is what it actually is), pumping up the Vitamins in my system to help my immune system battle that evil cold. By the end of this week I hope to again have a stable system with no signs of the cold insurgents.

Snatch is a great movie. There is a line in it about pig farms, something along the lines of “never trust a man who owns a pig farm…” Actually I think that is exactly what the line is.

Well, apparently Guy Ritchie knew what he was talking about when he wrote this. A Canadian pig farmer was convicted last week of killing 6 different people. This was his first trial, he was found guilty of second degree murder for all six folks and will have another trial for the murder of an addition 20 people he supposedly offed. And that’s not all. Although he is only on trial for 26 different murders, he claims to have killed 49 people and was hoping to make it to 50.

Most of his victims were prostitutes, junkies and other people of ill-repute. After killing them he would chop up their bodies and, you guessed it, feed them to his pigs. Investigators found severed skulls and feet on his property. But he thought he was still going to get off since the fact that the skulls and feet were on his property didn’t mean he had killed them. Oh the other hand he probably overlooked his confession to an under cover cop and the fact that his wife claims to have seen him chopping up some bodies.

The odd thing about this case (okay, one of the many odd things about it) is that the jury did not find him guilty of first degree murder, meaning they felt he had not planned to kill the victims ahead of time. It was just 26 spur of the moment decisions to kill these women. Man, even his picture is creepy.

Every now and then criminals do things that just baffle me. Like posting details about their crimes on the internet.

Associated Press has an article today about Lt. Charles Cohen who goes around talking with police officers and detectives about the internet, specifically sites like MySpace, Facebook and Second Life.

Basically what Lt. Cohen is lecturing about is how folks, specifically criminals, don’t quite get that the internet is not their private diary, and that things posted on the web are visible are available to the public and can be tracked back to them. He is also working on breaking the police department mindset that the internet is another realm, not worth monitoring. (more…)

Well, I guess that is one way to look at this one.

It’s not really that surprising that some people want Rudy Giuliani dead. He has been controversial in what he has done almost since day one. So it doesn’t come as much of a surprise to learn that while he was a U.S. attorney the mafia discussed taking him out (especially since he was going after organized crime).

Well, as it turned out two of the five family heads, mafia bosses John Gotti (Gambino family) and Carmine “The Snake” Persico (Colombo family) were in favor of having Giuliani sleep with the fishes. But this is all kind of old news. The memo that states this is from 1987 and was found in a file being reviewed during the prosecution of a former FBI agent Roy Lindley DeVecchio who is on trial for leaking information.

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We have another two-fer today: Stupid Criminals.

First up, we have a man in Suffolk County, NY who tried to rob a convenience store with a gun. Unfortunately it was either a toy gun or he was totally unwilling to use it (which technically wouldn’t be unfortunate, though if you are going to rob a store at gun point you might want to be prepared to follow through). The guy approached the counter waving his gun and demanded the money in the register. Hafize Sahin, who is, by the way, about 4′5″ and 90 pounds, said:

“I thought the gun is not real. I wasn’t going to open the drawer. I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to give him money.’ I couldn’t give him the money because I thought it was the first time he was doing it.” She added, “I was yelling at him and telling him ‘Get out of here!’ I didn’t want to hit him, I just wanted him to get out.”

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I get such glee about reading about idiocy, usually while thinking “You must be f#cking kidding me!!”

And today we have a two-fer:

First up we’ve got a school district in Atlantic City, NJ that has suspended a seven year-old due to “the school’s zero-tolerance policy for guns.”

Now, guns in school are generally considered a bad thing, and I won’t argue with that. Even toy guns can send the wrong message, so I get the idea behind a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to guns.

And I mean, a seven-year-old, right? That’s just scary. Except, the seven year-old didn’t have a gun, or a toy gun, or pretend to have a gun, or even an have an imaginary gun. He drew a picture of a gun.

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We all know the pirates are big right now. Since Johnny Depp dawned mascara and started impersonating Keith Richards pirates have been on the rise and getting really popular. Based on this you would think an article about the rise in piracy would either be referring to bootleg DVDs or Hipsters in Williamsburg.

Instead we have an article coming to us from National Geographic* about the Malacca Strait, a heavily trafficked trading route and home to some of the world’s most dangerous pirates or lanun. And these aren’t the swashbuckling pirates of yore, these are pirates armed to the teeth with modern weapons like machine guns and grenades.

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I just came across an article I missed from the middle of September. Newsweek reported on a website called MarryOurDaughter.com. The site appears to be under construction right about now, but here is what it had offered (according to Newsweek): “a matching service for followers of ‘the Biblical tradition’ of arranged marriages.” It allowed people to look through profiles of girls… and when I say girls, I mean girls, the majority were apparently around 15… whose parents wanted to marry them off and were asking for a price for their hand in marriage, a dowry if you will, usually something in the low to mid- 5 digit range.

Seems like an obvious choice for Newsweek to write about. Mail-order brides are not a new thing to the internet, but usually hey are from foreign countries and they are not underage girls. The thing is, Newsweek was not ‘exposing’ this site and telling us about the dangers of the internet, instead they were discussing the true mission behind the site.

According to MarryOurDaughter.com the site was not exactly a hoax, but rather an attempt to educate folks through something they call ‘viral politics’:

Call it an experiment an experiment in Viral Politics. That children can marry down to twelve years old in America, which they can do, is Not Right. That the age of consent is higher than the age of marriage is Not Right. That parents can marry off their children for money or for any other reason is Not Right. Railing about it on the web, as many do, wasn’t making a difference. Thinking outside the box led us to marryourdaughter.com.

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