I’m not sending this one to my great and good friend Weer’d Beard because…well…
A man died after a forklift hit him at a construction site in north Houston Wednesday morning.
…I’m not sure if he’s familiar with Staplerfahrer Klaus or “they tried to KILL him with a FORKLIFT“, and I don’t want to try to explain those references when I’m sending email from the phone.
(Also, I’ve been flooding his queue with “gun” death stories recently, so I figure I’ll give him a break.)
Has anyone noticed that the most recent crop of spam posters seem awfully obsessed with Harry Belafonte?
I love this story.
Guy needs a visa to go to China. Guy fills out forms, goes to Chinese consulate, finds out he filled out the wrong form and gets runaround. Guy has to go to nearby Internet cafe to fill out correct form. Guy discovers nearby Internet cafe is full of people who are having the same problem with visas and the Chinese consulate.
Guy and his friend rent a van and set up a business right outside the consulate providing computers, Internet access, printers, and Chinese visa consulting services. They charge $20/person (with a $5 discount for Buddhist monks) and are apparently doing reasonably well.
I’m a little shocked they haven’t run afoul of NYC parking regulations or some other picayune law unique to Bloomberg’s paradise, but good on them for seeing a need and filling it.
List of fatal cougar attacks in North America.
(You know, I have categories for reptiles, horses, primates, and spiders. Do I need a “cat” category? If so, should I have a “dog” category too? Perhaps “mammals” and make horses, cats, dogs, and primates subsets of that?)
(Explained.)
I’d been sort of vaguely following the LA arson case. I knew that they had arrested some German guy driving a van with Canadian license plates, and apparently he was somehow upset over his mother’s immigration issues or something. I didn’t realize how messed up things were until this morning: not only is Mom an illegal alien, but she’s wanted in Germany on 19 counts of fraud (and apparently Germany has requested extradition). It appears that she ripped off a bunch of renters and landlords (I think the NYT said something about her pocketing security deposits), and failed to pay for her breast augmentation surgery in 2004. And the LAT hints that she may have been in business as a “sensual Tantric masseuse”.
Obit watch: Ronald Searle.
Firing watch: Bears offensive coordinator Mike Martz and quarterbacks coach Shane Day. The Sun-Times seems to be spinning this as “resignations”, but I’ve seen reporting elsewhere that puts it more in the “you can’t fire me, I quit” category.
NYT headline: “Rangers Coach a Conspiracy Theorist“. Awesome. Does he believe the towers were brought down by the burning mind control agents on the airliners? Sadly, no. His conspiracy theory is much more boring: the officials made bad calls in order to make the game go into overtime.