- Well this is certainly a nice change. For once, felony charges against a Florida State football player are being dropped instead of filed. This is such a rare occurrence that I need to pause for just a moment to truly appreciate it and understand its significance. Okay, I’m good to continue. Oddly enough, a prosecutor in Tallahassee has dropped a felony charge against Florida State receiver Richard Goodman, who had been charged with aggravated battery after allegedly hurling a chair at a woman during a brawl in the school's student union. The brawl broke out between members of the football team and a fraternity and the female student was merely an innocent bystander when the chair struck her. The problem for Assistant State Attorney Jon Fuchs is pursuing the case against Goodman is that witnesses to the fight couldn’t make up their minds or come up with consistent stories about what happened and who threw the chair. Witnesses named at least four other people as the chair-thrower, but no one identified Goodman. Now that he’s been cleared of throwing the chair, he’s been reinstated to the team after being suspended following his arrest in May. It marks the latest development in an interesting few months for the FSU athletic department, which has also been busy fighting the NCAA’s quest to strip wins from football coach Bobby Bowden and pull scholarships from 10 FSU athletic programs following a massive academic cheating scandal. So there’s a bit of good news for you, FSU fans, cherish it because I have a feeling it’s not something that you’re going to have a lot of in the days ahead……
- David Bowden of Cary, N.C. is a man who has had enough, dammit. When the town widened his road and altered the terrain at the edge of his yard, Bowden claims the work created a steep slope that funnels rain water into his home. The town doesn’t deny that a problem exists but where the two parties differ is how to best address the issue. Because he feels that the town has wronged him and ruined the home he’s lived in since 1992, Bowden wants the town to buy his home. The town contends that it has a plan to fix the drainage issue but Bowden won't listen. "We have gone to him and said we have a design that would help resolve (the drainage issue)," Assistant Town Manager Mike Bajorek said. "He said, 'No, stay off my property. I want you to buy my house.’” When the town balked at that demand, Bowden decided to take the always logical step of spray painting his gripe on the side of his house in ginormous, red lettering for all to see. “The town screwed me,” he painted on the side of his white house, a message Bowden says is actually more tame than he originally wanted. “It's been cleaned up a lot," Bowden said. "That's not what was planned to go up there.” He also claims that the town attempted to pin responsibility for the drainage problem on him, saying the issue is with his gutters. There is precedent for the town buying homes with drainage problems, according to Bajorek, but only when there was no possible solution. We have a fix in place. We’re just waiting for Mr. Bowden to give us the go ahead to install that,” Bajorek explained. In the meantime, the town is doing something that should further infuriate Bowden. It has cited Bowden for being in violation of the town sign ordinance for every day the message remains painted on his house – $100 for the first day, $250 for the second and $500 for each day afterward. Bowden is well aware of the mounting fines but refuses to remove his message until the town satisfies his demands to buy the house. The question now is who will blink first……..
- Ah, the wonderful world of technology. Some people use it to make their lives better, others (allegedly) use it to endanger other people's safety by interfering with Chicago Transit Authority radio transmissions. Marcel Carter of Chicago would seem to fall into the latter category after the CTA fingered him as the radio hacker responsible for posing a threat to trains, buses and riders. Carter denies that he made any illegal radio transmissions and insists that the radio he bought from a man in Wisconsin over a year ago was already programmed with CTA radio frequencies when he received it. In his words, he was "just playing around with it." Police would seem to disagree with those assertions based on the fact that on Monday, Carter was walked into a federal courtroom in leg irons to face serious charges against him. The CTA says Carter made some 300 unauthorized radio calls on CTA frequencies, most of them between early June and late July. The agency says that Carter began by making nuisance calls, but later gave orders to train operators, and sometimes attempting to countermand orders issued from CTA's control center. The CTA recorded Carter’s calls and was typically able to keep them from reaching train operators, so that evidence should prove helpful in the case against him. Dude’s own mother admitted that she's seen her son talking on a hand-held radio over the last couple years, although she didn’t know who he was talking to. The answer to that question appears to be a Green line train operator, whom Carter allegedly radioed telling him he didn't have to stand at the station as previously ordered, a train operator Carter allegedly gave rule numbers that would've permitted a to bypass a red light and countless others. That apparently pissed off the FBI, which is also involved in the case. “Getting the frequencies, purchasing the radio was not illegal. It's what he did with them after he got them," said FBI official Ross Rice. With the mounting evidence against him, how would Carter respond in court? “Basically, I was just...I don't know... playing around with a radio,” said Carter in court. If nothing else, his actions, intentional or accidental, could end up being beneficial to the CTA. Agency officials are now considering encrypting their radio transmissions to ensure that no one else can replicate Carter’s hijinks. Public transit and law enforcement agencies around the country have done so with an infusion of Homeland Security money. You may be asking yourself why Carter was finally arrested if he had been making these calls for two months and authorities knew who he was and what was going on. Well, his downfall came Friday night after he asked a CTA customer service rep if he could get a reward for turning in a stolen CTA radio. He was then put in contact with the CTA control center and because of his frequent radio intrusions of the past two months, an operator there recognized his voice. Carter was arrested and he now faces up to 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 if convicted. Unless, you know, it was an accident………
- Think Ryan O'Neal would like to have this one back? I know that losing a loved one, especially a loved one who dies far too young because of a tragic disease, is very difficult. I’m not looking to bust up a guy who just lost the love of his life and I wouldn’t have had a single negative word to say about O’Neal….if he hadn’t hit on his own daughter at Farrah Fawcett's funeral. O’Neal claims that he only hit on daughter Tatum because he didn’t recognize her, which I’m not sure is much better than the alternative. On the one hand, hitting on your own daughter if you recognize her is so repulsive that it’s enough to induce instant nausea and horror. Incest just isn’t something most people are down with, period. However, not recognizing your own kid doesn’t say anything good about you either. Who doesn’t recognize their own kid? On top of that, who’s hitting on someone at the funeral of the person they supposedly loved more than anything? Way to mourn, Ry. Then again, not recognizing his own daughter is something you might expect from a guy like O’Neal, who has admitted he would "take back" having some of his children. I’m sure that does wonders for their self-esteem, right? But O’Neal detailed the bizarre funeral scene in an interview he did for next month’s issue of Vanity Fair. "I had just put the casket in the hearse and was watching it drive away, when a beautiful blond woman comes up and embraces me," O'Neal said. "I said to her, 'You have a drink on you? You have a car?' She said, 'Daddy, it's me — Tatum! I was just trying to be funny with a strange woman, and it's my daughter. It's so sick.” Sick would be a kind way of describing it, you twisted freak. Just because you’re a bad father who believes that he should never have had kids doesn’t mean it’s cool for you to hit on them or treat them like crap. To his children -
Tatum, Griffin, Patrick and Redmond - I feel sincerely bad for all of you that your father is such a scumbag who regrets having you and can’t help but wonder if your lives would be much better if you had a dad who gave a crap about being your parent……..
- Add the U.S. Marine Corps to the group of people who aren’t down with social networking Web sites. Although the Marines may not object to the sites for the same reason as most critics - namely that they’re a waste of time because no one needs to know the every detail of the lives of regular people - they still aren’t down. Just because they aren’t balking at the idea of reading your intense internal debate over Cap’N Crunch v. Froot Loops for breakfast or how incensed you are that while waiting in line at Starbucks you realized that they jacked the price of their macchiato again doesn’t mean they don’t have a reason to hate Twitter. No, the U.S. Marine Corps has banned Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites from its networks, effective immediately, because of the danger that classified, highly sensitive material might be leaked. “These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries," reads a Marine Corps order, issued Monday. "The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel... at an elevated risk of compromise." In other words, some low-level Marine might inadvertently slip up and post a Tweet something along the lines of, “Going on another top-secret bombing run, this is getting old. Be back l8r, peace out.” To prevent that from happening, the Marines will enact a one-year ban and see how things go. The decision comes in response to a late July warning from U.S. Strategic Command, which told the rest of the military it was considering a Defense Department-wide ban on the Web 2.0 sites due to network security concerns. I can see their point - sort of - because worms and viruses can definitely spread through social media sites and the way these sites are set up, security for those using them is neither a concern nor a priority. But fear not, Marines who enjoy getting your social network on. The Department of Defense is getting ready to unveil a new home page with its own social media tools and the Marines say they will issue waivers to the Web 2.0 blockade, if a "mission critical need" can be proven. If you can’t secure one of these waivers, then it looks like it’s back to plain old email home for you…….
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