Lowering the Bar

Good Reason to Kill #23: Canceled His Taco Order

2012-05-27T18:52:11-07:00

Police [in Corpus Christi] said a 17-year-old man canceled his taco order when he realized he was late for school. The 19-year-old man followed the teen and tried to run him over with his truck, police said.

He missed, but jumped out and punched the taco-canceler, who still managed to keep running. The 19-year-old then got back in the truck to continue the chase, but lost control and hit a building.

Neither was seriously injured. One was charged with aggravated assault.

Tips on Wearing the Clothes You Just Stole from Next Door

2012-05-25T11:39:36-07:00

Here are the three that occurred to me right off the bat:

Don't wear any of them right away.
Don't wear any distinctive items if the owner still lives next door.
Should you choose to ignore #1 and #2, don't answer the front door for a while.

These lessons are taught by this tale, reported by WBBJ-TV in Tennessee. A woman there told police she had come home from a trip to find that someone had broken into and ransacked her home. Oddly, her closet and dressers had been emptied out, but while the thief took much of her clothing and underwear, he or she did not take more expensive items like a laptop and jewelry. For reasons not explained in the report, the victim said she immediately suspected her neighbor, a woman named Stormy Winters Moody.

You wouldn't ordinarily expect trouble from somebody named "Stormy Winters Moody," so there must have been some history there.

Probable cause

CSI was not required in order to make an arrest here. When police arrived they "discovered" Moody wearing some of the clothes reported missing. The report provides no detail, so it's not clear whether she was out in the yard (see Tips #1 and #2) or just answered the door while trying on some of the goods (Tips #1-3).

Either way, the victim noted that Moody appeared to be wearing some evidence. I guess it's not impossible that she also owned and was coincidentally wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt and a pair of shorts that were identical to items recently stolen from her neighbor, but I think this would be enough for probable cause. (She reportedly has since admitted to the break-in.)

The tale also suggests another related tip:

4. If a neighbor's clothing is desired, consider stealing one item
at a time rather than the whole wardrobe.

This is likely to be less noticeable, at least for items other than Bob Marley T-shirts. Also:

5. Don't also steal a bunch of other incredibly random items, for
example:

some laundry detergent
a bag of makeup
a frog shower mat
one (1) pair black sweat pants
dishes
fishing equipment
one (1) Lava Lamp
one (1) Shark steam mop
iPhone
flat Iron
curling Iron
tampons
a race-car rug
some toys
child Seats
brooms and dust pans
a blender
some pots and pans
cleaning supplies
picture frames
jewelry (but not the expensive stuff)
Proactiv Skin Creme
one (1) camcorder and bag
deodorant
plastic tote (though you may need it)
hair mousse
Dunkin' Donuts coffee and filters
Band-Aids
DVD sleeves
one (1) Giant Coloring Book

This will increase your profile significantly. Besides, what are you, the Grinch?

Lawyer's Defective-Breakfast Suit Dismissed

2012-05-24T11:35:33-07:00

In one of the year's least-surprising results so far, Richard Katz's lawsuit against his health club has been dismissed. Katz sued The Setai Wall Street Club and Spa last year, alleging it had broken a promise to provide him with a free and fully adequate breakfast.

Katz, who is an attorney in Manhattan, was paying $5,000 a year in dues to this place, but while free cereal doesn't seem like too much to ask for that price, filing suit is not the right response to not getting it. (One idea: cancel that nonsense, join 24-Hour Fitness or whatever instead and then buy yourself $4,000 worth of cereal. You're welcome.)

The breakfast crisis began in August 2011, when the club either ran out of the yogurt and cereal he normally consumed or just decided to stop providing it. He complained, and the response was apparently not to his liking. Katz eventually sent an email demanding "WHAT THE F--- IS GOING ON? ... How would you like to explain there [sic] has been no yogurt for two (2) weeks and now no cereal. When does the coffee run out?" he concluded sarcastically.

To me, the great thing about this email is not that a lawyer got furious over somebody failing to dish up yogurt and cereal. It's that even in the grip of fury, he still wrote "two (2) weeks." Why do people do this? Maybe it made sense when things were written in longhand, but now that we have email and printers and whatnot there is generally not much controversy over what "two" is supposed to mean. If you haven't picked up this habit yet, don't.

Anyway, that email was apparently the last straw for the manager, who canceled his membership after that and accused him of "blatantly harass[ing] [her] in a threatening manner ...." Katz then sued, demanding well over $100,000 in damages for the breakfast deprivation, plus $5,000 from the manager for allegedly libeling him in the email, which she shared with someone.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Ellen Coin dismissed the case this week, according to the New York Daily News. While there seems to have been no written opinion, according to the manager's attorney the judge told Katz at the hearing that "he should be ashamed of himself" for filing the suit. That's hearsay, but the judge did order Katz to pay $440 in costs, which suggests what she thought of the case. The manager's attorney praised the decision for throwing out a case that was "embarrassing to the profession."

"This restores credibility to the system," he went on. I wouldn't go that far, but it's a good decision.

Edwards Jury Asks for "the Haircut Letter"

2012-05-22T18:36:14-07:00

Well, this can't be a good sign — for John Edwards, anyway. The jury that is currently considering whether to convict him for alleged campaign-finance violations asked yesterday for a copy of the "haircut letter."

Elderly rich person "Bunny" Mellon, then an Edwards supporter, wrote the letter to campaign aide Andrew Young in 2007 not long after it had come to light that Edwards had (1) gotten himself a $400 haircut and (2) charged said haircut to his campaign. "I was sitting alone in a grim mood," wrote Bunny, "furious that the press had attacked Sen. Edwards on the price of a haircut." These dastardly rules that prevent candidates from spending campaign money on themselves were unreasonable, Bunny apparently believed. "From now on," she told Young, "all hair cuts, etc., that are a necessary and important part of his campaign, please send the bills to me. It is a way to help our friend without government restrictions."

Oh dear.

The report doesn't say (and I don't know) whether any haircut bills were actually sent to Bunny, how she thought they might distinguish between haircuts that were a necessary and important part of the campaign and those that weren't, and most importantly, whether the "etc." referred to other luxuries like possibly hiring an untalented videographer to have sex with. But Bunny did proceed to write a series of checks totaling about $725,000, two of which were "funnelled to Andrew Young through an intermediary," which also doesn't sound that good. (The jury asked for copies of those checks, too.)

Defense attorneys suggested yesterday that the jury could be out for a while, but that might be wishful thinking.

Does Congress Need to Be Held Back a Grade?

2012-05-21T16:10:02-07:00

There are various software tools available that will let you determine the "grade level" and/or complexity of a particular piece of text. The Sunlight Foundation ran a couple of decades' worth of the Congressional Record through one of them, and the results showed a fairly dramatic drop in the effective grade level of speeches given by members of both parties since 2005:

Remedial classes needed?

That's one way to interpret the results, anyway -- that Congress has dropped from high-school-junior-equivalents to high-school sophomores over the last six years or so. This sort of interpretation does provide plenty of amusement, such as (if you're a Democrat) being able to point out that your party is apparently half a grade smarter on average, or (if you're a Republican) pointing to other numbers suggesting that the more liberal someone is, the lower the grade level.

The problem with those particular arguments, at least, is that they're probably backwards.

Writing (or speaking) at a higher grade level is not a good thing, or at least not necessarily. What these particular numbers really measure (at least the Flesch-Kincaid test) is the complexity and length of sentences. It says nothing about how accurate or intelligent the sentences are, and all else being equal, the shorter and simpler something is then the more thought was probably put into it. (This is why people who use legalese because they think it makes them sound smarter are actually proving the opposite.)

Shorter and simpler almost always means better communication, if nothing else. As the foundation points out, the Constitution (a great document, but not the most readable) measures 17.8 on this scale, the Gettysburg Address measures 11.2, and the "I Have a Dream" speech is down at 9.4. President Obama's recent State of the Union was delivered at an eighth-grade level (8.4), well below the average SOTU score of 10.7. FOX News illustrated this news with a picture of a kid in a dunce cap, possibly not knowing that simpler often means smarter or that 8.4 is almost exactly the same as the average American's reading level.

I just remembered that this test is built into most word processors, so I just ran it on my last several posts and the score came out to 10.0. I really have no idea what that means, if anything, but I thought I should disclose it.

Anyway, regardless of whether you think Congress's apparent decline is good or bad, there are so many possible reasons for it that it's hard to draw any conclusions about what's causing it. Since most incumbents get re-elected, it seems doubtful that any particular election year(s) would make a big difference. Maybe existing members just become better communicators as time goes on. Or maybe they really are getting dumber. They do seem to be doing stupid things more frequently, but that's a lot harder to graph.

(NPR via Neatorama)