Another crazy guy

I was behind this guy today, and as he was walking, I noticed he dropped some change. A quarter and three dimes. Not a big deal, but I thought I'd be kinda nice and pick the change for him. So I did. What he did next shocked the socks off of everyone around me.

I said, "Hey, man, you dropped your change." He turned around and held one hand out in a cup shape. I poured all of the change in his hand. He then took the change in his hand, cocked his arm back, and tossed the coins as far as he could. And then he turned and walked away like nothing had happened. He got about 5 feet away or so, and then turned around, and, in a voice that souned like he was trying to educate me, he told me that, "If it falls out of my pocket, then it doesn't want to be with me anymore. So I don't keep it." He turned around again and walked away. Me and the four other people around me were so surprised that we just burst out laughing as soon as he turned the corner.

It was one of the funniest thing I've ever seen someone do.

Police harrasment

The Toronto Police Department ran an e-mail forum-a question and answer exchange with the topic being "Community Policing."

One of the email participants posed the following question: "I would like to know how it is possible for police officers to continually harass people and get away with it?"

From the "other side" (the law enforcement side), Sgt Berezowski, a cop with a sense of humor (or reality), replied:

"First of all, let me tell you this...it's not easy. In Toronto we average one cop for every 600 people. Only about 60% of those cops are on general duty (or what you might refer to as "patrol") where we do most of our harassing. The rest are in non-harassing departments that do not allow them contact with the day to day innocents. And at any given moment, only one-fifth of the 60% patrollers are on duty and available for harassing people while the rest are off duty.

So, roughly, one cop is responsible for harassing about 5,000 residents.

When you toss in the commercial, business, and tourist locations that attract people from other areas, sometimes you have a situation where a single cop is responsible for harassing 10,000 or more people a day. Now, your average ten-hour shift runs 36,000 seconds long. This gives a cop one second to harass a person, and then only three-fourths of a second to eat a donut AND then find a new person to harass. This is not an easy task. To be honest, most cops are not up to this challenge day in and day out. It is just too tiring. What we do is utilize some tools to help us narrow down those people that we can realistically harass. The tools available to us are as follows:

PHONE: People will call us up and point out things that cause us to focus on a person for special harassment. "My neighbor is beating his wife" is a code phrase we often use. This means we'll come out and give some special harassment. Another popular one is, "There's a guy breaking into a house" or "So and so has a grow op." The harassment team is then put into action.

CARS: We have special cops assigned to harass people who drive. They like to harass the drivers of fast cars, cars with no insurance or no drivers license and the like. It's lots of fun when you pick them out of traffic for nothing more obvious than running a red light. Sometimes you get to really heap the harassment on when you find they have drugs in the car, are drunk, or have an outstanding warrant.

RUNNERS: Some people take off running just at the sight of a police officer. Nothing is quite as satisfying as running after them like a beagle on the scent of a bunny. When you catch them you can harass them for hours.

STATUTES: When we don't have PHONE or CARS and have nothing better to do, there are actually books that give us ideas for reasons to harass folks. They are called "Statutes"; Criminal Codes, Motor Vehicle Act, Liquor Act, etc... They all spell out all sorts of things for which you can really mess with people. After you read the statute, you can just drive around for awhile until you find someone violating one of these listed offences and harass them. Just last week I saw a guy smash a car window. Well, there's this book we have that says that's not allowed. That meant I got permission to harass this guy. It is a really cool system that we have set up, and it works pretty well.

I seem to have a never-ending supply of folks to harass. And we get away with it. Why? Because for the good citizens who pay the tab, we keep the streets safe for them. "

Lack of an air conditioner

My room is unbelievably hot right now. The building's air conditioning system has yet to be turned on, so I'm sitting and sweating in my 80+ degree room. Uggg...not fun.

Lost watch

I was stupid today. I took my watch off at the gym, it was just getting in the way, and I forgot to pick it back up. That makes for another minor annoyance in my day. Fortunately for me, I only invest in cheap $5 watches.

Spring cleaning

I did what had to be done; I needed more free space on my disk drive. So, I deleted my music library from my computer, and moved it to my iPod. I now have a nice chunk consisting of 14.6 GB of free space on my computer's hard drive.

I wish I could delete stuff in my room that I don't need or use like I do with my computer. The old mom-ism, "Your room looks like a bomb hit it!" would apply to my room right now. You can't blame me. After carrying all of my clean clothes upstairs (you gotta love going home-especially the free washer and dryer), I sorta jettisoned them into the room and immedately returened to my vehicle to find a legal parking space.

And how can one unplug a refrigerator and not know it? I mean, shouldn't you hear the motor turn off or something and realize you made a mistake? *shrug* Oh well. Live and don't learn, that's me.

Trouble with 3rd grade spelling

Just saw this on Reuters and thought it was pretty good:

Problems with his pasport...

Wed Mar 1, 2006 8:25 AM ET

NICOSIA (Reuters) - You might have the best forgery skills in the world, but it is not much use if you cannot spell.

A Cyprus court jailed Pakistani national Fazal Ur Rehman for eight months for forgery after police spotted spelling mistakes on stamps on an Afghan passport he was carrying -- otherwise it was a near-perfect copy, the Cyprus Mail said Wednesday.

"Ministry" was spelled "Menistry" and the first "n" was missing from government, the newspaper said.

"The passport looked perfect and professionally made ... almost deemed original by forensics," a police officer told a magistrate in the Cypriot capital Nicosia

70 degrees...and it's not noon yet

Now that it's March, the weather can warm up.

And today it has been looking that way. Ok, it's too nice to sit inside. I'm going outside.

Early-morning fire alarms

At 4:22am, some idiot pulled the fire alarm on my floor of the dorm. I was jarred from my sleep by something that sounded more like the theme from Mario Bros. than a fire alarm. I woke up thinking: "Who's playing vidoe games at that volume level at this hour of the morning?" That's when the automatic voice warning cut in over the PA and told me to vacate the premises. I was just going to sleep through it like I did in Douglas last year, but then the lady on the PA said the fire department was going to make sure eveyone was out of the building.

So I jumped out of bed. I wearing only my shorts, and at first was just going to walk out in that. But I decided that it might be a little cold outside, so I threw on my jacket, a pair of jeans, and a pair of shoes (forgot the socks and shirt), and headed for the stairs.

Noramlly, almost ten flights of stairs is no problem, but with almost 800 really groggy people trying to evacuate down two stairwells, it was kinda difficult. It sorta sounded like:

[step on person's foot in front of you]

"Sorry."

"Huh?"

"What?"

"Uhhhh...I don't remember."

Imagine a couple hundred people saying this, and you have what the evacutaion sounded like (insert some snoring too). It didn't stay that way for long though.

As soon as we hit the 30 degree air, everyone woke up. That, along with the sirens from the responding emergancy services. So we have a couple hundred people standing in the parking lot, almost all in pajamas and no shoes. I was freezing (remember, no shirt-only a jacket). As we got outside is about the time the university police showed up, an then Cola FD a couple minutes later.

The things we said from our sleep-deprived state was just amazing: "Look, the tiny fire engine's here. Oh no, alien abduction!""Why are don't they let us inside? Oh, the cops and firefighters must be hungry.""We're gonna put a strike party together and...[laughter]...what was I saying?" This was interspersed with tons of laughter. Looking back, what was said was completely rediculous, but for some reason, it made sense at the time, and was really very funny.

We finally started heading back in around 5:00am. Then some people actually wanted to take the elevator. The rest of us hit the stair, still making absurd statements and laughing for no reason.

When I finally got back up the almost 10 flights of stairs, I sorta tripped over the footboard in my bed and went back to sleep, jacket, jeans, and all.

I woke up about 5 hours later for class, but this event is, at the same time, both the high point and low point of my day.It was really fun looking at the time and looking back on it, but I'm tired now. And my chest looked funny when I got up at 10am from the pattern on the inside of my jacket.

Alarm

The good news: The fire alarm system in my building works.

The bad news: the fire alarm doesn't have a snooze button.

15 hrs.

I got more sleep last night (this morning and afternoon, too) than I have in the past 3 or for days.

Bedtime last night was somewhat early: around 11:45PM; I didn't get up today until 2:50PM. I was intending on getting some food around 11AM, but when my alarm went off, it was somehow quickly deactivated and I went right back to bed.

I finally got up when I realized that I needed to be at the Shack for 3PM to set up for church tonight.

I now feel more rested than I have at any point in the past two weeks.