Two notices for your consideration

• Some library patrons are just better with their hands than others.


• Informational display seen while shopping for GPS units.

Memory aid

I snapped this while in the checkout line at a supermarket, by way of perfecting my spying skills. It doesn't look to me as if that little note gets changed very frequently if at all. It is number 277 in the list of bad passwords, not even in the top ten among numeric passwords.

The mind reels. A determined band of thugs could gain access to the register and give themselves DOUBLE COUPONS with abandon.

Okay, I take it back

No, not my Budweiser review, but my Raptor drone paintball scheme. Yesterday around 7PM my wife and I were driving back from where I pick her up at the bus stop in town. We were stopped at a traffic light maybe three blocks from the house, and when the light changed, there was a sharp sound like a metal hammer hitting one of the windows. I looked to my left, and I saw what looked at first like a large white bird dropping on the driver's side window. Was it a rock covered with snow? Wait a minute...

Pam: What was that?
Me: I think they shot at me.
Pam: They shot at you?!
I touched the window to see if the glass was broken and I thought I felt something odd at that spot. Then I tried to determine whether something had passed through my body without my noticing, the way you read about sometimes, but that didn't seem to be the case as far as I could tell.

When we got home we tried to figure out what this thing was, white and goopy and with unidentified dark things in it adding to the turd appearance. Unafraid as I was of such things, I dragged my finger through it (thus the smear) and found it to be white paint. The thing that I thought was a crack in the glass was the edge of the sticker you can see in the picture. We called the local police and let them know of the incident; an officer came to the house to take down the details and look at the paint, asking whether we would file a complaint if the perpetrator was stopped. We said "sure," as we didn't want paintball-wielding maniacs frightening motorists to the point of possibly causing heart attacks or leading to insurance claims.

Only long afterward did I make the connection with my rocket-propelled paintball scheme and wondered whether a blog reader might have gone one step further and sent an unmanned drone over town. Not too likely, that part, but still an odd piece of timing.

But then again

This is a depiction of Judas betraying Jesus. That's a bad thing, right?

It's a sixteenth century masterpiece by the Italian painter Caravaggio. So that's good, then?

It was stolen from the Ukranian Museum of Western and Eastern Art in Odessa last summer. A very bad thing, no doubt.

But then the authorities recovered it. Great!

Some experts, however, believe it might simply be a reproduction wrongly attributed to the master. So what should one think?

Urban finger

Dan's Head,
originally uploaded by Canadian Veggie.

Has someone thought to promote the use of foam hands flashing gang signs yet?

Some signs, particularly the two-handed sort, are rather contorted, hampering the user's ability to handle anything at the same time. In fact, the slot in the bottom of the hand cutout might be a useful thing to have access to out on the street, it seems to me. With the right sort of cutout, one could even fashion it as an open carry accessory of a sort.

The foam and imprinting would come in red, blue, and gold, to appeal to the broadest number of customers.

According to All My Accusers, or A Tawdry Jaunt through the Multiverse: a rap sheet in ten criminal acts.

According to this search on Google, I may have been found guilty of the following:

1. Contempt of Court and sent to jail for refusing to evict the elderly
2. Three counts of assault and one count of assault with intent to commit sexual abuse
3. 7 counts and each involv[ing] one hundred 5 milligram Percocets
4. breaches of the Publicans Act on 16 August 1839, 27 September 1839, 11 December 1839, 11 February 1840 and 27 March 1840, and of murder and tried at Monmouth Summer Assizes on Wednesday, 18 August 1819
5. GBH (Gross Bodily Harm?) while staying at a North London hostel for the mentally ill.
6. not paying taxes on his Survivor winnings and earnings from a Radio show [I] was part of.
7. a misdemeanor assault charge in the spring
8. rape in April 1561, a crime that had probably motivated [my] flight to the continent the year before.
9. killing children [although there seems to be some doubt]
10. disorderly conduct and possession of drug paraphernalia.

I reflected on my past yesterday while sitting in traffic court, and have repented of all my misdeeds, vowing to make a fresh start.

My take on the story of the day

Bullfighters are people who fight bulls, right? Well, I think that dogfighters ought to be people who try to take on man's best friend in the ring.

To make it something like a fair fight, the dogfighter should be equipped the same way as his opponent - claws and teeth only. Anything less equitable would seem to me to be cowardly.

Evil dogs.,
originally uploaded by This Year's Love.

Matthew La Porte

My sense of surprise at the events at Virginia Tech seemed to be on a one-way track upward. First at the news of a campus shooting, at a place where I had former collaborators back when I was a scientist. Then the news that there had been two shootings on the same day. Then at the news that one of the victims was from here in Bergen County a very long way from home. Then finally that that 20 year old victim was in fact from the very town in which I live.

I talked to my wife, who said that she recollected the family name from back in the time when she was running for local office six years ago. The chain of connection stopped there, though, for we did not actually know them personally.

There's a sign up at the local garden center in support of the family. I am hoping the borough puts together some kind of memorial service for the victims soon though.

Now I don't own any firearms myself (even though I once used to belong to a rod and gun club in upstate NY), so I was not aware of how easy it was to obtain high-capacity clips for a pistol these days. I expect there will help revivify the push to bring back the Federal assault weapon ban.

Burglar's workout

They have kickboxing workouts, pole dancing workouts, military boot camp workouts, and prison workouts but I don't think the fitness experts have turned to the criminal world for inspiration. I imagine a Breaking and Entering Workout where participants learn how to move stealthily, climb improvised ropes, break through doors and windows, and sprint wildly for their lives under extreme time pressure. The instructors would be chosen for the depth of their first-hand knowledge, on either side of the penal system, and music would be chosen from among the vast assortment of caper film soundtracks, punctuated by loud alarm sounds when a student muffs one of the moves.
The students would have to sign a statement beforehand pledging that anything they happen to learn in the course of their instruction would be used only for good, not evil. Maybe they should be fingerprinted as well, just to be safe.

I decline to discuss specifically how this idea came to my mind today, but just wish to mention that I am sometimes very glad that I do take the time to try to stay in shape.

Evil minds at the keyboard

BigString (broken link) offers a free email service which enhances the email you send in the following ways:

• Self-destructing email (the screen image of your email burns up or fades away after being served up to the recipient).


• Non-printing, non-forwardable email.


• Messages which were sent from one email account which appear to come from another email account.


• Email which can be edited or deleted after it has been sent.


• Email which can be viewed only one time.

All of this is fine when used by responsible and morally upright folks, but if it falls into the wrong hands? Consider the possibilities:

• Man woos heiress and emails a proposal of marriage. Asks her for the combination of safe deposit box. Once he has the contents, edits his email to delete any mention of wanting to be wed.


• A person with a grudge email-bombs their target with a huge amount of disturbing and graphic images, maybe illegal, by way of harassment. When the victim calls in the authorities, they find only some innocuous vacation pictures.


• A spy could send pictures they took of secret documents to their handler (perhaps encrypted) and have them self-destruct.


• Same as preceeding, only substitute "unfaithful spouse" for "spy."


• The email-masquerading feature seems like a good way to provoke someone into doing something unwise that they might avoid if they knew who the solicitation was really coming from.

I'm sure that a security maven at the company could come up with some good countermeasures for each of these and others I could dream up (though I do not see them addressed in their FAQ - broken link), but it seems like it might be pretty messy. Until then, let all the hack mystery writers be on notice that this is the birth of a brand-new cheesy plot device to use!

Hit and run

It's been three years since I've been witness to a traffic accident here, so I had kind of forgotten how disturbing the experience can be. This one was particularly heinous, because it happened five feet in front of me.

It was about a quarter to six and the sun had already set. I was driving north through Teaneck, in a middle-class neighborhood on a main traffic route through town. I had just gone to the gym and had stopped off at a drugstore to pick up some things, and was planning to go to a bakery to pick up some pan de sal that Pam likes to eat for breakfast. I was stopped at the head of the line at a traffic light, and a young man, maybe 13 years old, was crossing the street in front of me just as the lights were about to change. From the cross street, traveling at a high speed, came a black light truck making a left turn - hitting the pedestrian with a loud sound.

I pulled the van out of gear and got out. The truck had hesitated by the side of the road a few car lengths behind, and I tried to make out the license plate. "V - O - M ..." Then he stepped on the throttle and left the scene: it was a hit and run.

I went back around to the front of the van and was looking underneath, because I thought the victim might have been thrown beneath my grill. Nobody there - what the hell? Then I saw him over on the side of the road, standing somewhat crouched over, so I went over to see how he was. I had actually expected more grievous or fatal injuries judging from the impact, but at first glance he didn't seem to have serious fractures or lacerations by some miracle. Another pedestrian, a woman about my age, was there asking him how he was feeling. She had already called the emergency 911 service and they were dispatching aid, so I put my phone away. The boy seemed to be relatively aware of his surroundings (he said he lived nearby and was able to give his name) so I don't think he'd had a head trauma.

Another person came up, a young woman, having seen the accident. She was crying, asking how someone could hit an innocent person and just drive off. I sort of knew the reason why, since the driver would likely have faced serious consequences from the accident, especially if they had a bad record, which seemed likely. I didn't advance this theory aloud, though.

All through this my van was blocking traffic. I'd fumbled when attempting to put my emergency flashers on and some people were starting to get annoyed and started honking as they went around. On the other hand, another driver called out as they went by "I saw the whole thing!" so not everyone was callous.

A Teaneck police officer arrived, lights flashing, and we told him what had happened and tried to give a description of the perpetrator. In addition to my partial plate number, one other person said that those were Jersey plates, and distinctly remembered a small mirrorball hanging from the driver's rear-view mirror. "He went that way!"

I took advantage of a lull in the action to get back into my vehicle and pull over into a parking lot. More emergency responders came, firetrucks and EMTs who assessed the boy's condition and set up a gurney for him to be transported to the hospital. I went back up to the police officer and gave him my statement and my business card. I hope they catch the offender and call me to the trial.

Now, ordinarily I'm among those decrying the surveillance regime creeping everywhere into urban life, but this one time I would have been grateful for a better means to identify the bad guy than trying to strain my eyes to read a license plate. I've always thought that if I were interested in becoming a criminal, I would want to have a vanity plate like IO1 0II or O00 0O1 or something equally hard to read. If I had the time I would have reached for my work camera in the back of the van or even my cameraphone and tried to snap a picture or two of the truck, but one only thinks of these things in retrospect.

To be better prepared for the next time, (and there probably will be a next time, judging from the congestion around here) I think I should study up on some elementary emergency training should I need it. And if I am the victim that time, inshallah, I'll be pleased if I can make it through the experience too thanks to the help of professional first responders and concerned strangers.