Saturday, January 8, 2011

The Squirrel's Nut Cache - 1/8/2011

A Saturday Nut Special!



The Nut Cache - a collection of recent things I found interesting, or amusing, or nutworthy.

With all the hoopla surrounding Arizona's "harsh" new laws regarding those who are in our country illegally, I guess we've never stopped to think about the places where illegals have to work really really hard to get deported. I wouldn't have thought Idaho would be a place that would be lenient towards lawbreakers, but I could be wrong. It seems like 38-year-old Guadalupe Cruz-Vasquez, who was in the United States illegally, really wanted to be deported. He even went into a police station and demanded to be deported. The cops, it seems, were busy with something else, and refused his demands... so he stole a cop car. Yep, caught and deported. Cops could have saved themselves the cost of that broken car window if they'd have just shipped him home when he first turned himself in.

I used to work as a security guard at a sawmill. Of course, employees who worked on the floor of the sawmill where not allowed to receive phone calls except in an emergency. I mean, it just didn't work to disrupt the production line by calling someone away to the telephone. Spouses, however, were very creative with the definition of "emergency." Often, these were just manipulative tactics to try to circumvent the rules. But, at other times, it was genuine panic about something that really wasn't an emergency. That's what I was thinking of when I read this story about a man who "butt-dialed" his wife, who panicked when he wasn't on the other end and called the cops, because "someone was holding him hostage." 30+ heavily armed SWAT officers then proceeded to the Illinois school, where the husband in question was attending a school board meeting. He'd already left, and gone home. Oops...

Back in September, I brought you the story of Romanian witches fighting new taxes on their... craft. In September, I told you that the proposed tax on witches and fortune-tellers in Romania had been defeated. Well, it's a new year, and, this time, the witches lost. And now they're not happy about having to pay these new taxes. Some of the... enchanters... see a silver lining in their new financial situation: the fact that, for the first time in Romania's history, witches, astrologers, and fortune-tellers are now listed as trades in the countries labor code. Me, I think it's another case of the over-regulation of business by lawmakers who are trying to conjure up more revenue during these hard economic times...

What do you do? You're being pulled over by the police on a traffic stop, and you know that you're wanted by the police. Well, that's the situation that faced Jonothan Ray Gonsalez when he was pulled over in Great Falls, Montana, last Monday. What did he do? Why, he gave the police another guy's name. He gave them Timothy Michael Koop's name, in fact. But, as luck would have it, bad luck for Mr. Gonsalez, Mr. Koop was also wanted by the police. That's the problem when you're a dumb criminal; all your friends are likely dumb criminals, too. The article doesn't say, but I believe that the police are still looking for Mr. Koop...

And the Nuttiness goes on and on...

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