The Blinne Blog

Another Tale Of the Tape

The AP had the following story about an unruly passenger.

Los Angeles - Airplane passengers subdued and then duct-taped a man who was pacing the aisle and reading loudly from the Bible during a flight from Hawaii, police and witnesses said.

No one was injured, and the man was handed over to authorities after the plane landed at Los Angeles International Airport early yesterday, said Sgt. Carl Sansbury of the airport police.

Brian Eager, 36, of Austin, Texas, was held for 72 hours to undergo a psychological examination, FBI Special Agent Matt McLaughlin said.

Sansbury said he didn't know what prompted the outburst on the United Airlines flight from Honolulu. He said the FBI was investigating.

Passengers and a federal immigration and customs agent who was traveling for personal reasons helped restrain Eager, but he managed to slip out of handcuffs, McLaughlin said.Eager could face a federal charge of interfering with a flight crew, Sansbury said.

Here's some questions I have:

1. We have people that cannot handcuff suspects protecting our borders?
2. You can bring duct tape on a plane?
3. How did they cut the tape if people aren't allowed fingernail clippers?

I am feeling very insecure now.

Can you raed tihs?

Currently bouncing around the net:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Heh, humans can deal with the paragraph above just fine. But, spell checkers are a different matter!

Stupid Criminals and GPS

Be careful what you steal. The AP reports about a GPS device thief caught by GPS:

JANESVILLE, Wisconsin (AP) -- To track down this alleged thief, all police had to do was flick on a computer.

A 40-year-old man was arrested Wednesday and charged with stealing a computerized tracking device that uses a global positioning system to keep track of jail prisoners on home detention.

'He apparently didn't know what he had because he would be awfully stupid to steal a tracking device,' said correctional officer Thomas Roth, who runs the home detention program at the Rock County Jail.

The $2,500 device was temporarily placed outside a home by a woman serving home detention. The device, which is a little bigger than a brick in size, has a built-in GPS satellite receiver.

Prisoners wear a transmitter about as big as a cigarette pack on the ankle, and it acts as a 100-foot tether to the portable tracking device.

By the time the prisoner called to report the theft Monday night, the device had automatically notified the jail that it had been taken outside the prisoner's home area.

Roth then tracked the device through the Internet on his home computer.

A trail of electronic dots led authorities to an apartment building, where the suspect was captured.

Klingon Interpreter Needed for Oregon Mental Patients

If ever William Shatner's famous "Get a life!" quote applies it does to this story:

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Position Available: Interpreter, must be fluent in Klingon. The language created for the Star Trek TV series and movies is one of about 55 needed by the office that treats mental health patients in metropolitan Multnomah County. "We have to provide information in all the languages our clients speak," said Jerry Jelusich, a procurement specialist for the county Department of Human Services, which serves about 60,000 mental health clients. Although created for works of fiction, Klingon was designed to have a consistent grammar, syntax and vocabulary. And now Multnomah County research has found that many people -- and not just fans -- consider it a complete language. "There are some cases where we've had mental health patients where this was all they would speak," said the county's purchasing administrator, Franna Hathaway. County officials said that obligates them to respond with a Klingon-English interpreter, putting the language of starship Enterprise officer Worf and other Klingon characters on a par with common languages such as Russian and Vietnamese, and less common tongues including Dari and Tongan.

Quote of the Day

The following story quoted noted primate activist, Jane Goodall, speaking to the State Department on Earth Day:

"Whoo whoo whoo oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh ooh ooh oooh oooh," Goodall bellowed in the State Department's Dean Acheson Auditorium, drawing laughter and applause from the diplomats and environmentalists gathered to mark Earth Day and to discuss the issue of deforestation.