A Royal Leak - Not Any More 

    Well, it had to happen sooner or later. The Dutch authorities have requested that people not pee on the downtown Amsterdam Royal Palace. And it was high on my bucket list too. The Royal Family does not live there, but they do work there. At night, because of the dark archways, and doorways, it is a perfect place for people to use when they can’t find a toilet.

    Authorities have tried putting a fence around the place, but decided that looked a little tacky. Now they’re toying with the idea of pop-up urinals that, guess what, you got it, pop-up after dark.

    They are also toying with the idea of lighting the whole place, so there are no dark corners.

How about (and this suggestion is free of charge) strategically placed cameras that go directly to public media? Of course there are the weirdoes who would come from miles around just to get noticed. Okay, so it may not be the best idea.

     Anyway, in deference to the Dutch authorities, the Royal Palace in downtown Amsterdam is off my list. They’ll just have to live with it, I know I can.

Pass the Cookie Dough Please

    In Wichita, a lady woke up at 3:30 in the morning and walked into her kitchen. There she found a man eating cookie dough. The man wasn’t related to her in any way. The intruder told police he thought he was in his aunt’s house. The lady was not hurt. It’s a good story, up to this point. Some things that were left out: Why was the man still there when the police arrived? Obviously he had plenty of time to leave. Maybe he wanted to finish the cookie dough. Another fact that wasn’t included: Was there any alcohol involved? That would explain quite a bit.

Old People Beware

    Here they go again, picking on old people. In Florida an 81 year-old man was arrested just because he picked a few tangerines out of some guy’s orchard. The police are charging him with grand theft. Give me a break, or maybe give this old geezer a break.

    However, it just might have something to do with the number of tangerines he picked. By the time police arrived, he had picked over 2,000 tangerines and was loading them onto his truck. His claim was that he was taking them to a nearby market.

    So, we have this guy who found a second career and was trying to pay his own way instead of depending on the kindness of strangers, or the government. (And the government is strange enough for anyone.) Try to do something for yourself and everyone turns into a critic.

Psst – Wanna Hot Calf?

    AP reports that in Riverside, CA, police arrested a man. Why? Because he had a 150-pound calf in the backseat of his car. The identification tag had been torn from the calf’s ear and the man had no proof of ownership. The charge is “suspicion of transporting livestock without proof of ownership or identifying information.” In other words, rustling.

    Now rustling is nothing new and it happens all the time anyplace cattle are present. What you don’t often see is somebody dumb enough to haul a rustled bovine around in the back seat of his car. A 150-pound calf can make quite a mess, beside being hard to handle. Watching this rustler getting a calf into his car would have been entertaining. Watching him clean up his car? Not so much.

Assume the Position

    A lot of things can go wrong when a modern day airliner is trying to get itself off the ground: mechanical things, pilot error things, weather things, and third party (control tower for example) things. A report, written for Reuters by Tommy Wilkes, points out that when trying to leave Surat, India, other things can cause a problem.

    The flight Tommy is reporting on hit a buffalo as it was trying to take off. The plane, not the buffalo. Maybe the buffalo was trying to take off also. The reporter didn’t say. No passengers or crew members were hurt, but the buffalo did not survive the encounter. If he had survived, we could ask him why he was grazing on a runway.                                                                       

    The plane sustained substantial damage. We’re talking about a Boeing 737.

    The lesson to be learned---if you’re flying out of India, make sure somebody has shooed all the buffalo off the runway before your plane departs. When landing you have no control over the situation, so just assume the crash position, and pray.