Crime of the Century (Errant Peeing Division)

SUFFOLK, Virginia - Sean P. Almond, of Windsor, VA., appears to be the sort of man who just doesn't have a lick of sense, if one is inclined to believe a clipping from the weekly publication The Virginian-Pilot (The "No. 1 source of news, information and advertising" for Southeastern Virginia and Northeast North Carolina).
  At about eleven o'clock p.m. on April 22, Mr. Almond, forty-three, is alleged to have entered the Kangaroo Express convenience store at 1125 Wilroy Rd., in Suffolk (pop.: roughly 83,000), and threatened the clerk, thrown her to the ground and robbed the store. 
  The Virginian-Pilot story admirably sticks to the facts, but, alas, it skimps on color. So it is unclear in just what way Mr. Almond menaced the clerk. Did he say he might shoot her? Did he make ribald jokes about her family, including its matriarch? Or did he simply ridicule her hairstyle? It seems sad that we shall never know.
  Whatever he did, he did it quickly and then took off. The clerk quite sensibly called the police. When they arrived, she pointed them toward the back of the building, the last known destination of the fleeing Mr. Almond.   
  When police rounded the corner, there he was - urinating against the wall. 
  Seen in one light, this shows extraordinary levelheadedness on the part of Mr. Almond. After all, as the saying has it, when one has to go, one has to go - even if, it might be added, it is done directly after one has held up a store. Seen in another light, however, it is an act of such monumental folly that it boggles what is left of the mind.
  Police discovered that Mr. Almond (who is not the man shown in the photograph above) was in possession of the store's cash. 
  He was booked on one count of armed robbery. Charges of assault and urinating in public were pending, police told the newspaper, as should have been a single charge of Mr. Almond's being rather a dolt, if one with a notably overexcitable bladder. 

Crime of the Century (Wagging the Dog Division)

ABERDEEN, Scotland, March 17 -- A twenty-eight-year old man has been fined nine hundred dollars for attempting to "assault" a female Scottish police officer with a dangerous weapon: his penis.
   Various British news outlets - the Sun, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mirror and BBC News, but not the Times, because that august broadsheet dasn't touch news of the common willie - reported today that the man, named Marium Varinauskas (photo, below), was arguing with his girlfriend when police were called to his Aberdeen apartment.
   When officers showed up, a Huffington Post roundup of the British press stories noted, he was "drunk and in his underpants." Colloquially, this means he was entirely shitfaced and nearly bare-assed nekkid.
   The HuffPo did not say, however -  nor, apparently, did the British press - what kind of "underpants" Mr. Varinauskas was wearing, so readers learned news neither of style, color, brand nor type: thong, bikini, briefs, boxer briefs, boxers, or other. This cannot be seen as anything other than an appalling oversight.
   An official told the court that Mr. V. (honestly, how many times does one need to type out "Varinauskas" in his ever-shortening lifetime?) stood over the police officer "exposing his penis and thrusting it in her face, forcing her to take evasive action to avoid getting struck." 
   It is unclear what "stood over" actually means. Mr. V. was, when deputies arrived, sitting on a couch. Presumably, as they were standing, they loomed  over him. When he stood, he'd have been eye-to-eye with them. 
   For him to have "stood over" the female officer, then, suggests that she was somehow below him, perhaps in a kneeling position, which would further explain why the potted Mr. V., who later confessed to having been in an alcoholic blackout, might have mistakenly thought it entirely correct and context appropriate  to "thrust" his member "in her face." 
   Alas, we will never know. 
   With classic Scottish understatement, a police department spokesman said, "This was a distasteful experience for the officer." 
    

Queer Notes From all Over (Underwear Occasions Bad Writing Division)

SYDNEY, Australia, March 5 - Reuters Life!, evidently a life-style offshoot of the Reuters news wire service, reports that underwear in a new, "eco-friendly" AussieBum line are composed of twenty-seven percent banana fiber, sixty-four percent cotton and nine percent lycra. 
   The two-graf Reuters Life! report, though alluring, is hazy. It notes that the banana fiber, made from bark weave found in banana plants, "makes the underwear not only lightweight, but also very absorbent...." This sounds promising, but what there is for the underwear to absorb Reuters Life! does not say.
   Lloyd Jones, an AussieBum functionary, noted that if the undies were to contain any more than twenty-percent of the banana fiber, "it might get a bit squishy." Mmmmm. 
   Jones added, according to Reuters Life!, that "wearers did not have to worry about real monkeys, because the underwear does not smell like a banana." 
   What it does smell like Jones did not say, perhaps because, in a monumental journalistic oversight, the Reuters Life! reporter, a woman by the name of Amy Pyett, failed to ask him. Or perhaps she did and her editor, a woman named Miral Fahmy, simply cut the information. Alas, we shall never know. 
   We also cannot know whether it was Ms. Fahmy or a nameless copy-editor who wrote the hed (headline),  but whoever it was should be disciplined severely. It read: "Aussie Underwear Has Gone Bananas."
   And Ms. Fahmy really shouldn't have let Ms. Pyett get away with this lede (first paragraph): "Australian underwear company AussieBum has been monkeying around and the result is a range of men's underwear made with bananas." 
   Not only is that factually wrong - the ingredient is banana bark weave, not bananas - but it is exemplary of the kind of writing that is driving readers away  from newspapers and leading, you see, to the collapse of the Fourth Estate. 
   Here, for curious readers, are some examples of AussieBum underwear. I don't know whether or not they're the banana-bark-weave ones, but who cares? The pictures are lovely. 
   

Crime of the Century (Art for Art's Sake Division)

   Two males, both seventeen, were stopped by Parsippany, N.J. police Thursday at about 11:30pm EST on the front lawn of the Parsippany High School, where the young men, using their shoe soles, were outlining, in the snow, the image of a 25-foot penis. 
  
    (This photo does not show the young men's art piece. It shows an effort created by students at the the University of Cincinnati football stadium. It is included here for illustrative purposes, you see.)
   According to the New Jersey Local News Service, Officer Steven Miller (no relation to the aged rock musician or the beer) saw the teenagers creating the snowbound phallus and "caught them soon after they left the school in a vehicle." 
   The NJLNS further reports that one of the artists was made to "erase the imagery as Parsippany Police Officer Robert Appel stood by." 
   This, of course, is an outrage. In an era when funding for public art has all but dried up, these young men were performing a noble civic duty. 
   That authorities saw differently, however, is not altogether shocking. As a rule, police tend to lean toward the anti-snow-penis. 
   In 2005, police in New Windsor, New York (pop. roughly 23,000), used shovels to demolish a six-foot snow penis erected (sorry) by Jessica Sherer, nineteen, on the lawn of her boyfriend's house. 
   There is no recorded indication whether the statue was, indeed, of her boyfriend's penis. If so, and if it was to scale, he obviously received a gift from the gods, as evidenced here: 

   But, because the world is populated with boors, not everyone saw it that way. 
   "We got some calls that people thought it was offensive," New Windsor police Chief Michael Biasotti told the Hudson Valley Times Herald-Record (a newspaper so nice they had to name it thrice). 
   Biasotti did not elaborate on what anyone could possibly find offensive about an artistic rendering of the male penis, the absolute perfection of which is the strongest possible argument for the existence of a God Almighty. 
   What is known is that police, finding no one home, took it upon themselves to shovel-pummel Sherer's snow penis senseless. (The first photo below shows the result.) Was this reaction reasonable or extreme? New Windsor Town Supervisor George Meyers sounded mixed. 
   "We probably weren't 100 percent correct in going on the property and knocking it down," he told the Hudson Valley newspaper of (times) record (herald). "But our intentions were pure. Some people were offended. There are school buses going by there every day."
   Perhaps Meyers was anticipating the possibility that, seeing the snow penis, a school bus driver might laugh so hard that he or she would inadvertently drive the vehicle into a tree. Or, alternately, that forty school kids spotting the snow penis might cause such a ruckus - laughing, screaming, throwing things, etc. - that the non-plussed driver would inadvertently drive the vehicle into a tree. Either way, at least they'd all die laughing, and their last visual on earth would be a snow penis. One is hard-pressed to think of a better final vision.
   For his part, Biasotti, the police chief, expressed concern that, snow-penis-wise, a copycat effect might manifest. 
   "Now we're going to get snow penises popping up all over town," he told the Hudson Valley newspaper. 
   One dasn't touch that one with a ten-inch pole. 
   Sherer, the snow artist, vowed to rebuild a day or so after the contretemps. Whether she did so or not is a mystery left to the ages; there is no followup in the Hudson Valley Times Herald-Record-Trumpet-Chronicle-Post-Examiner-Daily-News. 

Above: The damage done by New Windsor, NY, police to Sherer's work.
Below: More snow penises. They suggest that snow-penis erection - apologies - has become a national past-time on a par with baseball, apple pie, and breast enhancement surgery. Would that we had known that before the Winter Olympics rolled around.