Yearly Archives: 2008


Friday Ark #199

We’ll post links to sites that have Friday (plus or minus a few days) photos of their chosen animals (photoshops at our discretion and humans only in supporting roles). Watch the Exception category for rocks, beer, coffee cups, and….?

Visit all the boarders, Link to the Ark and check back for updates through Sunday afternoon!

You can board the Friday Ark by submitting your post here, leaving a comment or a trackback to this post or emailing fridayark AT themodulator.org.

You can find previous editions at the not quite up to date Arkives page.

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Extra, Extra: All Ark boarders are invited to shout out at the Friday Ark Frapper Map.

Cat folks: remember to submit your links to:

Birders: I and the Bird: A Blog Carnival for Bird Lovers is published every 2 weeks.

For the spineless: Circus of the Spineless. A monthly celebration of Insects, Arachnids, Molluscs, Crustaceans, Worms and most anything else that wiggles.

Dog folks: remember to submit your links to:

  • The Canine Carnival hosted by Pamibe
  • The Carnival of the Dogs hosted by Mickey’s Musings
  • has been out of operation since July 2007

For other current carnivals check out The Blog Carnival and The TTLB Uber Carnival


Copping A Feel

The Flint, Mich police are apparently a bit underworked so their interim chief has intitiated a war on saggy britches:

Dicks, who took over the department last month on an interim basis, announced that his officers would start arresting people wearing saggy pants that expose skivvies, boxer shorts or bare bottoms.
“Some people call it a fad,” Dicks told the Free Press this week while patrolling the streets of Flint. “But I believe it’s a national nuisance. It is indecent and thus it is indecent exposure, which has been on the books for years.”

It looks to me that it is more about copping a feel:

coppingafeel.jpg
MarcinSzczepanski/DFP

Their focus seems to be on guys but, surely, the rules apply to the ladies as well. Imagine the possible outrage at the local swimming hole when all those thong bikinis are bared.
Will these arrests stand up in court? I suspect that this Dicks’ personal vendetta will be tossed out on its hind quarters somewhere up the judicial system.

Via The Agitator who has a nice graphic explaining the rules.


May HR 6068 Die In Committee

Surely, surely if government has any role in inspecting hotel rooms for bed bug infestations it is a local role.
representative butterfield, d-North Carolina, introduced legislation to authorize grants to states to fund bed bug inspections: the Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite Act of 2008.
I checked, the bill was introduced on on May 15 not April 1 and:

The bill would create a grant program in the Department of Commerce and authorize $50,000,000 in each of fiscal years 2009 through 2012 for giving these grants to states.

Interestingly it appears that a number of the findings listed in this bill may have been taken from Wikipedia…with a little laxity. For example;

  • Bill: in a study of 700 hotel rooms between 2002 and 2006, 25 percent of hotels were found to be in need of bedbug treatment
  • Wikipedia: The Steritech Group, a pest-management company based in Charlotte, North Carolina, claimed that 25% of the 700 hotels they surveyed between 2002 and 2006 needed bedbug treatment.
  • Bill: bed bugs possess all of the necessary prerequisites for being capable of passing diseases from one host to another.
  • Wikipedia: Bed bugs seem to possess all of the necessary prerequisites for being capable of passing diseases from one host to another, but there have been no known cases of bed bugs passing disease from host to host.

There’s more if you are interested. I wonder which pest control company wrote this up for the good representative who is surely more capable than this…
Yea, bed bugs appear to be nasty little creatures but it strikes me that a few more well publicized damage awards to folks who get bit in hotel rooms would be a lot more effective than blowing away $50,000,000/year which, yes, the gov doesn’t have anyway.

Via The Agitator.