Compelling Explanations

From a Jan. 1 police report in the Gainesville (Fla.) Sun: A motorist who was clocked at 15 mph over the speed limit in Waldo, Fla., claimed that since state troopers' policy is to give a 5 mph leeway before ticketing, and since Waldo police often claim to give a 10 mph leeway, he thought the two leeway speeds could be combined to allow him to drive 15 mph over the limit. [Gainesville Sun, 1-1-04]

Our Tax Dollars at Work

While the Statue of Liberty remains shuttered for lack of $5 million in post-Sept. 11 upgrades, Congress in January mandated $10.7 billion in "earmarked" projects (also known as home-state "pork"), including: $50 million for an indoor rain forest in Iowa, $50 million to make sure a Florida beach resort bridge remains toll-free, $450,000 to decipher the gene structure of rainbow trout, $225,000 to repair a public swimming pool whose drain U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons of Nevada clogged with tadpoles when he was a kid, $200,000 to introduce golf to youngsters, $90,000 for the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, and, ironically, $500,000 for a University of Akron program that analyzes how Congress makes difficult budget decisions. [CBS News, 12-11-03; Associated Press, 12-6-03; Taxpayers for Common Sense press release, 12-8-03; New York Times, 12-20-03; Houston Chronicle, 1-26-03; Washington Post, 1-28-03]

People Different From Us

Alongside recent weight-loss and body-part-growth mass e-mails have been messages of Robert Todino, 22, of Woburn, Mass., who uses the spam (100 million messages so far) to locate time-travel hardware to buy because of his need to revisit his childhood, during which he believes a woman drugged him and implanted a device to give her followers the ability to monitor his every move. According to an August Wired magazine story, Todino has earnestly been seeking an "Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built-in temporal displacement" and an "AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor," among other gadgets, but that "the conspiracy" has subverted his attempts to acquire them. [Wired, 8-29-03]

After Norm and Darlene Scott's Montana farm burned in 1996, they collected $75,000 from Mountain West Farm Bureau insurance but weren't satisfied and demanded more, finally getting another $52,500 in 1999. However, they wanted still more money and sued the company, claiming it was dealing with them in bad faith. In November 2003, a jury in Helena not only rejected the claim for more money but found that it was the Scotts who had started the fire (a finding that probably never would have been made had the Scotts quietly accepted the first $127,500). (The statute of limitations prevents criminal charges against them, but the insurance company will sue to get its money back.) [Helena Independent Record, 11-23-03]