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How bizarre!
by Thanos Kalamidas
2012-04-15 10:40:47 |
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Escaped wallaby caught using huge fishing net
 A wallaby that was on the loose from a fishery near the boundary between Midlothian and the Scottish Borders has been found. The 2ft Tasmanian wallaby was caught just after midnight using fishing net after he was spotted feeding on a 40 acre estate. The animal swam off an island on a pond at Leadburn Manor, West Linton, with another wallaby on Wednesday.
A local marksman was able to dart the first one on Wednesday evening. Francis Gilhooly, owner of Leadburn Manor, told the BBC Scotland news website: "The man who sold the wallabies to us told us that wallabies hate swimming so it would be fine for us to put them on one of our three acre islands.” However, within six hours of us buying them they were furiously swimming off the island.
"It has been a heartbreaking and traumatic time for both us and the wallabies.” We will not be releasing them back onto that island because we can't take the chance of them swimming off again so instead we are building a big 1,000sq m enclosure for them. "We searched the area 30 times for the second wallaby and just as I had given up I saw him sitting in the long grass at one of the ponds, eating."
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The Mayor’s Kill Shot on Suburban LA
 "It is better to raise children with backyards than on condominium balconies," urbanist Wendell Cox said in a Wall Street Journal article entitled "California Declares War on Suburbia" this past week. But even as Cox pronounced the problem with Los Angeles’s urban development over the past decade, lame duck Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is moving in for the kill shot on the concept of a suburban Los Angeles. The Mayor is aiming for “a wholesale revision of the regulations that guide [LA’s] build form,” the Mayor's planning chief, Michael LoGrande, told key city administrators on March 27.
Although the citizens of Southern California endure the consequences of shifting planning regulations daily, few realize that even Eli Broad could not have become a maniacal billionaire working with the kind of zoning regulations within the city and most other Southern California counties today. Indeed, the State as well as the city of Los Angeles has all but abandoned the idea of promoting the development of stand-alone single-family housing, of yards front and back. Opting instead for “smart growth” developments that make for higher concentrations of people all throughout the State and especially here in Los Angeles throughout the past decade, State and civic leaders have demonstrated a preference for transit hub development and densely-packed mixed-use corridors, even in edge cities and collar counties.
And after ten years of contra-indicated results—with traffic congestion, for instance, worse than ever, even though population has barely climbed at all—Los Angeles’s political power brokers—including Mayor Villaraigosa, Eric Garcetti, and Controller Wendy Greuel—have never second-guessed themselves on their smart growth love affair, even as Los Angeles passed New York City in density earlier in the past decade and brought the Westside of Los Angeles to complete gridlock. Although they endure the consequences daily, few Southern Californians realize that Eli Broad could not have become the monument-erecting, self-aggrandizing billionaire he is today had some of the zoning laws we have today had been in place when Kaufman & Broad was slamming families into suburban lots in Orange County and elsewhere—as no less than six Southern California counties have laws on the books specifying that at prime locations throughout their counties a whopping 20 homes be developed per acre of vacant land—availing a mere 2,178 square feet per unit, including yard space!
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MSU graduate students vote to unionize
Graduate students at Montana State University have won a historic election to organize an employee union, the first of its kind in the state. After more than two years of organizing by the Graduate Employee Organization and MEA-MFT, graduate students voted overwhelmingly Monday in favor of forming a union.
One student reported the unofficial tally as 195 to 67. The Montana Department of Labour official in charge of the election was travelling and could not be reached to confirm the figures. MSU opposed the union, arguing that graduate assistants, who teach and do research for professors, cannot legally form a union to bargain with the university because they are “primarily students and not employees.”
Ballots were sent out to 570 graduate students and the vote was overwhelmingly in favor, Eric Feaver, president of the MEA-MFT, said Tuesday. MEA-MFT, the state’s largest union, represents teachers, professors and other government employees. “We’re very pleased with our success,” Feaver said. The vote means, he said, that the organization will go forward to the next phase — signing up members, writing a constitution, choosing officers and “working with the university on an initial contract.”
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Dealer tied 89 bags to penis, peed at the station
 Folcroft Police Corporal Christopher Eiserman has seen a lot during his 14 years as a cop in Delaware County. An alleged Philly drug dealer standing in the station with 89 bags of dope hanging from his schlong was not one of them. Not until he met Ray Woods Friday night. “Oh, that guy ...” Eiserman said when I called this afternoon to ask about Woods, 23, a resident of the city's Eastwick section awaiting his preliminary hearing on drug charges.
Eiserman said another officer was on routine patrol Friday when he pulled Woods over for a broken rear light and found marijuana in his car. When the officer searched Woods before placing him in the police cruiser, he discovered "a large bulge" in the front of his pants, Eiserman said. Police say Woods actually had the balls to deny that there was any contraband down there.
“He stopped him for the traffic violation and one thing led to another," Eiserman said. Back at the station, Eiserman said, police discovered that Woods had tied a large plastic bag around his penis that contained a whopping 89 small bags of suspected heroin and cocaine. Then things got messy. “I tried to remove it. Unfortunately, and I don't know if it was nervousness or not, but he started urinating all over," Eiserman said.
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