People On Drugs Need Sleep Too

I started this year off with a post about some dumbass who fell asleep with a meth lab in his car. Thus, I find it fitting that I end the year with a post about some dumbass who fell asleep with a meth lab in his car. Actually, this guy fell asleep with his meth lab in a cab. But really, for the sake of the argument, isn't that pretty much the same? I'm thinking that it is.

Here's the scoop: According to the Chicago Sun-Times, what we have is a one 25-year old (and old enough to know better) Joseph Hoffman, hailing from the fine Vancouver, Washington area. Mr. Hoffman, who was in the Chicago area for some unknown reason, decided to take a cab. I guess it must get tiring walking around a city carrying your possessions. I guess it must get really tiring if your possessions that you're carrying happen to be your meth lab. That's when Mr. Hoffman decided that it would be a good idea if he and his meth lab took a cab. (By the way, that's Mr. Hoffman over there on the right. He looks about like you'd expect him to.)

The cab driver took him somewhere (where isn't exactly clear because the media sucks) and when the cabbie went to collect his fare, he encountered a problem. The guy didn't pay up, but not because he had a problem with the fare or bolted or anything like that. No, he didn't pay up because he was asleep. SOUND asleep in the back of the cab. Yeah, it's problematic when you're trying to get money from someone and they aren't conscious. It makes it a little tricky.

The cabbie decided that he'd just take his slumbering passenger to the police station and see what they could do about it. Well, they couldn't get him to wake up either. Not knowing who Rip Van Winkle really was, they decided to search his bag for some identification. They found some, all right. He is now known as "Guy who fell asleep in a cab with a meth lab in his duffle bag."

Yep. They found three pounds of meth (which the cops claim is about $448,000 worth), and "chemical bottles holding a clear, crystalline" substance, wired to a power source." Again, it's unclear what the "power source" was because the media sucks and that was not addressed. The story goes on to say that "Police said the duffle bag included a "mobile meth lab". Wait. What was the substance wired to the power source? Wasn't that the meth lab? Are these separate things? Was the power source an alarm clock, powered by a liquid methamphetamine? I'm so confused.

But I'm not as confused as Mr. Hoffman. After he "... was taken to St. Francis Hospital in Evanston for treatment...when he woke up he allegedly gave police permission to search his temporary residence". What in the world is a "temporary residence"? Hotel room? Back alley? Pup tent at the KOA? Hard to say. Because why? Because the media sucks, that is correct. But I digress. Inside the "temporary residence" "...officers found "a gallon-size bottle of crystal material suspected to be GHB, or the so-called date rape drug, small blue pills suspected to be ecstasy, and a bag of cannabis". Wow. No wonder he was asleep. Mr. Hoffman seems like a very busy man. Naturally, Mr. Hoffman was arrested and charged with five felony counts of asshattery and dumbassed-ness.

When in court, Mr. Hoffman "...allegedly shook his head...when prosecutors said methamphetamine was worth $448,000 on the street." And while I think that Mr. Hoffman is a complete moron, I'm going to have to agree with him on this one. I've done a little research. Three pounds of meth isn't going to get someone almost half a million dollars. I'd really like to know what street that's on. According to the Department of Justice, "...methamphetamine prices nationwide range from $6,500 to $20,000 per pound, $500 to $2,700 per ounce, and $50 to $150 per gram." It's unclear to me when this was written, but even if we assume that prices have tripled since whenever and is now $60,000 per pound, they would still only be looking at $180,000. That's a far cry from $448,000. By their estimation, a pound of meth is $149,333. That's $9,333 per ounce and $333 per gram. A gram isn't a whole heck of a lot. I'm having a hard time that meth users are coughing up over $300 for a gram of stuff. I'd really like to know how the prosecution arrived at their estimate. I'm sure that Mr. Hoffman would too.

Why does one need a travelling meth lab? Is he like the old timey Fuller Brush man or the Hoover vacuum people? They just show up at your door out of the blue and start demonstrating their product right there on your porch? That seems like an odd way to run an illegal drug business. Then again, falling asleep in the back of a cab with your illegal drug factory in your duffle bag seems like an odd way to do things as well. So what do I know?

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Worst. Terrorist. Ever.

Let me tell you, it is only through a little bit of luck and a whole lot of incompetence that an awful lot of innocent people were not blown into bits by the "car bomb" left in Times Square. And while the bad news is that this poorly thought through plan got a lot farther than I would have preferred, the good news is that if this guy really was trained in bomb making in Pakistan and/or has ties to the Taliban and that particular "car bomb" was the best he could do then we don't have a whole lot to worry about in that aspect. Other aspects are rather troubling, but the actual constructing of an actual bomb that could do actual damage is a lot less worrisome to me at the moment.

Meet Faisal Shahzad. He is now going to be known far and wide and until the end of time as the "Times Square Bomber". Never mind that he didn't ever blow anything up. Never mind that his "bomb" had about zero chance of actually working. He's the Times Square Bomber. It's just like the Christmas Day Bomber. That guy gets that name, but all he did was light his grundle on fire and singe his panties a bit. No bombing. No bomber. But that's his name. Same with Richard Reid, the infamous Shoe Bomber. He has bombs in his shoes, that part is accurate. But he didn't bomb anything. No bomb went off. If I mail a letter, am I considered a postal carrier? I don't think I am. I've never felt like I was. Even if I was mailing something and I was wearing one of those safari hard hats at the time, I still knew I was just the mailer.

This guy is like the worst terrorist ever. Thanks to the folks over there at The Telegraph for providing us with this beautiful diagram of how this moron constructed his "car bomb". Why I can't find a lovely diagram like this in a US publication is beyond me. Oh, wait. That's right. The media sucks. I forgot. Behold! The "car bomb".

Oh, what the hell is that? You know what that is? That's a Nissan Pathfinder filled with a bunch of stuff, that's what we've got here. Let's go through the incompetence a piece at a time, shall we? First of all, he has these two alarm clocks for some reason. They don't appear to have much to do with the contraption as a whole, as there needed to be a fuse ignited first (which Shahzad did before he got out of the vehicle and left). Here is one of those clocks:

Where did he get that? Did he get a discount on it at an 80s store or something? It strikes me as an odd choice for some reason. It sure as hell doesn't look reliable. Then again, from what I can tell, it didn't really play a part in the "bomb" at all, so I guess who cares what it looks like? I wonder what he had to say about that? "What's the clock for?" "What is the clock for? Have you never seen Batman? All of the bombs always have a clock!"

Next on the list is the M88 firecrackers that he purchased and set up at three separate locations in the vehicle. All in all there were 152 of these things. Each one has its own fuse. According to something called Mid Day, a one Bruce Zoldan, who owns the chain of fireworks stores which included the one where Shahzad bought the M88s, in order for the fireworks to go off, each one of them has to have their own fuse individually lit. He said, "The M88 he used wouldn't damage a watermelon." Hmmm. And a Nissan Pathfinder is definitely a lot more sturdy than a watermelon, so there was really not a lot of thought put into this now, was there?

Mr. Zoldan also said that he would have been better off buying his fireworks on the black market. According to him, one M88 "...has an amount of pyrotechnic powder that is less than 1/6 the size of an aspirin." So, he had about 25 aspirins worth of powder? Was he too lazy to go to the black market to get his fireworks? Was he suddenly worried about doing something illegal by purchasing underground fireworks? Considering his goal was supposed to have been to blown people up, I'm finding it hard to believe he would have drawn the line at purchasing illegal fireworks.

Now, as you can see in the above diagram, there were three propane tanks in there as well. Propane is highly flammable. And that's the reason that we keep valves on those propane tanks. Those allow us to regulate the flow of the gas out of the tank. However (and this is important, kids!), in order for the gas to get OUT of the tank, the freaking valve has to be OPEN! That's right. He didn't even open the valves of the tanks! That according to Jonathan Alter over there at Newsweek. Could this guy have been more of a moron?

The answer to that is yes. Please note the type of fertilizer that he used for his "bomb". It is something called urea fertilizer. Over there at the University of Minnesota's website, they have a splendid data sheet on urea fertilizer. (It doesn't explain exactly what "urea" is though. It sounds like a female body part. Female body parts rarely explode, even when you guys are doing it right.) If you look down on the fourth section, it clearly states "Urea usage involves little or no fire or explosion hazard." This stuff wasn't going to explode no matter what. He might just as well have gone out and bought a bunch of bags of horse manure and threw those in there as well. The result would have been the same. No bomb.

And finally, in the last act of incompetence in this scheme that sounds like it was designed by all three Stooges AND Shemp, according to the huffy folks over at The Huffington Post, Shahzad "...left his keys in the ignition of an SUV" and his "...landlord....got a call from him that night saying he had lost his apartment key and needed to be let into the building." So he just put the key to the Pathfinder (that he bought specifically for the purpose of constructing this odd, odd paperweight) on his keyring with all of his other keys?! Was it too difficult for him to keep track of a separate loose key? And if it was, shouldn't he have maybe set things up so that he didn't have to return to his home after setting this thing off? Locked himself out of his house. What a maroon.

I'm just so confused by the ineptness of the whole ordeal. And he has allegedly had training in Pakistan? Screw Pakistan next time and spend fifteen minutes on the Internet. Hell, I spent five minutes on the Internet before I learned that urea fertilizer isn't very explode-y. And the amount of non-explode-y fertilizer that he used? That's right. About 250 pounds. Soooo, what? FIVE bags? Um, not to get all nit-picky or anything here, but the bomb that Timothy McVeigh used in Oklahoma City was about 7,000 pounds. What in the world did this dumbass think that 250 pounds was going to do? Was he just not that angry? I don't get it.

The only thing that would makes sense to me and that would adequately explain how someone who "trained in Pakistan" could have committed all of this bungling is very simple: It wasn't Shahzad at all. It was Wile E. Coyote.

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What in the Hell is Wrong With Reuters?

So, I'm flipping through the news online and I end up over there at Reuter's. Reuter's. Which bills itself as "...the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals." They also claim to "...combine industry expertise with creative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers....powered by the world's most trusted news organization." Sounds pretty impressive, does it not? Not so fast.

So, the story that I had clicked on was titled "Car loses all four wheels on highway". Now, you can debate the newsworthiness of that all you'd like, but regardless of your conclusion, you'd still have to admit that it's interesting. All four wheels?! That's quite the feat! I'd say it's newsworthy. It's not worth leading off your newscast with or anything like that, but it could definitely make it's way into a news lineup, say, right before Britney Spears.

Apparently, what ended up happening was that the dumbasses who were in the car had changed the tired from the winter tires to the summer tires. They were in Switzerland, so with the drastic change in climate between those two seasons, one with a lot of snow and one with no snow, having two sets of tires and switching them out is pretty standard.

What's also pretty standard is that the correct type of nuts are used when mounting the new set of tires. And, according to a statement by the St. Gallen (that's in Switzerland) police, "When they then drove back on to the motorway, all of the wheels disconnected." Yes, I imagine that they would. Morons.

But what does any of that have to do with Reuter's? The picture that accompanied this brief tale of vehicular incompetence is where my annoyance with Reuter's began. Here's the smaller version. Behold!

Now, I realize that's a little hard to see, but that's kind of my point. Well, part of it, anyway. So when I saw that picture, I couldn't quite figure it out because it looked to me like there was a cat on top of that wheel. I read the story again and there was no mention of a cat AT ALL. Fortunately (or unfortunately, as I wanted to pound my head against a wall after I noticed that) I could click where it said "Enlarge" in order to do just that. Enlarge the photo. Hence the name. So I did. Behold!

That's when I realized that it is, indeed, a cat, yes a cat, a cat on a tire! And again, fortunately or not, this time there was a caption for the photo. It read: "A pet cat finds shelter on the wheel of a car which was temporarily abandoned by it owner in Karachi August 29, 1998." ::: blink::: ::: blink :::

Um, WTF?!?!

First of all, 1998?!?! You can't find a more recent picture of the wheel of a car than one from 1998?! Oh, wait. Let me rephrase that. You can't find a more recent picture of the wheel of a car than one from 1998...with a cat?!?! There were no photos of tires/wheels sans cats?!?! In the past eleven years?!?! The point of this story was that all of the wheels fell OFF! Right there, underneath that cat? That looks like wheel to me!

Second, I thought Karachi was an interesting name for a city or town in Switzerland. It didn't sound very Swiss. So I looked it up. IT'S IN PAKISTAN!! It wasn't even a cat on a tire in the right country!!

So Reuter's "the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals" thinks that it's a good idea to include an eleven year old picture of a cat on a tire in Pakistan as the ONLY photo accompanying their story about a car that lost all four wheel on the highway in Switzerland?? They're the leading source?? Leading?! As in "others will follow"? THAT kind of leading?!

Leading us right off of a cliff from what I can tell. Maybe I'll start doing that. You know, just inserting random photos from decades earlier that have at least one thing to do with the story (as long as that thing is not the country that the story takes place in) but that also definitely include a cat. Maybe even change the name to "Random and Old Foreign Cats". Who knows? The possibilities are endless when you start delving in at this level of stupidity.

We're doomed. Doomed, I say.

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