Tag Archives: police

Imponderable: Hoquiam Washington (Classic Repost)

13 Apr

April 13, 2012

The Imponderable is on a brief break but don’t worry, new ones are already lined up and ready to go.

Consider yourself warned.

From June 24, 2011

Is that the world’s worst knock knock joke?

*knock knock*
“Who’s there?”
“Me.”
“Me wh- hey, wait a minute, what are you doing carrying a dead weasel?”
“It’s not a weasel, it’s a marten.”
smashes resident in the face with weas- er, marten
“Maybe it’s a mink.”

But that’s not the Imponderable. And neither is “what the heck is a marten?” (A marten is in the same family as minks and weasels, and those are all just ferrets to me.) The Imponderable comes from the following article which reports the same story from a very different point of view.

Why does the writer of the article think that the salient point of the story is that a man mistook a marten for a mink? And bonus points if you realized that the headline got it wrong- he mistook a mink for a marten.

The AP article doesn’t mention motive, which anyone reading that article must be dying to know. Wouldn’t you want to know why a man hit another man with a dead animal? The first article gave the motive, that they were dating the same woman. The second only hinted at a motive, that he was looking for his girlfriend. Believe it or not, the New York Post had the better reporting.

The AP article must not find that angle interesting. It devoted more space to the identification of the animal, its scientific family, and its habitat.

Why does the Associated Press find it more interesting and important that a man misidentified a mink than the assault?

The question is Imponderable.

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Cops and Strippers.

8 Aug

August 8, 2011

I originally slated this for a slot with The Imponderables but read the article and I think you’ll see why I changed my mind.

Before we go any further, I need to get something out of the way. “Biggins Gentleman’s Club.” BWAH HA HA! Lovin’ it! (And props if you remember that Biggin’s was Al Bundy’s favorite magazine.)

But I digress. (And props if you remember that “but I digresss” was my favorite expression in this blog for years.)

It sounds pretty funny on the face of it. A group of strippers sued and won a settlement in a case where the strippers were strip-searched by the police.

Part of the reason they won was the law that said, as a protective measure,  “strip-searches must be conducted by a person of the same sex and that any observer shall be of the same gender as the arrested person.” This despite the fact that women strip almost exclusively for men. (There is also a possibility of a homosexuality bias. What if the strippers worked in a gay bar? Or the observer is gay? Having observers of the same sex seems to go against the purpose of the law in those cases.)

I did a bit of research and the particulars of the case don’t come into play here, only the circumstances of the strip searches. It was a mostly clear-cut case of civil rights. Strange as it may seem simply on the face of it, they were wronged by being forced to submit to a strip search. There is a joke somewhere in here about strippers not giving it away for me but I won’t make it. (Though you can feel free to leave it in the comment section. You may want to base the joke on the cops not giving the strippers any singles first.) It is actually straight-forward once you stop giggling.

The takeaways of this case?
One, that not every Imponderable is as Imponderable as it may seem.
And two, “Biggin’s Gentlemen’s Club.”

BWA-HA-HA!

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