Need another good reason to avoid the shopping malls this holiday season?

Yeah, I say like the horrible parking, lousy customer service, crazy traffic and throngs of grubbing people aren’t enough reason to avoid them like the plague. Well, anyway, here’s another good reason:

Federal officials said Shareef planned to set off four hand grenades in garbage cans at the CherryVale Mall in Rockford, about 90 miles northwest of Chicago.

“He fixed on a day of December 22nd on Friday … because it was the Friday before Christmas and thought that would be the highest concentration of shoppers that he could kill and injure,” said Robert Grant, the agent in charge of the Chicago FBI office.

Weren’t we supposed to have bomb-proof garbage cans by now?

Since Nov. 20 at least 60 cases of E. coli infections have been reported across six states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), most of them linked to Taco Bell restaurants. Forty-eight of those people have been hospitalized, seven with potentially fatal kidney failure, and more cases are likely to be reported.

Seriously, isn’t this similar to what happened to Chi-Chi’s before that chain went out of business? I don’t know (actually, I don’t know either — if this is similar, or that Chi-Chi’s went out of business), and I don’t care, but I do have an old Chi-Chi’s shirt in my closet from when I worked there. I’ll sell it to you for $50.

(Except, with Chi-Chi’s, I think it was onions).

UPDATE: And, of course, still no emergency maintenance by the time I went to bed, so I dug a wrench out of my linen closet — where do you keep your tools? — and am prepared to jury-rig it. Henderson-Webb is going to be getting a rather nasty e-mail.

Either my landlord’s maintenance department was really busy today, or whoever took my maintenance request forgot to send it through. Ah, I love maintenance guys on call and an emergency contact number. I bet the guy who comes out to fix this puts a beating on the dude who forgot to log the call and caused him to have to interupt a Friday night.

Yesterday’s answer was “Popcorn.”

Here’s a fun one for today:

Gov. Schwarzenegger has a long one.
President Bush a short one.
Madonna doesn’t have one.
Pope Benedict does, but he doesn’t use it.

I know your minds are in the gutter, you bunch of sick fucks. You know — or should — the drill by now. See ya tomorrow.

I don’t think it is any secret that I own a gun or two and generally tend to be towards the right when it comes to firearms and using them in self-defense. That said, just because you, as an American citizen, have a right to own a firearm, that doesn’t mean you have to exercise that right if you don’t choose to.

Well, if the trend used to be to ban firearms all together, there’s a town in Pennsylvannia doing the reverse:

A tiny town in western Pennsylvania could ask all of its residents to own guns, if a proposal under consideration on Wednesday wins approval from local officials.

Under the proposed law, residents of Cherry Tree, Pennsylvania, would be asked to own guns and know how to use them. Cherry Tree, some 70 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, has about 400 residents.

The town council was scheduled to vote on the proposed “Civil Protection Ordinance” on Wednesday evening.
Statkowski said homeowners have a right and a responsibility to defend against intruders rather than calling police and waiting for help to arrive.

Now, I don’t know if that last paragraph is just how CNN phrased it, but I strongly disagree with it. I agree with the first part of the sentence, but the “rather than calling police” disturbs me. It is one thing if you’re forced to use lethal force before the arrival of the police, but not calling them at all — assuming, mind you, that you have the option to do (if the bad guy is in the room with your only phone, that’s another story) — strikes me as negligent on the part of the homeowner.

Anyway, so to sum up: Guns good. Requiring people to own them, not so good. Not calling the police? Also not so good.

UPDATE:

Reuter’s had this quote from Statkowski, which lends me to believe CNN phrased theirs correctly: “I don’t believe your wife would appreciate it very much if you said, ‘Honey, I’ll wait until the police arrive and have them defend your life,’ he wrote.”

I don’t think Statkowski gets it. Someone breaks in? Grab your gun, call the police, and then do your thing. But not calling the police at all — which is what Statkowski advocates — is absolutely negligent!