Burglary and Bile, or DNA and Dumb-Ass

(with half-hearted apologies to Jane Austen for the format convention of the title)

A thief in Sweden broke into an apartment. As he was going about his pillaging, he helped himself to some left-over pizza. When he was finished his snack, he chewed a piece of gum and returned to his casual larceny. Before leaving with his newly acquired booty, he deposited the masticated piece of gum in the empty pizza box.

Later, he broke into another flat. And as he was scavenging for more 'collectibles' he began to feel a lumpy, heavy discomfort in the pit of his stomach, shortly followed by gassy gurgling, followed thereafter by a sharp stomach pain. He began to sweat feverishly, then he felt dizzy and nauseous. (I'm embellishing a bit. But, anybody who has ever experienced food poisoning knows what I'm talking about.) This pizza he had consumed earlier was two weeks old.

He succumbed to vomiting. Right there. In the flat he was burglarising. Leaving a nice little token of his visit for the rightful occupants. And leaving an important clue for the police.

It's crime lab time!!! Linking the DNA from the masticated piece of gum at the first address, with the DNA from the large puddle of bile at the second, police were able to link the 'vomit voleur' to both home invasions.

CSI Sweden. Who knew?

You just can't make up stuff like this.

'Dine and Dash' Euro-style

A German couple 'ditched' three kids in an Italian restaurant.

A German couple abandoned three young children in Italy because they had run out of money, a police official said Friday, adding that the mother had been charged.

[...]

Caterina Remhof, 26, and Sascha Schmidt, 24, who is not the father of the children, walked out of a restaurant in the northern town of Aosta on Sunday after ordering a pizza for the children.

Oh, it gets better. Don't get too weepy about the financial struggles of this poor young couple trying desperately to raise three young kids in these tough economic times. They weren't just vacationing when they ran out of cash. Schmidt was "on the lamb" from German authorities for parole violation, and his girlfriend Remhof was apparently aiding and abetting his evasion of justice willingly.

P.S. Seeing as Schmidt is not the father (as Maury Povich would say) of Remhof's children, this of course begs the question -- where is their father? Will their real father step up and sue for custody? And will German courts ever actually grant the real father custody? Or, will social services (who now have the children) work to reunite them with their obviously loving, responsible and stable mother. The youngest of the children is eight months old.

N.Y. Hotel Manager Fired for Being a Jerk

Ash Wednesday in the Catholic faith is the first day of Lent. On Ash Wednesday, observant Catholics attend morning mass, and receive the sign of the cross smudged with ashes on their foreheads. Many Catholics allow the ashes to remain for the duration of the day, though this is not required by church teaching.

Well then. It seems that somebody needs a little sensitivity training.

"Wipe that f-----g s--t off your face," managing director Niklaus Leuenberger told a bell captain at the New York Palace Hotel on Feb. 25, sources said.

The unholy ultimatum ended up costing Leuenberger his job at the Palace, a swanky 55-story tower on Madison Ave. across the street from St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Incidentally, as Kerry Burke notes: "The hotel leases its land from the Catholic Church." Heh.

While it seems that he behaved like an autocratic idiot, I'm sorry that this Leuenberger fellow lost his job. I think that's going a bit far. Perhaps if somebody had drawn his attention to the people coming out of St. Patrick's Cathedral, with the same mark on their foreheads, he might have felt like the jerk he clearly is, and offered a begrudging apology. Apologize and move on.

Here in Canada, Leunberger might have ended up in front of a Human Rights Commission. Hmm. Actually, maybe not. Canada's HRCs are so capricious that they probably wouldn't have taken the case. After all, the plaintiff would have been a Catholic, and Catholics can only be defendants.

P.S. This same hotel used to be run by Leona Helmsley, 'the Queen of Mean'. Heh. Heh.

When Komodo Dragons Attack, and "Progressives" Get Nutty

You just don't hear about this sort of thing everyday.

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Two Komodo dragons mauled a fruit-picker to death in eastern Indonesia, police and witnesses said Tuesday, the latest in a string of attacks on humans by the world's largest lizard species.

Police Sgt. Kosmas Jalang said 31-year-old Muhamad Anwar was attacked on Komodo, one of four islands where the giant reptile is found in the wild, minutes after he fell out of a sugar-apple tree on Monday.

He was bleeding badly from bites to his hands, body, legs and neck after two lizards, waiting below, attacked him, according to a neighbour, Theresia Tawa. He died at a clinic on the neighboring island of Flores soon after.

Attacks on humans by Komodo dragons - said to number at less than 4,000 in the wild - are rare, but seem to have increased in recent years.

With "earth hour" fast approaching, what else can I say? I blame it on global warming.

Oh, and the moonbats were out in force in the comments to this story. Here are a couple of samples --

First there's this gem from some PETA-addled "progressive":

It's kind of obvious. More people means more attacks by these lizards as we encroach on their land. Too bad the natural population controls, such as disease, cancer and famine, no longer prevent us from mass reproducing.... I wonder how many lizards have been massacred due to these few attacks.

And then there's this nugget, from some wildlife "relativist":

Very sensational ... but domestic dogs do this hundreds of times a year in North America alone. In Indonesia, the SNAKES kill many, many times more people than the Komodo dragons. Of course, big lizards are scary.

Keep digging. There's gold in them thar comments.

In 'Loving' Tribute to the Moonbat Shoe Thrower

Surely you remember the Iraqi journalist, Muntadhir al-Zaidi, who threw his shoes at George W. Bush at a press conference during the former president's final trip to Iraq. (If you need a refresher, I wrote about it here.) Well, via the blog Canada, eh?, here's a photo of the monument to the shoe thrower.



Of course, this reminds me of a piece I came across awhile back in The Nashville Files -- "Which Shoe Makes the Best Weapon." The article ranked the Frye Harness 8" boot as having a "high" threat level. Garden clogs had a "low" threat level.

If that's the case, steel-toed baseball cleats would have to be ranked "critical" -- threat level RED. If I wanted to do some real shoe-throwing damage, that's what I would use. None of this pansy patent-leather wing-tipped crap for me.