Lead Story
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A spokesperson for Bramhall High School in Stockport, England, insisted in March that concern over possible accidents was behind a recent decision requiring students to wear clip-on ties, rather than the conventionally knotted kind, as part of the school uniform. A few weeks later the Daily Mail reported that the British governmental agency that enforces health and safety laws had warned its own staff not to try moving office chairs and tables by themselves but to instead call a porter 48 hours in advance. (The article acknowledged that the health and safety office did, in fact, have an excellent workplace safety record.)
Scared Attentive
When police responding to complaints of a foul smell arrived at a small 15th-floor Toronto apartment in March, they found a nearly textbook scene of animal hoarding: 300 to 400 pigeons flying around and roosting in the open, about 250 caged mice driven to cannibalism by lack of other food, and a thick layer of droppings coating the floor and furniture. But though the apartment’s human occupant, a man in his 60s, was detained under Ontario mental-health law, he had apparently been rational enough to keep his sizable collection of pornography carefully wrapped in plastic to protect it from damage. In the same month 53-year-old engineer Michael Palmer was arraigned in Santa Clara County, California; authorities said he’d kept a huge collection of child pornography (possibly the largest ever seized in the Bay Area) in ammunition canisters buried around his primitive cabin in the mountains near Silicon Valley.
Readers’ Choice
