Tag: ha

SIdeshow Bob’s Night on the Town

Or: How to get arrested in Costa Mesa, CA:

Unpaid checks, pursuit lead to arrest
Man who failed to register as a sex offender is suspected of walking out on bills at restaurants.

By Kelly Strodl

A brief vehicle pursuit earlier this month led Costa Mesa police to an unregistered sex offender, authorities said Tuesday. The man in the pursuit allegedly neglected to pay his check at two eateries on March 4, police said.

According to police, at 1 p.m. a man left Wingnuts at 2340 Harbor Blvd. driving a 2001 Honda Pilot having allegedly not paid his bill. At 11:45 p.m. that day, employees at Denny’s restaurant at 290 Bristol St. reported a similar scenario of a man leaving without paying the bill, but this time driving a large Dodge passenger van, police said.

Police who saw the van being driven away from the restaurant pursued the vehicle while calling in another unit to determine if a robbery had been committed, Sgt. Matt Grimmond said. After the officers at the Denny’s radioed the ones following the van that the alleged crime concerned an unpaid bill, the pursuing officers took down the vehicle’s license plate information and stopped the chase, Grimmond said.

“This was like a $10 grand slam from Denny’s,” Grimmond said of the unpaid check. “We terminated the pursuit just because pursuits are dangerous, and we’ll catch him later. And we did.”

Both vehicles were registered to Anthony Tabarsi, 41, of Costa Mesa, a convicted sex offender who it seems had failed to register in his new city of residence, police said. In 1998, Tabarsi pleaded guilty to oral copulation with a child under 14, rape and penetration with a foreign object. He served five years in state prison.

At 2:30 a.m. Monday, police received a call about a disturbance at the Q Club & Cafe, at 1525 Mesa Verde Drive. There police found an intoxicated man calling himself King Anthony and challenging everybody to a fight, Grimmond said.

The man was identified as Tabarsi and arrested on suspicion of public drunkenness and failure to register as a sexual offender, Grimmond said. The two alleged thefts are still under investigation, police said.

This is a fine Hoppe’s #9, nonvintage but oleaginous and cleansing.

http://www.nrawines.com/

This month’s specials are a Smokeless Fumé Blanc ’98, a charmingly rusty but deburred 1911 Colt, and several beautifully aged and rare 1944 Mauser Qualitatswehr from the extremely limited Himmler Select collection. For a relaxed sipping evening we once again offer excellent values in case quantities of Mad Dog 30/30.

Great idea. Alcohol and firearms are an awesome mix. I think I’ll also join the American Heart Association Bacon Club, and order another case of Abstinence Project Thongs from Cafe Press.

Win goes to zebulon_y: “Whites Only”

The shoes.

I had a mission. It seemed simple. My task was to acquire and ship a pair of shoes to mendel.

Acquisition was easy; about five clicks of ecommerce.

Then I discovered that shipping a pair of shoes to a friend in Canada is… fraught. It’s not expensive. Nor is it physically difficult. However, the bureaucracy involved is nearly Slavic.

First I tried to do this via FedEx. They had a reasonably priced shipping option, and their website promised a step-by-step process for getting the customs declarations and shipping labels right.

The actual process resembled a “choose your own adventure” script in which failure might result in international arrest warrants for fraud, smuggling, failure to comply, cavalier attitude towards generally accepted procedures of international commerce, and yeggery. Deep in the middle of Adventure #3 I found myself faced with a screen in which I had to choose whether the shoes were “ornamental” in some way or “shoes, leather sole, fabric upper, pointed, ballet, en pointe, intended for legitimate artistic purposes.” I imagined a bad click resulting in poor mendel forced to pirouette on a pair of city walking boots under pain of permanent fugitive status on an Interpol warrant.

I gave up on FedEx. Their process “concluded” without any ability to schedule a pickup. Apparently I hadn’t finished, but there was no clue why.

The United States Postal Service was more promising. In fact, their procedure was honestly step-by-step, and the rates again very reasonable! I happily clicked through a few screens, entered my information, and was presented with a PDF which I printed. No joy. The PDF printed without addresses and strangely truncated. I had mistakenly clicked “okay!” and charged my credit card before I saw that the printout was very much not okay. Oh God! What to do now? Once you’ve printed out the damned thing you can’t do so again without doubling the charge, which then becomes less than reasonable.

Fortunately the EZ-Print-O-Matic system had dropped a turd on my desktop which turned out to be the PDF itself. I opened it with Adobe Reader instead of the Mac’s “Preview” program and it printed out just fine. Whew! I now had the five required copies of the label/customs declaration, prepaid postage, the package itself, and a false sense of confidence.

eyeteeth and I arrived at the post office today and found it nearly empty! no line, friendly staff. Hopes were high. Unfortunately, I had failed to throw out the first, bad printout of the label and had brought it with me instead of the second, good printout. The postal lady couldn’t do a thing with the first printout because it was so badly truncated that there wasn’t enough information for her to fill out a real one. She sadly told me I’d have to bring the real one or she couldn’t ship.

Ordinarily I would have cursed God and died, rushed home, found the proper paperwork, and gone back to the Post Office. But I had to feed the eyeteeth and myself, and had to get her to the airport. This was no time to admit defeat. Off we went to Cafe Zinc to eat well, and from there to the airport.

Problem: the mailing date on the forms was fixed at today. What will happen? Tomorrow I will try to contact “customer” “service” at the USPS and find out if I have completely failed and missed my “window” in which case I’ll start over. With luck this will be no problem. Then I will be able to mail the package.

As Art Spiegelman titled his story of Maus after the war, and now my troubles began. Or rather mendel‘s troubles. If or when I ship the package, will he receive it? Will the broker (Canadian for “bandito”) give him the shoes? Will the shoes arrive? Will they be approved by Canadian Customs, or rejected as somehow dangerous or economically rapacious or otherwise un-Canadian? Will mendel be forced to dance a sequence from Swan Lake for Mounties to avoid transportation to the Baffin Bay Correctional Work Institute?

You my readers will be the first to know. Pray for us.

useless parks

The city government here wants to build a new shiny city hall. The residents are skeptical. To avoid a vote on the subject, the government first tried funding the new city hall without a bond issue. This was noticed. Then, there was an election.

The new city council has three times shot down a proposal to build the new city hall on land previously designated as “open land, future park.” The last news was that they directed the city government specifically to finalize plans for theh park.

After the angry meeting that resulted in this decision, our Mayor, who supports the new city hall, made a career suicide statement:

“Personally, I don’t think it’s the end of this. I think there are people who are committed to … not building useless parks,” Mayor Steve Rosansky said at the end of a lengthy, impassioned speech in which he accused fellow council members of caving to “political expediency.”