I posted my latest entry about the perils of using an ammo can as a geocache container just last night.  This morning, one of my news alerts sent me a story from Midland, Texas.

According to the story, three young people carried a package out to the mesquite grove next to a University of Texas building at 4 p.m. and then left the area.  Someone reported this to the police who investigated.  The Midland Police Department robot, Andros, X-rayed the package that said “10 blasting caps” on the side and found several toys inside. Investigators from the sherriff’s office said they’re going to be taking fingerprints from the container and looking for the people involved.

How many more incidents is it going to take before people learn?

Unfortunately, in this case the spammer killed his family before killing himself.

U.S. Attorney Troy Eid summed it up best…

“What a nightmare, and such a coward.  Davidson imposed the ‘death penalty’ on family members for his own crime.”

Thursday’s Metro Ottawa included a story that opened with the following:

A suspicious package attached to a pole forced the closure of Riverside Drive and a section of Ottawa’s bus Transitway for several hours yesterday.

That description made me think "I wonder if it was a geocache", so I popped over to the OttawaGeocaching.com forums to see if anyone had posted about it and sure enough, it looks like Dead End Cache (GC1DT9M), now archived, was destroyed by the bomb disposal robot.  At least it was "not deemed hazardous".

Pictures of the geocache from some of the logs show that it was a flat metal container with a green "official geocache" sticker on it.  In other words, another opaque geocache container on a bridge reported to the police as "suspicious".

While the hiding spot probably wasn’t the best choice (on a bridge over the Transitway), this incident probably could have been avoided if the container had been transparent.  Chances are that the person who reported it to the police wouldn’t have been concerned about it if it was a Lock ‘n’ Lock full of trinkets they could see into, and even if they did report it to the police, the police would very quickly have been able to determine there was nothing dangerous in it without having to open it.  Instead, the police ended up closing a section of the Transitway, and parts of Riverside and the overpass it was on for several hours, and paramedics, firefighters, the bomb squad and the Hazardous Materials Unit were tied up while it was being investigated.

So, let’s start using more transparent containers.  And, let’s stop placing geocaches in locations where people looking for it could be mistaken as doing something nefarious.

Shortly after 8am this morning, the lower section of the south side stands at Frank Clair Stadium in Lansdowne Park were demolished in a controlled implosion.  I was heading over to my apartment to meet up with the painters, so I stopped off along the way to watch the show.

I parked on Bristol Avenue, near Echo and Riverdale and joined the growing crowd on Echo.  We could hear the three-minute and one-minute warning sirens and then the countdown of the last few seconds.  After zero there was a pause and then a series of booms, kind of like someone taking slapshots at the board in a hockey rink, without any visible effect on the part of the stadium we could see.

After a few more booms the east end kind of folded up and dropped into the growing cloud of dust.

	Very cool! I posted some pictures in my gallery.

CNN has a story about a woman named Andrea Curry-Demus showed up at a hospital in Pennsylvania on Thursday with a newborn baby that still had part of its umbilical cord attached.  Apparently, she must have claimed that she’d given birth before she could make it to the hospital.  Naturally, the hospital performed some tests and determined that Curry-Demus was not, in fact, related to the baby.

On Friday, the police made the gruesome discovery of a woman’s body in an apartment.  Finding a body in an apartment isn’t too unusual, but what was is that the body was bound and the poor person had been eviscerated and her unborn baby cut from her body.  And it was in Curry-Demus’ apartment.

Curry-Demus has subsequently told the police that she bought the baby for $1000 from someone named “Tina”.

This isn’t the first time that Curry-Demus has been involved in something like this.  She tried to steal a baby at knife point in 1990 and when that didn’t work, she took a 3-week old baby being treated for meningitis at a hospital home after its mother had gone home for the evening.  She was sentenced to a few years for this little crime spree.

The scary thing is that Curry-Demus may not have come up with this little plan all on her own.  She might have been copying what Lisa Montgomery did to Bobbie Jo Stinnett in 2004.  Montgomery was convicted in October 2007 for almost the exact same crime.

Why do these people think they will get away with something as horrific as this?

It’s amazing just how much of an effect two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom can have on one’s life.

It is absolutely necessary if you wish to stay alive.  For example, you can survive for about 9 days without water when the temperature is 80F, but raise the temperature by just 30F and this drops to 3 days.  And that assumes you’re in the shade while you’re without water.  If you’re in the sun, you’re basically screwed.

But the presence of water can also be a bad thing, such as the Saguenay region in Quebec experienced in July 1996 or the tsunami that devastated countries in the Indian Ocean in 2004.

Or when it’s in your living room.

(more…)

The weather here at the ODBF isn’t as nice today as it was yesterday. It’s not actually raining at the moment, but it’s overcast and windy and every time the trees sway drops of water fall on us. The conditions on the course weren’t the greatest — choppy and windy — but we were third in our race this morning and just a few tenths of a second behind the boat just ahead of us.

Out final race of the day is a 200m sprint at 2pm. This is the first year they’ve held a 200m race. In years past, there were two 500m races, but the second race rarely had a significant impact on the overall standings, so they’re trying something new. Should be a lot of fun! 🙂