$100,000 worth of damages when a 17-year-old smashed her speeding car into two cars, a boat and a house in Barrie, Ontario. [Postmedia News]. 


Police speculate that the teen was texting on her phone while at the same time attempting to pick up a cat that was loose in the car.


The moral of this story? Cats don't take lightly to you stopping them texting.

Money laundering in Montreal? Pas possible!

According to the Montreal Gazette in October 2011 the International Money Laundering Conference in downtown Montreal attracted more than 600 delegates from 48 countries.

After all, what location could surpass that of Montreal where hoodlums are lionized and a public enquiry into corruption among politicians and construction companies will finally soon be underway after months of stalling by Quebec's premier? Where the Gazette routinely reports on Mafia killings and the exploits of the Hell's Angels?

No doubt delegates had fun swapping heavy suitcases full of cash from the four dozen countries.

It's Always Healthier to Wash Your Hands

Two Montreal men tried to fool a Calgary sailboat seller by offering to buy two sailboats (worth a cool $100,000) with cash. [Postmedia News] 

Catch was that their "cash" had to be smuggled into the country disguised as plain paper. The scam artists washed such a piece of paper with a chemical to transform it into a $50 note.

But the boat salespeople were suspicious and called the police. The men have been charged with fraud.

Gives a whole new meaning to "money laundering."

Burglar demands two weeks' pay

(vegadsl)

After a New Brunswick man was arrested for breaking into the place where he worked he later demanded 2 weeks' pay because his boss had not given him the customary two weeks' notice!

A tribunal actually awarded the would-be thief over $900. However, New Brunswick's Labour and Employment Board reversed that decision, concluding that his burglary "constituted just cause for termination of his employment." [Montreal Gazette].

The man served time in house arrest for the break-in.

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World's cardinals meet for sex abuse talks

World's cardinals meet for sex abuse talks. [headline in the Montreal Gazette, courtesy of Agence France-Presse]


Honing their techniques?

Mounties Catch Piggy Bank Burglar

Mounties in the Sardis Park neighbourhood of Vancouver have caught the burglar who was breaking into homes and stealing the change out of children's piggy banks. [Postmedia News]. Perhaps he was always short of change for those pesky parking meters.

Now that he's been caught imagine how relieved are The Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus.

Driving interferes with reading a book

A car driver on the 401 highway in Ontario was charged with careless driving after being pulled over for reading a book while his car "straddled the centre (road) line." [Agence France-Presse]

And you thought modern technology had spelled the book's death knell.

Teen Throws Kitchen Knife at Mother

A 14-year-old boy in Winnipeg, Manitoba was so upset with his mother driving drunk that, to stop her, he threw a kitchen knife at her. [Toronto Star].It struck her in the upper body. Police charged the boy with aggravated assault. The mother is recovering in hospital.


Do you think she got the point?

Only on Air Canada You Say? Pity.

A British professor was alarmed that Air Canada left him to sleep way after his flight from Calgary to Vancouver had landed.

Kris Lines of Staffordshire University was not amused to be awoken by a mechanic after his Air Canada Jazz plane was towed into a hanger. The professor of sports law had apparently been snoozing for 90 minutes. [Montreal Gazette, April7, 2010]


So? New slogan for Air Canada? "Let sleeping profs lie"?

Hey, why walk when you can steal a ride?

Four teenage car thieves in Winnipeg, Manitoba, decided it was too cold to walk to their counselling session (on why they should stop stealing cars!) so they stole a car for the ride. [Canwest News Service]

Three of the four alleged chronic car thieves were arrested shortly after exiting the Winnipeg Training for Youth program where they had spent the morning learning why it's wrong to steal cars.

But what's a teen to do in the deep freeze for which Winnipeg is world-renowned? Shiver in the cold while walking, or waiting for public transport? At least they were up and about. Many teens would prefer to stay snug and warm in bed for the morning.

Bank invites rip-offs

A man deposited a bank draft which 48 hours later turned out to be a fake. The teller accepted the deposit and allowed the customer to withdraw some of the $1.5 million face value of the draft. [Montreal Gazette}

A court case by the National Bank of Canada to recover the monies paid out on behalf of the customer was dismissed by the judge who said the bank's employee should have been more diligent.

The bank's lawyer is horrified and plans to appeal. Claiming it's a matter of principle he says if the ruling prevails the bank "would have the burden of verifying bank drafts against the issuer."

Wow. Guess this means you can cheerfully deposit fake bank drafts in the National Bank, withdraw the money,
and walk off with the cash. At least until the appeal is heard. Wonder if anyone's told the Nigerian scammers about this potential goldmine?

Our Tax Dollars At Work

Federal tax collectors in British Columbia downloaded over 800 pirated MP3 files of music and stored them on Canada Revenue's computers so they could listen and share the songs. [Canadian Press; Canwest News Service]

The digital music took up more than five gigabytes of space.

Gives a whole new meaning to "whistle while you work".

Pissing contest?

A new, unintentional tourist attraction in Edmonton will invite men (and eventually women) to urinate in public.

Downtown businesses on Whyte Avenue, evidently a popular area for drinking, are tired of drunks relieving themselves in alleys and doorways. So they are installing open-air plastic urinals.[Montreal Gazette]

Four men can use the urinals at one time. A plastic divider will provide a semblance of privacy for the urinaters. Since they are drunk one wonders if they'd care.

No details yet on the proposed outhouses for women.

Gives a whole new meaning to the concept of being judged by one's pee-rs.

Ethics of a Car Salesman

No Saturday shopping for a new car in Quebec. Nor Sunday for that matter. Most new car dealers in the province are closed on weekends.

When the PIE IX Dodge Chrysler dealership decided to defy the local dealers' Association and open on weekends many of the other new car dealers were outraged. They expelled the dealership that dared to put customers' convenience first.

So outraged were the dealers that they staged demonstrations to make it difficult for would-be customers to enter the premises of the open-on-weekends Dodge dealer. The protesters also jammed phone lines to the open dealership so potential buyers couldn't get through. [Montreal Gazette]

One disgruntled car salesman went too far. He called in a bomb threat. But he had to leave a message because of the phone blockage. The message carried caller ID. So the manager called that number, pretended to be someone else and got the man's name and the name of the GM dealership where he worked.

Police were notified and charges laid.

The man's boss said the guy was on sick leave.

Dah.

West Coast Wackies

If you've ever wondered why our west coast people are considered somewhat wacky, here are two stories from Vancouver [courtesy the Montreal Gazette]:

A driver charged with impaired driving after his car was stopped for weaving on a freeway claimed his attention was not compromised by the 10 beers and double cocktail he'd consumed but rather because his wife was enjoying a new vibrator.

In a hopefully unrelated story, the RCMP have new orders to check inside cars that appear to have been abandoned. This followed the revelation that a dead man sat in his car on the Trans-Canada Highway (presumably on the shoulder) for 3 days despite the car being noticed and flagged by local police and the Mounties. Seems no-one looked inside the vehicle.

Just goes to show that on the West Coast cars can be hazardous to your health.

Centenarian Won't Be Caught Napping

Saskatchewan centenarian Phyllis Perkins was excused from jury duty because serving as a juror would likely "interrupt her nap time." [Montreal Gazette]
The Saskatoon resident (born in 1903) meets the only legal requirements in that province for jury duty: being an adult and living in the judicial district.

Pity she's excused from serving. Ms Perkins might have set a whole new trend: Regular snooze time for judges and juries. Imagine what that could do for our moribund justice system.

Forget Radar Traps -- Just Use Goats

No goats on the 401 (Canada's busiest highway linking Montreal with Toronto) provided a Swiss visitor with an excuse for driving 61 km/hr over the speed limit. [Montreal Gazette]

He told police that he figured it was okay to speed because he was unlikely to hit a goat.

Hmm. Guess that driver has never seen Canada's main weapon in the fight to slow speeders: the Moose.

Anti-war Christmas Tree Unacceptable to United Way

Anti-war decorations on a Christmas tree were offensive to someone in the United Way in Burlington, Ontario [Montreal Gazette] so the tree was removed from its charity auction.

The tree was decorated with Christmas crackers, poppies and a platoon of toy soldiers by Pakistan-born artist Asma Arshad Mahmood. She entitled the piece of art "Merry Christmas from Mesopotamia, lest we forget."

Quite right. Christmas is not, of course, a time to encourage peace and an end to war. The tree is a pagan symbol and Christianity itself has a long history of torture, blood, gore, prejudice and discrimination.

Just as Jesus said: "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword. " [Matthew, 10:34]

Nothing To Crow About

Crows are flocking to our cities. Murders of crows are blanketing Charlottetown, P.E.I.'s waterfront and have previously inundated Woodstock, Ontario where at least 40,000 crows outnumbered human residents. [Canadian Press]

The noise and feces of these murders disturb and annoy their human hosts. In Charlottetown the City Council is reluctant to spend the necessary money to shoo away the birds with "high-pitched bird distress and and predator calls".

One councillor suggested his colleagues fear the crows might migrate to their own backyards.

A solution is still being sought.

Strange that the City Council doesn't see the obvious: why not make crow pie a delicacy, in the clever way that the French made slimy snails (ugh!) and slithery oysters (double ugh!) into gourmet foods.

Oh, right. No City Councillor is going to eat crow.