Designing artist t-shirts is good, mkay

It’s a basic rule of being a petty criminal — or any criminal — don’t sign your name at the crime scene. Again, it’s basic sense — just like don’t eat yellow snow.

However, as I ahve mentioned here again and again, we have a special brand of stupid infecting local criminals.

First up, we have someone — actually several someones — who have taken to defacing public property. The city, as part of a revitalization and renewal project, has been pouring new sidewalks all over town. About a week ago, someone started writing their name, nothing creative, more a Billy Bob loves Jo Ellen, sort of thing, framed with gang symbols in the wet cement. They have been doing it in the afternoons, so by the time the work crews find it the next day it has already set. That requires that the cement be ground down and repoured, no small task.

Unfortunately for the criminal, he used his real name and that of his girlfriend. But wait — just to make things easier on the investigators, it’s also the name he has on the vanity tag on his car. Police had no trouble finding him. He made their job even easier since, the second day he went out to leave is wanna-be tag in the cement, he did so only about a block down from where the street crew was pouring sidewalk in cement they had just put down.

Dude gets to go to jail. Even though his crime is a misdemeanor, he will probably get some real time here, at least a few months, since he is already out on probation for something else.

Now, we have several copy cats doing the same thing, on the same street. Even though the local paper has pointed out the city is going to prosecute for this, the new crowd learned nothing from their retard tagging idol. They too are using their real names.

Moving right along.

In a more serious crime, a couple of years ago, we hade a double homicide, a sort of driveby type crime that involved shooting into a car. Now, Alabama has made it a death penalty crime when a murder is committed by firing into or from a motor vehicle — this is an attempt to stem drive-bys and car jackings.

Investigators quickly had a suspect, but it took some work to get him here, since he fled to California. Eventually he was caught in a really basic manner, something like a traffic stop, and extradited back to Alabama. Now, word on the street is he may have sealed his fate. While on the West Coast, he put down an amature hip-hop album … where he bragged, in some detail, complete with names, about committing the murders.

Needless to say, there is something amazing about that level of stupid. Does it count as a Darwin award if the individual in question eleminates himself from the gene pool by getting the death penalty for something like this? It should.

Now, it’s time to make fun of Boston. I saw the photos, lots of them, of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force ads that caused all the bomb scare rucus. What a bunch of crap. The things looked like Lite Brites. By the description the district attorney and other law enforcement and government gerbils are using, I would be afraid to throw out an old VCR for fear of bringing the city to a standstill. Everyone says this is a post 9-11 era and things have changed.

Well, that’s just a huge pile of crap. Sept. 11, 2001 did not turn Americans into pussies. Sorry. It just did not happen. Though apparently, a lot of people in Boston seem to be way to tightly wrapped. There was no local angle to the story, so, as much as I wanted to, I could not justify writing that editorial.

Still, I’m a constitutionalist (tend to piss of liberals and conservatives on an equal basis, sometimes just for fun). So I came home and created a couple of custom shirts for our Art Life Collective project that should piss of exactly the right kind of people. The first shirt points out that people in Boston who raised such a fuss are a bunch of mouth-breathers. The other, an ATHF Bomb Squad shirt, should take care of anyone else I missed.

Just an aside, I’m sorry Anna Nicole died. I also don’t think it is news and am not going to let it run on our front page unless told otherwise by my superiors. Some news outlets still have integrity.