The Story That Wasn’t

Today’s Wall Street Journal featured an interesting opinion piece from its former publisher L. Gordon Crovitz about the scandal that wasn’t. I am, of course, talking about the Los Angeles Times story about Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski wherein the paper accused the judge of peddling pornography. Mr. Crovitz discusses how bloggers got right what the Times did not, and he goes on to discuss different aspects of the article that were discredited by bloggers, a group that included his wife. The article certainly paints an interesting picture of the changing media landscape, where blogging and the internet as a whole have allowed citizens to become journalists, and where old media cannot assume that readers will take them at their word.

The article, “Smearing Judge Kozinski,” which appeared in the Information Age column of June 23’s Wall Street Journal, can be found here.

Oddly enough indeed…

Oddly Enough is certainly an apt title for the Reuters column that runs stories like this one: “Armpit sniffer gets jail and cane.” According to the article, the 23 year-old man was sentenced to 14 years in jail and 18 strikes of the cane for sniffing womens’ armpits in stairwells, elevators, and even their homes. Even stranger, the man is reported to be mentally unstable. If you ask me, regardless of his mental faculties, 14 years is a bit excessive for this kind of thing. Or maybe this is normal in Singapore. In that case, I wonder what their punishment for drunk driving or murder is?

This just goes to show how different our two countries’ justice systems are. In Signapore, this activity warrants extended jail time. In the U.S., the offender would be institutionalized and medicated for his disorder, all the while undergoing extensive therapy.

A Bizarre Approach to Animal Control

“As bomb scares go, this one might be the most unusual for local police.” So opens the Hartford Courant’s Courant.com article about a bomb scare in Simsbury, Conn. It seems that someone in a residential neighborhood was having problems with bears and decided to take matters into his or her own hands. The individual’s solution: stuff a whole roasting chicken with a pipe bomb. Police responded, detonated the chicken, and are now looking for the culprit.

I’ll be sure to follow up with this story, just for the sheer hilarity of writing about pipe bomb chickens.