Suburbia, IL

Suburbia, Illinois

For Tristan and Jon

“Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium” -CyrilConnolly

The suburbs. You hear the words, “American suburb,” and instantly, the image(s) of either verdant, sprinkler-tended lawns enclosed by white picket fences or automaton-like (kill this?) Stepford Wives mulling around an ominous dark underbelly of diabolical repression dah dah dah dah dah go dancing in your head. The truth was a little of both. Everyone has crowd/circle (no not here)

(great author?) They say (s?): _________________

But really, dah dah dah dah dah-dah-dah. Everyone has a crowd/a circle/a ….

We grew up in the suburbs. There’s nothing to make one feel so mediocre, right off the bat, than having to admit they hail from some little suburb. Ask the person where they grew up, and inevitably he or she will pause, the obscure truth teetering upon their tongues for a moment, before they simplify things: “Cincinatti,” they will say, “Seattle,” or “Atlanta,” but really, a fellow suburbanite will know that the answer is more like, “___,” or ____, or ____. it’s better to be either from small small town” or maybe if you are coming from city this is better because if then make for either one extreme: little big:. in between bad.

We grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois, in middling (?) towns you’ve never heard of– do you really want to know their names? Medinah. Roselle. Itasca and Bloomingdale. See? In our cases, it’s easier to just say “Chicago,” or “near Chicago,” and so that’s what we do.+

The suburb has always been trying to be the city, and to escape it, at once. Major roads and railways Branching out from the cities like tributaries carrying …it was along these that the drugs came…

See the Sam’s Club, in all its colossal, buy-in-bulk enormity, King Kong-like front doors looming like the gates behind which King Kong-size containers of mustard and and laundry detergent sit shelves, and the mothers proudly lugging them out to their minivans. “The smart way to shop,” they all say with….proud…pride….”in bulk, see?”

See the….

Now see the son, sitting at a stop light…grey, to grey, to grey…, a quarter of a kilo of cocaine beneath the seat…

He lays down in a box garden of assorted flowers, and in the morning the cars drive by…people going to work…suburbanites going to work….thing stuff…thinking, “he must be sleeping.” how silly he’ll feel when he wakes up. “Not really dead, just a bad seed, idiot, miscreant” is what you want them thinking as they drive by in the morning (early morning milky whatever better than milky) light (maybe even avoid ‘Light’)

See the local h.s.?//

The Chicago Housing Authority…began tearing the projects down…they began demolishing the projects in…demolition charges and Wrecking balls bringing the fail…s…down in chalky clouds,,,get poetic on the clouds here…. of chalk and demolition charges

They crop up maybe… huddle around the cities, roads and railroads like spiderwebs Or maybe the city gives birth to the suburbs, the suburbs hung on the roads and railways strethcing out like spider webs, the suburbs hung. Connected. The city vaguely feels the tremors of the happenings in the suburbs, but for the suburbs the city looms largely and darkly, dictating its every …move…thing…

“The U.S. Open is in Medinah this year, you know,” they would say, pride…dah dah dah. “That means Medinah is on T.V. How ’bout that. Pretty cool, huh?

We never knew….

didn’t know any better.

Riding our bikes and blah blah blah ….take it from the suspiciously subjective biography!!! here. Lazy summer days. It was quite nice, the early days, as childhood tends to be…

The drugs

The town

The people

The music: we listened to hip hop, we listened to gangster rap. the west coast was at war with the east coast; nobody really knew why, but it was Tupac Vs. Biggie, which side were you on? when Biggie got shot I cried. When Tupac got hit a __ later, you knew that somehow the words on the discs meant more than just…videos…discs…suburban wannabes. It was something more serious than us.

Cabrini Green, __-, ___, ____ were being torn down. DETAILS. on when and when and when each got torn down, razor sharp concision and precision, like a historian. The displaced tenants flooded the suburbs –many of them showed up in neighboring Bensonville, in Elgin, in ___ (Maywood?) the diaspora walked a little harder than us, talked a little harder, we knew they were the real thing and so they became the images after which we tried to make ourselves in. And

When we were in elementary school, the U.S. Open came to Medinah, owing to the Medinah Country Club. The town of Medinah was actually named after the Medinah Country Club, in what must be a rare case of such a thing happening…

…Medinah and Roselle have pact,, connected, share L,P. H.S, like two friends…fending off…together…back to back small towns small towns back to back…

All of this was the pride of our little corner of the Chicago suburbs. Medinah’s claim to fame. The town of Medinah was actually named after the country club,

inevitably say

ominous Stepford Wives dark underbellies of repressed

the more adventurous of us looked to the city.

The area surrounding the current Village of Roselle began to be settled in the early 1830s, as settlers moved in next to the native Potawatomi Indians. Silas L. Meacham and his brothers Harvey and Lyman settled the area now known as Bloomingdale Township. The government had been offering land in the area for around $1.25 / acre. In 1837, Deacon Elijah Hough and his wife settled in the Bloomingdale area, with his sons Oramel, Rosell [sic] and daughter Cornelia.

In 1868, at the age of 48, Rosell Hough returned from a career as an alderman and a businessman in Chicago, and saw that the area had become a farming center for corn and flax. He opened the Illinois Linen Company on the northwest corner off of what is now Roselle Road and Irving Park Road. Hough was also the president of the Chicago and Pacific Railroad Company. It is rumored that because of his position, he spent some money to alter a land survey to show that a railroad line should run through Roselle, Itasca and Wood Dale instead of Addison andBloomingdale. The new train schedule is believed to have misprinted the name of the new town on the new rail line, giving Roselle its current name.^[5]

Medinah is home to the Medinah Country Club, which hosted the USGA US Open in 1990, 1975, 1949, 1946, and 1937. Medinah also hosted the 1999 and 2006 PGA Championships. The club is scheduled to host the 2012 Ryder Cup.

The drugs flowed…like ether…ether…they came in, in dah, dah and in dah, in bricks of __ and dah of dah, dah dah dah to dah make you dah dah dah, waiting at stop lights, grey, to grey, to grey, we )__

Though We All Know Joe Was An Atheist, Still, Now Is The Time For Staying On Topic When Posting To His Legacy.com Obituary Guestbook

To the family, my deepest condolences, and why would a just God give someone a peanut allergy? Proof of imperfection. Evoulution. Pro atheist.

X. An innocent (but one who pushes it forward)

X. Hardcore atheist. (2)

X. Religious Person (2)

X. Rabbi comes in out of no where.

X Scientist (Geneticist?) comes in out of no where.

X. Legacy.com moderator intervenes.

X. Mother chides everyone (?)

X. An innocent. (subtly pushes it forward)

Comment 1: Peanut allergy. Joe, in all the years we went to school together, I never knew anything about a peanut allergy. I guess those things can develop as an adult. You were one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. I wish we could have stayed in touch, more. Still, I’m going to miss you, buddy. To the family, may God be with you in this, your time of loss. Whether the peanut allergy was there all along, or developed later on, take solace in knowing that, however unfair it may seem now, it was all part of God’s plan, and that Joe is now there with Him, smiling down upon us. Also, I know a great lawyer, whenever you’re ready to deal with that restaurant.

-X, From X.

Comment 2: Little brother, what can we say? Mom, Dad, Trevor and I are missing you so badly right now, there are no words. I’ve been dreaming of you every night for a week now. I wake up crying, at least once a night. My brother, my best friend, I feel as though we knew each other better than anyone else. We shared everything; secrets, laughter, dah, dah, even each other’s beliefs. And so I know that you wouldn’t want to be considered to be with God right now, since there is no (telelological argument is bunk…etc) rational reason to believe that God exists, what with the concept of God being something that humanity must grow out of …dah dah blah.

-Forever your sister, Julie

Comment 3: Joe, miss you so much already. Not sure why humanity would have to grow out of religion, Joe, considering that the very foundations of modern western ..civilization were largely built upon Judeo Christian principles. The soul does exist, I assure you Joe, as you now know very well; it has has survived your death, meaning that you have not disappeared, but rather, have transitioned. …there need be no proof of where you are right now, or Who you are with, because I feel it, we all feel it, we all just know, epistemological…sceience has, and never will, be able to explain everything, because science , too, exists only because of God. Proof is not necessary for that which we already know. And I, for one, know you are in heaven, not in some dark abyss of non-existence.To make that leap of faith. The theory of evolution itself is a leap of faith, the gaps in the fossil record have never been filled. Joe, I remember the time….do you remember? I’m sure you do, and I’m sure you’re smiling down at this post right now, even as I type, since the soul does exist, has survived your death, meaning that you have not disappeared, but rather, have transitioned. …there need be no proof of where you are right now, or Who you are with, because I feel it, we all feel it, we all just know, epistemological…sceience has, and never will, be able to explain everything, because science , too, exists only because of God. Proof is not necessary for that which we already know. And I, for one, know you are in heaven, not in some dark abyss of non-existence.

Comment 4: My deepest condolences to the family. Miss you, Joe. However, the burden of proof lies not with the atheist, but rather with the other side. (has to get barbed here, probably already should have been getting there. Speed this the fuck up.) I am not literally addressing Joe right now– he exists no more– but rather, am addressing the concept of Joe. Though the concept of Joe may exist, it does not mean that Joe still does, in any real sense. No more so than that teapot orbiting the sun. “There’s a teapot orbiting the sun.” There, I said it. It would now be up to me to prove that. Until then, there would be no rational reason to believe it to be so. Joe would not believe it, and did not believe it, as one of the enlightened few who refused to join the ranks of the mindless multitude who live their lives beneath the dictates of an invisible and angry teapot circling overhead. I get into all of this indepth on my blog, atheistpunk.blogspot.com. Miss you, Joe.

NOTICE: We ask that guests refrain from linking to websites that are irrelevant to the mourning occasion. Please re-read the Legacy.com guidelines. Thank you.

-The Legacy.com team

Comment 5: Joe, being in heaven, as you are, and being now privy to nearly all human knowledge, I for one am just glad that you realize that something as complex as the human eye could not have come about randomly. Explain how something as complex as the human eye came about by chance. Oh, Joe, how I wish you could come back to do that for all of us right now. But as you know, being that you are in heaven, and now know all, such a thing would be impossible to do. Because the one next to you right now, God, is the only explanation for the human eye.

To the family: my sympathies are with you. My brother’s guestbook was also recently overrun by religious zealots attempting to force their beliefs upon my family. Here goes the very best fact about religion causing murder you can find. Original.

To the family of the deceased: I did not have the good fortune of having known either Joe, or any of you, but still, my heart goes out to all of you– take solace in knowing that Joe is in God’s hands, now. my name is rabbi —-. i just happened to come across this guestbook, and it is always in my interest to stop the spread of disinformation regarding my religion. no where did..say…leviticus; 23, in fact, we are told, ‘dfjjfdjdfjdfjdfj.’ tht is all.

-___.

To the family…irreducible complexity….

(I thoroughly explain all of this on my blog, godfearingatheist.blogspot.com). My thoughts are with the family right now.

-Sheldon, ….

My apologies. (lights a candle)

-Sheldon, Akron

I never really knew Joe, or the family, but my thoughts are with all of you. My name is Rabbi Boteach (change) of the ____. I just happened to stumble across this guestbook, and would just like to quickly point out that no where in the Torah is it said that God condones….etc…This is pure myth. Leviticus: 23:1 teaches us that God _____, for __- __–. You are perpetuating misinformation, Sheldon. This is not good. Please know the bible before you speak of it with an air of such authority.and Big bang, what was there outside of this ball the size of a///baseball? There is no answer to that. God bless.

Joe,

Infinite regression is not addressed. Who designed the designer? Just because we don’t have the answers yet, does not mean that we should give up searching. To the family, there are certain people who are just close-minded, hopelessly so, and it is these people who are setting the human race back. Joe i remember the time you crapped your pants…and stuff..

-smitty.

Comment 6:

Comment 7:

Comment 8:

(Comment 9:)

(Comment 10)

To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection…

the eye.

Everything was contained within something (size of baseball, make this beautiful), then big bang, and 4 billion galaxies came into existence…what was outside of it? (no one seems to know…?)

To Joe’s family, my deepest condolences. Jerry is just drunk right now, I can tell, he always gets like this…begins mixing uo losing focus

Joe, I remember how we… Todd, so like a theologian to resort to ad hominem tactics.

science too is based on 2 faith based propositions: 1. we live in a rational universe. “lawful” universe. language of mathematics.

Atheists have to take these things on faith in order for make their belief .

concept of god removes free will from pic

The dials of the properties of the universe thing. Rate of expansion of the universe, per Hawkings. Fool with the dials even the slightest, and everything goes out of existence. No life. No universe. Maybe. “The universe seems to be kind of a giant conspiracy to produce, well..us. and i think we owe a little bit of a thnk u note togod for that one” -Dinesh D’sozuza

why is it that humans accomplished nothing until biblical era kicks in? hm? pyramids…cathedral of…

almost seems as though x2,000 years ago some kind of transcendent entity entered the world and breathed …

genital mutilation is purely in the province of religion

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Apr 21

Posted by questionnothing

“There’s nothing like getting shot at. Most alive you’ll ever feel,” Guy says of the experience.

There was one incident in which Guy was laying down fire while in a skirmish with one of the rebel groups. It was him, and one of his fellow soldiers– a man who wore glasses. Guy ended up firing his gun to the point that it actually caught fire, and found himself having to drop it to the ground, furiously kicking sand over it to put it out. He was laughing as he did this, talking to his friend, when suddenly he heard the unmistakable sound of a bullet’s ricochet. Alarmed, he looked over to his friend, who was still just lying there, the same as before. The only difference now, was that his friend was no longer wearing glasses. Not only was he missing his glasses, Guy realized as he looked at him, but his retina, as well. A piece of shrapnel had blown his friend’s glasses right off his face and glanced his eye, tearing off his retina. .

“He didn’t even realize it. He was just lying there like nothing had happened. He saw the concern in my face as I looked at him, but I played it down like there wasn’t much wrong. But it was very creepy; literally looking into someone’s eye like that.”

~~~

Guy’s time in Botswana was the last time he’d be in a hot zone, and luckily (at least as lucky as can be for a man once struck by lightning), he got through his military career relatively unscathed. Unfortunately, his loss of sight in one eye limited his eligibility to perform many of the duties in the military he most desired. Guy went on to be transferred to Ft. Lewis Washington where he was a heavy vehicle repairer 63H. Guy and his wife also welcomed a set of twin girls and give their son a set of sisters. Guy had undoubtedly had a successful military career; one which had courageously brought a lot of help, too many people. By the time his service was over, in 1998, Guy’s uniform was adorned with at least 9 ribbons and 3 medals. His uniform was “stacked,” as they say in the military—indeed, there were many instances when one of Guy’s fellow soldiers would note, during training exercises, and beneath his breath, that Guy should have been the one in charge, not their superior.

After his return to civilian life, Guy started his own carpet installation business, which was quite successful. But with the terror attacks of 2001, the opportunity to serve his country arose once again at the urging of his friend and current Terminal Manager, Marty Rodriguez, Guy applied for TSA, where he still proudly serves, doing his part to protect his nation, keeping in line with family tradition.

But first and foremost, and most essentially, Guy continues to this day to do what he’s always done, and what he’s best at: helping people.

So it seems that some of are having trouble adjusting to what’s good and pure and fine. No problem. We’ll get you guys thinking healthily soon enough. So what I vow to do on this now-blessed blog, is to post 100 quotes from “The Secret,” five every day, for the next 20 days. After that ends, I’ll be moving on to quotes from Paulo Coelho, and Dr. Phil.

Alright! Let’s get thinking positively! Abandoning wives and children is bad, stealing blogs from people who did that is good!

1. We all work with one infinite power.

2. The Secret is the Law of Attraction (LOA).

3. Whatever is going on in your mind is what you are attracting.

4. We are like magnets – like attract like. You become AND attract what you think.

“There’s nothing like getting shot at. Most alive you’ll ever feel,” Guy says of the experience.

~~~

But first and foremost, and most essentially, Guy continues to this day to do what he’s always done, and what he’s best at: helping people.

Alright! Let’s get thinking positively! Abandoning wives and children is bad, stealing blogs from people who did that is good!

1. We all work with one infinite power.

2. The Secret is the Law of Attraction (LOA).

3. Whatever is going on in your mind is what you are attracting.

4. We are like magnets – like attract like. You become AND attract what you think.

5. Every thought has a frequency. Thoughts send out a magnetic energy.

“There’s nothing like getting shot at. Most alive you’ll ever feel,” Guy says of the experience.

~~~

But first and foremost, and most essentially, Guy continues to this day to do what he’s always done, and what he’s best at: helping people.

Alright! Let’s get thinking positively! Abandoning wives and children is bad, stealing blogs from people who did that is good!

1. We all work with one infinite power.

2. The Secret is the Law of Attraction (LOA).

3. Whatever is going on in your mind is what you are attracting.

4. We are like magnets – like attract like. You become AND attract what you think.

5. Every thought has a frequency. Thoughts send out a magnetic energy.

“There’s nothing like getting shot at. Most alive you’ll ever feel,” Guy says of the experience.

~~~

But first and foremost, and most essentially, Guy continues to this day to do what he’s always done, and what he’s best at: helping people.

Alright! Let’s get thinking positively! Abandoning wives and children is bad, stealing blogs from people who did that is good!

1. We all work with one infinite power.

2. The Secret is the Law of Attraction (LOA).

3. Whatever is going on in your mind is what you are attracting.

4. We are like magnets – like attract like. You become AND attract what you think.

5. Every thought has a frequency. Thoughts send out a magnetic energy.

“There’s nothing like getting shot at. Most alive you’ll ever feel,” Guy says of the experience.

~~~

But first and foremost, and most essentially, Guy continues to this day to do what he’s always done, and what he’s best at: helping people.

Alright! Let’s get thinking positively! Abandoning wives and children is bad, stealing blogs from people who did that is good!

1. We all work with one infinite power.

2. The Secret is the Law of Attraction (LOA).

3. Whatever is going on in your mind is what you are attracting.

4. We are like magnets – like attract like. You become AND attract what you think.

5. Every thought has a frequency. Thoughts send out a magnetic energy.

“There’s nothing like getting shot at. Most alive you’ll ever feel,” Guy says of the experience.

~~~

But first and foremost, and most essentially, Guy continues to this day to do what he’s always done, and what he’s best at: helping people.

Alright! Let’s get thinking positively! Abandoning wives and children is bad, stealing blogs from people who did that is good!

1. We all work with one infinite power.

2. The Secret is the Law of Attraction (LOA).

3. Whatever is going on in your mind is what you are attracting.

4. We are like magnets – like attract like. You become AND attract what you think.

5. Every thought has a frequency. Thoughts send out a magnetic energy.

“There’s nothing like getting shot at. Most alive you’ll ever feel,” Guy says of the experience.

~~~

But first and foremost, and most essentially, Guy continues to this day to do what he’s always done, and what he’s best at: helping people.

Alright! Let’s get thinking positively! Abandoning wives and children is bad, stealing blogs from people who did that is good!

1. We all work with one infinite power.

2. The Secret is the Law of Attraction (LOA).

3. Whatever is going on in your mind is what you are attracting.

4. We are like magnets – like attract like. You become AND attract what you think.

5. Every thought has a frequency. Thoughts send out a magnetic energy.

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Apr 21

Posted by questionnothing

fgggggg

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Mar 21

Posted by questionnothing

hold hypnotic influence over juries, like Satan waving a

absurd ability to influence real-life juries like Satan dangling the judicial system in sometimes laughable, sometimes horrifying ways, like a dangling in front of a live studio jury. have the effect of suggestive hypnotic influence of pop culture like a hypnotist dangling . As we’ve [previously covered],”CSI” is no exception, having convinced juries that nothing short of

solved a murder by comparing toenail clippings. “If I can match the nail in the sneaker to the suspect’s clipping

On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 8:18 PM, Jason Harrington <jason.e.harrington@gmail.com> wrote:

x most absurd

As we’ve previously covered, television shows such as “CSI” have been proven to absurdly influence real-life courtrooms, like a hypnotist dangling a hologram-projecting pocket watch in front of a couch potato jury. But it turns out the absurdity isn’t just confined to the courtroom; there have been some absurd incidents involving crime scene and forensic investigations themselves that take the wind out of make CSI look like …absurd. Incidents like…

6. The Scene:

In 2010, investigators raided a fraudulent gambling operation outside of a hotel in Blackpool, England.The operation had been under surveillance for weeks. The operation was picked apart, disassembled, evidence was hauled off to a lab for analysis, handcuffs were slapped on the boss…another shyster off the streets. Another societal leech and robber baron safely behind bars, and so it was, the world became a safer place.

But wait...for all the hoopla, it turns out this wasn’t a case of a mob boss on par with Mo Green having had his operation shut down. It was all over a carnival game.

[actual image]

Pictured: The Operation.

Wait, what?: All the investigative hoopla was for just that: hoopla. The operation in question was a stall game of hoopla. And the head of the scheme was Phillip Williams. Basically, a carnie. “Step right up ladies and gentlemen and try your hand at the amazing game of hoopla!”

[img]http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/47924000/jpg/_47924065_hoopla.jpg[/img]

The face of organized crime.

Phillips had been running a hoopla stall outside the hotel, the kind where you attempt to toss a ring over a block from a distance; the kind of game that we all pretty much assume to be rigged as the 1909 World Series. But that didn’t stop authorities from launching a full blown investigation into the matter. After sending in two teenage girls strapped with hidden cameras to play the game, reviewing the footage and determining the game was rigged, breaking up the operation and disassembling the massive criminal complex, presumably with a Phillips screwdriver and a little elbow grease, they went so far as to send the “crime scene” over to Dr. David Lucy, a statistics expert at Lancaster University, so that the game could be “tested” by statisticians to determine the chances of winning. Dr. Lucy and his colleagues, who were in no way just fucking around in the name of science, proceeded to make nearly 600 throws “without any joy” which led him to calculate “on the geometry that one would have to try 2,600 times to stand a reasonable chance of being successful.”

[img people playing hoopla ridiculously]

Forensic science.

Things get even more absurd when you consider why this kill-a-fly-with-a-sledgehammer investigation was launched in the first place: tourists had actually been blowing their every last dime on this game, to the point that they consistently ended up broke and stranded. One of the victims was even a doctor. And what did Philips did his two weeks in jail and 270 hours of community service? Got right out and set up another hoopla game, of course! One which immediately began receiving more complaints.

Everything else you need for this entry. Dr. David Lucy, BBC, Telegraph, Register.

http://www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/department/info/news/dr-david-lucy-helps-bring-crooked-hoop-la-stall-operators-to-justice

Dr Lucy and his team set up the game and played it for hours, before producing diagrams that showed the odds against winning were at least 2622 to one.

Then they rushed in and seized everything.

X. The Scene: South London

For days, gunshots had been shattering silence in Heygate Estates, in Elephant and Castle. It seemed as though anarchy had really, truly, finally broken out in the U.K., and a few concerned citizens were uneasy about it. So the police were called one morning after a particularly pitched exchange. Cops rushed to the scene, where they found 1700 empty shell cases littered about the street. The casings were taken back to the lab and tested, where apparently…

Turned out: The cops had actually given permission for the gun battle, themselves.

Wait, what? In a bit of investigative idiocy to make the Keystone Cops look like a state of the art investigative unit, London police had actually given Foxtrot Entertainment the go ahead to shoot their gangster film, “The Veteran” starring Toby Kebbell in that very same neighborhood. In addition to that, they had actually been present during the 3 days of filming. For an entity highly trained in the art of connecting dots and making those challenging links, you’d really think that someone from the police force would have been able to trace the shell casings back to the fucking shooting permit sitting on the sarge’s desk before the forensics technicians had to be brought into the picture to confirm that all 1700 bullets were, in fact, blank rounds, all of which had been fired under the supervision of the very same police who would come back to the scene the next day like neurologically challenged, magnifying glass-touting bloodhounds chasing their own tails.

And then, to top it all off…yes, of course, the cops actually threatened to charge the production company for wasting their time.

An actual still from “The Veteran” shoot.

It likely took Scotland yard a week

to determine this wasn’t bonus behind-

the-scene footage of an actual snuff film.

The Scene: Forensic lab technician Ann Chamberlain works late into the night. Hunched over her workspace in her lab in Lansing, Michigan, she’s hard at work on a case. This one is tough. This one gets to her at night.

She has nothing but a strand of pubic hair to go on, recovered from a suspect– one Charles Gordon Jr’s– underwear. She has separated the hair’s DNA from other unwanted molecules by placing it in a chemical solution, spun it in a centrifuge, removed the resulting filtered DNA, amplified it using a polymerase chain reaction, and then, finally, analyzed it for individually unique genes. She analyzes the results. The room goes carousel. Her stomach sinks. She doesn’t have a match–

–it’s not her pube–

–the evidence points almost irrefutably to one conclusion:

Her husband is banging another chick.

Wait, what?

Charles Gordon Jr. was Ann Chamberlain’s husband, and the undies in question were his. The pubic hair she found on his underwear, was not, as she suspected, hers, leading her to bring the full brunt of her forensic science prowess bearing down on her cheating husband and his crime of passion. During the divorce hearing

that followed, she admitted that she ran the test on her own time, with state property chemicals from the laboratory. A violation of policy that got her terminated. All of this is even more ridiculous when considering the fact that Ann Chamberlain is an

award-winning scientist http://www.forsci.com/staff.html for her research and method development in embryonic/fetal DNA recovery. It seems passion truly can override logic, and that hell hath no fury like a woman-in-a-lab-coat scorned.

Also, this is kind of another reason to make you nervous about those home DNA testing kits, isn’t it…Tiger?

X. The scene: The East Side of London. Dozens of women are turning up dead in the

Turns out: The crime scenes are 122 years old, and the investigator is Patricia Cornwall, American crime novelist and attention whore

Wait,what? and author of the Scarpetta forensic investigation-themed series of novels, which began in 1990, and ended up being one of the major influences on “CSI” as we now know it, in all its jury-tainting glory. IN 2002 she published Portrait of a Killer- Jack the Ripper: Case Closed, which failed to deliver on both premises, being that there will likely never be a true portrait of jack the ripper, short of the invention of the long-overdue time machine we’ve all been waiting on, and that the case was not in fact, not closed, but rather superficially reopened, butchered and exploited by Cornwell in an attempt to look cool.

[img]

Patricia the Ripper, investigating Jack the Ripper.

With her book, cornwell tossed her hat into this most famous century-old ring of “Name That Killer” with a definitive declaration that Walter Sickert, the highly influential 19th century English Impressionist painter who happened to be intrigued by the Ripper murders, much like, oh, say, half the fucking world at that time, was the culprit. so she spent millions of dollars to hire entire teams of forensics investigators, bought 30 of sickert’s paintings, and set in on getting to the bottom of The Crime Of The 19th century all in the hopes of silencing her critics, who very correctly pointed out that her book’s claims were basically bullshit, and maybe, just maybe, generating publicity for herself and her book. During her batshite insane investigation, Cornwell actually tore up one of Sickert’s paintings (keep in mind this is an art giant), and actually pored over hundreds of the letters signed “Jack The Ripper” which were sent to newspapers and the police at that time, in an attempt to find evidence linking Sickert to one of the many Ripper letters. Now. Keep in mind that newspapers and police received hundreds of these letters during the time of the Ripper murders. Of the three letters given the most credibility, the first, the one which introduced the world to the nickname “Jack The Ripper,” was eventually admitted to have been a hoax perpetrated by a journalist hoping to increase circulation of his newspaper.

Cornwell has been involved in a continuing, self-financed search for evidence to support her theory that painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. She wrote Portrait of a Killer—Jack the Ripper: Case Closed, which was published in 2002 to much controversy, especially within the British art world and among Ripperologists.^[3]^[4]^[5] Cornwell denied being obsessed with Jack the Ripper in full-page ads in two British newspapers and has said the case was “far from closed”.^[6]^[7] In 2001, Cornwell was criticized for allegedly destroying one of Sickert’spaintings in pursuit of the Ripper’s identity.^[8] She believed the well-known painter to be responsible for the string of murders and had purchased over thirty of his paintings and argued that they closely resembled the Ripper crime scenes.^[8] Cornwell also claimed a breakthrough: a letter written by someone purporting to be the killer, had the same watermark as some of Sickert’s writing paper.^[8] Ripper experts noted, however, that there were hundreds of letters from different authors falsely claiming to be the killer, and the watermark in question was on a brand of stationery that was widely available.^[9]

Seriously, writing letters claiming to be Jack the Ripper was like a national pastime for England in the late 19th century, with everyone from

he investigation was initially conducted by the Metropolitan Police Whitechapel (H) Division Criminal Investigation Department (CID) headed by Detective Inspector Edmund Reid

Police officials later claimed to have identified a specific journalist as the author of both the “Dear Boss” letter and the postcard.^[105] The journalist was identified as Tom Bullen in a letter from Chief Inspector John George Littlechild to George R. Sims dated23 September 1913.^[106] A journalist called Fred Best reportedly confessed in 1931 that he had written the letters to “keep the business alive”.^[107]

Over the course of the Ripper murders, the police, newspapers and others received many hundreds of letters regarding the case.^[85] Some were well-intentioned offers of advice for catching the killer but the vast majority were useless.^[86]

Hundreds of letters claimed to have been written by the killer himself,^[87] and three of these in particular are prominent: the “Dear Boss” letter, the “Saucy Jacky” postcard and the “From Hell” letter.^[88]

X. Sometimes, you just have to say, “It appears as though death has occurred…”

There seems to be something about the U.K. that makes it surprisingly conducive to balls out ridiculous crime scene investigations. Coming from the culture that gave us Sherlock Holmes, (MAKE THIS BANG0 you really wouldn’t expect this level of mind blowing incompetency. But here’s one that would have Sherlock rolling in his grave.

Turns out:

X. The Scene: A woman’s apartment in Boston. Her television has been blaring for an unusually long time. Neighbors become concerned. Well, probably more pissed off than concerned. We’ve all had that neighbor.

Police enter the apartment and find a woman, dead, slouched over in a tub of cold water. Apparent overdose. A few other officials are called to the scene.

“Never gets any easier,“ they think as they zip up the body bag.

“When they’re young like this, it gets to you, sometimes,” are the words that seem to float in the awkward spaces between the the ambulance drivers’ forced small talk, body bumping along in the back. “Yeah, these are the tough ones.”

“But hopefully she’s in a better place now,” the funeral director mutters beneath his breath, as he closes the morgue drawer with finality.

“Let me the fuck out of here, please,” the dead woman pleads.

Turns out: She wasn’t really dead.

Wait, what? Like something straight out of a horror movie, the woman was an actual victim of the old “wake up in the morgue while still alive” scenario. Only this time, there was no fancy, ultra rare medical condition, such as cataplexy http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/517043/cataplexy_can_send_you_to_the_morgue.html to blame for the mishap. Let’s reconstruct the sequence of events:

– The police showed up on the scene and checked the situation out. Taped off the scene, and, as trained observers, failed to notice any rise and fall of chest action. without ever getting around to taking a close l

-Then a homicide detective arrived on the scene, and, using his powers of keen intuition and fine-tuned investigative prowess, ruled out foul play, as well as the possibility of there being a pulse.

-The ambulance arrived to pick the woman up, presumably one manned by trained EMTs, who also managed to overlook the possibility of the “not dead” scenario.

-And finally, the funeral director, traditionally someone trained and quite experienced in dealing with corpses, failed to notice the “I’m not fucking dead, yet’ state of affairs. It was only when the funeral director heard a ‘faint noise” coming from the body bag that his Spidey senses kicked in and he realized what was going on.

When Fire Chief William Kee, the one in charge of the EMT section of the chain-failure, was asked about how such a thing could happen, he offered the classic explanation that: “Sometimes, you just have to say, ‘it appears as though death has occurred.’

X. The Scene: Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Besides its rather insidious effect on juries who literally believe anything they see on T.V., ”CSI” and its many imitators have also had a similarly stupid impact on high schools, universities and naive youths everywhere, with thousands of students http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/6348107/CSI-fuels-forensic-science-degree-rise.html having become convinced that a forensic science major will one day have them running around from crime scene to crime scene in a frenzied, high-octane, gun-toting whirlwind of badassery. Also, the kids are in it for the beard, and the chance to bang Sara Sidle.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7b/Grissomsara_csi.jpeg

Just change majors. If the above were to go down on your crime scene, it would actually becomes a crime scene within a crime scene.

In 2006, Ms. Messenger’s high school criminology class, one devoted to teaching kids the reality of crime scene evidence preservation, documentation, and collection, went on a field trip to a mock crime scene set up by Messenger at Fort Lauderdale’s Holiday Park. All went according to plan, just as it had for the 20 years that Messenger had been teaching the class…

Fake blood-splattered weapons hidden in the bushes…bullet-ridden plastic skeletons… OJ-inspired planted leather gloves…shell casings that had nothing to do with the London Police…the corpse of a dead homeless man…

Wait, what?

fake skeletons with bullet holes and other evidence at mock crime scenes for more than 20 years to give her students a firsthand look at what crime scene investigators do.

The reality is that “CSI” has actually managed to confuse half the world as to what exactly a crime scene investigator is, with its amalgamation of traditional crime scene investigators, forensic scientists, and action heroes.

Just change majors. The above will never happen on your crime scene.

For the record, crime scene investigators are the ones whose duty it is to mostly tape the scene off and make sure no one fucks with anything, evidence collectors are the ones who make sure forensic scientists are

like Gill Grissom and Sara Sidle solving crimes by matching toenail clippings Ms. Messenger’s 29 student criminology class at St. Thomas Aquinas High School

http://www.ehow.com/about_6292565_difference-between-csi-forensic-science_.html

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Truth proved to be at least as strange as fiction for a high school criminology class investigating a fake crime scene after students discovered a real body on a field trip.

Teacher Sue Messenger has been planting fake skeletons with bullet holes and other evidence at mock crime scenes for more than 20 years to give her students a firsthand look at what crime scene investigators do.

“I think they kind of went into shock and disbelief, but also, you have to say it’s completely bizarre,” Messenger said. “I mean … what are the odds that we would be out here?”

The discovery Monday at Fort Lauderdale’s Holiday Park by 29 students from St. Thomas Aquinas High School jolted the class.

“It was a good crash course,” said student Juan Cantor, 15. “The first thing we thought was, ‘That’s a real good dummy she set up.'”

The body of the man, in his mid-50s, was not immediately identified. He appears to have died recently of natural causes, Fort Lauderdale police Sgt. Andy Pallen said.

Investigators arrive at scene of unidentified dead body (turns out to be natural causes), finds there’s already a team of investigators there. What the hell?

Turned out: A high school criminology class happened to stumble upon the dead body while on a mock CSI field trip, replete with mock planted evidence. Kid who found the body thought it was a dummy placed there by teacher, at first. (Man’s identity never ascertained).
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13168398/ns/us_news-weird_news/

‘

“In Boston, sometimes, you just have to say: ‘It appears that death has occurred.’ ”

-Fire Chief William Kee, after the incident…

The third time they were allowed into the apartment by the property manager, aNevernd found the woman in a tub of cold water having apparently overdosed on pills.

Police called for an ambulance. Then a State Police homicide investigator was summoned and ruled there was no foul play.

No one realized she was alive until she was taken to John Matarese Funeral Home in Ashland where John Matarese heard a faint noise and discovered she was alive and unzipped her body bag.

Hears a faint scratching at the

, had already visited the woman’s apartment complex in Ashland twice Saturday morning after neighbors had complained of loud television noise.

The third time they were allowed into the apartment by the property manager, aNevernd found the woman in a tub of cold water having apparently overdosed on pills.

Police called for an ambulance. Then a State Police homicide investigator was summoned and ruled there was no foul play.

No one realized she was alive until she was taken to John Matarese Funeral Home in Ashland where John Matarese heard a faint noise and discovered she was alive and unzipped her body bag.

Pawelec said the woman has now “recovered physically” from the incident.

Seriously, days. Concerned neighbors.

Haim

Donuts

Jesus, Kay Fab

Gil Grissom, the star criminalist, who is played by William Petersen, solved a murder by comparing toenail clippings. “If I can match the nail in the sneaker to the suspect’s clipping . . . ” Grissom mused, then did just that.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/05/07/070507fa_fact_toobin#ixzz1GvtuuDFW

X.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Truth proved to be at least as strange as fiction for a high school criminology class investigating a fake crime scene after students discovered a real body on a field trip.

Teacher Sue Messenger has been planting fake skeletons with bullet holes and other evidence at mock crime scenes for more than 20 years to give her students a firsthand look at what crime scene investigators do.

“I think they kind of went into shock and disbelief, but also, you have to say it’s completely bizarre,” Messenger said. “I mean … what are the odds that we would be out here?”

The discovery Monday at Fort Lauderdale’s Holiday Park by 29 students from St. Thomas Aquinas High School jolted the class.

“It was a good crash course,” said student Juan Cantor, 15. “The first thing we thought was, ‘That’s a real good dummy she set up.'”

The body of the man, in his mid-50s, was not immediately identified. He appears to have died recently of natural causes, Fort Lauderdale police Sgt. Andy Pallen said.

Investigators arrive at scene of unidentified dead body (turns out to be natural causes), finds there’s already a team of investigators there. What the hell?

Turned out: A high school criminology class happened to stumble upon the dead body while on a mock CSI field trip, replete with mock planted evidence. Kid who found the body thought it was a dummy placed there by teacher, at first. (Man’s identity never ascertained).
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13168398/ns/us_news-weird_news/

6.
The Scene: Police are called to Virginia woman Kay Fab’s home. They arrive to find the home already cordoned off as a crime scene investigation, yellow tape and all. That’s why Kay Fab called the police, see. She was curious about this. What the fuck.

Turned Out: The mystery crime scene turned out to be a CSI-themed surprise birthday party for Kay. This annoyed the police. So Kay brought donuts to the police station the next day. Seriously. The Fab family apparently doesn’t do subtlety very well.
http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/news/virginia/080709_va_woman_mistakes_birthday_party_for_crime_scene

5.

The Scene:

Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, South London.Officers raced to the area after a member of the public found “bullets.” One of the things that “CSI” teaches us is that the members of the investigation team are all running smoothly, like a well-oiled machine, Intercommunication. Connected. On the same page. seamless communication between the investigators and the police. Nothing gets past them. They are perfectly coordinated synchronized via radio fancy communication pictures of cSIs on phone and computers and all connected funny caption all their communication technology blackberries Iphones CSI apps Fancy shit. All the fancy shit. .

Turns out, they just forgot. Push analogies. Keystone cops something.

Investigators called to Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, South London, due to reported gun activity. Investigators find 1,700 bullet casings. Forensic experts get involved, test the bullet casings. Must have been a major gun battle here then, right, mates?

Amazingly, they didn’t link the incident to a film crew who hours earlier fired 1,700 blank rounds for a scene in gang flick The Veteran. It stars Toby Kebbell, 28, as a squaddie who turns to crime.

Crew … on three-day shoot

Two cops were present during three days of action. Then production staff swept up the empty shells. But next morning police were alerted to suspected gun activity on the Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, South London.

Forensic experts combed the streets and found some bullet casings. But it was not until the next day that tests revealed they were blanks – and the penny dropped.

Investigators called to Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, South London, due to reported gun activity. Investigators find 1,700 bullet casings. Forensic experts get involved, test the bullet casings. Must have been a major gun battle here then, right, mates?

No.

Turned out: The police had given Foxtrot Entertainment permission to film their gangster movie, “The Veteran,” the day before, and somehow forgotten about it. Casings and sounds of gunshots were from the fake gun battle. Police understandably embarrassed. As if it couldn’t get any more ridiculous, police then threaten to charge the production crew for wasting their time.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/07/16/london-cops-mistake-movie-set-crime-scene/?test=latestnews

BUNGLING cops gave permission for a movie gun battle on an estate – then later declared it a CRIME SCENE.

Officers raced to the area after a member of the public found “bullets”.

Amazingly, they didn’t link the incident to a film crew who hours earlier fired 1,700 blank rounds for a scene in gang flick The Veteran. It stars Toby Kebbell, 28, as a squaddie who turns to crime.

Crew … on three-day shoot

Two cops were present during three days of action. Then production staff swept up the empty shells. But next morning police were alerted to suspected gun activity on the Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, South London.

Forensic experts combed the streets and found some bullet casings. But it was not until the next day that tests revealed they were blanks – and the penny dropped.

Entertainment hire firm Foxtrot, which supplied guns for the filming, got approval from the Met Police. A spokesman said: “It is astonishing the police could not tie the two together.”

He said cops had suggested the firm could be charged with wasting police time.

The derelict estate – often used in ITV’s The Bill – is set to be demolished. Former resident Larry Colfer, 68, said: “It’s pretty stupid. Everyone knows there is always loads of filming going on.”

An actual photo from “The Veteran” shoot.

It likely took Scotland yard a week

to determine this wasn’t bonus behind-

the-scene footage of an actual snuff film.

A spokesman for Scotland Yard said the casings were “confirmed to be blanks” and inquiries were “ongoing”.

4.
“In Boston, sometimes, you just have to say: ‘It appears that death has occurred.’ “-Fire Chief William Kee, after the incident…

Don’t disturb the crime scene! Etc! The classic thing! No tuching.

Apparently, this included woman’s pulse.

[img]

The scene: Officers arrive at woman’s apartment in Boston after complaints of incessantly blaring T.V. Find woman slouched over in bathtub of cold water. Suicide. Obviously. Paramedics zip her up and toss her in a body bag. She’s a goner. Sad to see. Case closed.

Turned out: Woman wakes up in body bag in morgue. She’s OK. Investigators and EMTs never got around to actually checking her vitals. Because sometimes, in the city of Boston, you just have to say…
http://www.boston.com/news/daily/25/corpse.htm

Then a State Police homicide investigator was summoned and ruled there was no foul play.

No one realized she was alive until she was taken to John Matarese Funeral Home in Ashland where John Matarese heard a faint noise and discovered she was alive and unzipped her body bag.

Pawelec said the

3.
The Scene: Investigators surround health club in Minnesota, after a frightened employee reports that a suspicious male with dark hair, bearded and bleeding had walked down to the showers. Surely, an epic standoff was about to ensue. That guy was just freshening up after a full blown Minnesota massacre. Who knows what’s next.

Turned out: It was just Jesus. The man was Lee Backhaus, who had just played Jesus in the annual Passion Drama presented by Zion Lutheran Church and Good Shepherd Lutheran in Alexandria. Showering off after a hard day of hitting the stations.
http://ksax.com/article/stories/S1500815.shtml?cat=10230

2.
The Scene: Police show up to a house where it’s suspected that a man is being held captive and tortured by gangsters. When they get there, place is empty. “Must have been a false alarm” they think. A little while later a pizza delivery boy shows up, finds out the police didn’t order the pizza. “Must be the wrong address,” he thinks. Cops know an opportunity when they see it, buy the pizza off the delivery boy at reduced price, sit in their squad cars scarfing it down.

extra toppings/pizza hut promotion joke/meatlovers/ sardines/ stuffed crust…stuffed crust. DONUTS joke. At least it wasn’t donuts. If the evidence had consisted of donuts.

exhibit A

[img pizza]

Exhibit a. Exhibit

All just one big misunderstanding and a happy coincidence, no harm done.

Turns out: There had been 2 gangsters torturing a man just before the cops arrived, two gangsters who had ordered a pizza. The victim had escaped through a window when the gangsters weren’t looking, gangsters fled, police arrived, then delivery boy arrived.

Cops unknowingly ate the gangster’s pizza, a.k.a. the evidence. Pizza boxes had the gangster’s cell phone numbers on the attached receipts, too. Luckily, the cops didn’t throw the boxes out, just tossed them in the trunk.

They ate the evidence. For christ’s sake. Picture, caption, “Umm num num, funny”

So it was only mildly embarrassing for them in court when one of the prosecutors actually uttered the phrase: “The officers ate some of the evidence, Your Honor.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1334752/Police-eat-criminals-pizza-evidence-crime-scene.html

1.
The scene: Investigators called in to Pittsburgh hotel where they discover a hotel-room-blood-bath. Chief investigator describes it at the time as ‘the most grisly murder scene in his 35 years in law enforcement’. Detectives spend eight hours of overtime on the investigation, getting to the bottom of the matter.

Turned out: The blood wasn’t real and the murder scene was, in fact, the leftover set of a horror movie, “New Terminal Hotel,” filmed two years prior. Starring Corey fucking Haim.

Check Corey Haim filmography.****

Not

Dr Lucy and his team set up the game and played it for hours, before producing diagrams that showed the odds against winning were at least 2622 to one. Basically, about what you would expect from a carnival game.

By: Eddie Westnorth

As we’ve previously covered, TV shows such as “CSI” have been proven to absurdly influence real-life courtrooms, like a hypnotist dangling a hologram-projecting pocket watch in front of a La-Z-Boy-seated jury. But it turns out the absurdity isn’t just confined to the courtroom; there have been a few extraordinarily absurd incidents involving crime scene and forensic investigations themselves. Incidents like…

2. Incompetency in the U.K.

The Scene: South London
For days, gunshots had been shattering silence in Heygate Estates, in Elephant and Castle. It seemed as though anarchy had really, truly, finally broken out in the U.K., and a few concerned citizens were uneasy about it. So the police were called one morning after a particularly pitched exchange. Cops rushed to the scene, where they found 1700 empty shell cases littered about the street. The casings were taken back to the lab and tested. By God, a massacre must have taken place here, right?

Wrong.

Turned out: The cops had actually given permission for the gun battle, themselves.

Wait, what? In a bit of investigative idiocy to make the Keystone Cops look like a state of the art detective agency, London police had actually given Foxtrot Entertainment the go ahead to shoot their gangster film, “The Veteran” starring Toby Kebbell in that very same neighborhood. In addition to that, they had actually been present during the 3 days of filming. For an entity highly trained in the art of connecting dots and making those challenging links, you’d really think that someone from the police force would have been able to trace the shell casings back to the copy of the fucking shooting permit sitting on the sarge’s desk before the forensic technicians had to be brought into the picture to confirm that all 1700 bullets were, in fact, blank rounds, all of which had been fired under the supervision of the very same police who would come back to the scene the next day like a pack of neurologically-disabled bloodhounds chasing their own tails.

And then, to top it all off…yes, of course, the cops actually threatened to charge the production company for wasting their time. Coming from the culture that gave us Sherlock Holmes, you really would expect a little more.

An actual still from “The Veteran” shoot. It likely took Scotland Yard a week to determine this wasn’t bonus behind-the-scene footage of a self-immolation snuff film.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3056571/London-cops-shoot-themselves-in-the-foot.html

3. Bringing Out The Dead

The Scene: A woman’s apartment in Boston. Her television has been blaring for an unusually long time. Neighbors become concerned. Well, probably more pissed off than concerned. We’ve all had that neighbor.

Police enter the apartment and find a woman, dead, slouched over in a tub of cold water. Apparent overdose. A few other officials are called to the scene.

“Never gets any easier–” they think as they zip up the body bag.

“–when they’re young like this, really tears you up–” are the words that seem to float in the awkward spaces between the the ambulance drivers’ forced small talk, body bumping along in the back.

“–to see them check out in their prime– goddamned shame,” the funeral director mutters beneath his breath, as he closes the morgue drawer with finality. “But hopefully, she’s in a better place, now–”

“–please, let me the fuck out of here,” pleads the dead woman.

Wait, what? Like something straight out of a horror movie, the woman was an actual victim of the old “wake up in the morgue” scenario. Only this time, there was no fancy, ultra rare medical condition, such as cataplexy to blame for the mishap. Let’s reconstruct the sequence of events:

1. The police showed up on the scene and checked the situation out. Taped off the scene, and, as trained observers, failed to notice any rise and fall of chest action.

2. Then a homicide detective arrived on the scene, and, using his powers of keen intuition and fine-tuned investigative prowess, ruled out foul play, as well as the possibility of there being a pulse.

3. The ambulance arrived to pick the woman up, presumably one manned by trained EMTs, who also managed to overlook the possibility of the “not dead” scenario.

4. And finally, the funeral director, traditionally someone trained and quite experienced in dealing with corpses, failed to notice the “I’m not fucking dead, yet’ state of affairs. It was only when the funeral director heard a ‘faint noise” coming from the body bag that his Spidey senses kicked in and he realized what was going on.

When Fire Chief William Kee, the one in charge of the EMT section of the chain-failure, was asked about how such a thing could happen, he offered the classic explanation that, due to shortages in the city of Boston’s crime scene response budget, “Sometimes, you just have to say, ‘it appears as though death has occurred.”

(Spoiler alert) Pictured: What happens when there are shortages in crime scene response budgets.

http://www.boston.com/news/daily/25/cor

5. Child’s Play

The Scene: Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Besides its rather insidious effect on juries who literally believe anything they see on T.V., ”CSI” and its many imitators have also had a similarly stupid impact on high schools, universities and naive youths everywhere, with thousands of students around the world having become convinced that a forensic science major will one day have them running around from crime scene to crime scene like Gil Grissom in a frenzied, high-octane, arrest-making whirlwind of badassery. Also, the kids are, alternately, in it for the beard, and the chance to bang Sara Sidle.

Just change majors, kids. If the above were to go down on your crime scene, it would probably just become a crime scene within a crime scene.

In 2006, teacher Sue Messenger’s high school criminology class–a class devoted to teaching kids the reality of crime scene processing– went on a mock crime scene investigation set up by Messenger at Fort Lauderdale’s Holiday Park. All went according to plan, just as it had for the 20 years that Messenger had been teaching the class…

Fake blood-splattered weapons hidden in the bushes…”bullet-ridden” cardboard skeletons… OJ-inspired planted leather gloves…shell casings that had nothing to do with the London Police…the rotting corpse of a dead man…

Wait, what?

In the kind of coincidence that lends credence to Voltaire’s notion of God as comedian, Ms. Messenger’s mock CSI field trip stumbled across a real dead body. All was, indeed, going according to plan, until St. Thomas Aquinas Junior Josh Rosenthal noticed a hand protruding from beneath an industrial air conditioning unit. Though the hand and the body attached to it likely seemed beyond the pale of papier-mâché classroom props, Rosenthal, according to his teacher, pretty much just assumed that the body was a dummy and that the entire thing was a joke, as did the rest of the class, at least up until the point that the real crime scene investigators arrived and thankfully decided to end the cosmic joke right there, as opposed to handcuffing Josh as a person of interest in another hard lesson in functions that real-life crime scene investigators don’t perform.

The man, who was determined to have died of natural causes, was never identified, constituting yet another myth-busting bomb in the blitzkrieg of hard realities that came raining down upon the students’ heads that day:positive matches aren’t always made. As Rosenthal said of his sobering discovery after the incident: “It turns you onto it because it’s helping the community. It turns you off of it because it’s, like, disturbing.”

Actual crime scenes investigation, disturbing? Yes. Welcome to the real world, kids.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13168398/ns/us_news-weird_news/
http://wideshut.co.uk/yet-another-staged-crime-scene-at-uk-school/

6. The Pittsburgh Hotel Massacre

]The Scene: When firefighters were summoned to a blaze in The George Washington Hotel in 2010, they had no idea what they were in for when they broke down the door of a long-abandoned room at the end of a hallway. They were shocked; it was a scene the likes of which they’d never before laid eyes on. The police were immediately called in.

At the time, Police Chief J.R. Blyth, the man in charge of the investigation, described the discovery as “the most grisly murder scene in my 35 years in law enforcement.” The room looked like Jackson Pollock had hit it with a paint brush and a bucket of blood. There were bottles of alcohol strewn about, as well as a chunk of scalp.

The room was taped off, a team of investigators was called in, and they set to work. They logged a total of 8 hours of overtime before Chief Blyth came to the realization: they’d gotten it all wrong. There was more to this than they’d even begun to imagine.

They were dealing with the unthinkable.

This, was a case…of Corey Haim shenanigans.

Wait, what the fuck?

It turned out they’d all just stumbled upon the two year old leftover set of the straight-to-DVD horror movie New Terminal Hotel, starring Corey Haim, a movie that apparently was pretty goddamned gory for a Corey Haim flick.

OK, so it was hard for them to get out of The Shining’s shadow with this one. Even in terms of avoiding the use of young Jack Nicholson’s clone

.

The hotel’s owner, Kyrk Pyros, had decided to leave the room untouched, in case the crew ever had to come back for re-shoots. Although, you would think that two years on, the possibility of the crew returning was just about moot. It was more likely the case that, for Mr. Kyros, that leftover movie set was the equivalent of a tender kiss on the cheek from Corey Haim that he vowed he’d never wash off.

And who can blame him. Really, the guy was dreamy.

To be fair to the investigators, the George Washington Hotel doesn’t have the best of reputations to begin with, when one considers the 12 deaths that have occurred on its premises since 1923, and the local rumors of it being haunted. Then there was the fire. So, all in all, a gruesome murder scene discovery would actually be par the course for the George Washington Hotel.

Seriously, fuck this hotel.

(Cut and pasted the other entries offline, just for the hell of it, will start knocking out Jesus, birthday party and the pizza incident tomorrow after work. En route.)

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/forums/index.php?topic=82394.msg1803040#msg1803040#ixzz1I3JNR6fx

The Scene: Investigators surround health club in Minnesota, after a frightened employee reports that a suspicious male with dark hair, bearded and bleeding had walked down to the showers. Surely, an epic standoff was about to ensue. That guy was just freshening up after a full blown Minnesota massacre. Who knows what’s next.

Turned out: It was just Jesus. The man was Lee Backhaus, who had just played Jesus in the annual Passion Drama presented by Zion Lutheran Church and Good Shepherd Lutheran in Alexandria. Showering off after a hard day of hitting the stations.
http://ksax.com/article/stories/S1500815.shtml?cat=10230

2.
The Scene: Police show up to a house where it’s suspected that a man is being held captive and tortured by gangsters. When they get there, place is empty. “Must have been a false alarm” they think. A little while later a pizza delivery boy shows up, finds out the police didn’t order the pizza. “Must be the wrong address,” he thinks. Cops know an opportunity when they see it, buy the pizza off the delivery boy at reduced price, sit in their squad cars scarfing it down. All just one big misunderstanding and a happy coincidence, no harm done.

Turns out: There had been 2 gangsters torturing a man just before the cops arrived, two gangsters who had ordered a pizza. The victim had escaped through a window when the gangsters weren’t looking, gangsters fled, police arrived, then delivery boy arrived. Cops unknowingly ate the gangster’s pizza, a.k.a. the evidence. Pizza boxes had the gangster’s cell phone numbers on the attached receipts, too. Luckily, the cops didn’t throw the boxes out, just tossed them in the trunk.

They ate the evidence. For christ’s sake. Picture, caption, “Umm num num, funny”

So it was only mildly embarrassing for them in court when one of the prosecutors actually uttered the phrase: “The officers ate some of the evidence, Your Honor.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1334752/Police-eat-criminals-pizza-evidence-crime-scene.html

The scene: Alexandria, Minnesota

Nothing ever happens in Alexandria. Alexandria is the kind of town where news of an altered hairstyle rolls faster down the streets than even the tumbleweeds. So when a man walked into Alexandria’s Racquetball Plus Fitness Center, long-haired, bearded and dripping with blood, it didn’t take long for the police to be called to the scene. The fitness center’s employees were terrified; the man had simply strolled right in and headed straight for the showers, presumably to rinse the cold, cold murder off his body whilst whistling effervescently.

Surely, this could be nothing but a case of a man freshening up after having committed the most brutal crime in Alexandria’s 153 year history. A SWAT team surrounded the club. Officers were sent in to question the staff. It would take nothing short of Jesus Christ Almighty Second Coming to the scene to defuse the situation.

And that’s exactly what happened. In fact, He’d been there all along.

Wait, what? It turned out it was just Jesus– Lord had mercy and the investigators gave an amen! Local man Lee Backhaus had just played “Jesus” in Zion Lutheran Church’s annual Easter Passion Drama, and had simply needed to wash away the sinful amount of fake blood splatter he had accumulated after a hard day of hitting the stations.

altered hairstyle spreads faster than

The Scene: Hertford, U.K.

When police officers arrived at the scene where it was suspected that three gangsters were torturing and holding a man hostage, they had a surprise in store for them. Word on the street was that the local drug kingpin, known only as “CJ,” had sent his cronies over to the man’s house to convince him to stop moving in on CJ’s turf. But when the officers entered the home, it was empty; not a drug-trafficking soul in sight. They snooped around for a while, until they began to notice one telltale sound: their stomachs were growling. They were hungry, hungry police. Right on cue, the doorbell rang. A Dominoes Pizza delivery man stood in the doorway, apparently as the result of a mistaken address.

The cops knew a good opportunity when they saw it, offering to buy the pizza from the kid at a reduced rate. Everyone was happy– the delivery man got a tip, the cops got a killer deal and, in celebration, proceeded to return to their squad car to hold an all out pizza party, ravenously scarfing down their two deep dish pizzas. The only problem being that it wasn’t just pizza they were eating.

It was the evidence.

Wait, what? It turned out, there had been 3 gangsters torturing a man just before the cops arrived, three gangsters who had ordered a pizza. The victim had escaped through a window when the gangsters weren’t looking, prompting the gangsters to flee. The police then arrived, followed by the delivery man, all of them presumably acting under the suggestion of an unseen improv comedy audience member who had shouted out “Agatha Christie meets Monty Python!”

Eventually, when the gangsters were apprehended and the pizza partying police officers were called in to testify, lead prosecutor on the case, Sally Meaking-McLeod, when recounting the sequence of events, actually uttered the words, “it came to light that the officers had eaten the evidence.” Constituting perhaps the most shameful sentence ever formed in police investigative history
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1334752/Police-eat-criminals-pizza-evidence-crime-scene.html#ixzz1IISDwt7d

Cops unknowingly ate the gangster’s pizza, a.k.a. the evidence.

dn’t have to deal with any pesky shootouts, and, on top of it all, they got to return to their squad car and scarf down some

The delivery boy obliged, the cops left the scene to go back to their squad car, and proceeded to have an all out pizza party.

Police show up to a house where it’s suspected that a man is being held captive and tortured by gangsters. When they get there, place is empty. “Must have been a false alarm” they think. A little while later a pizza delivery boy shows up, finds out the police didn’t order the pizza. “Must be the wrong address,” he thinks. Cops know an opportunity when they see it, buy the pizza off the delivery boy at reduced price, sit in their squad cars scarfing it down. All just one big misunderstanding and a happy coincidence, no harm done.

Police show up to a house where it’s suspected that a man is being held captive and tortured by gangsters. When they get there, place is empty. “Must have been a false alarm” they think. A little while later a pizza delivery boy shows up, finds out the police didn’t order the pizza. “Must be the wrong address,” he thinks. Cops know an opportunity when they see it, buy the pizza off the delivery boy at reduced price, sit in their squad cars scarfing it down. All just one big misunderstanding and a happy coincidence, no harm done.

Turns out: There had been 2 gangsters torturing a man just before the cops arrived, battering a chair-tied man across the face with frying pans. The victim had escaped through a window when the gangsters weren’t looking, gangsters fled, police arrived, then delivery boy arrived. Cops unknowingly ate the gangster’s pizza, a.k.a. the evidence. Pizza boxes had the gangster’s cell phone numbers on the attached receipts, too. Luckily, the cops didn’t throw the boxes out, just tossed them in the trunk.

They ate the evidence. For christ’s sake. Picture, caption, “Umm num num, funny”

So it was only mildly embarrassing for them in court when one of the prosecutors actually uttered the phrase: “The officers ate some of the evidence, Your Honor.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1334752/Police-eat-criminals-pizza-evidence-crime-scene.html

Police officers wolfed down pizzas at a crime scene without realising they had been ordered by the very suspects they had been hunting, a court heard.

They bought the two deep pan pizzas at a reduced price from a delivery boy after the gang who ordered them refused to answer the door.

The Old Bailey heard the food had been ordered by the gang from the Hertfordshire house they were holding a drug dealer hostage, in April.

The victim was beaten and bound to a chair and battered across the face with frying pans.

During his ordeal the gang ordered a Domino’s pizza but before the food arrived the victim escaped through a window and raised the alarm at a nearby building site.

Police arrived to find the delivery boy and then ‘ate the evidence’ outside the house.

The following day another officer found the boxes in the boot of the police car.

‘The address was written on the pizza box, together with the time, 5.13pm, and a mobile telephone number,’ said prosecutor Sally Meaking-McLeod.

The empty boxes were seized and produced in court as an exhibit for the jury to examine.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1334752/Police-eat-criminals-pizza-evidence-crime-scene.html#ixzz1IFBJHc00

The Scene: Vienna, Va.- When local woman Kay Fab pulled up to her residence one night, she was sure that tragedy had finally struck. Though the sight of yellow crime scene tape surrounding her home struck her like a yield sign, still, she dared to step out of her car and creep a little closer, for a glimpse of what she was sure to be a scene of life-changing carnage. And a scene of carnage it was.

Strewn about in the shadows was a severed arm, a foot, a weapon of some sort. Looking to the house, she saw human forms hovering past the windows. When she noticed the dark figure of a man lurking further back in the garage, she decided she’d had enough. Her husband was in there–those could have been his apendages, in fact– but fuck that. Kay Fab had seen enough horror movies to know you don’t dawdle at times like that, so she made a beeline for the police station.

When she returned to the scene police officer in tow,

standing the dark figure of a man.

Looking to the house she saw human forms

In fact, there was a full-fledged, bloody crime scene spilled across her carport.

And there was suspicious activity all around.

“She could tell there were people in the house, and she was not expecting that and she could see some dark figure standing in the carport,” her husband said.

Kay decided not to go one step further. She went down the street and called the cops. When an officer arrived, he approached the house and what he found was indeed surprising.

Police are called to Virginia woman Kay Fab’s home. They arrive to find the home already cordoned off as a crime scene investigation, yellow tape and all. That’s why Kay Fab called the police, see. She was curious about this. What the fuck.Turned Out: The mystery crime scene turned out to be a CSI-themed surprise birthday party for Kay. This annoyed the police. So Kay brought donuts to the police station the next day. Seriously. The Fab family apparently doesn’t do subtlety very well.http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/news/virginia/080709_va_woman_mistakes_birthday_party_for_crime_scene

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Mar 4

Posted by questionnothing

[i]”A man about forty-six years of age, giving the name of Joshua Coppersmith, has been arrested in New York for attempting to extort funds from ignorant and superstitious people by exhibiting a device which he says will convey the human voice over metallic wires, so that it will be heard by the listener at the other end. He calls the instrument a ‘telephone’, which is obviously intended to imitate the word ‘telegraph’, and win the confidence of those who know of the success of the latter instrument without understanding the principles on which it is based. Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires….the authorities who apprehended this criminal are to be congratulated, and it is to be hoped that it may serve as an example to other conscienceless schemers who enrich themselves at the expense of their fellow creatures…”[/i]

-Boston newspaper—

–1873.

http://books.google.com/books?id=e_H6lQWiY8wC&pg=PA214&dq=joshua+coppersmith+telephone&hl=en&ei=MLJwTeDeK8mTtwfphYT7Dg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CFIQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=joshua%20coppersmith%20telephone&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=tC-Eq7kBxdcC&pg=PT33&dq=joshua+coppersmith+telephone&hl=en&ei=SbFwTc-gHdOgtgeCwu2CDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CEQQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=joshua%20coppersmith%20telephone&f=false

The people were wary in 1873. This “telephone” idea was floating around–it all had the air of black magic and witchcraft. The poor public was paranoid and skittish, distrustful of this new technology looming on the horizon– schemers and shucksters and sheisters, oh my, a line connects, and who knows what evil lurks on the other end? Looking back now, it all seems quite amusing…

Because they were totally right.

[center][img]http://jeffpearlman.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/heath-ledger-the-joker-in-the-dark-knight5.jpg[/img]

“[b][b]These people just want their phone calls[/b][/b].” [/center]

[i]We really cannot fucking recommend that. [/i]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/data?pid=avimage&iid=iDPEVXJWnniY

Payphone