Let Me "Knock Out" a Quick Post Here

It's fairly late on a weeknight, the AL has won the All-Star Game again (Ten in a row? Wow), and a ten-hour teaching day tomorrow will keep me from seeing Harry Potter at midnight tonight. I'm pretty wiped out, so I don't feel up to waxing philosophical on this or that, but I did have to share a couple of weird stories that I heard about today:

• A teenager accidentally rams his SUV into a porta-potty on the beach, temporarily knocking out the guy inside (whose last name was "Fear," incidentally). I also thought it was interesting that the story described the teenager as temporarily reversing his SUV over the "kerb." I didn't realize that they spelled it that way in California.
  Hat tip: Dave Barry's Blog


• A one-and-a-half ton wrecking ball, which was being used to demolish a building at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, broke loose from its cable yesterday and went on a mini-rampage of sorts, damaging a dozen cars and injuring three people before coming to rest in the trunk of a car at an intersection. This story about the incident notes that the college student whose car served as the wrecking ball's final resting place was probably spared from more serious injury by the presence of eight soccer balls in his backseat, which minimized the impact of the much bigger ball. (And yet another funny-name link: The driver of the crane that lost the wrecking ball has the last name of "Boring." Not today, he wasn't...)
  Hat tip: The KRLD Afternoon News, on my way to big band

I'll try to have something of more substance tomorrow during my break, but I just couldn't resist posting those two stories.

The long arm of the lawn: An elderly widow in Utah was arrested for failure to water her lawn. ( I'm glad they didn't do this here during our drought a few years ago, or I may have gotten a trip to the pokey myself; but then again, this lady hadn't watered hers in more than a year.)

A side order of spam: You can imagine how intrigued I was to receive a message with the subject "©w´Á©wÃB°òª÷¨C¤ë¤@¸U¤¸,¤£¥Î©â°e§Awii" in my inbox today; I just wish I recognized the name of the sender. (It came from someone called §õÅU°Ý , in case that name rings a bell.)