No Excuses, Except This One

The Daily News has a story today about a dock owner in Margate who thinks the town wants her out so it can build condos or something.

The U.S. basketball team is being too distracting with its dunks for me to get into the story, so let’s just cut to the chase: This woman breaks the rules occasionally, and the town occasionally busts her. She says that’s unfair. (Really, it kinda does go something like this.) Here’s my favorite part:

The impetus for the restraining order happened Aug. 9, when a police patrol boat stopped one of Scott’s rentals for going too fast in a no-wake zone.

It turned out that the registration for Scott’s entire fleet had expired on July 31, something she admits was her fault.

“I have no excuses for that,” she said, as her black lab, Dock Dog, chewed on bamboo leaves. “I’m the mom running a mom-and-pop shop.”

The only thing better than the excuse following the “no excuses” line is the important details of her dog’s breed, her dog’s name and her dog’s bamboo leaf chewing. Very important details.

Dock owner sees Margate conspiracy [Daily News]

Loch Ness Monster Shuts Down Crime Cameras

A 23-year-old man was shot and killed outside a Chinese restaurant over the weekend. Fortunately, there were cameras outside the restaurant, and the killer will hopefully soon be identified.

Ha ha, just kidding! (Not about the homicide, but about the cameras.) In yet another example of the incompetence of Big Brother, the cameras outside the Chinese restaurant were not working. (If Nineteen Eighty-Four were real, Winston’s time in Room 101 would have been spent playing with puppies.) Back in March, the cameras — installed by the Philadelphia Commercial Development Corporation — also didn’t work, so they’ve really made a lot of progress on the issue. (Hey, another parenthetical aside: Perhaps one of the problems was that ex-PCDC president and soon-to-be-City Councilman Curtis Jones said he had a master’s degree when in fact he had a certificate of compliance from a weekend seminar of some sort.)

Anyway, the PCDC does have an excuse for the non-working cameras.

The Philadelphia Commercial Development Corporation which runs the cameras, says hackers and a lightening strike were the reasons the cameras were off. The president of the PCDC says the cameras should be working again by Friday, and he wants the D-A and the US attorney to investigate the hackers.

Hackers and a lighting strike? Usually when you comes up with ideas for a ridiculous excuse to save face, you only choose one one those ideas.

But who knows. Perhaps there really were hackers. I don’t know what they were like, but I can only assume they are like Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller’s characters from the 1996 film Hackers, not nerdy script kiddies in their parents’ basement. This makes for a sexier story.

Anyway, next time this blog happens to be down, it’s the fault of Bigfoot and solar flares.

Crime Cameras Stall in Wynnefield
March 26: Get Ready For More Of This In The Coming Weeks

An admission of guilt (also, there’s still no news going on)

I’ll be honest with you. I had a nice big ol’ Christmas essay ready for you guys today — and then my computer went and ate it. (It’s nowhere to be found, I can’t undelete it and I’m not rewriting it.)

And, so, I present to you the Christmas essay I wrote on Nov. 16 for the Holiday Guide: The North(east) Pole. I’ll be checking out of here in a little bit — and by “checking out,” I mean “getting on the R7 and riding it to Cornwells Heights” — so I’ll take this time to wish all of you a very happy holiday season. More ruminations, in the form of essays and such, to come next week.