That Must Have Been Some Special Garbage
The Drudge Report picked up on this sad little tale last week and
catapulted it into the Internet stratosphere. Two hungry young men from
back east stopped in Steamboat Springs, Colo., one night in June hoping
to get a bite to eat. They couldn't find a place that was open, so they
jumped a fence at a produce shop and grabbed some fruit and vegetables
out of a Dumpster. And they wound up getting thrown in jail for six
months for "stealing garbage."
Now, admittedly there are extenuating circumstances on both sides of
this story. But read it and see if the same question that occurred to me
occurs to you: Six months?
What Would Cheech & Chong Say?
The illegal immigration flap keeps rolling back around, spinning off
unexpected new subplots. Such as this one: Park rangers in California
say they are discovering growing numbers of big, sophisticated marijuana
farms on their lands. Federal officials say they believe Mexican drug
cartels are hiring illegal immigrants to plant and cultivate the crops
to get around the problem of having to smuggle the stuff into the U.S.
And the environmental damage that these farms inflict can be fairly
serious.
I know what you're thinking. I too find it hard to believe that those
south-of-the-border drug lords don't train their recruits in the finer
points of sustainable agriculture. The scoundrels!
Those Wiki-Wacky Brits
Imagine what would happen if the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided
to "wikify" its next major rulemaking. (For those unfamiliar with the
world of wiki,
here is a quick overview from -- where else? --
Wikipedia's Wiktionary web site.)
Probably the result would be something like
what transpired recently when the British government's
USDA counterpart, Defra, tried to go all wiki with a project involving
environmental contracts. How do you say "prank" in British?
Pete
Fehrenbach is assistant managing editor of Waste News. Past
installments of this column are collected in
the Inbox archive.
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