Canadians rejoice! Arizona is with you!

Oh, you may think your government is full of crazies and drunkards but...um, you know, never mind. The point is you're not alone. (Okay, if you've been following our Republican primaries you already knew that.) But did you know the State of Arizona sold off its own capitol building?

Now, I'm not sure how it occurs to somebody to think this is a good idea. For that matter, I'm not sure who'd buy such a thing. What would you do with it? Rent it out to a new and upcoming state government? Haul it off to another state so they can have two capitol buildings? In Arizona, the answer was to lease it back to the original tenants - you know, the people who'd been there in the first place, only now the government had to pay money to occupy the building they'd constructed for themselves. Arizona now wants to buy it back, and if I'm reading the article right someone's pocketing over twenty million dollars in this little caper, and it's not the taxpayers.

This is my boggling face

Remember last week when I wrote up the story of three different groups of antisocial teenagers at Denny's?

Well...here I am at the same Denny's - where most nights are not like this, really! - and a few minutes ago a kid who'd kept his hood up while he ate grabbed his skateboard and ran out. This was not a total surprise, as you'd imagine. Alas, he had that skateboard and a gentle downhill slope in his chosen direction; he vanished into the night all too efficiently, despite the restaurant manager and I chasing after him on foot - without a lucky break, it was a lost cause. But a few minutes later two people who'd left at about the same time came back bearing some pieces of paper. It seems our friend had dropped two things: his birth certificate and a court document about his arrest for a previous misdemeanor. I suspect this is going to be a rather easy case for the police.

You hear these 'Stupid Criminal' stories all the time, but you never really expect to see one unfold in front of your face.