I guess if you were a paroled bank robber facing new charges of eluding police, aggravated assault on a civilian, carjacking, aggravated assault on a police officer, disarming a police officer, resisting arrest, harming a law-enforcement animal, unlawful possession of a weapon, possession of prohibited, hollow-nose bullets and possession of a weapon by a convicted felon, and you’re from the Jersey Shore, you might get into court and just say fuck it, imagine yourself as Bon Jovi singing at a deserted drive-in theater atop a mesa in the Moab Desert, and go out in a blaze of glorious mayhem.

The defendant, 41-year-old Neptune resident Anthony Montgomery, smacked his own attorney, deputy assistant public defender Philip Pagano, in the face yesterday morning in a Toms River courtroom. Later, after being tackled and subdued by four sheriff’s officers, as he was being led out of the courtroom in shackles, he somehow managed to pick up a microphone stand and threw it at the lawyer.

The trial stems from an incident in 2008 when Montgomery led police on 16-minute chase from Tinton Falls to Neptune during which he is alleged to have crashed into one civilian motorist, attempted to pull another civilian out of another vehicle, punched a police dog and a police sergeant, and attempted to steal another police officer’s gun. That’s right: he punched a police dog. I haven’t heard of that kind of mayhem since last summer, when that guy punched the cop’s horse at Lollapalooza.

“Buttermilk Channel in Brooklyn had rabbit on some menus shortly after it opened in late 2008. But after a table of guests walked out, it came off. Now the only rabbit served at the restaurant is disguised in a country terrine. ‘It seems to me that the more you can make rabbit not look like rabbit, the easier it is to sell people on it,’ said the restaurant’s owner, Doug Crowell.”

The FAA is investigating an incident where a child was allowed to direct traffic at JFK last month. If you listen to the audio it seems pretty clear that no one was ever put in real danger, but rules are rules and certainly there for a reason. It’s fun to watch the reporters try to gin up outrage over the potential peril this situation put passengers in. I mean, it’s much easier to talk about that than about the woefully inadequate system of child care we have in this country, right?

Look, captioning errors happen. It’s understandable. Particularly in this day and age, when the frequent use of slideshows and galleries tends to introduce a number of extra variables which increase the opportunity for misaligned photos and descriptors. But you know what? This is still pretty great. [Via]

Laura Fontana is an eight-year-old from Brazil who loves to dance around to the music of Lady GaGa, at least judging by the video clip of her performing “Bad Romance” and “Paparazzi” on the Brazilian talent show Qual é o Seu Talento?. The outrage over her performance has already come from the usual quarters, and truth be told, the whole tableau definitely has its creepy aspects, from her mom’s cheerfully singing along with the slightly menacing lyrics of “Bad Romance” to the half-hearted gyrations she’s engaging in for the benefit of the Bruce Vilanch/Santa hybrid who I guess is the “Simon” of this show’s judging panel. But is it really anything new?

As a recovering eight-year-old girl (those wounds run deep), what I’m seeing here is pretty much Madonna Wannabes Version 3.0*, complete with the “sexy” dancing and the not-even-coherent-enough-to-be-vague understanding of what the lyrics being warbled might actually mean. (As for the outfit-related outrage, were none of the people currently getting all het up about Laura honoring GaGa’s “no pants” edict not in dancing school at that age? Leotards and tights were the norm for performing!) She’s a young girl emulating a pop star, which, hello, is something that many girls do at that age. If you’re going to get upset over an example of that, you may want to set your sights for despairing about society a wee bit higher.

If anything, I’m more dismayed by the judges’ coddling of her performance than anything — according to a Gawker commenter who’s fluent in Portugese, one of the judges told her that she could be recording an album right now, which, c’mon, is so not true. (The word “pitchy” comes to mind, although this could perhaps be in part because I spent four hours thinking about American Idol last night.) I don’t know what this irritation says about my priorities — maybe that I’m tired of grade inflation, particularly grade inflation that’s designed in large part to make a YouTube clip go viral outside of the Portugese-speaking world?

* Version 2.0 arrived on the scene around the time that “Wannabe” was released.

What does Karl Rove consider to be one of his greatest mistakes during his time advising the previous administration? “[N]ot pushing back against claims that President George W. Bush had taken the country to war under false pretenses.” No word yet on where “taking the country to war under false pretenses” falls on Rove’s list of errors, but I’m guessing it’s a lot lower.

These things happen: “After being admonished by an ethics panel for accepting corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean, Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., will take a ‘leave of absence’ from his chairmanship of the powerful House Ways and Means committee, NBC News has learned.”

Dear residents of Hudson Street between Morton and Barrow Streets,

I’m sorry for shouting out my window at that old lady who used to tie her dog up outside Famiglia’s pizza shop. And for my lack of creativity.

It was early 2001, I think, shortly before we all had far more to be worrying about than the nuisance of noise pollution. But back in those comparatively carefree days, I was very much bothered by the loud, raspy barking of a dog that was routinely left leashed to a lamppost on Hudson Street, three stories below my bedroom window. It would happen every day, at various times: long, long sessions of barking, 45 minutes, an hour sometimes. After a while, when I’d hear it start up, I would look out my window and see the dog, a medium-sized mutt with dingy, matted fur, looking plaintively in the direction of the deli-mart across the alley from Famiglia’s pizza, and barking and barking and barking.

It drove me crazy. I’d been working from home for a couple years at that point. I was used to the sounds of the city, able to tune most of them out. But something about this particular’s dog bark-maybe how sad it sounded, along with its incessancy-got to me in a different way. There was a cruel and inconsiderate dog-owner out there, making the lives of at least two living beings worse. I complained a lot about the situation to my girlfriend, who I shared the apartment with and would soon marry. But she worked in an office, and so heard the barking only on weekends or the rare nighttime episode. And she is generally less bothered by things than I am anyway. Other than her, I didn’t know who to appeal to. I’d never actually seen anyone out there tying up the dog.

One day I wrote a note on a piece of yellow legal-pad paper and taped it to the lamppost while the dog was there barking. “Please don’t leave this dog tied up here,” it said. “It is obviously unhappy and it barks and barks. This is unfair to the neighborhood and unfair to the dog.” I felt pretty stupid, seeing it there in my handwriting. I looked down at the dog, who wasn’t paying attention to me, and then just walked away.

Nothing changed. Weeks passed.

I was at the end of my rope the night that I finally saw her. It was a weeknight, Tuesday maybe, and later than usual, ten o’clock or so. Quiet out on Hudson Street, other than the dog’s barking, which had been going on for a half-an-hour. Quiet inside our apartment, too, other than my ranting about the social contract, etc., which had been going on for about as long. Emily was sitting in bed, trying to read or something. I’d staked out a position at the window, watching the dog, waiting for the owner. When she appeared-sort of waddling out of the deli-mart, a short, heavy-set woman with white hair, maybe in her 60s-and stepped to the lamppost and began untying the leash, I jumped up and ran into the bathroom, where the window in the shower provided a more direct angle from which to shout.

I stepped into the tub, the crinkly plastic shower curtain cold and dry as I pushed it aside, and opened the window and stuck out my head. “Hey, lady!” I said, and heard Emily questioning my actions from the bedroom. “Don’t tie your dog up there anymore! It barks too loud!”

My voice echoed off the buildings, louder than the dog’s barking. The old lady didn’t even really look up to see where I was. She dismissed me with a sort of feh-style wave of her hand and said, and croaked, “Don’t tell me how to care for my animals.”

It was like she’d heard it all before-she had, I suppose-but simply did not care. She was super New York; she had bigger problems to worry about.

“Come on, lady …” I started, but she cut me off.

“Ahh, shut up!”

I was stunned. The gall of this person. But standing in my bathtub at ten o’clock at night, craning my neck out the window, all hot in my ears, I didn’t know what to say.

“No, you shut up!” I shouted back.

I shook my head to myself in the pause that followed. I am not very good at shouting at people.

Then the phone rang. I told Emily I’d get it and pushed back the shower curtain and stepped out of the tub and walked into the kitchen where the phone was.

“Hello?”

“Dave?” It was Nick, my old roommate, who now lived in the building next door. On the sixth floor, with his girlfriend Eva.

“Hey, Nick.” I said.

“Did I just hear you shouting out your window?”

“Oh, man…”

Nick started laughing. Did you just tell someone, “‘No, you shut up?!’”

I should have known better than to have gotten involved.

Dave

Uh, wow, I clearly need to pay much more attention to the advertising around me.

“As for me, I can’t really figure it out. I did make my avatar look pregnant and go travelling around to see if people noticed, I didn’t have the scripted text with the baby talk, so no one took much notice, but it didn’t feel right for me. I think I’ll stick with my virtual Siamese kitten Max, he sleeps anywhere without the need of a cot or a buggy and runs around without me looking after him, but maybe I’m the exception to the rule, because there are plenty of SL shops doing very well in the baby business! It must be that human instinct that people want to act out, even if it is just virtual.”
–CNN iReporter Janey Bracken can’t figure out why people would like to have babies while playing Second Life. As opposed to say, having a virtual Siamese kitten, which is completely understandable. She is also an exception to the rule about writers ending sentences with periods.