So my laptop should be delivered today. UPS tried to drop it off yesterday, but no one was at home. With that and the cell phone I got last year and the digital camera I bought the year before that, I should be caught up to at least the year 2000. I’ll have to wait until next year to join the 21st century and upgrade to a camera phone and a GPS unit for the laptop. Well, I’ll add it to the gift list, so it can get ignored with all the rest. 🙂
Meanwhile, a source told me a protesting high schooler in Dallas got hit by a bus. Damn, I didn’t know Metro ran up there. I think the story got garbled (or there’s two incidents), because that’s not what I found upon searching.
The story is rather tragic. An 18-year-old senior lost her hand when the SUV she was riding in flipped trying to go around a corner:
“We were attempting to catch up with them, and unfortunately, they came through this intersection at a high rate of speed,” [Dallas Independent School District spokesman Donald] Claxton said. “This is an example of that can go wrong when they go wild.”
“When the car flipped, her hand just tore off,” said a boy who identified himself as the victim’s brother.
A 15-year-old boy who said he was the driver of the Ford Expedition said he had taken the car without his parents’ permission.
“I was like fixing to crash through that sign, so I went straight in and flipped,” the boy said. He denied traveling at excessive speed.
Idiots. You don’t have to travel at excessive speed to roll an SUV. A more experienced driver might know that. Yeah, I’m being cold, but a fifteen year old has no business “borrowing” the folks SUV to play hooky. And don’t tell me that’s what HISD was trying to prevent by sending the school buses. I know it, but I still disagree — those kids belonged in school. If you’re going to freeload off my tax dollars, make it count.
I don’t know what the hell they’re up in arms about anyway. It’s not like we’re enforcing the laws we have now. If we were, they wouldn’t be here.
Finally, a correction. (I’m doing a Chronicle here, and burying it on the back page. Ha.) I figured out a way the H.E.C. could be telling the truth about how expensive it would be to retrieve all those call records. You see, I was thinking in terms of the data being stored electronicly. But what the city often does is take the paper printouts of the reports containing the data in question and film them. Then record the immages on either microfiche or CD. In that case, it really would require printing out all the pages and manually collating the data (I would not trust an OCR program; they’re good but not perfect).