Some people just have too much time on their hands. Left to their own devices, they get into all kinds of trouble. And as you'll see, ignorance of the law is no excuse.

The Thermadorian Reaction

In this case, it wasn't 18th Century French radicals, but rather a militant arm of the Animal Liberation Front known as the "Groundhog Crew," who went on a rampage Sunday in the parking lot of the Chicago-based Supreme Lobster and Seafood Co.

Vandals entered an unsecured lot on the 200 block of North Avenue and cut the lines on dozens of Supreme Lobster and Seafood Co. trucks. They also wrote "ALF—No Brakes" on a bay door of a company building.

"Their lives cannot be returned, but we will continue to strike at them until future generations are truly free. Didn't know groundhogs were such fans of sea creatures, did you?" the group asked.

How Is This Justice?

That's what we're wondering in the aftermath of the trial of Ed Rosenthal.

On Friday, a federal grand jury found author and columnist Rosenthal guilty of marijuana cultivation and conspiracy. The odd thing here is that his actions were wholly legal under California's medicinal marijuana law, Proposition 215. But that didn't stop the feds from pressing charges and now Rosenthal is facing "a minimum of five years in prison." His response to this was valiant:

Proposition 215 "will outlive the Bush administration, it will outlive Ashcroft and it will outlive all of these cruel people who want to stop people from getting their medicine."

Juror Marney Craig called the trial "the most horrible experience I've ever been through."

"It's the biggest mistake I've made in my life and a lot of jurors feel the same way," she said. "It was a very unfair trial and not impartial at all. How can we be fair and impartial since the judge wasn't fair and impartial? This man was not a criminal."

"When there's a conflict between federal and state law in a criminal case, the jury ought to know about it," said Dershowitz.

Dershowitz said the conservative-leaning Supreme Court has tended to side with states rights in recent years, which could be good news for Rosenthal.

Glad They Cleared This Up

You can rest easy now that a court in central Indial has finally ruled that "eunuchs are male." Turns out this was a rather important issue.

The High Court of Madhya Pradesh state on Monday upheld a lower court ruling barring Kamla Jaan from becoming mayor of the town of Katni because the post was set aside for women to encourage their participation in politics.

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Why is it that some people behave badly? And why do they wait until they're in public to do it? If we knew the answer to that, we could solve a lot of problems. Until then, don't venture outside without your Kevlar-lined Levi's, and always be ready for anything. I try to live by those rules, but I still wasn't ready for this onslaught of bizarre tawdriness:

Karma Hit by Dogma

The Vatican released a document Monday that was six years in the making. Titled, A Christian Reflection on the 'New Age', the 90-page booklet addresses everything from healing crystals to channeling in an effort to clarify the differences between Christian theology and the New Age movement.

Here you see the key presenters, Pontifical Council for Culture president Cardinal Paul Poupard, right, and Archbishop Michael Louis Fitzgerald, President of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, who perform miracles daily by managing to pronounce their own job titles.

The document stresses that much of the New Age phenomenon is driven by marketing books, therapies, and crystals, and it notes some consider New Age just a label "for a product created by the application of marketing principles to a religious phenomenon."

Dating a la Mode

Actually, it's Emode, an online matchmaking service that uses what it claims are "Ph.D.-certified" IQ tests that link you up with someone is compatible with your level of brain-power. This article interviews Emode CEO James Currier, who says that he's seen users "take more than 120 million tests, with 3 billion questions answered." It's amazing they have time left over to date. Here's one happy customer, Craig Dillenbeck, who likes the pre-screening approach:

"It's based on tests and logic, things that make a difference in the long run."

Hole in the Sky

Just the other day, I was sitting around thinking to myself that we haven't had one of those incidents lately where a rock star trashes an airplane and gets arrested. My prayers were answered this morning. Courtney Love was taken into custody by British police at Heathrow Airport Tuesday after a Virgin Airlines cabin crew claimed that she had "abused them." What was she doing up there, singing? Detail are sketchy so far.

"She was having a row with one of the flight attendants," one woman passenger told reporters. "There were a lot of raised voices." British police said Love had refused to sit down and put on her seatbelt prompting the plane's captain to radio ahead shortly before the plane landed.

This publicity can't be bad, following as it does the controversial naked photo shoot she did for this month's issue of Q Magazine, which is running an "extraordinary" feature on Courtney having her bikini line waxed. A real cultural ambassador, she.

Knickers, Bunched

How about this headline: London Goes Wild for Kylie's Knickers.

Turns out that Australian pop diva Kylie Minogue has come out with a signature line of lingerie called "Love Kylie" for Selfridges'. As you can see in this photo, Ms. Minogue isn't all that prone to wearing underthings, and she seizes every possible opportunity to prove it. Anyway, people are swarming around the department store's window display, which contains "a video of the near-naked star" that Kylie says wasn't all that much trouble to put together:

"All I had to do was jump up and down in my underpants," she told reporters.

Be Kind to Us

That's my suggestion for Jerry Springer, who appears to be exploring a run for the U.S. Senate.

A Democrat, Jerry is aiming at the seat currently held by Senator George Voinovich (R-OH), that'll be up for grabs in 2004. Now, it would be easy to go after the cheap joke here, like the LA Times did:

Jerry supports a woman's right to choose—whether to spend the rest of her life with her good-for-nothing husband, her transsexual male lover or her male lover's stripper mistress.

The issue is not going to be whether or not I can be taken seriously. The issue in America really is whether millions and millions of Americans take their politicians seriously. The government is not responding to their needs. Whether we're talking about health care, whether we're talking about jobs or whether we're talking about the insanity of going to war when we really have a war right now against terrorism...

And no one, not the Democrats or the Republicans, are asking the question, "How is bombing Baghdad a remedy to stopping the use of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons?"

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