"MY fault? How can that be MY fault, Carmine?"

"I made a mental note to go out and buy a Club© when I read in the local paper that car thieves were targeting Dodge Intrepids like mine in my neighborhood, but I didn't get around to it, and then two days later, my car was stolen."


Actual statement made on WBAL-TV news by a car theft victim who cannot say she was not amply warned. Emphasis mine.


This all goes back to that sense of responsibility that we seem to lack. Next, she will point out that the police should have posted an officer 24-7 alongside her car until she "got around" to purchasing a Club©. Of course, had she gotten around to protecting herself against this crime, she would have been intrepid.

I remember a call to 911 reporting a dwelling fire. The captain of Engine 6 told me later that the fire was caused by a man on one of those oxygen tanks, sitting in his living room, smoking a cigarette. The captain asked the man's daughter why she allowed her ill father to light smokes around oxygen. "It's his one pleasure," came the reply.

Drive around on a rainy day, and see how many street drains are clogged with the unwanted detritus of everyday life: McDonald's bags, Red Bull cans, copies of the Baltimore Examiner. How many people do you see going out to the curb with a rake or even their hands, to clear the grate and open the drain?

A Canadian woman, whose 9-year-old son tunneled under a fence into an electric sub-station and was badly burned, is suing a Manitoba power utility for negligence. (UPI). They should have made the foundation a mile deep, and of granite, you see.


In Texas, the Patterson Nissan dealership held a contest awarding prizes to the participants who could hold their hands on a car the longest. One contestant dropped out, ran to a nearby store where he broke a gun out of its case, and shot himself. The dealership has now settled the lawsuit by Richard Thomas Vega II’s widow claiming that the stress and sleep deprivation of the event amounted to “brainwashing” and that the sponsors failed to make allowances for temporary loss of sanity. (AP/FoxNews.com).

15-year-old honor student and SADD member Lindsey Billman snuck out of a slumber party with three of her friends and had an alcohol-fueled night with two 18-year-old boys. Around 2:45 a.m., two boys and two girls had the clever idea of stacking milk crates to reach an air-conditioning unit that allowed them to clamber onto the roof of Anna S. Kuhl Elementary School. The two couples went to separate sides of the roof. Billman and Nicholas Moscatiello then had the further clever idea of doing whatever they were doing while sitting on a skylight, which didn’t support their weight, and the 33-foot-fall onto the gymnasium floor below killed Billman.

This is, alleges an Orange County, New York, suit filed by Lindsey’s parents, the fault of the school district and the city of Port Jervis, New York. After all, the district was “irresponsible” stacking milk crates by the school. (UPI)


Back here in Baltimore, a few years ago a teenaged girl was systematically and routinely beaten by her mother's boyfriend, until she finally succumbed. People who had been working with the family testified that yes, they knew about the horrible abuse, had even documented it in their files, but did not see that it was their place to report it to the police.


Calvin once talked about how the world had failed to empower him. Calvin is supposed to be a child. The rest of us are not.

Red Forman would know what to do.